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MAGA Implodes over Kristi Noem’s “Stare Down” with Man in Chicken Suit - 2025-10-11T10:00:00Z

This week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem staged a bizarre photo op in Portland that appeared designed to bolster President Trump’s effort to deploy Oregon’s National Guard against ICE protesters in the city. Noem stood on a rooftop observing protesters below, and MAGA influencers hailed it as a moment of extraordinary heroism against a powerful, implacable enemy. “Noem just stared down violent Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” one wrote.

Alas, it turned out there were only a few protesters milling around far in the distance, including one man in a chicken suit. Intense online mockery ensued, and this buffoonish display is now at the center of a good New York Times piece, which details how the White House is relying on MAGA media personalities to spread the deceptive impression of a city in large-scale civil collapse.

However, the Times piece commits one misstep: It keeps describing those MAGA personalities as “provocateurs.” In fact, they are propagandists. Mainstream news outlets appear uncomfortable wrestling with the degree to which pro-Trump media figures practice propaganda undertaken in bad faith toward expressly instrumental ends. We need them to get past that.

This may seem like a churlish objection given that the Times piece is well reported and informative. But this euphemistic “provocateur” language risks diminishing the force and quality of the paper’s own reporting. The piece notes that federal and state law enforcement have reported that protests there are small-scale, and nothing like the civil breakdown depicted by Trump to create a rationale to federalize Oregon’s National Guard (that’s temporarily blocked in court). Then it reports this:

But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape” — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself.

The piece also refers to “dueling visions of reality.” But this isn’t a case of one side genuinely seeing things one way (as “comparative calm”) and the other side genuinely seeing them differently (as a “hellscape”). It’s a case of one side (law enforcement, local journalists) trying to faithfully depict what’s really happening, and the other side (MAGA) concertedly lying about it to serve corrupt ends that are comprehensively, even intentionally disconnected from facts on the ground.

One influencer, for instance, accuses the Portland police chief of “allowing violent terrorists” to “run the city,” which is horseshit of the highest order. The Times piece quotes another MAGA personality suggesting that right wing agitators might be handing out flags and trying to bait protesters into burning them.

Other MAGA figures have described the city as a “war zone” and “under siege by antifa” or “fallen to antifa” and even in a “state of open insurrection.”

Indeed, as Media Matters documents, the gap between what MAGA media are portraying and what local press is reporting (the protests are mostly small and peaceful) has grown to enormous proportions. As one reporter put it, many protesters are “in pajamas, sharing pastries, throwing a frisbee, and playing board games.”

The point is not that there are zero examples of leftist protesters getting violent—as the Times notes, a handful of leftists are getting prosecuted for just that. Rather, it’s that none of this remotely matches what Trump and MAGA are conjuring into being.

The word “provocateur” doesn’t do justice to any of this—and we don’t mean to pick on the Times here, as that euphemism is constantly used elsewhere, too. “Provocateur” implies that all this is akin to plucky showmanship—political theater designed to needle, satirize, provoke, and entertain, as opposed to manipulate and deceive.

Some of these personalities probably do see themselves, to some degree, as putting on a show. But the broader aim of all this agitprop is far uglier. Trump has employed a form of state propaganda that may be unrivaled by any presidency in modern memory, and these MAGA influencers are generating material for that vile effort.

This is partly about producing endless online content to keep the MAGA base well-fed. Noem has chroniclers around her capturing her every move: When she gazed down on the man in the chicken suit, several depicted her as bravely confronting antifa mobs, even though the man stood with a few other people hundreds of feet away.

But the absurdity of this episode doesn’t diminish how sinister and carefully elaborated much of this propaganda truly is. When ICE raided an apartment complex in Chicago, where Trump is also trying to deploy various National Guards, state propagandists produced a slick video portraying it as a heroic operational triumph against a dangerous, determined, dug-in enemy. Stephen Miller declared that the complex was “filled” with Tren de Aragua “terrorists.”

Yet as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, all of two people were identified as possible members of the gang, per CNN. While some others reportedly had criminal histories (some just involving drug possession), surely that doesn’t justify a massive hypermilitarized operation that terrorized scores or hundreds of people (the building has 130 units) and dragged children into the street.

If Miller were being honest about his true project, he’d forthrightly admit that he consciously intends all this as deliberate propaganda. It’s geared toward establishing unlimited discretion for Trump to simply invent emergencies with an eye toward vastly expanding presidential power. Miller wants Trump to bulldoze the courts into surrendering on fact-finding, into granting him quasi-absolute authority to declare into existence—merely by fiat—the conditions needed to justify whatever law enforcement or domestic military operation that Trump (i.e., Miller) launches next, including ones targeting Americans.

If inflicting these operations on civilian populations incites violence in return, from Miller’s perspective that’s surely all the better. Asawin Suebsaeng reports for Zeteo that Trump advisers are nudging him to invoke the Insurrection Act if necessary to circumvent judicial checks on these authorities. That’s plainly what Miller hopes for.

Yet the conventions of political reporting today are poorly suited to capturing this naked use of sheer pretexts and the bottomless bad faith they rely upon.

Headlines in the Times, for instance, regularly fall short in just this way. They treat Trump and his administration’s stated rationales as things they authentically believe, whether it’s the claim that Harvard violates students’ civil rights to justify his state crackdown on academic freedom:

...or the insistence that Portland is under siege from domestic terrorists to justify deploying the military there:

In these cases, casual readers will have zero inkling that these are bad-faith pretexts as opposed to genuinely held positions. The media needs to find new tools to convey these basic realities.

Propagandists are not “provocateurs.” Trump’s stated grounds for his abuses of power are not actual reasons, they are pretexts created for purely instrumental ends. And Kristi Noem did not “stare down” mobs of antifa terrorists in Portland. That’s because there isn’t any serious network of organized leftist violence in the United States, no matter how loudly Miller shrieks otherwise. Grasping how committed MAGA is to such industrial-scale deceptions is critical to getting this broader moment right.

Surprise! Vivek Ramaswamy’s Turning Point Event Derailed by Racism - 2025-10-10T21:11:06Z

Try as he might, Vivek Ramaswamy will never be fully accepted by MAGA world.

The Ohio gubernatorial candidate and former DOGE co-chief came face-to-face with the racism rampant among American conservative youth culture Tuesday when he headlined a Turning Point USA event in Montana.

Speaking at Montana State University, Ramaswamy fielded disturbing questions about how he believed he could adequately participate in electoral politics when his religion and ethnic identity don’t align with stereotypical white American ideals.

“Jesus Christ is God, and there is no other God,” said a male student. “How can you represent the constituents of Ohio who are 64 percent Christian if you are not a part of that faith?”

“If you are an Indian, a Hindu, coming from a different culture, different religion than those who founded this country, those who grew this country, built this country, made this country the beautiful thing that it is today,” he continued. “What are you conserving? You are bringing change. I’ll be 100 percent honest with you—Christianity is the one truth.”

A female student asked Ramaswamy why he chose to “masquerade as a Christian.”

Before he became an alternative fixture in Trumpworld, Ramaswamy was a biotech investor, an entrepreneur, and a 2024 Republican presidential candidate. But none of those notches on his belt could atone for the color of his skin or his religion with some members of the Turning Point USA crowd, which was apparently more fixated on Christian nationalism than honoring the First Amendment’s allowances for freedom of religion.

“I’m an ethical monotheist, that’s the way I would describe my faith,” Ramaswamy said in another jarring exchange with a student. “Do you think it’s inappropriate for someone who’s a Hindu to be a U.S. president?”

“No I think it’s—” another male student started, before stopping himself. “But isn’t Charlie Kirk’s organization founded on Christian values as well? And isn’t America based on what Protestantism is and based on how those values are? Wouldn’t that contradict what your beliefs are?”

The tour stop had been scheduled before Turning Point’s founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September. Kirk launched Turning Point to spread conservative ideology among America’s youth.

There are some 900 official college chapters and around 1,200 high school chapters of Turning Point USA across the nation, but the conservative advocacy nonprofit received more than 54,000 inquiries for new campus chapters in the 48 hours after Kirk’s assassination, TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet announced last month.

Why Trump Will Never Win a Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-10T20:58:31Z

On Friday, President Donald Trump got tantalizingly close to the Nobel Peace Prize he has been on a weird, quixotic quest to win since his second term began. Trump wasn’t recognized by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but he was given a shout-out by its 2025 recipient, Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado, a strident advocate for free-market ideals and a staunch opponent of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator who has ruled her country since 2013.

“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” Machado wrote on X. “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause.”

That is the best Trump could hope for, though he certainly will keep begging for the Nobel Prize in the coming year, pressuring foreign leaders to advocate on his behalf like a pleading toddler and threatening Norway with sanctions or worse. Trump will not win the prize even if the Gaza peace deal he helped broker between Israel and Hamas miraculously holds in 2026, because his other policies are pushing regions around the world—including Venezuela—very much in the opposite direction of peace.

The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the few truly genuine missions of Trump’s second term. He is often checked out in official meetings, and seems to have left the functioning of the government to Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget—who are using their power to inaugurate fascism and purge the bureaucracy. But Trump has earnestly pursued diplomacy in the Middle East while also desperately, embarrassingly campaigning for the prize.

Trump’s obsession with winning it is fairly easy to understand. Five years ago, he left office having accomplished very little besides a corporate tax cut that any Republican president would have signed into law. The legacy of that term was largely defined by the day-to-day chaos of his lead-by-tweet approach and two massive failures during his last year: his woeful mismanagement of a pandemic and his effort to overturn a legitimate election. The Peace Prize is tantalizing because it’s a tangible and rarefied accomplishment—proof that he’s a winner, not an incompetent loser. (And the man does love awards, so much so that he invents them to honor himself.) Also, Barack Obama won one.

Much of Trump’s diplomatic work suggests that he is both incompetent and a loser, however. He is fond of claiming that he has stopped seven wars and ended conflicts that had been ongoing for “decades”—like one between Azerbaijan and Armenia (which he almost always confuses with Albania). For the most part, though, Trump’s work has consisted of swooping in to help halt relatively minor escalations. The full-fledged wars that he promised to end on his first day in office on the campaign trail last year—in Ukraine and Gaza—are still very active and only recently paused, respectively. After eight months of costly dithering, he has finally begun aiding Ukraine against Russian invaders, albeit to a lesser extent than his predecessor. In Gaza, the recent truce is a positive sign—and an accomplishment that Joe Biden could not achieve, due to a combination of his own spinelessness and Benjamin Netanyahu’s eagerness to continue the conflict (and aid Trump’s reelection effort).

It’s unlikely that the Gaza peace deal will hold—Netanyahu clearly wants to continue the war, and the thorniest part of the negotiations are yet to come—but even it does, Trump will never win the Nobel for a simple reason: He is running an increasingly violent, murderous, and despotic government. Masked goons from the Department of Homeland Security are kidnapping and disappearing people from the streets, shooting priests with pepper balls, and handcuffing naked children. He is ordering the wanton bombing of small boats off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, claiming that they are filled with drugs and “narcoterrorists” without providing any evidence, in clear violation of U.S. and international law. And his administration is inching closer to war in Venezuela.

The fact that Machado was awarded the prize may ironically make that war more likely. She advocates for regime change in Venezuela, though she has stopped short of endorsing a U.S.-led overthrow—but she has endorsed America’s extralegal strikes in the Caribbean, claiming that they are necessitated by Maduro’s oppressive narcoterrorist government. By endorsing her project, the Nobel Committee has given it greater legitimacy. It has handed a potent argument to figures in the Trump administration, notably Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who are pushing the United States to remove Maduro from power through military force.

For these reasons, Machado might seem like an odd laureate. But in truth, looking to the past, the Nobel Peace Prize has never only been about peace. You can applaud the bombing of fishing boats and still win one—or, in the case of Henry Kissinger, you can order the secret bombing of a country not even involved in a war and still win one. Trump has blood on his hands, but that hasn’t stopped the Norwegian Nobel Committee before. So I guess there’s a glimmer of hope for Trump after all.

Stephen Miller Accidentally Says “I” When Discussing Trump’s Powers - 2025-10-10T19:52:09Z

Stephen Miller may have just accidentally confirmed that he, not President Donald Trump, is the one calling the shots in regard to deportation raids and National Guard deployments.

“Illinois governor says we’re provoking actions that are unlawful,” Miller said on CNN on Monday. “Why would the mere presence—just think about this for a second. If I put federal law enforcement and National Guard into a nice sleepy Southern town, is anyone gonna riot?”

Miller’s use of the first person is alarming here, suggesting that he—an unelected deputy chief of staff—has either the complete authority or an outsize influence on the administration’s most authoritarian decisions.

“Miller says quiet part out loud,” one user wrote on X. “He determines where to put ICE, CBP & other federal agencies, but he is also doing the same for various National Guards. An unelected staffer making these decisions, where is the president? Both Miller and Vought are running this admin.”

Additionally, Miller misrepresents small Southern towns and the actions of the National Guard. If hundreds of armed military members descended on some remote Southern locale and started violently rounding up neighbors, employees, and friends, I’d be willing to bet that it wouldn’t go so peacefully.

Miller made the remarks in the same interview where he claimed Trump has “plenary authority,” after being asked whether the administration would abide by court rulings blocking his deployment of troops to American cities.

Republican Rep Claims Everyone at “No Kings” Protest Is a Terrorist - 2025-10-10T19:35:47Z

GOP congressional leaders on Friday smeared an upcoming anti-Trump protest in Washington, D.C., in the most hysterical, demonizing terms.

After House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise referred to the peaceful “No Kings” protest planned for October 18 as a “Hate America rally,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer went one step further, calling it a “terrorist” event.

At a press conference, Emmer accused Democrats of causing the government shutdown in order to “score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold … a ‘Hate America’ rally in D.C. next week.”

Earlier, Johnson had also baselessly attributed the shutdown to the event. Calling the prospective protesters “pro-Hamas” and “antifa,” he told Fox News that Democrats will not “reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base.”

“No Kings” events have taken place in towns and cities across the country since President Donald Trump was elected. On June 14, when Trump held a massive military parade in the streets of Washington, D.C., millions of people—of varying political stripes—peacefully protested against his antidemocratic second-term agenda.

The upcoming event will take place nationwide. According to Ezra Levin, who co-leads Indivisible, one of the organizing groups, it is set to be “the largest peaceful protest in modern American history.” And as emphasized on an organizing page, “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action.”

That hasn’t stopped Republican fearmongering.

Emmer’s remarks echo the ongoing, authoritarian efforts by the Trump administration, spearheaded by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, to crack down on the Democratic Party and political left based on ludicrous accusations of ties to “terrorism.”

Federal Workers Might Not Know They’ve Been Fired Thanks to Shutdown - 2025-10-10T19:26:31Z

President Donald Trump’s administration announced Friday that the government initiated sweeping layoffs of furloughed federal employees—but they might have some trouble actually delivering termination notices amid the government shutdown.

White House budget director Russell Vought announced that the reductions in force were finally underway, after he’d warned federal agencies to prepare for mass layoffs as means to force Democrats to approve a stopgap funding measure.

But federal employees sent home on furlough are typically barred from accessing their email accounts, except for in limited cases, CNN reported Friday. The Antideficiency Act—the same law that places some constraints on whether Trump can actually fire federal workers during a shutdown—bars federal employees from doing any work during the shutdown.

One employee at the Department of Agriculture suggested this could delay workers receiving termination notices. “So I guess we won’t find out we’re laid off until after the shutdown ends?” the person told CNN.

Trump administration officials said that employees would also be notified by mail, and that furloughed employees were permitted to use government-issued equipment to check for updates on the reductions in force. So, rather than waiting indefinitely with an axe over their heads, they may know in just a few days, as USPS has not been affected by the shutdown.

Responding to the announcement that layoffs were underway, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 820,000 government workers, wrote on X, “The lawsuit has been filed.”

MAGA Melts Down Over Trump Giving Qatar a Military Base in U.S. - 2025-10-10T19:08:06Z

The Trump administration’s approval of a Qatari air force base in Idaho isn’t popular with either of America’s political parties.

Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the forthcoming Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in America’s heartland Friday morning, thanking the Middle Eastern nation for playing a “core part” in negotiating the ceasefire between Israel and Palestine. Mountain Home Air Force Base will host Qatari F-15 fighter jets and pilots, and allow Qatari forces alongside American troops for F-15 pilot training.

The move, which stands in stark contrast to the president’s “America first” agenda, seriously rattled some of Donald Trump’s most outspoken supporters.

“Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans,” posted far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who has operated as Trump’s informal “loyalty enforcer” since August. “I don’t think I’ll be voting in 2026. I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis.”

“This is where I draw the line,” she wrote.

Other conservatives were left bewildered by the seemingly nonsensical decision.

“What’s the strategic rationale for this? Either ours or Qatar’s?” posted the National Review’s Noah Rothman. “You could rattle off all the problems/risks we’re inviting easily. But I have no idea what the steelman case for this would be? I’m sure we don’t need to import any more Qatari covert assets into this country.”

And still others pointed out the inconsistent hypocrisy of the administration’s policies.

“Joe Biden was criticized for a Chinese balloon flying over our airspace,” wrote GOP consultant Mike Madrid. “They’re giving Qatar an entire f’ing air base.”

Dan Caldwell, who was forced out of the DOD during Hegseth’s Signalgate disaster, wrote on X that the joint air force operation was being blown out of proportion.

“The freak out around this is of course totally unwarranted since this is actually a pretty common practice with countries that buy and operate a lot of U.S. military aircraft. Singapore has a similar facility and detachment for its F-15 training unit at this very same airbase,” Caldwell said.

But even beyond the Air Force base, Qatar appears to have bought itself a very sweet spot in Trumpworld. Just months ago, Qatar solidified a deal with the Trump Organization to build a Trump-branded golf course and a beachside project as part of a $5.5 billion development project. The tiny nation also bestowed a wildly controversial super luxury jumbo jet on to Trump, all in an apparent attempt to shore up its relationship with the U.S.’s notoriously flighty leader.

Those transactions began to pay off earlier this month, when Trump signed an executive order that pledged to give the tiny, energy-rich, non-NATO ally the same level of protection from the U.S. as some of America’s most powerful allies.

GOP Candidate: It’s Not Discrimination to Fire Someone for Being Gay - 2025-10-10T18:56:03Z

Virginia Republican gubernatorial hopeful Winsome Earle-Sears seems to have a very loose definition of what is and what is not discrimination. 

Earle-Sears and Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger got into a back-and-forth exchange about transgender people and bathrooms during the Virginia gubernatorial debate on Thursday, before moving on to Earle-Sears’s record on discrimination. 

“My opponent was asked about her record of discrimination,” Spanberger began. “And importantly, my opponent has previously said that she does not think that gay couples should be allowed to marry—” 

“That’s not discrimination!” Earles-Sears interrupted defensively. 

“She is quote unquote ‘morally opposed’ to same sex marriage—”

“That’s not discrimination!” Earles-Sears interrupted again. 

“My opponent has also previously said that she thinks it’s OK for someone to be fired from their job for being gay, that is discrimination—” 

“That’s not discrimination, nooo,” Earles-Sears said yet again.

Earles-Sears did not immediately respond to Spanberger’s examples, instead accusing her of wanting to defund the police. 

If being “morally opposed” to gay marriage and supporting firing people for their sexual orientation isn’t discrimination, what is? 

Sears has been a vocal right-wing firebrand long before she joined Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin as his lieutenant governor. The state’s first Black lieutenant governor has suggested it’s time to move on from slavery, supported making abortions illegal at six weeks and threatened violence against reproductive rights activists, held an assault rifle in her 2021 campaign posters, and thinks “critical race theory” creates “morale problems,” among other things. She and Spanberger are currently fairly close in the race for Virginia’s gubernatorial seat, as The Decision Desk has Spanberger at 51 percent and Earles-Sears at 44 percent.   

The election is on November 4.  

White House Begins Mass Firing of Federal Employees Amid Shutdown War - 2025-10-10T17:23:19Z

Russell Vought, the White House budget director, announced that the administration has begun firing federal workers en masse.

Vought warned last week that “consequential” layoffs were forthcoming amid the ongoing government shutdown. On Friday, he tweeted, “The RIFs have begun,” referring to “reductions in force.”

Vought, as anticipated, is now using the government shutdown to cull the federal workforce, fulfilling Trump’s recent vow to cut “vast numbers of people out,” as well as slash programs that he says Democrats “like.”

An unnamed White House official told MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, “We expect thousands of people to unfortunately be laid off due to the government shutdown.” CNN’s Alayna Treene reports that a White House official said that fired workers have begun receiving notices and, “It will be substantial.”

Agencies poised to be affected, according to Politico, include the Departments of the Interior, Treasury, Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Reacting to Vought’s four-word social media announcement, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 820,000 government workers, shot back: “The lawsuit has been filed.” The AFL-CIO told Vought, “America’s unions will see you in court.”

This story has been updated.

Trump’s Latest Posts Show He’s Pissed He Lost Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-10T16:43:22Z

President Donald Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize Friday—but that isn’t stopping him from trying to make the prestigious award all about himself.

The president took to Truth Social to share a video of Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizing past winners and praising Trump’s peace efforts on long-standing crises.

“There have been cases where the committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to people who have done nothing for peace,” Putin said, according to the AP’s translation. “A person comes, good or bad, and [gets it] in a month, in two months, boom. For what? He didn’t do anything at all. In my view, these decisions have done enormous damage to the prestige of this prize.

“[Trump’s] really doing a lot to resolve such complex crises that have lasted for years and even decades,” Putin added. The Kremlin had announced earlier Friday that it would support Trump’s bid for a peace prize—but clearly Moscow’s efforts were too little, too late.

“Thank you to president Putin!” Trump wrote when resharing the video.

Trump also shared an X post from this year’s winner, María Corina Machado, a pro-democracy activist and the leader of the opposition party in Venezuela, where she partially dedicated her win to Trump for supporting Venezuela.

“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” Machado wrote on X. “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

Trump then proceeded to go back to posting about his efforts to prosecute his political enemies, namely New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was indicted Thursday for mortgage fraud by the president’s (seemingly incompetent) former lawyer who was recently installed as a prosecutor in Virginia.

While Trump seemed to avoid having a total temper tantrum (for now, but he’s speaking late Friday afternoon), the White House didn’t spare fighting words.

In announcing the award Friday morning, the Nobel Committee warned about the dangers of unchecked leaders. “When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the committee said.

Mike Johnson Blames Shutdown on “No Kings” Protest in Absurd Rant - 2025-10-10T16:09:32Z

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson thinks the “No Kings” rally planned for next week is a “Hate America” rally meant to extend the government shutdown—something someone who has never been to a “No Kings” event would say. 

“We’re so angry about it. I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people. They’re playing games with real people’s lives,” Johnson said Friday morning on Fox News, in his usual monotone voice. “The theory we have right now: They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. It’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base. This is serious business hurting real people.… I’m beyond words.” 

The “No Kings” rally is a nationwide action with a very simple goal: oppose the blatantly authoritarian tilt of the Trump administration. The protests are supported by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the College Democrats of America, among others. The rallies have been very tame, and I have run into veterans, federal employees, and mostly older, liberal white people who love America but hate what President Trump is doing. No one there is particularly close to being pro-Hamas, and antifa (whoever that is) would likely consider the action to be insufficiently leftist for them. 

But Johnson can say ridiculous things like this because his party can’t fathom that not everyone who opposes them is some militant anarchist with a Molotov cocktail locked and loaded. The government is shut down because Republicans refuse to negotiate with Democrats on extending health care subsidies millions of Americans rely on, not because Democrats want antifa to destroy the government.  

Bari Weiss Just Sent an Elon Musk-Style Memo to CBS Staffers - 2025-10-10T16:04:38Z

Bari Weiss must have pulled a lot of management inspiration from the Department of Government Efficiency.

The new editor in chief of CBS News issued a memo to staff Friday, ordering them to send her memos by Tuesday denoting how they spend their workdays and what they believe could be improved.

“By the end of day Tuesday, I’d like a memo from each person across our news organization,” Weiss said in a copy of the email obtained by Semafor’s Max Tani. “I’m not looking for a JD or words like synergy. I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better.

“Then I’ll use your memo as a discussion guide for when I meet with most of you (ideally, all of you if time permits) in the coming few weeks,” Weiss added.

That strategy is remarkably similar to the one employed by Elon Musk when he ran DOGE. The parallels weren’t lost on CBS staffers, either: One lamented to Status newsletter writer Oliver Darcy, “We just got Elon Musk-ed.”

In February, Musk ordered federal employees across the government to email his office weekly summaries of their achievements. Failure to do so, under Musk’s rule, would be grounds for immediate firing.

The mandate was remarkably unpopular and scantily enforced by agency heads—some of whom butted up against Musk for making demands outside of his purview as a special government employee. The program met its quiet demise in August, when the Trump administration officially axed it—months after Musk was forced out.

Weiss’s version will have her inundated in paperwork. CBS News on its own employs thousands of individuals. A memo from each person on staff would lend itself to a tremendous amount of work.

The anti-woke, pro-Israel grifter became CBS’s newest chief last week. Her far-right, pro-genocide blog, The Free Press, was simultaneously scooped up by CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, for roughly $150 million. It will also be Weiss’s first foray into running a major news operation. The Free Press, by comparison, employed more than 50 people as of last month.

The acquisition—and Weiss’s whopping promotion—mark the beginning of a radical new era for the historically middle-ground, traditional news conglomerate. Weiss is expected to bring a notably right-wing slant to CBS, which has served as the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, including Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

America First? Hegseth Announces Foreign Air Force Facility in U.S. - 2025-10-10T15:48:31Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday announced the establishment of a Qatari military installation in Idaho.

Seated beside Qatar’s defense minister, Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Hegseth announced that the United States is “signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho.”

The facility, the defense secretary said, “will host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase lethality, interoperability”—though he provided little else by way of detail.

The two officials signed a letter green-lighting the move, after Hegseth praised Qatar for its role in securing a peace deal in Gaza. Notably, the announcement also comes from an administration heavily criticized for corruption involving Qatar, a country the president accused of being a “funder of terrorism” in his first term.

The agreement builds on an existing U.S.-Qatari military relationship. Under a $12 billion deal signed in 2017, the U.S. gave aircraft and U.S.-based training to Qatar. In 2022, it was reported that about 170 Qataris were to be sent to train with F-15s at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Base, which already hosts Singaporean forces and would be expanded to accommodate the new arrivals.

Representative Mike Simpson, a pro-Trump Republican of Idaho, called the development “fantastic news.” But some proponents of the president’s so-called America First cause disagree.

Laura Loomer, an informal Trump adviser and frequent purveyor of Islamaphobic hysteria, decried the administration’s decision. “What the hell is going on? Why are we trying to train more Muslims how to fly planes on US soil? Didn’t we already learn our lesson?” she wrote, saying it would allow “the Islamic enemy to gain so much ground in our country.”

“The Boys Are Fighting”: Team Trump Is Locked in Internal War - 2025-10-10T15:42:14Z

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and White House Budget Director Russell Vought are reportedly at odds over massive cuts to clean energy projects, Politico reported.

One senior administration official told Politico Thursday night that the White House Office of Management and Budget was annoyed that Energy Department senior staff had prepared a broad list of clean energy projects the agency hoped to target without sharing its contents with the White House. The list was the product of nearly 100 DOE staffers working to identify potential cuts, with a committee of roughly eight making selections and Wright making final determinations, people familiar with the process said.

That senior administration official said there was some friction within factions at the DOE, and that a “Colorado and DOGE crew” that lacked experience in government wasn’t interested in running decisions by the White House. “The tension is between the people who worked in government before and this other team who worked in the private sector and don’t think they need to follow processes or rules and think they can turn things on their heads,” the official told Politico.

Another person with direct knowledge of the discussions told Politico that Wright’s office was ready to drop the ax on a whopping $30 billion in funding awards but was told to wait so that OMB could use the funds as leverage against states.

Cut to last week, when OMB Director Russell Vought—not Wright—declared that the Trump administration would cut $8 billion in lawfully approved funding for energy projects, targeting 16 Democratic-led states. At the same time, a copy of the complete list began to circle around the Capitol, alarming energy advocates and lawmakers, including Republicans whose districts could be affected by the cuts. The fate of the remaining $22 billion, which is mostly earmarked for Republican districts, remains unclear.

Politico reported that the White House had forced Wright’s hand on the timing of the announcement. “Timing of announcements, I don’t control that always, but these decisions are made all in the Energy Department, all based on facts,” Wright told CNN last week.

There seems to be even more infighting at the DOE, but it’s not totally clear why. Two people told Politico that the DOE was looking to oust Undersecretary Preston Griffith Wells III. “It’s toxic af over there,” one person who works with senior DOE staff texted POLITICO. “The boys are fighting.”

But another person said that Wright had a good relationship with Griffith.

GOP Rep Reveals Nonsensical Revenge Plan After Trump Loses Nobel Prize - 2025-10-10T15:19:33Z

Donald Trump did not win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, so his GOP allies in the House are working to slap together the next best thing: a resolution to get him one.

Speaking with Fox Business Friday morning, Representative Buddy Carter said that (instead of working to end the government shutdown) he and his colleagues were going to file a resolution “today” to honor the president with the Nobel Prize.

“[Donald Trump] deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” Carter told the network. “That’s why I’m introducing a resolution today for a sense of Congress today that will honor him with the Nobel Peace Prize.

“If need be, we’ll call for a discharge petition on that. I hope we can work with the speaker though and get it on the floor for a vote,” Carter added.

That would imply that congressional Republicans would rather scratch Trump’s back than chip away at their actual jobs, which includes urgent work such as ending the government shutdown, passing appropriation bills, and swearing in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva.

But simply asking for one is not how winning the Nobel Peace Prize works. Speaking with reporters on Friday, Norwegian Nobel Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes explained that Trump’s covetous, multiyear campaign to snag the prize had no impact on the judges’ deliberations.

“In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think this committee has seen many types of campaign, media attention,” Watne Frydnes said. “We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what, for them, leads to peace. This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”

It’s no secret that Trump has pined for the international honor: The ego-driven U.S. president even phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” back in July to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of prize recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the contention could be that four other U.S. presidents have received the award, including Trump’s political nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

Trump’s obsession with obtaining the prize has led to some odd boasts over the last several months, including that he has resolved eight wars around the globe within the span of his second term. Trump has so far claimed responsibility for peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda, between Cambodia and Thailand, between Israel and Iran, between India and Pakistan, between Serbia and Kosovo, between Egypt and Ethiopia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and for “doing the Abraham Accords,” all while complaining about a lack of recognition by the Norway-based judges’ panel.

As Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan pointed out last month, practically all of Trump’s war-solving braggadocio is “demonstrably untrue,” to the extent that several of the listed examples were never even at war.

Trump Nominee Accused of Sexually Harassing a DHS Colleague - 2025-10-10T14:45:44Z

The president’s nominee to run the Office of Special Counsel was recently investigated for harassment.

Paul Ingrassia currently serves as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump tapped him to man the independent agency in June, but one month later, Ingrassia allegedly effectively coerced a lower-ranking female colleague to share a hotel room with him, reported Politico.

Ingrassia’s junior, another Trump appointee, had arrived with Ingrassia and other DHS colleagues at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando in late July. But it was only when the group reached the front desk that she learned she had not been provided a room of her own.

“Eventually the woman discovered that Ingrassia had arranged ahead of time to have her hotel room canceled so she would have to stay with him,” three administration officials told Politico anonymously.

The unnamed woman initially protested the arrangement, but relented to prevent making a scene in front of her colleagues. The two went to their room and slept in separate beds, according to Politico.

But the incident has remained a hot topic amongst DHS staffers ever since.

Ingrassia’s attorneys denied the allegations, and said that no last-minute changes were made to the hotel reservation.

“Mr. Ingrassia has never harassed any coworkers—female or otherwise, sexually or otherwise—in connection with any employment,” Edward Andrew Paltzik wrote in a letter to Politico, acknowledging that the DHS co-workers shared a hotel room but that “no party engaged in inappropriate behavior” on the trip.

The unnamed woman told Politico in a statement that she “never felt uncomfortable” with Ingrassia’s behavior and said she never made a complaint.

“A colleague misjudged the situation and made claims of alleged harassment that are not true,” the woman said. “There was no wrongdoing.”

The woman wasn’t the first to file a complaint. Instead, a career official filed one, with Ingrassia’s female colleague filing her own complaint afterward. The woman later retracted her complaint, which three officials said was out of fear of retaliation.

But in her interview with Politico as well as the legal complaint, the woman underscored that she wanted Ingrassia to change his tone with her and to begin communicating in a more professional manner. Five administration officials told Politico that Ingrassia’s behavior was “affecting her ability to do her job.”

A DHS spokesperson told the publication that its investigation into the incident had been fruitless.

“Career human resources personnel thoroughly looked into every allegation and concern and found no wrongdoing,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Ingrassia was already a controversial pick before news of the investigation became public. Republican senators have raised concerns about the 30-year-old’s lack of experience and his ties to multiple antisemitic extremists. That would include white nationalist Nick Fuentes and self-proclaimed misogynist and proud woman-beater Andrew Tate, whom Ingrassia worked for as a member of Tate’s legal team.

The incident also casts Ingrassia’s nomination for the Office of Special Counsel into doubt, particularly as the agency’s work primarily focuses on sensitive matters, including federal employee whistleblower complaints and discrimination claims.

The Undiscussed Reason the Democratic Party Might Wither and Die - 2025-10-10T14:45:12Z

Don’t miss: Watch the entire discussion between TNR host Perry Bacon and Democratic strategist Arkadi Gerney here, or read the interview transcript here.

Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It - 2025-10-10T14:35:32Z

David Axelrod is far better known these days for occasionally wagging his finger at his fellow Democrats than for breathing partisan fire, so it caught my eye when he posted this on X Wednesday: “So far, the ICE gang has shot & killed an unarmed man & lied about the circumstances; shot a woman 5 times for obstructing their vehicle; roughed up elderly women and zip-tied small children; shot a clergyman in the face with a pepper ball; marched through downtown Chicago, masked and armed. And they’re not going after the ‘worst of the worse,’ [sic] as promised. Most of the people they’re snagging have clean records. Some are citizens. To be clear: This is NOT making Chicago safer. It’s state-sponsored mayhem; dangerous political theater calculated to provoke.”

Historians sometimes say that when societies are descending into fascism, it can be hard for the people to notice it in real time. Well, historians of the future, I’m here to tell you: We are noticing. Millions of us are noticing. And we are horrified and enraged. We are well aware: We once lived in a country that, for all its frequent imperfections, was a place where the rule of law was a broadly shared value and where leaders acted with democratic restraint. We now live in a country where there is no rule of law; where leaders, especially the president but also others who support him, spit on the idea not only of democratic restraint but of democracy itself; and where the timorous first reflex of nearly every member of one of our two political parties is, at virtually all times, to do precisely what the leader wants.

That’s fascism. It may be—for now—a comparatively mild form of fascism. Political opponents aren’t being jailed or shot, opposition media outlets aren’t being shuttered, and books aren’t being burned. But a lot of things are happening that are terrifying. And last year, we lived in a country where the three scenarios I just listed were barely conceivable. Today, we live in a country where they are more likely only a matter of time.

Let’s go back to Axelrod, and specifically, his use of the phrase “state-sponsored mayhem.” That is exactly what President Trump is imposing upon Chicago. To take just one of the incidents Axelrod cites: Pastor David Black of the First Presbyterian Church was with a small gaggle of protesters outside a Chicago ICE facility. Three agents stood on the roof of the two-story building as Black and the others stood on the sidewalk maybe 15 feet away from the building. Black raised his arms to the sky, as if in prayer. Someone who appears to be a fellow protester approached Black to confer with him. Next thing you see in this video is a considerable puff of smoke explode from Black’s forehead as he falls to the ground. That’s a clergyman. Exercising his First Amendment right (he’s fine, and he’s suing). Black later told CNN: “We could hear them laughing.”

Shooting an unarmed and peacefully protesting pastor is by definition an act of state-sponsored mayhem. State-sponsored mayhem starts at the top, with the president’s thuggish, lawless threat to imprison the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago (by the way—Greg Sargent speaks to said governor, JB Pritzker, on his Daily Blast podcast today). From there, the people with the uniforms and the badges and the guns get the message, and they go out and do the things Axelrod listed above.

Administration officials pile lie upon lie upon lie. With respect to Portland, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refers preposterously to “the radical left’s reign of terror” there. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declares antifa to be “just as dangerous” as ISIS, which was killing perceived apostates by the thousands at its peak and raping little girls. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, rants nightly about armed confrontations that either don’t exist or exist solely because the administration creates them so it can have the footage that will air over and over on its propaganda network, Fox News. It’s all toward the purpose of erasing dissent, erasing democracy. As Zeteo’s Kim Wehle put it last week, reporting on two Trump-issued “national security” directives: “The president is taking steps to criminalize being anti-Trump in America.”

When a president and his aides are doing that, it’s no longer America.

When masked government thugs take potshots at a priest, it’s no longer America.

When a handpicked hack prosecutor with no prosecutorial experience indicts two honorable American citizens within a month of the president ordering their prosecutions, and when two real prosecutors quit rather than pursue these obscenely political prosecutions, it’s no longer America.

When the third-ranking official in the country, the speaker of the House of Representatives, delays the swearing-in of a duly elected member of that body because he knows she will vote to release files that potentially may shed light on unsavory behavior by the president, it’s no longer America.

When the presidential administration announces that it’s going after nonprofit charitable groups that have operated unmolested in this country for decades under Democratic and Republican administrations because they donate to causes the president disfavors, it’s no longer America.

When naturalized citizens are canceling overseas trips because they can’t be certain they’ll be welcomed back to their own country upon return, it’s no longer America.

When the Department of Education is bullying universities into agreeing to a “compact” under which they’ll promise not to “belittle” conservative ideas, it’s no longer America.

When the president and his family have used his office to enrich themselves to the tune of $3.5 billion in nine months, and when the Congress, controlled by the president’s party, refuses to do a thing about this rancid, dictator-level corruption, it’s no longer America.

When the Supreme Court of the United States has sold its soul to all this barbarity, it’s no longer America.

And when this thuggish dictator-wannabe is also a buffoonish man-child who sits there in his breathtakingly tacky Oval Office with his fake face and fake hair next to another head of state (the president of Finland) as he boasts yet again about passing a simple dementia test that a 10-year-old could ace, and we realize that this man-child is the sitting president, it’s no longer America, at least for anyone who cares about how we look to the rest of the world.

Historians of the future: Rest assured, millions of us know all this in real time. We are horrified, shocked, enraged, and ashamed. We are acting, in a thousand ways, to oppose it. This cannot, and will not, be how the United States ends.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Trump Attorney Makes Embarrassing Error in Letitia James Indictment - 2025-10-10T14:30:35Z

MAGA prosecutor Lindsey Halligan is already making basic errors in her indictment of New York Attorney General (and Trump target) Letitia James. In an official court filing Thursday, Halligan listed James’s address as “Brooklyn, New Jersey” instead of New York, where Brooklyn is.

Screenshot of a tweet

This is a pretty glaring mistake that someone trying to prosecute a state attorney general for false statements to a financial institution should not be making. Halligan, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, also brought forth charges last month against former FBI Director James Comey for lying to Congress, after her predecessor refused to. In that indictment, Halligan too made basic errors, like misspelling words and submitting the wrong documents to the judge.

Halligan, previously Trump’s personal lawyer, is a deeply unqualified pawn whose only mission is to head these obviously politicized legal attacks on people Trump doesn’t like. She had literally never prosecuted anyone before Comey, and has most of her experience in insurance cases.

“When you bring a case against the former director of the FBI, you definitely want it to be the maiden voyage of an insurance lawyer,” Last Week Tonight host John Oliver said sarcastically after Halligan indicted Comey. “What she lacks in prosecutorial experience she more than makes up for in random insurance facts and a shitload of undereye concealer.”

Now those same concerns are bubbling up again as Halligan makes an easily avoidable blunder in her newest politically motivated prosecution. All this from the administration obsessed with merit.

The Vindication of László Krasznahorkai - 2025-10-10T14:19:40Z

As soon as László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in literature, I started getting congratulatory texts. Not because I have played any role in the Hungarian author’s success but because for years I have attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to convert friends to his intricate charms. I keep a copy of Seiobo There Below next to my bed as a source of emergency bedtime balm; I have pictures of its three-pages-long first sentence in an email that I send to seemingly persuadable readers. I first read Krasznahorkai by accident, frozen in a bookstore and vulnerable to the holograph on Seiobo’s cover. As befits the cascading form of his novels and the fanatics among his characters, one book led to another and another and another. Except for those still only in Hungarian and the novella Animalinside (of which only 2,000 copies were printed, each costing $300), I have read every one of his books. I’ve wanted to write about him for years: about his style, his themes, his lonely acolytes. But until now, no one has been too interested.

Krasznahorkai’s following is small but extraordinarily devoted; his most loyal readers have a tendency to fall into frenzied, minutely detailed conversation about his writing. Its complexity has aggravated some and deterred many. Critics tend to describe Krasznahorkai’s style, with his long sentences—Herscht 07769 is technically one sentence—as hypnotic or mesmerizing. His layered digressions are called unsettling, his novels likened to an abyss. There is no doubt that reading him can be challenging. Two hundred and eight pages into the sentence that comprises Herscht, for instance, presents:

… it comprised a much more abundant wholeness, itself only apprehended by means of another viewpoint, radically differing from the conventions of science, although not unscientific or antiscientific, not some kind of mystical or transcendent or other foolish gobbledygook, but instead an image of the real obtained via a different view, only that the construction of this reality, its logic, is not yet before us, because we cannot know, here, what exists there in place of a causal system, and this is what he wished to say: the decisions of the Security Council must emphasize the fully justified concern over the catastrophe that might ensue at any moment, and yet as we stand in the dreadful shadow of this total catastrophe, we must yet realize: the experiential world as sensed by ourselves, from the viewpoint of this veritable realm, is only an idea, a mere idea, Mrs. Chancellor, of what reality truly is …

To pick a fairly mild example. In my experience, however, reading Krasznahorkai is challenging not because it is unwieldy and frenetic but because it is meticulously, precisely, intricately ordered. Antecedents are answered by consequents, clauses that are left open find closure, chains of thought eventually relink—even if we must track them over pages. We are not used to this task. For me, reading his sentences, following the subtleties in his worlds, serves as a dose of rare and cleansing concentration. It is a visceral experience of feeling one’s brain struggling with, but ultimately embracing, a mental mode far different from the one conditioned by emails and group chats, social media, and screen time. It doesn’t feel like getting lost: It feels like finding oneself precisely coordinated, grounded in a mass of text. It is a pure antidote to the worst cognitive tendencies in the rest of our lives.

Consider “He Rises at Dawn,” one of my favorite chapters in Seiobo There Below, a book described as a novel but which will read for most as an anthology of stories about art and creation. One of many works that engages Krasznahorkai’s interest in Japanese craft and culture (those with similar interests should try the novella “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East”), this chapter is about an expert mask maker working on a single mask. He works

a month and a half, so, roughly, that much time, here on the tatami placed in his work-box from early morning to early evening, and as for speaking, he doesn’t speak, not even to himself; if he makes any sounds at all, it’s only that he is lifting the piece of wood and quietly blowing off the wood shavings chiseled off the mask, and sometimes when he changes his physical position in the work-box and sighs while doing so, and once again he bends toward the block of wood, for at first it all begins with the Okari wood-merchant located in the one-time Imperial Palace, below Gosho to the south, in the person of Okari-san, who is of about the same stature as he, therefore very short, a good fifteen years older, and fairly gloomy, Okari-san, from whom he has been buying wood for years—he just bought this newer piece—he trusts him, the price is always good, the annual rings are thick and dense, the lines are without defects, namely the hinoki from which the chosen block of wood originates grew slowly; in addition, the wood is delivered from Bishu, in the prefecture of Gifu, from a forest that has the highest reputation, from a forest renowned for the quality of its material—the whole thing is a simple rectangular-shaped block of wood, that is how it all begins, with the circular cutting with the saw on the basis of the stencil to the desired proportions; he does not think, because he doesn’t have to, his hand moves by its own accord, he does not have to control its direction, the saw and the chisels know by themselves what they have to do, so it is no wonder that this first, this very first phase of the work is the fastest, the most free from the later, frequently tormenting anxiety …

Roughly the same plot of this story could be covered in a “Come With Me as I Make a Japanese Noh Mask” Instagram reel, from the montage of the idyllic woods to the time-lapse of a wood block shaving into shape. The vast majority of our media consumption and communication is now defined by this compression of complicated, unwieldy life into tidy little rectangles. Social media videos, television, and films are designed to demand the smallest of sustained attention, and to capture it as quickly as possible, as part of a larger project of sustained attentional extraction. TikTok is the apotheosis of this trend: To prevent the viewer switching to other content, the content will continually switch for the viewer. That infinite carnival, I think we all can recognize, is the real hypnosis, the true abyss.

In contrast, any time I sit down to read Krasznahorkai, it feels like launching into space: a terrible roar, a series of bumps and shakes, and, mostly, an irrepressible forward motion that eventually sustains itself. If I’ve spent hours or days flitting about threads and feeds, the initial resistance can be intense. He rejects the smoothness, synopsis, and universal flavor of our modern digital culture. Our mask maker is a very specific one, in a very specific space, found at a very specific time. In another of my favorite chapters from Seiobo There Below, “Il Ritorno in Perugia,” Krasznahorkai spends nine pages describing the exact steps a fifteenth-century workshop takes to prepare a canvas so that its maestro may paint.

But his heterodox style or esoteric subjects don’t ultimately make for fitful or circular reading. It’s all headed somewhere, and sometimes it’s headed there fast. Krasznahorkai will kill off a character amid a bush of commas, barely noting their demise as he gets on with, say, the cataloging of a desk’s items. You can’t look away because you can’t afford to. War & War and The Melancholy of Resistance both offer stretches of Krasznahorkai at his most propulsive, aided by plot where characters themselves are flowing forward, rather than solely considering existential puzzles in decrepit hovels. A spirit of a chase, in the latter novel, is described with this sentence:

The bitter, evil pleasure of seeing these three lonely shadows helplessly swaying ahead of us, not even knowing for certain what was in store for them, exceeded even the power of the spell cast by the sight of the smashed-up town, meant more than the satisfaction occasioned by all the pieces of useless stuff we had trampled underfoot, for in that perpetual holding back, in the sheer joy of deferral, in that infernal putting off, we savoured something wry, mysterious and ancient that lent our least movement a fearsome dignity, the kind of unimpeachable pride possessed by all barbaric hordes, even when they know they might be scattered far and wide the day after, mobs whose momentum is unstoppable since they have appropriated even the thought of their own death, should they decide to make an end, their mission done, having had their fill for ever of both earth and heaven, with misfortune and sadness, with pride and fear, as well as with that base, tempting burden which will not allow one to give up the habit of pining for liberty.

Part of the challenge of selling Krasznahorkai beyond a Nobel jury is that his work is not compellingly summarized nor easily excerpted (see: this essay). He resists the passive absorption that we’re accustomed to. Instead, you might consider his texts as a building. Viewed up close, we see a variety of mundane materials pressed together; given a longer view, a grand architecture emerges.


Not just for this reason, brevity is not a sign of accessibility in Krasznahorkai’s works. It’s actually his longer novels that offer more traditional footholds for fiction readers. Although Herscht is written as one long sentence, it offers the most recognizable form of plot and the themes are urgently contemporary. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming conjures a world in a town, and its coda is nothing like I have ever read before or since. The Melancholy of Resistance offers some of both, with shorter sentences. For those resolved to start small, Spadework for a Palace can offer a taste of the archetypal style and madness. In any attempt, I might suggest new readers think of the experience like running: difficult at the beginning, euphoric at stages, biologically limited, and good for your health.

Seiobo There Below was an unorthodox place for me to start, but a revelatory one. It asked things of me that a book had not asked before: to simultaneously hang on tight and relinquish all control. It showed me a writer whose work is often perceived as chaos but in whom a reader can find meditation; escape from the rest of our frenzied world. I have since sought this feeling across his work. Revisiting that first sentence I’d read—the one people might actually want to try after this week’s prize—I see that it doesn’t just induce that feeling, it describes it. Krasznahorkai writes of a bird, that it

may bring its snow-white body to a dead halt in the exact center of this furious movement, so that it may impress its own motionlessness against the dreadful forces breaking over it from all directions, because what comes only much later is that once again it will take part in this furious motion, in the total frenzy of everything, and it too will move, in a lightning-quick strike, together with everything else; for now, however, it remains within this enclosing moment, at the beginning of the hunt.

Nobel Committee Warns About Rising Authoritarianism as It Snubs Trump - 2025-10-10T14:05:41Z

Passing over Donald Trump (in spite of his less-than-subtle appeals), the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday gave Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado the Nobel Peace Prize.

The award’s announcement cautioned that democratic backsliding is accelerating globally—a trend to which Trump has made no small contribution.

The Nobel Committee said it was recognizing Machado for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights” in an “authoritarian state.”

“Democracy is a precondition for lasting peace,” the committee stated. “However, we live in a world where democracy is in retreat, where more and more authoritarian regimes are challenging norms and resorting to violence.”

The “same trends” of repression and consolidation of power seen in Venezuela are happening globally, the committee said: “rule of law abused by those in control, free media silenced, critics imprisoned, and societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarisation.

“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the committee continued.

In these warnings, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the United States today under Trump—the militarization of American cities, weaponization of government against political opponents, violations of civil liberties, deportation of dissidents, and attacks on the press, academia, and other institutions.

Last month, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a global democracy watchdog, reported that it had flagged twice as many instances of the U.S. government eroding or abolishing “rules, institutions, and norms” that shape American democracy in the first four months of Trump’s second term as in the previous two years. Examples included “efforts to restrict academic freedom, criminalize protest activity, question the legitimacy of certified elections, selectively restrict media access to the executive and circumvent due process norms.”

Three More GOP Reps Split From Mike Johnson Over Shutdown - 2025-10-10T13:57:22Z

It’s been three weeks since House Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers back to their districts, and Republicans are getting seriously sick of his WFH strategy. 

During a private conference call with House Republicans Thursday, at least three lawmakers raised concerns about keeping the House out of session after it passed a stopgap funding bill that never made its way through the Senate, sources told MSNBC.  

California Representative Jay Obernolte warned that staying home would make it seem like Republicans were “prioritizing politics over government.”

“I think we’re gonna get to a point where it’s damaging to continue to keep the House out of session,” he said. 

Oklahoma Representative Stephanie Bice said she had “concerns” about lawmakers staying in their districts during the government shutdown, and that constituents probably “wonder why we’re not there,” according to one source. She warned leadership to imagine the optics of staying home next week, when lawmakers could just as easily deliver messaging from Washington. 

North Dakota Representative Julie Fedorchak expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that their messaging would be stronger and more consistent if they weren’t all working from home. 

Some Republicans have already voiced their disapproval publicly. 

California Representative Kevin Kiley fumed at the speaker’s comment Thursday, claiming that the House would likely remain out of session for another week because “we’ve already done our job.”

“What the House has done is pass a 7-week Continuing Resolution. The entire reason a CR is necessary is that Congress has not done its job in passing a timely budget,” Kiley wrote on X. “The Speaker shouldn’t even think about cancelling session for a third straight week.”

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has found herself at odds with party leadership, has slammed Johnson all week for sending lawmakers home.

“I think he should really bring the House back in session for many reasons. We have appropriation bills that need to get passed. There is a new Democrat that’s been elected that does deserve to be sworn in. Her district elected her. We have other bills that we need to be passing,” Greene told CNN Thursday. “Any serious speaker of the House is going to build consensus within his conference behind a plan. It’s not something secret that gets worked on in a committee.”

Earlier this week, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie suggested that Johnson had scattered lawmakers to the winds to avoid swearing in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who would be the tie-breaking vote on a petition to discharge the Jeffrey Epstein files in full. When pressed about it on Tuesday, Johnson struggled to explain why he was waiting for the House to be in full session, when she could be sworn in in a short pro forma session. 

Two Republican Governors Slam Trump’s Use of National Guard Troops - 2025-10-10T13:16:33Z

Two Republican governors have broken with the Trump administration, condemning the president’s decision to release the National Guard into American cities.

Vermont Governor Phil Scott called it an “unnecessary” and “unconstitutional” move that only “further divides and threatens people.”

“We need stability right now in this country—we don’t need more unrest.… I don’t think our guard should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional,” he told VTDigger on Thursday. “Unless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw Jan. 6 a few years ago.”

Scott also said he would reject a request to deploy Vermont’s National Guard elsewhere, and that Trump calling for the jailing of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was “wrong on many, many different levels.”

Scott did not support Trump in 2016 and called for his removal from office after the January 6 insurrection.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has been much more supportive of Trump than Scott has in the past, attending rallies and receiving endorsements from him since 2018. Even he thinks this is a bit much.

“We believe in the federalist system—that’s states’ rights,” he told The New York Times on Thursday. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”

“I was surprised that Governor Abbott sent troops from Texas to Illinois,” Stitt continued. “Abbott and I sued the Biden administration when the shoe was on the other foot and the Biden administration was trying to force us to vaccinate all of our soldiers and force masks across the country.… As a federalist believer, one governor against another governor, I don’t think that’s the right way to approach this.”

Stitt, who made the comments shortly before Scott, indicated he isn’t the only Republican governor who disapproves of Trump sending military from other states into the streets of Chicago, Portland, and Washington, D.C.

“Maybe you just haven’t asked the right ones,” he said. Only time will tell.

White House Flips Out After Trump Loses Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-10T12:54:54Z

“This is an achievement of a whole society,” said Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado upon receiving the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. “I am just, you know, one person. I certainly do not deserve this.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, did not receive the honor, despite believing—and asserting incessantly—that he deserves it more than anyone.

The White House on Friday lamented that the prize was not bestowed upon the man who felt the most entitled to it: “President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives,” wrote Steven Cheung, the notoriously feisty White House communications director, on X. “He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.”

“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” Cheung continued, in a seeming slight to Machado, whom Trump has previously praised for her pro-democracy activism and resistance to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Screenshot Truth Social Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Venezuelan democracy activist Maria Corina Machado and President-elect Gonzalez are peacefully expressing the voices and the WILL of the Venezuelan people with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the regime. The great Venezuelan American community in the United States overwhelmingly support a free Venezuela, and strongly supported me. These freedom fighters should not be harmed, and MUST stay SAFE and ALIVE! Jan 09, 2025 5:14 PM

Trump and his team have vociferously campaigned for the award in recent months, spuriously claiming the president has ended eight wars during his second term. In August, the president reportedly called Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, “out of the blue” to say “he wanted the Nobel Prize.”

World leaders seemingly caught on to Trump’s yearning for a Nobel as a way to the president’s heart, with the rulers of several countries, such as Pakistan, Israel, Guinea-Bissau, Gabon, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, scoring points with him by stating publicly that he deserves it.

Transcript: Trump ICE Raids Worsen as Pritzker Drops Bombshell Warning - 2025-10-10T11:47:05Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

(After we recorded, a judge temporary blocked National Guard deployments in Illinois).

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Trump’s invasion of Chicago has really gone off the rails. The imagery is jarring: hyper-militarized raids of apartment buildings, children being pulled out into the streets and potentially traumatized, a priest being shot by a smoke pellet. And Stephen Miller is boasting about it all over right-wing media, relishing every minute of these horrors. He and Trump plainly want to incite violence to justify further authoritarian crackdowns. In response to all this, Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois has taken a lead role in denouncing Trump’s abuses of power and warning that our ongoing slide into authoritarianism could end in true catastrophe. We think Democrats as a party could be doing a lot more of what Pritzker is doing. So today we’re fortunate to be talking to Governor Pritzker about all this and where it’s all going. Governor, thank you so much for joining us today.
Governor JB Pritzker: Great to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: So, Governor, can you just bring us up to date on what’s going on in Chicago with the National Guard and ICE right now at this moment?
Governor Pritzker: Sure. Well, I think I’m making news if I tell you this, but we have seen in addition to the Texas National Guard, which have not been deployed but they are on the ground, we now have seen that there are 14 so far California National Guard on the ground. And then, of course, they’re federalizing our Illinois National Guard. So, none of them have been deployed. Again, we don’t get direct information from the feds, but we do get reports from folks. That’s how we know anything really is that sometimes it’s people who work for me, sometimes it’s other law enforcement around the state, or just bystanders. So we know that they’re on the ground but not deployed.
Sargent: Well, I want to get your response to something Stephen Miller said on Fox News about the raid on Chicago’s South Side. He called it one of the most successful law enforcement operations that we’ve ever seen in this country. He said it targeted an apartment complex full of Tren de Aragua terrorists and that this operation saves many lives. Is any of that true? What’s your response?
Governor Pritzker: Well, I mean, if you—if this was Pinochet’s Chile, if this was Argentina under authoritarian rule, maybe you’d call it successful, meaning that they went after a few people in a building by absolutely terrorizing everybody in the building. There are about 130 people living there, a few of them being targeted, and everybody else—U.S. citizens, people with documentation who may not be U.S. citizens, and even undocumented people, who are not Tren de Aragua—who were held for hours and zip-tied. This is middle of the night: troops dropping—not really troops; they were agents—dropping from Black Hawk military helicopters onto the building, ransacking the place, breaking down doors and windows and so on.
And they arrested a few gang members. And by the way, I’m for—let’s go get the bad guys. Let’s get the bad guys. That’s why we have police. That’s why we have FBI and DEA. Let’s get gang members who are selling drugs or killing people. But that’s not how you do it. That’s not how we do it in the United States. You don’t round up the usual suspects—all the brown people who live in a building—and then ask everybody for their proof of citizenship before you’ll let them go while you’re arresting the people you actually were aiming at.
Sargent: So he said the building was full of Tren de Aragua terrorists. False?
Governor Pritzker: Absolutely false. Although I must say, you know, whenever the ICE and CBP agents say something, they put out a release or, you know, you’ve got Stephen Miller talking about it, they are lying.
I mean, there are several times now where it’s just obvious they’re lying. You know the story of the man, Silverio, who was shot and killed on a street in Chicago. They claimed that he had dragged an officer and that the officer was seriously injured. Look, we don’t know all the details. They don’t wear body cams and share any of the information with us. They just sort of put a release out later about what happened.
But now the news media has reported, the Sun-Times, that actually that’s not what happened—that the officer stepped in front of the guy’s vehicle, that the officer was, in fact, hit at the corner of the vehicle, but he was not severely injured, seriously injured, as they first said. And yet these officers opened fire and killed the guy who was driving it. And this is a guy who was dropping off his kids at daycare. I just—that plus, you know, the recent shooting. So this is two shootings.
We have one dead person, somebody else who went to the hospital. It turns out, you know, that they were saying that ICE was saying that there were ten vehicles that surrounded the ICE agents. But apparently, according to her attorney, there is body cam footage that shows something different, and that in fact this one ICE agent rammed her and got out of his vehicle, was yelling things—including the B-word—at her, and that she ended up being shot at because she has a gun in her car. So I’m just saying that you can’t believe anything that they say. We now have to investigate all of it. I’ve called on DCFS, for example, our Department of Children and Family Services, to investigate what happened to the children at that South Shore building that they attacked.
Sargent: I did want to ask you about that, Governor. I understand that that’s what you’re doing now. Several state agencies are looking into what happened at this raid. Any information back yet?
Governor Pritzker: No, they’re still doing their work. It’s going to take a few days for sure. The first thing we wanted them to do was less of an investigation, more just support for the families and the children. You can imagine, these children are totally traumatized. Right? Some of them are very young children, totally traumatized, and they’ve been attacked like they were in Fallujah.
Sargent: Is that what you’re hearing—that they are—that you’re getting back, that they are traumatized, the children?
Governor Pritzker: That’s what I—well, first of all, we start out imagining that that is what happened because we look at the building, look at any of the video that Kristi Noem now posted. If you were a young child in that building sleeping, and all of a sudden agents are coming through your door—they’ve got big weapons, they’re grabbing people and taking them out—and you get zip-tied, and maybe your grandfather gets zip-tied too. You know, this is... you can imagine what that would do to a young child.
Sargent: Well, so clearly Stephen Miller is using footage from Chicago as part of a vast national propaganda campaign. I wonder though, are you or Illinois law enforcement getting any briefings at all from the Department of Homeland Security or anyone else in the federal government about what they’re actually finding in raids like this one? It seems to me you’d want to be able to coordinate with them in some sense? Do they talk to you at all before they do these things?
Governor Pritzker: Greg, they have not called me once. Not once. I mean, we literally have almost no information. When they called out the National Guard—when they federalized our National Guard—they told me that I was going to get a call. This is the first time, by the way—no calls from the president of the United States, no calls from Kristi Noem about any of this, no calls from Greg Bovino, who’s the officer on the ground with CBP who’s in charge of all these agents, who just seems to be a terrible human being. And on the day that they were going to call in the National Guard and federalize them—the Illinois National Guard—I was told and informed by someone from the Department of Defense that the Defense Secretary, [Pete] Hegseth, was going to call me at a specific time. I said, I’d cleared my calendar to make sure that I would have time to call him, that I would not miss the call, and waited. Two and a half hours I waited for the phone to ring. Never called. I obviously kept my phone on me the entire rest of the day. They never called. Never called the next day. Still have never called. And it turns out that Secretary Hegseth was actually at a football game, taking part in a push-up contest. And this is all while he’s calling out the National Guard on my state and unwilling to call me to even let me know that that was going to happen.
Sargent: Well, know, pushups are important. It’s important to do that to keep in good health, Governor. But I do want to ask you, though, have you been trying to reach out to them in any sense, like very recently, and just to get a sense of what’s coming next? And are they answering your calls? What’s the state of the communication?
Governor Pritzker: So unfortunately, they don’t seem to want to respond to my entreaties. And I have said, you know, many times in public, on television, clearly the president is listening to what I’m saying on television about what it is that we want. What we’re getting, the way we’re getting any information from them has been either by people in their departments leaking things—maybe they’re people from Illinois or maybe they’re people who care about Illinois, but they’ve been leaking things. That’s one way.
A second is that we have some staff or people in our departments who regularly work with people in other departments in the federal government who just, knowing those people, have called to say, what do you know? And can you give us any information? So I think that the combination of that has given us a little bit, but you’re, what you said is a hundred percent accurate, Greg. If they would let us know, we’re not looking to impede. I mean, I want to impede the what some of the things they’re doing that are breaking the law. But we’re not going to stand in the way of them executing federal law. We can’t, we literally are prohibited by law and we follow the law here.
But what we could do is make sure that the neighborhoods are safer and that the officers themselves might be safer if they weren’t just surprising people in a neighborhood and showing up with these unmarked vehicles, wearing masks, banging on doors, disrupting people. Because you know what’s happening? Spontaneous protests. It’s not, you know, we have a couple of, we have a couple of blocks, two blocks across from an ICE facility in Broadview where people are showing up to protest every day. But in a neighborhood when these cars descend on and these people in masks, people in the neighborhoods are, first of all, they’re naturally freaked out.
And second, they have an extremely negative reaction to it. They love their neighbors, you know, they love their community. And so they’re yelling things at the officers like, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this? I know those people!” That kind of thing. And some of that could end up with something terrible happening, violence or otherwise. We would like to be able to prevent some of that just by our local law enforcement knowing what they’re doing. They don’t do any communication with us. It is truly an invasion of the city of Chicago, even without the troops being called up. And now potentially those troops will be showing up shortly if we don’t win in court.
Sargent: Well, Governor, the president has called for your arrest. I just want to ask you this pretty bluntly. Do you expect to be arrested soon?
Governor Pritzker: I do not expect to be arrested. And the President of the United States says a lot of crazy things. I genuinely think there is something wrong with him. I wish that his family would intervene, because I do think he needs mental health help. And I don’t think anybody around him that works for him is going to do that, because they’re benefiting from his failure of mental health, his dementia. I wish somebody would help out the President of the United States.
Meanwhile, you know, he says a lot of crazy things. He doesn’t have authority to arrest elected officials or really anybody where you don’t have any example of a crime being committed. And I find it ironic that this guy who’s a 34-time convicted felon is saying that I should be jailed. I’ve never been accused of, or convicted of, or, you know, gone on trial for anything. He’s the guy who’s done that so many times, and cheated, by the way, in civil court. And I don’t take it seriously other than I think the man has so much power at his fingertips because he’s president of the United States that the people around him might try to take it upon themselves to just make something up and come after me, or Gavin Newsom, I know they’ve mentioned that they might jail him, or the mayor of the city of Chicago.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about that. Do you think Stephen Miller is whispering in Trump’s ear that he should start arresting Democrats like you?
Governor Pritzker: Well, he’s saying it out loud. I don’t know why he isn’t whispering in the president’s ear. I mean, he’s basically claiming—and the president repeats these things—but Stephen Miller is claiming that, you know, antifa is involved somehow. Believe me, come to Broadview, would you, to these protests—there’s no antifa there. I mean, nobody’s revealed themselves to be antifa. I’m not even sure what antifa would look like, but they haven’t revealed themselves or caused any mayhem there. There are people who’ve broken the law, by the way, in those places, but it’s usually like their refusal to step out of the street, you know, when they should be. But Stephen Miller has essentially demonized any opposition, any opponent of the president of the United States, and made them seem like they’re terrorists. He’s used that word. And he’s called Democrats part of that sort of terrorist network. It’s ridiculous. Stephen Miller is a dangerous individual on his own. He’s very dangerous when he’s got the power of the president backing him up.
Sargent: Well, I wonder if Democrats as a party could be doing more to raise alarms along the lines of what you’re talking about—about Trump’s escalating authoritarianism. When Trump calls for the arrest or the prosecution of this or that Democrat, couldn’t the party leadership all stand up as one and warn that this is an emergency—that Trump is threatening to arrest and prosecute members of the opposition, and this is the onset of authoritarian rule? Couldn’t Democrats do more of that kind of thing in unison? Would you like to see more?
Governor Pritzker: Yeah, don’t you think? [Laughs] And I mean, look, I understand there are people who’ve stood up, I want to say, and we should give kudos to those people. I think Cory Booker has been terrific. I think that we’ve seen people standing up—Chris Murphy, Gavin Newsom—you know, there are people who are regularly calling it out. Right. But I wonder about lots of other folks.
And it’s not something that’s like, well, maybe, you know, if something happens this month, I’ll say something. No, it’s happening every single day. I mean, I’m living it here in Chicago and in Illinois that it’s happening, but it’s happening in Portland. It’s happened in L.A. It’s happening in Washington, D.C. And those are just the troop movements. We’re also seeing ICE in places that, you know, nobody expected them to be—in suburbs and rural areas of my state and elsewhere. So I am surprised that more leaders have not stood up. I don’t think we should just say Democrats—like, “Why haven’t Democrats”—because that sounds political. And to be frank with you, this isn’t about politics. This is genuinely about the future of our country. Do we believe in a constitutional republic, or do we think that it’s okay if this becomes the law of one—the president of the United States, the law of Donald Trump—that that is what we’re going to go by and not the law that is set out in the Constitution of the United States.
Sargent: Well, Mike Johnson was just asked about the threat to arrest you. And he basically said, I don’t really follow that stuff too closely. Go ask the attorney general. So it seems to me the Republican Party is mostly a lost cause. Assuming that, yes it would be better if Republicans join Democrats. Doesn’t the party, just the Democratic Party, really does have to step up a little bit here, doesn’t it? It seems like what we need is a party that’s sending signals loud and clear that we’re in the middle of an emergency. Would you like to see that?
Governor Pritzker: Yeah, Greg, I guess what I’m really trying to say when I say don’t just say Democrats is, there are business leaders—yeah, they might be a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent. You know, there are university leaders—again, what party they belong to doesn’t matter. What matters here is that people speak out. Look, I’ll give a little bit of credit today to Governor—I don’t know if you saw that Governor Stitt, Kevin Stitt in Oklahoma, finally said he doesn’t agree with the president, doesn’t think that, you know, the National Guard of one state should be sent into another state. I don’t think he’s doing anything about it as chairman of the National Governors Association, which he should. But the fact that he spoke out about it is at least evidence that there are some people that have rational thoughts about what the future could hold if we let Donald Trump do the things he’s doing now. Because think about if the situation were reversed and there was some other party—the Democratic Party,  there’s a Democratic president—who was calling the National Guard into a state to confiscate guns. I mean, everything I just said is against the law, unconstitutional. And yet the reverse of that is essentially happening right now. So people have to project forward: What does this country look like if we allow this to happen now?
So I think that’s the reason that I’m not focused just on Democrats. I do think there are good Republicans out there. I know it feels few and far between—people who are Republicans and speaking out—but we’ve seen some of them, Bill Kristol and others, over the last few years. I think more and more we’re seeing Republicans now saying, “Wow, there are limits to what I think Donald Trump should be able to do.” I wish more people in Congress, though, would do it. They are genuinely afraid in their Republican primaries that they will lose. The people who’ve been willing to stand up and speak out—Don Bacon, others, right—have to leave office because they know they’re going to get defeated in the next election.
Sargent: Well, I think a lot of members of Congress are frankly afraid of getting killed, aren’t they?
Governor Pritzker: I mean, look, this is the world that we’re living in for sure. I mean, if they’re afraid, you can imagine that there are Democrats ... I have threats now happening at a much higher pace than ever before.
Sargent: Is that right? Can you talk about that?
Governor Pritzker: I just—to say that, you know, when I ask our state police who protect me—because they don’t tell me about every threat that comes in—but when I ask them just, you know, what’s the level of threats, what are the numbers, they say there are more—a lot more—now. And it’s really been since before Charlie Kirk. And you saw that. I mean, look at the Speaker of the House of Minnesota and what happened to her and her husband. It’s been going on for a long time now.

I find it abhorrent that this is now part of our world—our political world. But this is, I think it’s a dangerous world. Republicans are getting threats; Democrats are getting threats. But I think there is a tone that gets set at the top. From my perspective, this wasn’t happening the way it is now under Obama, or before Obama under George W. Bush, or before that under President Clinton. But now we’re seeing it, and I think it happened sometime during Trump’s first term. I think there was a lot of rhetoric that he put forward that, I think, enticed—incited people, rather. And I think it’s being amplified now.

Sargent: So what more are Illinois state officials going to do to protect Chicagoans and Illinois residents from ICE? What’s in the pipeline? What are you going to do?

Governor Pritzker: So I think there are probably two levels of things that we look at doing. One is what we’re doing in the courts focused on Illinois specifically and Chicago specifically. And what can be allowed. We’ve seen a federal judge now expand a court order that limits what ICE can do in enforcement. That happened before today.

Sargent: But law enforcement on your side, what can be done?

Governor Pritzker: Well, again, what we are doing is protecting the protesters. We’ve got Illinois State Police out there with protesters. Protecting them, meaning they’re standing in between ICE and the protesters in order to because you saw that ICE was firing pellets and you know gas pellets and rubber bullets and so on. That’s rarely happening now at the Broadview facility. So that’s an example of of our local law enforcement protecting our people.

Sargent: Will there be more of that?

Governor Pritzker: We’re continuing to do that. We want to make sure that—look, if you want to protest peacefully, we are going to protect that right. If you’re not protesting peacefully, then we are not protecting you from potentially arrest if you’re going to be aggressive and violent. But I want to just say what the other level of fight that we’re putting up is: This is a national fight.

And what’s good, if we can fight this on a national level, too—if we can get people incited to protest peacefully across the country, like, for example, at the No King’s rally that will happen on October 18. If we can have that happen, and we’ve seen a lot of spontaneous peaceful protests across the United States, I think that’s a really good thing. I think it sends a signal to the rest of the public—the folks who are just trying to get to work and pay the bills—that something’s going on here that they better pay attention to. That’s a very important thing for us to have happen, because if we don’t win the 2026 elections—those of us who want to preserve democracy... If Democrats don’t win that election, Katy bar the doors. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future and whether we’re actually going to have elections.

Sargent: Governor Pritzker, thank you so much for coming on with us. We really appreciate it. 

Governor Pritzker: Thanks, Greg. Great to see you.

Trump Is Following in the Footsteps of a Failed English King - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

The federal government is currently shut down because Congress and President Donald Trump couldn’t agree on a funding measure. Earlier this week, the Trump administration claimed that it would keep funding WIC, a federal nutrition program for low-income families, despite the lapse in congressional appropriations. How do they plan to do that? By using revenue from Trump’s tariffs to make up the shortfall.

Is that legal? Probably not. For one thing, the tariffs themselves are likely illegal because the president invoked a law to levy them that doesn’t actually mention tariffs at all. (The Supreme Court will hear a case on the matter in November.) Using illegally obtained revenue to fund unrelated programs without Congress’s permission is likely a violation of the separation of powers as well, even if the programs are otherwise unimpeachable.

Few legal experts have applauded Trump’s attacks on Congress’s power of the purse. But he would likely find a kindred spirit in Charles I, the seventeenth-century English king whose own taxation policies and preference for absolute rule led to civil war. Charles’s downfall during the English Civil War helped transition England from the divine right of kings to parliamentary supremacy. It also inspired the Founders as they built a republican government around rights and liberties on these shores.

Trump’s second term reads like a list of the Founders’ worst fears. Over the last 10 months, he has blocked congressional appropriations at will and levied billions of dollars in tariffs on Americans without the consent of Congress. He has deployed troops onto the streets of the nation’s capital for pretextual reasons and sent the National Guard into states without the consent of their governors. He has claimed absolute immunity from criminal prosecution while targeting his political opponents with malicious indictments. “We took freedom of speech away,” he even remarked in a recent White House event.

All of this is at odds with two and a half centuries of American political thought. But it also extends even further back through the Anglo-American legal tradition to lessons that the Founders learned long before the Revolution. The Trump administration has done many things over the past 10 months on the specious grounds that doing so was necessary to protect our “culture” or our “way of life.” Its actions show that it knows nothing about them.

English kings and parliaments often quarreled over money. The medieval English monarchy was responsible not only for the king’s personal expenses but also for the salaries of royal officials, the maintenance of warships and docks, the upkeep of castles, palaces, and other holdings, and so on. In times of war, the king would also be responsible for paying armies in his service. War in the medieval era, as well as today, could be ruinously expensive.

The Crown had held its own land and estates since the Norman Conquest, but this was almost always insufficient to cover its costs on its own. By the time Charles took the throne in 1625, his predecessors had worked out a solution of sorts. Parliament would grant newly crowned monarchs permission to collect “tonnage and poundage,” a form of import-export duties, for the duration of their reign. In times of war, the Crown could also ask for additional funds as necessary.

It is important to emphasize that Parliament did not function as a full-time legislature as we know it today. English monarchs could summon and disband parliaments at will. (They technically retain this power today but now only exercise it at the prime minister’s request.) Elizabeth I only summoned it a dozen times during her reign, often with great hesitation and annoyance. Her successor, James I, whose only experience was with Scotland’s more deferential counterpart, quarreled with Parliament more openly than Elizabeth, though not as bitterly as his son.

Charles took the throne in 1625 amid religious and political tension. Henry VIII had cleaved England from Rome almost a century earlier, but the exact contours of what the English church would look like remained an open question. Charles, though Protestant himself, often sided with those who favored a church that more closely resembled the Catholic one it had left. His marriage to Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic, stirred distrust among Protestants who feared a return to papal authority.

Further complicating matters was that Charles was also an avowed proponent of the divine right of kings, in which a monarch’s right to reign came from God and no one else. This was not unusual in and of itself: His father, James, had written treatises defending the same principle during his own reign, and the Tudors before them—most notably Henry VIII—had adopted the same stance. Nor was this concept alien to Christendom in general. But in the English cultural mind, Catholicism and despotism were closely linked, and Charles’s perceived crypto-Catholic views amplified fears that he threatened their liberties.

What set Charles apart from his father was his absolutist stance on the matter coupled with his lack of political skill. Parliament was not merely a legislature as we know it today but an assembly of the wealthiest and most powerful subjects in the realm. Its privileges and powers had been carefully asserted and entrenched over the preceding centuries. It was one thing to insist that the king could govern without Parliament as a matter of law and philosophy. It was another to suggest that he could actually reign without the realm’s aristocrats, bishops, and landowners altogether.

When Charles became king, he asked Parliament to grant him tonnage and poundage. It declined, at least not without conditions that Charles was unwilling to meet. He responded by dismissing Parliament and beginning an 11-year era known as the Personal Rule, where he governed exclusively through his royal prerogatives and refused to summon Parliament at all.

This did not really solve the king’s problems. Without the Lords and Commons, Charles had to turn to other means to shore up his finances. He sold off lands and titles, granted illegal monopolies to supporters in exchange for cash, and taxed his Scottish subjects much more heavily, a move that would later backfire. He also leaned on other traditional forms of taxation. The most notorious of them was known as “ship money.”

Ship money was a quintessentially English tax. The island nation was naturally vulnerable to naval invasions. In times of war, medieval English kings had required coastal towns and villages to either provide warships for a royal navy or some sort of monetary equivalent when threats arose. Charles expanded these taxes in two significant ways. First, he began to require it from inland communities that had never had to pay the tax before. Second, he began to levy the tax on more vague grounds of national emergency instead of actual wartime.

Charles’s taxation efforts fueled discontent across the English countryside. Historian Jonathan Healey described it as “the most controversial of all the Crown’s financial policies, and something that would become the defining constitutional issue of the decade.” Among those unhappy with paying ship money was John Hampden, a wealthy landowner in Buckinghamshire. His refusal to pay in 1637 set up a test case of sorts on the legality of the taxes. Charles and his advisers welcomed it because they assumed the 12 royally appointed judges would rule in his favor and legitimize the taxes.

Oliver St. John, who would serve in the Cromwellian government after the Civil War, was among the lawyers who represented Hampden. A complete rejection of royal authority was still years away. Instead, he argued that Charles could only lawfully demand ship money in a genuine emergency. “St. John accepted that the king was the ‘fountain of justice,’ but claimed that ‘though all justice which is done within the realm flows from this fountain, yet it must run in certain and known channels,’” Healey noted in a recent book on the fraught and fateful era, with St. John referring to Parliament and the courts.

The king’s lawyers, as one might expect, took a more expansive view of his powers. “Bankes made the royalist case eloquently,” Healey wrote. “‘This kingdom, it is a monarchy,’ he said, ‘it consists of head and members, the king is the head.’ The head, he continued, ‘is furnished with entire power and jurisdiction.’ It was an emergency because the king said it was, and it was in the monarch’s power to anticipate danger and to act in the public interest.” It did not matter if the king’s claims were pretextual or not; all that mattered was that he made them.

Charles received the victory that he sought, but not the legitimization that he desired. Seven of the 12 judges sided with the king, with the remaining five judges dissenting. Charles grew dissatisfied that almost half of his own judges had ruled against him. The maximalist argument that his lawyers had made was constitutionally transformational as well, inflaming the opposition and delegitimizing the courts. Copies of the dissenting judges’ opinions were widely distributed among the public.

“What [the king’s lawyers] had done was convince the judges that England was, if one looked closely enough, a truly absolute monarchy,” Healey explained. “‘If we grant ship money,’ one critic would write, ‘we grant all besides.’ The king, when it came down to it, had an absolute right to take his subjects’ property as and when he felt that he needed it. To those versed in Roman history, it implied that the English people were little better than slaves, for they had no secure control of their lands and goods. More to the point, it underlined the viability of Charles’s rule without Parliament for the foreseeable future.”

Events only deteriorated even further from there. The Scots rose up in revolt once again, frustrated by overtaxation and religious differences, and Charles struggled to fund an English army to counter them. (It did not help that more than a few Englishmen sympathized with their northern neighbors.) The revolt forced Charles to end the Personal Rule and summon Parliament in 1640 to request additional funds. It would prove to be a momentous decision: The Long Parliament, as it became known by historians, would ultimately wage war against Charles in the English Civil War, overthrowing him and establishing England’s first and only republic.

Even the Stuarts’ restoration in 1660 could not fully reverse Parliament’s ascendancy. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw James II’s ouster in favor of an avowedly Protestant succession, furthered England’s transition to parliamentary sovereignty. The English Civil War and its aftereffects would also be felt in the fledgling colonies in America. New England, the ideological cradle of American liberty, was drawn from the same cultural stock as the Parliamentarian forces in the war: Puritan in religiosity, egalitarian in sentiment, and democratic in local governance.

When the American colonists spoke of “the rights of Englishmen” in their protests against British rule, they referred to a liberal (and occasionally idealized) vision of the rights that they and their ancestors had enjoyed. The turmoil of the seventeenth century in England imparted to early Americans a strong cultural belief in representative government, both in laws or taxation. The English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell’s dictatorship, and the British occupation of American cities during the Revolution also instilled them with a strong cultural aversion to standing armies.

The Constitution is extremely well informed by these hard-won lessons. Article 1 explicitly gives Congress the “power of the purse,” as it was known in England, by granting it the exclusive power to levy tariffs and duties, to fund and regulate armies and navies, and to declare war. While the president is the commander in chief, military officers must be confirmed by the Senate and funding for the army must be renewed every two years.

These protections were seen as obvious and necessary for republican government by the Framers. Standing armies, as Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 10, tend to “strengthen the executive arm of government, in doing which their constitutions would acquire a progressive direction toward monarchy.” He added that it “is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.” Charles and Cromwell likely loomed in his mind when writing that maxim.

John Adams, the eventual second president, recounted in his diary about visiting two historical sites during a tour of England with Thomas Jefferson in 1786. “Edgehill and Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as scenes where freemen had fought for their rights,” he wrote, alluding to the Parliamentarian victories that had been achieved there in the Civil War. Adams also expressed surprise at what he saw as a lack of reverence from the locals.

“The people in the neighborhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester,” he wrote, “that I was provoked, and asked, ‘And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.’ This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their awkwardness before might arise from their uncertainty of our sentiments concerning the civil wars.”

Trump knows little of this history and tradition, and the American civic tradition has left no visible imprint on him. He does not speak the common language of American political leaders, nor does he share the republican values that are so bedrock to our national identity that they went largely undisputed for the last two and a half centuries. Just as the English of the seventeenth century found themselves ruled by a Scottish-born king who did not believe in their rights and liberties, so too do Americans find themselves under a half-Scottish landlord who claimed that he has “an Article Two [of the Constitution], where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

A reporter asked Trump this week during a roundtable session at the White House whether he would try to suspend habeas corpus. “Suspend who?” the president replied, then referred the matter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. So ignorant of our Yankee culture and traditions is Trump that he was apparently under the impression that “habeas corpus” was the name of a person to be arrested or deported. Even Charles I knew better than that.

The Candidate Caught in a Nazi Porn Scandal Is Today’s GOP Personified - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

With his normcore style and measured, talk-radio voice, John Reid, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia, is no internet-pickled groyper. He’s a stock MAGA uncle, smarmy and bluff. But for six months now, he’s been giving lech. He’s been giving Gaetz lite.

Back in May, research from an anti-Reid faction in the state GOP alleged that he was behind a Tumblr account, “JRDeux,” which posted penis pics. (Reid’s Instagram account has the same handle.) At the time, Reid denied he was responsible for the account, claiming he was the victim of a smear campaign for being openly gay; he stayed on the ticket over the objections of his own party, including Governor Glenn Youngkin.

But you can’t keep this sordid story down. Last week, with early voting well underway in the November 4 election, American Journal News revealed that, on the same porny Tumblr blog, JRDeux didn’t just serve up lewdery. He boosted a user who brandished swastikas. (See: “Republican Candidate in Virginia Caught in Nazi Porn Scandal.”) Back in 2015, JRDeux also shared an image of a male college student posted by a user who self-described with a racial slur and sought the company of “superior white men.” Turns out Reid’s alleged Tumblr clique was devoted to the eroticization of slavery and “overt Nazi fetishism.”

“No one’s ever seen a candidate like me in Virginia and quite frankly most places across the country,” Reid boasted not long ago to a Charlottesville media outlet. He’d be right—except that, for those keeping count at home, Reid is the second Republican to be engulfed in a Nazi porn scandal in just over a year.

So that’s all deeply bleak. But what’s weirdest about Reid is not his weirdness. It’s how MAGA-typical his whole career is. Billing himself as an “American Patriot, Reagan Conservative, Virginia Gentleman,” Reid has a personal story that doubles as the spiritual journey of four decades of GOP putrefaction. Reid has Zelig-ed his way through just about every stage in the GOP’s metamorphosis from anti-fascist family-value conservatism to its current incarnation as the profa (as opposed to antifa) party of pervs.

Four decades ago, Reid started strong. He graduated from tony St. Christopher’s prep school in Richmond, and then Baylor, the Christian university that later brought in Ken Starr as president, only to fire him for licensing campus sexual assault. In 1993, Reid moved to Los Angeles to intern for former President Ronald Reagan.

What telegenic Reagan conservative of the 1990s didn’t want to be on TV? Reid then spent a decade as a reporter and then anchor for a morning show at the ABC affiliate in Richmond. Years later, he built on this success by hosting a conservative radio show on WRVA. Trump called in to his radio show last February, and Reid buttered him up.

In the 2000s, Reid flacked for then-Senator George Allen during Allen’s infamous racist interludes. (A longtime friend to the Sons of the Confederacy, Allen, as Virginia governor, declared April “Confederacy Month.”) All along, Reid has had a soft spot for Richmond’s racist monuments. “We must not let angry mobs and corrupt lawless Democrats destroy and erase our history and our public artwork, monuments, memorials, and tombs,” he posted to Facebook in July.

And the Virginia Flaggers have never forgotten Reid’s kindness to their movement. Last month, the Flaggers, a neo-Confederate group known for espousing Lost Cause ideology and installing massive Confederate battle flags over highways, posted to Facebook: “John Reid for Lt. Governor of Virginia is the ONLY candidate for statewide office who is not afraid to speak out and speak up about the war on our history and heritage!”

In 2011, Reid joined what has been called the Torturers’ Lobby, the K Street “communications” firms whose dark arts for whitewashing foreign authoritarian regimes were pioneered in part by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. In 2011, Reid rose to partner at Qorvis, the strategy firm notorious for counseling barbaric governments like Saudi Arabia and Libya. (Most recently, Qorvis helped Saudi Arabia sweep under the rug the torture and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by government agents.)

At Qorvis, Reid became a registered foreign agent. “Reid’s experience normalized influence-peddling for repressive governments,” David Leblang, who teaches public policy at the University of Virginia, told the Virginia Mercury. On September 8, Qorvis CEO Matt Lauer (not the disgraced TV guy) appears to have attended a Reid fundraiser on Capitol Hill, along with loose-collared Dancing With the Stars personality Sean Spicer.

Though Reid came out as gay in the 1990s, and has been with his boyfriend, Alonzo Mable, for eight years, he opposes enshrining gay marriage (along with voting rights and reproductive rights) in Virginia’s constitution. He regularly orates on “predatory” trans women, “the physical mutilation of children,” and the rest of the MAGA urban legends.

Meanwhile, his whole ticket is troubled. At the top, gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears is polling well behind her Democratic rival, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger. Youngkin, for his part, is whipping up made-for-Fox outrage about Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, who not long ago shared high-key disturbing fantasies about committing political violence. And on Tuesday, the Republican Governors Association dropped another $1.5 million into the race to boost Earle-Sears.

So it’s gonna be another nutty month in Virginia. But have no fear for John Reid. If he wins, he wins. But if he leaves Richmond for D.C. in some Trumpy capacity, he might also get a hero’s welcome there. The perv-fascist solidarity in Trump’s Washington has come to seem like the #MeToo movement in reverse. Lechy newcomers get to burst onto the scene at Butterworth’s—“me too, guys!”—into the loving arms of the sex-scandal-plagued elite: former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, and of course Trump himself.

Who Gets Away With Crimes Against Humanity? - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

From Nuremberg to The Hague, the postwar order promised a universal standard of justice. In practice, it has delivered something else: a system that shields the powerful and their allies, and reserves prosecution for poorer, weaker countries. The same states that helped draft the rules have worked just as hard to ensure that those rules almost never apply to their own leaders. This selective enforcement is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. The case brought last year by South Africa at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide, a charge co-signed by several other countries, big and small, is only one of the most recent tests of whether the promise of impartial justice can survive geopolitical reality.

The rise of reactionary “anti-globalist” political movements has rendered the possibility of international justice ever more shaky in recent years. During his first term as president, Donald Trump displayed a hostility to the very notion of universal rights. Seeing a ruler’s power as essentially absolute, he extolled Saddam Hussein’s brutal record on counterterrorism in Iraq and celebrated the authoritarian “leadership” of Vladimir Putin. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have warned that the second Trump administration will likely further erode the rights of vulnerable people at home and abroad. The recently constructed Alligator Alcatraz in Florida—a slapdash detention center surrounded by swamps and predatory wildlife—is a brutally surreal symbol of state cruelty.

American politicians have long floated above the reach of global human rights law no matter how egregious their conduct. While U.S. leaders have escaped the scrutiny reserved for the likes of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor, and Laurent Gbagbo, they have also frequently intervened on behalf of friends accused of horrific acts. When the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year, Senator Tom Cotton dismissed the ICC as a “kangaroo court” with no standing to bring charges. “If you help the ICC, we’re going to crush your economy,” Senator Lindsey Graham intoned. Earlier this year, the Trump White House sanctioned the ICC, an act U.N. experts said “strikes at the very heart of the international criminal justice system.”

In a postwar global order defined overwhelmingly by U.S. actors serving U.S. interests, the miracle might be that any world leader friendly with Washington has ever been held liable for their gruesome deeds in an international court of justice. Augusto Pinochet was likely comfortably assured of his impunity when he was awakened in a London hospital by Scotland Yard officials on the evening of October 16, 1998. Two detectives and an interpreter were there to place the 82-year-old retired army general under arrest for crimes committed during the ruthless dictatorship he ran in Chile for almost two decades. “I know the fucker who’s behind this,” Pinochet said. “It’s that communist Garcés, Juan Garcés.”

He was right. As a young man, Garcés had become a friend and adviser to President Salvador Allende, the democratic socialist overthrown on September 11, 1973, in a violent coup led by Pinochet with the Nixon administration’s support. “Someone has to recount what happened here, and only you can do it,” Allende told Garcés on the day he died. Garcés went on to study law in Paris and returned to his native Spain in 1975 after the death of strongman Francisco Franco. Garcés then spent years organizing the legal case against Pinochet under universal jurisdiction, a legal principle allowing prosecution for torture and crimes against humanity regardless of where they occurred or the nationality of the perpetrators and victims. In coordination with human rights groups, he worked closely with a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, who ultimately issued the warrant that led British authorities to detain Pinochet.

Philippe Sands was an attorney for Human Rights Watch, one of the groups pressing for the prosecution of Pinochet at the time. In 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia, he offers more than personal recollections of the case, which he calls “one of the most important international criminal cases since Nuremberg.” As he uncovers the surprising links between Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, and the shadowy remnants of the Third Reich on the run, Sands weaves a chilling transnational history of twentieth-century atrocity. What emerges is a profoundly humane examination of the legal, political, and ideological networks that make impunity possible, and a study of the moral clarity needed to confront power when it shields itself behind a uniform, a border, or a flag.


For Garcés, bringing Pinochet to justice was a means of reckoning with the legacies of the Spanish Civil War, fought from 1936 to 1939 between an elected republican government and a fascist military uprising led by Franco. The conflict claimed well over a hundred thousand lives and displaced millions more. As the then–U.S. ambassador to Madrid later recalled, “it was evident to any intelligent observer that the war in Spain was not a civil war.” Something larger and more ominous was afoot: “Here would be staged the dress rehearsal for the totalitarian war on liberty and democracy in Europe.” After Franco’s victory, some 15,000 Spanish Republicans were sent to Nazi concentration camps. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish dictator outlived World War II, serving for decades as a beacon of reaction for authoritarian traditionalists the world over.

As historian Kirsten Weld has shown, crucial figures in the Chilean dictatorship understood themselves to be following in Franco’s footsteps. The Pinochet regime, like Franco’s, sought to impose a conservative, nationalist order that rejected liberal democracy and leftist movements of any kind, justifying brutal measures—including disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings—as necessary to preserve order and civilization. Three years after the coup, Pinochet himself told U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that events in his country represented “a further stage of the same conflict which erupted into the Spanish Civil War.” (Kissinger, for his part, considered Pinochet “a victim of all left‑wing groups around the world.”)

It was in Spain, too, however, that legal activists began the battle to prosecute the Chilean dictator for his crimes. Central to this effort was the case of Antonio Llido, a Spanish priest arrested in Santiago in 1974. Witnesses asserted Llido was badly tortured before he disappeared forever, one of thousands murdered by the state. With the return of democracy in Chile in the 1990s, Chilean and Spanish human rights groups filed complaints on behalf of Llido and other victims, triggering investigations in Spain that culminated in Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998. The ex-dictator claimed immunity from arrest as a former head of state. But in a highly publicized ruling, the House of Lords—at the time, the United Kingdom’s highest court of appeals—found that former heads of state could not claim immunity for torture charges after 1988, the year that conspiracy to torture outside the United Kingdom became a crime in English law. On other points, however, the decision was mixed, allowing the pro- and anti-immunity sides to claim partial victory. The lords left Pinochet’s fate up to Home Secretary Jack Straw. For a moment, it seemed entirely plausible that Pinochet would be extradited to Spain, where Chilean survivors were preparing to testify against him.

Yet Pinochet never stood trial. Behind the scenes, the ex-dictator’s powerful allies weighed in on his behalf. In 1982, Margaret Thatcher had reportedly given him her word that he could seek medical care in Britain as needed in exchange for support against Argentina during the Falklands War. “During his annual trips to London, Pinochet says, he always sends Thatcher flowers and a box of chocolates, and whenever possible they meet for tea,” journalist Jon Lee Anderson wrote in 1998, just days before Pinochet’s arrest. In the aftermath, Thatcher wrote Prime Minister Tony Blair to lobby for her friend’s release. The Vatican also quietly yet forcefully pleaded for a “humanitarian gesture” from British authorities. For its part, the Chilean government under President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle—hardly a Pinochet defender—demanded the former strongman’s release in the name of national sovereignty and political reconciliation at home. They all got their way. After 16 months under house arrest in Britain, Pinochet was sent home in March 2000 by Straw. The Spanish case met a dead end.

What makes Sands’s account of this legal drama so compelling is the way he weaves it into both the story of democratic reconstruction in post-dictatorial South America and the broader trajectory of his long-running investigations into atrocity and impunity. Indeed, one way of understanding 38 Londres Street is as the final piece of a Sands trilogy on atrocity and impunity that includes East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (2016) and The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive (2020). Research for both of those works led him to the other major character in this latest book: former SS commander Walther Rauff.


Rauff was born in 1906 in Köthen, a town roughly a hundred miles from Berlin. In 1924, the year Adolf Hitler was imprisoned for leading the Beer Hall Putsch, Rauff joined the German navy. He soon visited South America for the first time, landing in the Chilean port of Valparaíso in late 1925. “Making his way to the Naval Academy,” Sands writes, “Rauff passed the San Rafael Seminary, where one of the pupils was ten-year-old Augusto Pinochet.” This was not the last time the two would be so close.

A dutiful Rauff excelled in the armed forces until he began an extramarital affair that culminated in a nasty divorce and military court proceedings against him in 1937. That same year, he joined the Nazi Party. In 1938, the year of the Munich Agreement and Kristallnacht, Rauff joined the SS, the elite Nazi paramilitary organization led by Heinrich Himmler. Decades later, Rauff’s Chilean grandson would tell Sands he liked to imagine him as a reluctant collaborator. Sands’s careful research shows, however, that Rauff was a true believer. He stood out for his technical prowess and would prove to be an innovator in atrocity. He closely oversaw the design and implementation of mobile gas vans used to murder Jews, Roma, and Soviet civilians in the occupied Eastern territories. “The main issue for me was that the shootings were a considerable burden for the men who were in charge thereof, and this burden was removed through the use of the gas vans,” Rauff later remarked.

In late 1942, Rauff led a special unit in Tunis that persecuted and killed Jews. By September 1943, he was transferred to Italy, where he would meet Mussolini—but not before participating with Karl Wolff, Germany’s military governor of northern Italy, in secret talks with Allied forces, who had landed in Sicily that summer. “In return for peace, he and Wolff hoped to avoid prosecution.” In Switzerland in early 1945, Rauff met Allen Dulles—the powerful local representative of the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence body that would become the CIA (both the State Department and the CIA have made available troves of documents pertaining to Rauff).

Held in a POW camp after the end of the war, Rauff escaped in December 1946 and spent over a year hiding in an Italian monastery. Like many Nazi fugitives, he fled across the Atlantic. In a letter uncovered by Sands, Rauff advised a former high-ranking SS officer and Nazi official: “Accept the current situation and you can achieve a lot and climb back up the ladder … The main thing is to get out of Europe … and focus on the ‘reassembling of good forces for a later operation.’” Rauff suggested South America.

In early 1950, Rauff and his family arrived in Ecuador, where they set about creating a new life. Rauff engaged in various business dealings and, as was revealed decades later, did some spying for West Germany. His sons took military paths, with support and letters of recommendation from friendly Chilean officials stationed in Quito—including Pinochet, then in his early forties. The future strongman had joined the army in the 1930s, a time when Chile’s military was considered one of the most modern and professional in South America. Pinochet rose steadily through the ranks, holding command positions in various army units. In 1956, he was invited for a teaching stint at Ecuador’s War Academy. “Pinochet and Rauff, and their wives, became socially close, bonded by a virulent anti-communist sentiment, respect of matters German and a mutual interest in Nazidom,” Sands explains, undercutting Pinochet’s later claim of never having met the escaped SS officer with a direct hand in the murder of thousands. The two men saw each other as allies in a shared epic struggle bigger than themselves.

In the late 1950s, Rauff settled in Chile. He joined a large German expatriate community and made an ostensible living as manager of a crab cannery near the country’s southern tip while continuing to write reports for West German intelligence. Accountability eventually came for certain high-profile Nazis in hiding. Adolf Eichmann, who managed many of the logistics of the Holocaust, also fled to South America after the war. He was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960; taken to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people; and executed by hanging in June 1962. Rauff himself was apprehended in 1962 in what Sands sees as a parallel with Pinochet: “two men arrested at 11 p.m., on charges of mass murder, with a request for extradition from one country to another.” Rauff assured his family that he was safe, that the high-profile connections he had established in Chile would shield him from Eichmann’s fate. He was right.


Pinochet’s rise to power no doubt set Rauff’s mind at ease. The dictatorship repeatedly rebuffed fresh extradition requests from West Germany and Israel, even as Nazi hunters like Beate Klarsfeld and Simon Wiesenthal located war criminals. For Pinochet, harboring Rauff was neither accident nor oversight. As Sands makes clear, Pinochet’s regime was ideologically aligned with the arch-traditionalism of Francoist Spain and the repressive anti-communist order that Nazi veterans represented. Rauff, an unrepentant party man who celebrated the Führer’s birthday every year, embodied both the continuity of far-right authoritarianism from the 1930s to the Cold War and the conviction that leftist politics were an existential threat to be eradicated.

Sands examines these overlapping life histories and political narratives with sensitivity and clear eyes. He is not inflammatory or accusatory. Rather, through meticulous archival research, interviews, and vivid reporting in several countries, he allows readers to trace surprising—and damning—connections across time and place. Sands himself is often the vessel for these discoveries. He recounts walks in recent years through unassuming Santiago neighborhoods, retracing with torture survivors the footsteps of political detainees and observing the architecture of state violence, unchanged in a Chile that is otherwise vastly different. He visits the site of the former Socialist Party headquarters, turned after the coup into a notorious center of interrogation and torture, at the titular 38 Londres Street. The book includes photos that reflect Sands’s personal, memoiristic style: snapshots of rooms, buildings, and people, evidently taken by the author himself. The effect is to heighten the reader’s sense of accompanying Sands on a chilling journey into a human rights heart of darkness.

When Rauff died peacefully in Santiago in 1984, surrounded by his sons and grandchildren, the Pinochet government had shielded him for more than a decade. His funeral drew open displays of Nazi salutes, a final reminder that the ideological underpinnings of his crimes were far from extinct. In this light, Pinochet’s own confidence in his untouchability seems less like personal hubris and more like the logical conclusion of a system in which those who serve the right cause, in the eyes of powerful patrons, are protected no matter the enormity of their crimes. Just as Rauff eluded the hands of justice, so, too, did Pinochet hope to evade the authority of any court. That he was wrong, even briefly, is why his arrest in London still resonates: It was proof, however fleeting, that the walls built to shelter the powerful can be breached. Pinochet was eventually sent home to Chile rather than Spain, where he would have stood trial. Claiming concerns for his health, he left London in a wheelchair that he abandoned on the tarmac in Santiago. He died in 2006 at the age of 91.

Sands insists that the spectacle of the dictator’s arrest was not for naught. It helped lay the legal groundwork for the successful domestic prosecution of other members of the regime. Unlike Brazil, for example, which never held any agents of its Cold War–era dictatorship criminally liable for human rights violations, Chile made significant legal strides. Over the past two decades, hundreds of military officers have been indicted and dozens convicted for their involvement in forced disappearances and assassinations of dissidents in Chile and beyond.

Chile’s protection of Rauff was of a piece with the regime’s use of former Nazis and fascists as advisers, trainers, and symbols of a militant anti-communist international. It was also a vivid demonstration of the formal and informal mechanisms that sustain impunity—convenient legal loopholes and mutually beneficial alliances binding together fundamentally anti-democratic actors across continents and decades. Our attention to these networks should serve more than historical understanding. Sands, who last year argued against the legality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine at the International Court of Justice, understands this implicitly. In a moment defined by a lack of accountability, the Pinochet precedent reminds us that impunity is not inevitable. It is a political choice that can be—and has sometimes been—reversed.

Trump’s Tariffs Should Force a Reckoning With America’s Soy Industry - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

Usually, the best thing about being in the American soy business is the predictability. Buy seeds from the same companies, sow them, water them, harvest the crop, and sell to the same buyers who have been buying it for decades. The last few years have been particularly profitable, with historically high prices and a consistent client in China, the world’s biggest buyer of soy. The United States is the world’s second-biggest producer of soy, after Brazil, growing over 80 million acres of the oily bean across vast swathes of the country’s farmland. About a quarter of all that crop goes straight to China, bringing in $13.2 billion last year alone.

Now that market is gone, as is any predictability. After the U.S. levied heavy tariffs on Chinese imports in April, China responded by refusing to buy American soy. That was in May. Now, with the American soy harvest nearing the end of its season, American farmers are panicking. As the global soy value chain rearranges in real time, Brazil has become China’s biggest supplier while Americans go hat in hand to small markets like Nigeria and Vietnam hoping to cut some deals. The Trump administration has hinted at a bailout. And to add insult to injury, Argentina, which the administration just promised a $20 billion currency swap to rescue its flailing economy, is now selling shiploads of soy to China.

This agricultural drama has been getting a lot of media attention over the past few weeks, in part because it is exemplary of the helter-skelter policymaking of the Trump administration and its unpredictable global implications. The bigger story about soy, though, isn’t the current trade war but the fact we’re producing far too much of the crop—not so humans can eat it, but so animals can.

In 1962, China’s per-capita gross domestic product was $71 and the average Chinese person ate about nine pounds of meat per year. But as the country industrialized and urbanized, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, increased consumer spending power fed a growing appetite for meat, especially pork. That, in turn, drove the country to pursue agricultural modernization, replacing smallholder farms with industrialized ones and embracing an “industrial meat regime” rooted in factory farming pork and poultry. In remaking its economy, China also remade its diet. Today, China’s per-capita meat consumption is 154 pounds. The country has grown into the world’s biggest pork producer and pioneered massive pig production facilities like a 26-story megafarm in Hubei province.

Factory farming entails taking animals out of fields and growing them for the entirety of their lives in enclosed warehouses where their diets can be optimized to maximize quick growth for slaughter. But to feed all those animals, the fields need to be used to grow feed like corn and soy in massive quantities. China embraced soy production, but soon its demand for meat far outstripped its supply of available land. Today it imports 85 percent of the soy it uses, representing 60 percent of all global soy imports.

While China’s embrace of a meat-heavy diet is remarkable in its speed and scale, it is only catching up to Europe, which has long practiced factory farming, and still lags the United States, which pioneered industrial animal farming and where per-capita meat consumption is 220 pounds per year (and more if you count fish). The geographer Tony Weis calls the remaking of food systems to serve factory farming “meatification,” which entails diverting grain and oilseed production from human food toward animal feed. In the U.S., 35 percent of all corn and over 90 percent of soy becomes animal feed. In fact, 67 percent of all crops go to animal feed while 27 percent go directly to humans (the rest goes to biofuels). (Globally, 77 percent of all soy goes to animal feed; only 7 percent goes to human food like soy milk and tofu.) While this is inefficient and environmentally dubious, at least the U.S. can handle its domestic demand. The EU and China can’t. Hence the huge market for American soy abroad and Brazil’s and Argentina’s massive soy economies.

As China’s demand for foreign soy grew, American farmers grew more of it: U.S. soy production and exports have doubled over the past 30 years, roughly tracking increases in Chinese meat consumption and soy demand for feed. The same was the case in Brazil. Importing soy amounts to offshoring demand for land. And that means offshoring deforestation. Most deforestation to create new soy farms takes place in South America. And with the U.S. cut off by China, Brazil is ending a moratorium on deforestation to cash in.

This is just one of the many harms caused by a global appetite for meat. The recently released “EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems”—a collaboration between the Swedish food nongovernmental organization EAT and the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—shows that the global food system is outstripping planetary boundaries and driving unsustainable climate change, land use change, and eutrophication of water. The single biggest culprit by far is meat. China may have offshored deforestation, but its glut of factory farms has caused a series of crises at home, as well, such as widespread pollution and animal disease outbreaks, including a swine fever epidemic in 2019 that killed tens of millions of animals.

The irony here is that soy itself is an incredible crop and food. It’s hardy, adaptable, cheap to grow, and it fixes nitrogen in the soil, minimizing the need for fertilizer. The soybean is highly nutritious, packed with 35 percent protein and easy to cook or process into a variety of products, from oil and soy milk through to edamame, tofu, tempeh, and plant-based meats like Impossible burgers. This polyvalence and ease of use is precisely why it’s so widely used in animal feed. It’s just that feeding it to animals, beyond the environmental downsides, is inefficient. Any animal will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it will yield as meat; the average pig will only yield about 9 percent of the protein that it consumes. Eating soy directly requires far less soy (and land) than feeding it to animals.

It’s not that soy is inherently harmful. It’s how we use it that’s harmful.

Yes, American soy farmers are suffering. But we should take this moment to reflect on why we use so much American farmland to feed pigs both at home and in China, giving fuel to an environmentally destructive industry. How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing but for how unsustainable it is.

Hold That Nobel Prize: This Peace Plan Will Die, and Bibi Will Kill It - 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z

“For years, Netanyahu manipulated American Presidents. He tricked Bill Clinton; he swindled Obama; he took Biden for a ride. Now he is trying to con you on Gaza, President Trump.”

This is not the opening paragraph of this article, although it very well could be. Rather, this is the text of an ad that aired for five consecutive days on Fox & Friends, Fox News’s morning show, in Washington, D.C. The “demographic cohort” it was apparently targeting consisted of one lone viewer: the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Donald Trump. Ultimately it seemed to have the desired effect. Trump, who had checked out of the Middle East over the summer, was all of the sudden reengaged, experiencing an increasingly vitriolic MAGA distaste for Netanyahu and Israel and arguably not disagreeing with the gist of it.

Within two weeks, a disillusioned, agitated and livid-with-Netanyahu’s antics Trump adopted a general framework and plan: a somewhat vague outline of how to end the war and an intricate yet nebulous roadmap of “Postwar Gaza.” He forced Benjamin Netanyahu into endorsing it publicly, realizing that a Netanyahu pledge and commitment made in a closed room has the lifespan and credibility of a mayfly.

Yet the plan begins with a clear and attainable goal, not with the intractable down-the-road obstacles: a ceasefire, even if temporary, and a hostage release. This is what dejected and traumatized Israelis want (except for one Benjamin Netanyahu); this is what desolate Palestinians are desperate for; this is what Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, Trumpworld’s business buddies, had implored him to do, and this is exactly what Trump announced ceremoniously on both Wednesday and Thursday.

The ad was aired a week after Israel’s reckless attack on Doha, without U.S. coordination or sufficient advance notice, in a bold attempt to kill three Hamas leaders directly involved in negotiations in the middle of the capital city of the chief mediator, Qatar. This was not only Netanyahu’s hubris at work, attacking a U.S. ally, but an audacious overreach that tested Trump’s notoriously flat learning curve (see Vladimir Putin). During the White House meeting where he presented his plan, and to make Netanyahu realize just how serious he was, Trump resorted to old-fashioned humiliation: He made him apologize to the Prime Minister of Qatar in a call on a phone the president was by sheer coincidence holding on his lap, with Mohammad Al Thani on the other side. 

It also came three months after the United States collaborated with Israel in June and sent B-2 bombers armed with GBU 57 massive ordnance to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. In exchange for the Americans’ assistance on that matter, Trump expected the war in Gaza, which he believed was unnecessarily protracted, without a coherent postwar political vision, to end. It didn’t.

With mediation in Ukraine-Russia at an impasse and Putin openly playing him, with his erratic and bullying tariffs policy unpopular in the world and at home, with the comical hyperboles of annexing Canada and purchasing Greenland being mocked everywhere outside the White House and the Magaverse, and with his domestic agenda increasingly meeting legal challenges and now political resistance, Trump had one place where success could be almost guaranteed: ending the war in Gaza.

How do you do that? First you decide that you’ve had enough and act on it. His predecessors vented their frustrations in expletive-filled “closed meetings,” using colorful variations of f**k and s**t, but they never converted language into policy. Then you proceed to do what neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama nor, most recently, Joe Biden ever dared do: Apply real pressure on Netanyahu and remind him that in an asymmetrical alliance, the lesser partner is expected to be attentive to the bigger power’s interests and not defy it constantly. You call his bluff, recognizing that his presumed Washington magic and dexterity are self-aggrandizing myths, those of a paper tiger.

Netanyahu outmaneuvered himself into a corner where he had only Trump (and maybe Senator Lindsey Graham) as an ally in the 202 area code. Odd that it was Trump that finally figured that out. Their perennial hesitancy, tendency to overthink political ramifications, sheer ineptness and often inhospitable geopolitical circumstances caused American presidents to defer to Israel even when they believed that U.S. and Israeli regional interests were not aligned.

But the praise that Trump warrants for the ambitious attempt—not yet the reality—of ending the Gaza war may dissipate once “phase one” of the plan, the hostage release and prisoner exchange, is completed. Then comes the hard part, and it is doubtful whether Trump will maintain the same level of personal engagement and political commitment. He loves the attention, the limelight, and the gratitude, but there will be little of that left in the next phases.

There are two ways and perspectives to look at what we are now forced to call the “Trump Plan.” The first is to determine that whatever its flaws, ambiguities, amenability to contrasting interpretations and difficult implementation chances are, this is the only plan that is currently on the table. If Trump had any respect for multilateralism, international institutions, and the international order, he would submit the plan to the U.N. Security Council and ask that it be regarded as a binding resolution. Like it or not, it is the only game in town, endorsed by the entire world and especially by the Arab Gulf states.

The second is to dissect it, deconstruct its 20 points and inevitably conclude that it is not viable. The second approach has defined Mideast diplomacy for over a hundred years. “It’ll never work” is the one line that all Israelis and all Palestinians can always agree on, blaming the entire world—and particularly the United States—for their own shortcomings and failures.

So let’s briefly look at the prospects and viability of the first perspective: adopting the plan, in spite of its deficiencies.

First there are the very practical issues: Israel needs to withdraw, Hamas is obliged to disarm. Will either of those actually happen? No. In that event, does the ceasefire hold? Not likely.

Assuming all this does happen, the plan calls for the establishment of an interim Arab force, an “International Stabilization Force.” Does it include the Palestinian Authority? “Only if it reforms,” Israel disingenuously says, knowing full well that won’t happen to Israel’s full satisfaction. So what then?

The redeeming quality of the plan is that it correctly assumes that there is no current Palestinian political entity that can govern. But it equally assumes that Israel cannot stay in Gaza or the West Bank. This means a “trusteeship” of sorts. A build-operate-transfer process that would lead eventually to a Palestinian state. But Netanyahu and his messianic theo-nationalist coalition oppose that. So essentially, the “Trump Plan” only has viability under a different Israeli government. That requires an election, and during an election, nothing happens on the ground.

So what then are the chances of the Trump plan to actually be implemented in its entirety? Very slim. Yes, everyone is entitled to the optimism of a ceasefire and hostage release, but the rest is ominously murky.

Trump ICE Raids Take Unnerving Turn as Dem Gov Drops Bombshell Warning - 2025-10-10T09:00:00Z

In this episode, we talk to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who shares striking new details about President Trump’s occupation of Chicago. What’s happening there has gone off the rails: ICE launching hypermilitarized raids of apartment buildings. Children getting pulled out into the streets. A priest shot in the head by a pepper ball. This has led Pritzker to take a lead role in denouncing Trump’s abuses of power—and in warning that our slide into authoritarianism could end in catastrophe. In our interview, Pritzker tells us what he’d like to see from Democrats, discusses how Illinois law enforcement is protecting local residents from ICE, and debunks Stephen Miller’s lies about what’s happening on the ground. Pritzker also discusses his inability to even get Trump officials on the phone amid this worsening crisis—making this all look dramatically more dangerous—and warns that Trump’s mental state is worsening fast. (After we recorded, a judge temporary blocked National Guard deployments in Illinois.) Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Transcript: Dems Will Stay Weak Until They Stop Obsessing Over Polls - 2025-10-10T09:00:00Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this episode here.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now by The New Republic. I’m joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s a political strategist. She works for progressive groups both here and abroad. You’ve probably seen her on MSNBC or seen her or heard her podcast. She’s all over these last four or five years, particularly. She’s been all over the place. She’s a very eloquent and has a lot of interesting thoughts about politics and policy. So, Anat, welcome.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So let me start—and I try to avoid long preambles, but I’m going to violate that today—which is that there was an interesting discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein in The New York Times podcast about 10 days ago.

And the sort of narrative throughout that was Ezra Klein was essentially saying the Democrats need to move to the right or move to the middle to win elections. And Coates basically saying ... I’m a writer. I’m not here to like, I want to talk about policy and my values. That’s what I do. And then Coates saying, yes, but we talk about elections. And sorry, Klein saying, yes, we need to talk about how Democrats win. And Coates saying, no, I don’t do politics.

But it left me with a challenge, which is that it seemed to me that Klein was sort of saying, Democrats, move to the right. Coates was saying, I don’t want to engage in that, which left the implication in some ways that Coates might agree with Klein that the political move, the electoral move, to move to the right, is correct. But he didn’t necessarily want to condone that or lay it out himself.

So I’m happy to have you here because you’re a progressive person, I think, on some politics issues. But you also—you do work in elections. You do work in winning. You do get into these issues of politics. I want to talk to you about that.

And I want to start from the premise, which I think is a lot of the sort of popularist or poll-ist—we’ll get into what we should call them in a second. I think their argument, at the core of it, is: If every Democrat who ran for the House, the Senate, and the presidency ran on Joe Manchin’s platform—and we can talk about why that might be morally wrong, which is where I might be and where Coates might be—let’s say that were somehow possible. I think that’s the advice they’re giving, is if every Democrat, the whole party in unison, said these things that polled well and were bland and didn’t offend anyone—Democrats would win more seats.

I think you might disagree with that electorally. Is that correct?

Shenker-Osorio: Just a little.

Bacon: Okay. We’ll talk about why then. If we all move to the right, if collectively the party moves to the right, why wouldn’t that work?

Shenker-Osorio: So that premise, which I call in my piece polling-ism—it’s known, as you said, by the name popularism, but I actually think that’s a misnomer—it is built out of a set of assumptions that, on the face of them, seem very logical. And I think that that’s why they’re so easily adopted.

Premise number one is, you ask people their issue preferences, they tell them to you, and then you repeat those back. Right? That seems logical.

Premise two—and I’m not going to go through all of them—you then formulate ads, which you concentrate at the end of the cycle, because truth, most people are low-information voters, they’re paying no attention. If they tune in, it’s sort of at some point in October, you hope. And so you kind of blow your cash on end-of-cycle ads that are about that popular issue or those popular issues, which you’ve tested through randomized control trials and found out that this ad moved vote choice, which is the metric you use.

Again, seems logical. The name of the game in an election is to net more votes. So shouldn’t you test things on the basis of a dependent variable that says, yep, this ad in the test says more people wanted to vote for my candidate? So it all feels very logical.

Bacon: It feels kind of Moneyball-ish to go back, maybe to date myself a little bit like we have data. The data shows this. And you and I agree that polls can show you something, right?

Shenker-Osorio: This is the irony of this piece is that I co-founded an organization called the Research Collaborative. I probably do as much research as all of these people. I’m in focus groups every week. We’re in surveys every two weeks. I do RCTs. It’s not like I have a beef with research. What I have a beef with is using a thermometer to try to change a tire.

So basically, the reason why those seemingly logical assumptions don’t actually stack up in the real world is a few things. Number one, if you want to persuade people—and hopefully what I’m about to say is absolutely, utterly uncontroversial so I can get to controversial later—they have to hear what you’re saying.

A message that nobody hears cannot persuade them. That feels like everyone should sort of be able to agree. If people don’t hear what you’re saying, then you don’t move them.

And we live, as I think everybody on this live knows, in an extraordinarily saturated environment in which information, messages, propaganda, lies, you know, sports, reality TV, your children, the homework, et cetera, is all happening.


Bacon: Let me interrupt and ask something. Okay, so you’re saying a message nobody hears, it doesn’t work. But we agree that TV, like if you spend a billion dollars in TV ads, people probably literally heard the message. You mean they don’t remember the message or you mean they literally didn’t hear it? Because Kamala Harris had a lot of ads running. Surely most Americans heard what Kamala Harris said, right?

Shenker-Osorio: At a literal level, largely no, because a lot of people, even if you’re paying top dollar for non-skippable things, people are still multitasking. People are still sort of halfway paying attention. Most people actually don’t watch linear TV, and they’re finding ways to sort of not watch it. And then even if they did sort of catch half of it, then they also caught 50 ads saying the opposite thing.

So the next thing is, so a message nobody hears doesn’t convince them. The next is a message nobody believes also doesn’t convince them. So let’s say you’re Kamala Harris, and you find out that, or you believe through surveying that you have this debility on the border—we’re just gonna cut straight to the heart of it—and so you decide, or your super PAC that we need to put out a bunch of ads, or at least a few, where you are the tough person, right? And you say—and there was a literal ad, I’m not making this up—a 30-second ad in which she said “the border” five times, and the words the border appeared on the screen six times in 30 seconds. So in essence: I’m going to get tough on the border. Also the border. Also, I was a prosecutor and the border, and I’m from a border state and the border. Did I mention the border? Have I made you think about the border—for the people who actually catch this?

So the idea is, you know, you have a perceived weakness on this, so you’re going to come back by essentially presenting what I would call a Republican-light version of the same message. Because people are concerned about this, and so you need to also sort of offer them the thing that you believe that they are wanting.

Donald Trump then—not only makes ads, but also does Truth Social posts and also goes on podcasts and also gets his red-hat-wearing army to all make ads and posts and videos and talk—and this is the most important part—to their friends and family constantly about how she’s full of it. She doesn’t mean it. She’s going to turn the border into a sieve and lure newcomers here with fat checks on real Americans’ dimes. So now you’ve raised the saliency of the border, if people indeed heard that.

You’ve credited the opposition’s argument. And you actually didn’t succeed in characterizing yourself as also tough because politics isn’t a soliloquy. It’s a shouting match.

So that’s the next reason. You can’t just expect that the claims that you’re making are what people hear. They’re also hearing the unrelenting din. And then the third reason—if I’m on three; I might be on 12, I don’t know. 

Bacon: Let me interrupt and ask one question. So you gave a very specific example of Kamala Harris and immigration. So Kamala Harris lost—so we sort of assumed that—but let me put my popularist hat fully on now. I think they would make two arguments. One is, maybe Kamala Harris would have lost by even more, except that she moved to the right on the border. And then two, because I said Joe Manchin at the beginning here—so imagine if Kamala Harris had not run for president and said all these lefty things in 2019. Maybe she would have been more credible with her border message then. So address the 2019, and address the she-would-have-lost-by-more arguments.

Shenker-Osorio: Sure. Basically, if you want to win an election, you have to make it about a thing that you can win on. Okay? If you want to win a debate, you have to make the debate be about a topic that favors you. Because people are extraordinarily low information, for the most part. Not the people listening right now, so it’s hard to internalize. But if you were to watch focus groups, I can’t tell you the degree to which people, like, have no clue what’s happening in politics. Really, truly, deeply.

And so, basically, that Joe Manchin strategy, let’s call it. Joe Manchin is running as Joe Manchin, let’s say, nationally, or whatever his figure, his archetype. And there’s still, let’s say, a Donald Trump running who, regardless of what Joe Manchin is actually saying, is saying that Joe Manchin is a socialist, is saying that Joe Manchin is handing out abortions—and would you like fries with that? Is saying that Joe Manchin personally went to the border to, like, be a coyote to bring people over.

Because of course—I mean, I can prove this with an example—Chuck Schumer is a socialist, right? The senator from MasterCard, a.k.a. Joe Biden, before he became vice president and president, is a socialist. They’re not confined by a reality-based view of the world.

So even if you’ve maintained your Manchin-ism, that doesn’t actually mean that that’s what people hear about you. Because again, a lot of this polling-ism is credited—it’s run on the fiction that what people believe about Democrats is made out of what Democrats say. And it’s not. It’s made out of what is said about them.

And then the next thing is that it’s credited on the fiction that what people believe about a politician is what that politician or their super PAC paid for by to say. When in fact, most of people’s judgments come filtered through their identity or what their friends and family say.

And so if you’re a political person who isn’t tuning in much and you live, let’s call it, in rural Pennsylvania or in the middle of Ohio or in the Central Valley of my state, California, and it’s coming close to election time, you haven’t thought about it at all, and you wander around and your bowling buddies are wearing red MAGA hats, and no one is wearing any other kind of hat, and you’re kind of like, oh, I don’t really know about that, what is that, back in the day? And then you conclude, understandably, that this is what people like me think. People do the thing they think people like them do.


Bacon: So you said something back a few minutes ago along the lines of like, okay, so Democrats cannot control ... Okay, so you need to say things that people remember, that are believable, as I think what you said in the so ...

Shenker-Osorio: You need to make them believable. 

Bacon: Okay, so is the argument that Kamala Harris should not run immigration ads or is the comment essentially that Kamala Harris should make sure the election is about—Kamala Harris cannot win an election on immigration policy or getting tough on the border. She can win an election on other issues. So the key is to make the election about other issues. Is that the idea here? Kamala Harris cannot win an election on who’s tougher on the border against Donald Trump. So she needs to make the election about something different. And she is that what the sort of sub-argument here is, or one of the arguments is here.

Shenker-Osorio: The argument is that you need to make the election about something you can win on, which is not an argument to say, don’t talk about immigration. Because again, as I said before—I mean, that would be hypocritical of me—politics is a shouting match, not a soliloquy. You don’t get to pick that immigration is just not going to be a topic. You don’t get to pick that trans kids are just not going to be a topic. You don’t get to pick that, you know, “inner city crime,” which is just a dog whistle for race, isn’t going to be a topic—because the topic is defined by what’s in the discourse, which the opposition is very much interested in setting.

And so, at a practical level, what that means is that rather than running yourself as Republican-light and crediting this idea that immigration equals border—that that is the only thing to know about that topic—what you say instead, and newsflash, we tested it, because I do actually believe in testing, and we tested it in combat testing after exposing voters to a real-world Donald Trump ad, not a make-believe kind of message that we invented ourselves.

And an ad that says—they watch a Donald Trump ad, then they watch a “the border, the border, the border” ad, and basically there isn’t movement. They watch a Donald Trump ad, and they watch an ad that says some version of, most of us would move heaven and earth for our families. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. And we know that moving is one of the hardest things a person can do. Today, Republicans peddle hate and take away what all of our families need, hoping we’ll point our finger in the wrong direction. Let’s trade Republican hate peddling for Democratic problem solving.

You basically say, hey, here’s the shared value behind immigration. Then you say, hey, here’s the actual villain. Then you say, hey, they’re trying to get you to point your finger in the wrong direction. You essentially narrate the dog whistle, and then you close with some sort of vision or something desirable.

And that structure, which has a name—we call it the race–class narrative or the race–class–gender narrative—we’ve used over and over and over again. And at risk of taking us too far afield (you can pull me back), an incredible example of it happening right now is Zack Polanski, who is just absolutely killing it in the U.K. as a leader of the Green Party.

Another way of putting this is that you level with people and you say: Yeah, you’re right, someone did take your job. You’re right, someone did take your healthcare. You’re right, someone did take your ability to have a single income and be able to go to Disneyland once a year with your kids. If you’d like to know who took your money—it’s the people with all the money. That’s how you can tell. But if they can get you to point your finger at the Black guy or the Brown guy or the trans kid, then we actually will not be able to confront the people who’ve screwed us all over.

And that’s it. That’s it.


Bacon: So my top-level question was if the entire party sounded like Joe Manchin, would it be better? And I think part of your argument is people would not, Americans would not hear that or they wouldn’t notice it or they wouldn’t respond to it.

Shenker-Osorio: Well, first of all, stalwart Democratic voters wouldn’t act as required to repeat the refrain. They would not, whatever the blue hat thing would be that the Joe Manchin would produce, the like, what do we want? Incremental change. When do we want it? Let’s get around to it. Like, they’re not going to wear that on a hat because they believe in fundamental—or whatever the Joe Manchinism is. Right.

Bacon: And why is it important? I think these guys would actually say, we want indivisible. They wouldn’t say quite directly. We want the activists to move the party to the left. We don’t want them anyway. Oh, good. The choir is not saying liberal things. Great. I think they might be for that, right? So in some ways, why is the choir speaking important? Because the choir is going to vote for Joe Manchin. Most of the choir, a lot of the choir is going to vote for Joe Manchin over Donald Trump, even if they don’t enjoy the song, so to speak.

Shenker-Osorio: First of all, no, they won’t. They’ll stay home. 

Bacon: Well, that’s an assumption we gotta talk through, but OK.

Shenker-Osorio: Ok. We win or lose by 1%. So some of them is meaningful, even when it’s teeny tiny. 

Bacon: Yes, I agree.

Shenker-Osorio: So some of them staying home is a big deal. So that’s first. They’ll head to the couch.

And then second ... those are the folks who actually spread your message. So the reason why this is meaningful—I mean, if you look at the Obama era, in the Obama era and in the Mamdani era right now—these are human beings who, in their own very different ways (and there are other people in this category), have perfectly hacked the idea of brand advocates. That’s what this is known as in marketing, right? The people who are so excited about and loyal to your product—not that humans are products, but in marketing—that they will bake the chocolate cake with Miracle Whip, you know, serve it at the family reunion. The family eats it and says, this cake is moist and delicious. What’s in it? Would you believe Miracle Whip?

And suddenly people are entertaining Miracle Whip that never, ever, ever would—and especially wouldn’t if Kraft Foods sent them an ad. Because when Kraft Foods sends you an ad saying Miracle Whip is delicious, you’re like, I don’t believe you. That’s your job. You sent me this ad because that’s your job. But if your friend gives you a piece of cake, hmm, you might entertain it.

So translate that into politics. These are the folks who, first of all, at a practical level, literally go door to door for you and register voters and get them to the polls and drive them and remind them when the election is and actually ensure that the voting happens. So that’s just a practical thing. And if they’re not excited about the candidate, then they’re not going to do it. And that’s a sort of volunteer base that you really, really need.

And then short of people who are that dedicated—which obviously is not most people—they are the ones who are spreading the gospel and who are saying to you, you know, you need to do this. This is what I’m excited about. This is why you should be excited about this. And telling person after person after person, because a message is like a baton. It has to be passed from person to person. And if it gets dropped along the way, it doesn’t get heard.


Bacon: Let me ask. So a lot of the advice the Democratic Party is getting is sort of rooted in this 1992, 1996, if you move to the right. So was Bill Clinton’s message, did he have a message that was beyond? A lot of it has become convinced to us that Bill Clinton’s message was black people have too many ... we should have more policing, and we should move to the right, and so on. But is your argument essentially that Bill Clinton, that that’s outdated? Or that Bill Clinton had a message that did spread that is not the sort of negative move-to-the-right one, or that that, or that that kind of polling-ism can work, but there are alternatives to it.

Shenker-Osorio: I have two different arguments. So the first is that right now, we are relying on tools that, in their moment, were innovative and arguably matched reality. So when you lived in a reality in which people watched linear TV, and there were many, many, many fewer sort of sources of entertainment or news or, you know, what passes as news, then if you’re doing a randomized control trial—and, okay, we’re getting deep nerd—in a randomized control trial and in a survey, by definition, you have a captive audience.

You have recruited people to pay attention either by giving them a financial incentive or because of the way a test is configured. You literally, like, can’t leave the platform. It’ll cancel you out of the test. It knows when you’ve sort of wandered off into another tab. It can tell. So you make people listen to your 100-word thing or you make people watch your 30-second ad inside of the test. And they know they’re being studied. Like, they know they’re in a survey. They know they’re in an RCT.

And then you measure vote choice. Does it make you more, you know, want to vote for Bill Clinton or more want to vote for Bush or whatever, right, is going on? Then you say, okay, this is the ad that did that the most relative to the control, which got no ad or got a placebo about something apolitical. And then you think that’s going to translate out in the real world. Maybe once upon a time, where people were more like a captive audience—for the younger folks, you’re just going to have to believe me—you used to just have to watch commercials. If someone in the chat can back me up.

Bacon: Yes, yes. You had to. 

Shenker-Osorio: This used to happen. Then you could more closely credit that the kinds of responses you were getting matched the kinds of responses that actually occur in the world, because there was a little bit more continuity between those two situations. And this whole, “if your message doesn’t get people to stop scrolling in the first place, then it doesn’t work” was less of an issue.

And then the second answer is that you can very much win the battle to lose the war. And Bill Clinton presided, as you know, over the great shellacking that the incumbent party has taken in a midterm. And of course, the incumbent party always suffers in a midterm election. I understand that that is a vibe because of differential turnout, and the out-of-power people want to go vote and the in-power people are lethargic and apathetic—speaking of the couch as another option.

But it was unprecedented, at least in modern history, how bad it was. So basically, Bill Clinton, and “welfare as we know it”-Bill Clinton, went in in an argument vilifying government, went in in an argument and a policy platform of NAFTA, actually sort of stepping away from the historic support that the Democratic Party had given to the working class—way back machine FDR times. FDR times, when being a Democrat wasn’t just something a working-class person voted, it was something a working-class person was. It was core to their identity, and it was an era of Democratic ascendancy we’ve never seen since.

So he wins the battle in terms of winning the presidency—obviously undeniable—and he ushers in an era of Democratic losses down the ballot across the country, which is then recreated under Obama. And he overall, I would argue, moves the country, the discourse, the belief system to the right—crediting the opposition’s argument that what you should look for in a public servant, what you should look for in a politician, is someone who says the government is bad. And again, that’s the Republican brand advantage. That’s not the Democratic brand advantage.

And so here we are now, and this is an argument that I’m having, obviously, live. If we believe that our job right now—and I believe it is—is to blunt the authoritarian assault that we live within, then we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that electing Democrats in 2018, in 2020—a trifecta, remember 2020?—and to the extent that we did in 2020, did not stop Trump. Electing Democrats in those instances—I’m speaking facts—that did not stop Trump. It did not stop the abductions. It did not stop the military into our cities. It did not stop all of the things that I don’t need to detail to you.

And so the question really is, for me, the purpose of politics is to enact an agenda. It’s to actually improve the material conditions of people’s lives. It isn’t merely to get Democrats elected for the sake of doing so. And yes, I understand that that process requires electing Democrats. But which Democrats we elect, and critically, how we get them elected, matters.


Bacon: Let’s talk about, for the rest of this, we have about 10 minutes left, talk about what you called “magnetism.” Describe that, because you said there’s a ... We’ve talked mostly about polling-ism, which I would argue is ... Everyone here knows what polling-ism is on some level, because when you watch Hakeem Jeffries say, “The police sent to Chicago is a distraction from my health care talking points.” That’s poling-ism. I think we all know what that is. We know where it’s coming from. We’ve lived it, we’ve experienced it. Magnetism, I struggled with a little bit more. I wasn’t as familiar with what you were getting at. So talk to the audience about that a little bit.

Shenker-Osorio: So magnetism is, unfortunately, what MAGA has run on. And what’s ironic is that in all of these sort of Democrats need to be more moderated, Democrats need to sort of eschew the base and even like crap upon the base. In all of that, what folks are never asked is, how come Republicans do the exact opposite and they win with it? Like that’s never asked, right? Why is it that that’s enough?

Bacon: I think the claim is that they have the geographic advantage based on the election. I think that’s usually the it’s usually you get this. 

Shenker-Osorio: Sure. So magnetism is the idea that if you want people to come to your cause, you need to be attractive. So number one, that requires having a cause. That requires actually having an agenda that you desire to enact. Second of all, it requires understanding that the people who have previously voted for you— which the polling-ists eschew as “your base,” because they think only in demographic categories. When I say the people who have voted for you, I literally mean those human beings, not their demographic features. I mean those people. And yes, they have demographic features because people have demographic features. But I actually mean those human beings. First of all, you actually need those people to be carrying your tune. If you think back to the first six weeks of the Kamala Harris campaign, you know, the coconut tree and the meme and the cake hive and if you want people to come to your party, throw a better party and everyone and voter registrations going through the roof suddenly and people being excited and people wanting to affiliate and so on. So that’s the first premise is have a clause—

Bacon: I think it’s an important thing to say, to note ... I remember the first few weeks of the Harris campaign had people doing these Black women or white men for Harris. These phone calls, they’d be on a boring Zoom call. People were going to events. And then ... And she was getting criticized, though, for parts of the party for not being centrist enough. And then she started moving. I want the most lethal military in the world. And then we get Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait and so on saying she’s running the greatest campaign of all time, look how brilliant it is.  And then her numbers started stalling the moment she started doing the thing that they asked for. That is a note. Sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, yeah. So the “Freedom” ad, which, if you ask people, is the only ad that they remember from the Harris campaign. And I’m very biased because I ran an entire “Protect Our Freedoms” campaign in 2022 and “Our Freedoms, Our Families, Our Futures” in 2024, so, biased. But when there was excitement, that was magnetism. So you have a cause. And on the economic side, let’s remember, in those first six weeks, she was running on ending price gouging, which Donald Trump called communism and price controls. In the “let’s give them something to talk” about theory of messaging, which I espouse, when your opposition is attacking you because you’re going to implement price controls, that is quite different than attacking you on you’re going to turn the border into a sieve and “illegals”—pardon my use of the opposition language—are going to come and, like, destroy all of life as we know it. So she was making, like Mamdani, super concrete economic promises. She talked about raising the minimum wage. She talked about, you know, slashing childhood poverty. She talked about an extensive hike to the capital gains tax.

So it wasn’t just that she was being coconut meme, freedom, happy, throw a better party. She also had super concrete economic policies. Fast forward six weeks, the folks come in, tell, you know, the grownups come into the room, say, stop having your nice time. Yeah. And we veer from those concrete promises, which are important, to an opportunity economy, a walk back of the capital gains tax, no more talk about price gouging, and these sort of vague things plus Liz Cheney.

So magnetism is also an understanding that, like any magnet, you have a polarity. And what that means is, yes, you attract people to your cause, but you also repel. So let me give a super concrete example. You repel the portion of people that cannot, shall not, will not ever vote for you. Like, you will never have those people. Like me and Trump, like there is nothing he could ever do. He could say he could produce, he could provide. I’m never going to vote for him. Right. And he relishes in repelling people like me. And I’m speaking in the singular because I don’t want to speak for anybody else.

You understand that the job of politics is actually to agenda set, both because you want to make people’s lives better with public policy and also discursively you want to agenda set because you want people to be talking about your thing, including coming at you for daring to take on price gouging. Like, imagine if that’s what she were being attacked for rather than, you know, the border or trans kids. That’s an argument that you want to be having. So that’s what the right does over and over again. They figure out this is what we need people talking about.

So back in the day, not so long ago, it was critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey in history in which the majority of American voters were asked, what is your top issue, your most pressing issue? Critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey where the majority was like, my most pressing issue is trans girls playing volleyball or my most pressing issue is DEI? That’s never happened. Their most pressing issue is money. It’s always going to be money. So the right sees those issue surveys and they’re like, great. Nobody cares about this. Nobody knows what this is. We can use it as a vessel to populate it with our own disgusting meaning and then make an astroturf group like Moms for Liberty to be our choir and make believe this is a big issue. Or with DEI, we call university presidents into Congress. And have at them. So they don’t just issue talking points, right? They don’t just do a social media post. They do a 360-degree surround-sound strategy around issues that are not popular.

Bacon: So you’re saying in New York ... New York, I hadn’t thought of it this way, but saying, “I’m for free buses, I’m for free childcare,” and so on, and getting people to say, no ... Because I thought of him as being, he’s charismatic, he smiles a lot, he has good ideas, people like him, but you’re saying he is magnetic, Mamdani. I mean, he is magnetic to people who agree with him, but he’s also getting the right, he’s also drawing the right opposition in a certain way.

Shenker-Osorio: He is drawing the right opposition, he’s forcing—I don’t know if folks have seen that brilliant, brilliant dramatic reading of the piece from The New York Times about the people in the Hamptons who are crying themselves into their whatever, and I mean that is a perfect encapsulation of magnetism. He is  reveling in repelling the billionaire class that’s very upset about him. He’s not making believe—don’t worry, a rising tide lifts all boats, it’s fine, Everyone’s going to do better, I’m not going to ... He’s like, “No.” I’m not sure if I’m allowed to swear here. This is the longest I’ve gone without swearing. “No, jerk face.” That’s my PG. “No, jerk face. I’m going to tax you. I’m not going to pretend I’m not going to. And when that pisses you off, I’m not going to be concerned about that. I’m going to call it magically delicious.”

Bacon: I think part of the issue is here, I guess people probably listening to this call and myself even, the paragon of our politics is a man who sort of famously said, there are no red states or blue states, which he probably knew was inaccurate at the time, and has become really much so. I don’t think Obama, I don’t think most of the time was trying to get everyone to like him and antagonize no one. So I’m struck by this. You need magnetism means not just being appealing, but also picking the right enemy, so to speak, or picking the right ... And I think it’s an interesting insight that I’ve got to think some more about.

Shenker-Osorio: I mean Obama, because—I’m going to provide you some information you didn’t know, Perry—because America has a slight problem with Black men, because there’s a little bit of racism in our country, which I’m happy to, I’m glad to explain to you. Because you don’t know never heard of it

Bacon: Yeah, never heard of it.

Shenker-Osorio: Boy I hope people can hear sarcasm. He was magnetic in the attractive-repulsive by his very being. 

Bacon: Okay, that’s fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Shenker-Osorio: As is Kamala Harris. And I hope it’s clear—that’s not a him thing.

Bacon: I agree, yes.

Shenker-Osorio: My younger son says to me, that’s an ish you, not an ish me. So that was an ish you for America, not an ish me. That’s just the reality of who he was, who he is, of course. But, and I talk about this in the piece, one of his most famous ads, which actually was only released on the web, they never spent any TV money on it at all, was a group of celebrities singing from the concession speech that he gave when he lost in his first primary or second, I don’t know, I think it was Iowa, was him saying, yes, we can, and speaking about enslavement.

Bacon: I’ll go back and look at that. 

Shenker-Osorio: That is an example of magnetism.

Bacon: All right. Well, let’s, I think this has been a good, we’re going to come back and come back and talk to you again to get into this more. We can talk about this for two hours, but I’m going to stop here. Anything else with the piece or anything else about what you really about polling-ism and magnetism that you want to tell the audience that I didn’t ask about?

Shenker-Osorio: What I would say is that the siren song of authoritarians everywhere, both in contemporary time and in history, is to foment a counter-revolution against a revolution that never occurred. It is to say, would you like to know why you’re struggling? Would you like to know why you’re having a hard time? Would you like to know why you feel out of place? Would you like to know why you have more month than check and the world is making no sense to you? It’s because of those people. And those people could be welfare queens back in the day who are not working, who are living high off the hog in the system. Those people could be, forgive the terminology, illegals. Those people in other times and places are Roma in Hungary, or they’re Syrian refugees there as well, or they’re Southern Europeans in the case of Brexit, or they’re Muslims in the case of India with Modi. But this is what authoritarians do, right? There’s no quicker route to an “us” than construction of a “them.”

And if we don’t deeply understand that and that that is the argument that they are providing to their base, they are providing an origin story for people’s pain. It’s a lie. But they are telling people, these are the heroes. These are the villains. This is why your life is hard. And this is how we’re going to fix it for you. And when we are making believe that that isn’t going on and we are either actually crediting their argument by saying, you know what? You’re right. We did lose because of immigrants and trans people.

Bacon: Education is too woke. You know, yeah, yeah. All the things that they say.

Shenker-Osorio: Right. You’re saying that your opposition is correct. In some way, right? And you are feeding their origin story, their lie, and you are failing to give a correct origin story. But the only way that the correct origin story can work is if you actually mean it—if you actually mean that you are going to govern with, for, and by working people.

And that means that you can’t talk about, you know, the rules are rigged and we have to actually make things right for you and vote for, you know, crypto corruption. You can’t do that. And you can’t, you know, not full-throatedly support and endorse and force a hike of the minimum wage. You know, you have to full-throatedly support unions.

When FDR said about the billionaires—you want to talk about magnetism—“I welcome their hatred. I welcome their ire,” right? Because he knew there are sides, and the sides are the working people of America across races, places, genders, whatever, and the owning class that is taking the wealth our work creates.

And when you try to replace that and have no villains because you just want neoliberalism and a rising tide lifts all boats and we’re all going to do better and we don’t need to actually have and support unions and raise wages and all the rest of it, then you render people susceptible to this siren song of the right. Neoliberalism is the handmaiden to authoritarianism everywhere. That’s what I would say.

Bacon: And that’s a great note to end on, Anat. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to the audience who tuned in to watch. And we’ll be back next week. Thank you. Bye-bye.

The Dems Will Stay Weak Until They Stop Obsessing Over Polls - 2025-10-10T09:00:00Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following us on YouTube or Substack. Read the transcript of this episode here.

Democratic politicians are overly reliant on polls and don’t use them correctly, says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist who works with progressive candidates and groups both in the United States and abroad. In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon, Shenker-Osorio argues that politicians taking positions based on what people say they support in surveys isn’t effective because such polls can’t capture what messages and policies will be memorable and viral and ultimately inspire people to vote and get engaged in campaigns. Kamala Harris’s hawkish immigration stands in 2024 might have polled well but didn’t help her much because that rhetoric did not excite liberals and was unconvincing to moderates and liberals, according to Shenker-Osorio. Alternatively, she argues that President Trump and Zohran Mamdani, while having opposing policy views, both smartly identified messages that galvanized their bases and created conflicts with their opponents on the candidates’ preferred terms. The conversation is based on a recent piece in which she encourages Democrats to embrace “magnetism” and reject “pollingism.”

RFK Jr. Links Autism to Circumcision in Truly Deranged Rant - 2025-10-09T21:06:50Z

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. added to his repertoire of controversial, unsubstantiated claims about causes of autism at a Thursday Cabinet meeting, where the health secretary linked circumcision to autism.

President Donald Trump was repeating his administration’s hotly contested claim that Tylenol during pregnancy increases the risk of autism when Kennedy cut in to offer an example of “confirmation studies” to that effect.

“There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism,” he said. “It’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol. So, you know, none of this is dispositive, but all of it is stuff that we should be paying attention to.”

Kennedy did not specify the research he was citing, but one high-profile study that matches his description is a heavily criticized 2015 study that found, in a subgroup of a larger cohort of Danish children, “risk of infantile autism in circumcised boys was twice that of intact boys.” Notably, experts have warned against drawing sweeping conclusions from that study, which was “observational,” not “causal,” and did not account for myriad possible “confounding variables,” such as “cultural or social factors affecting the likelihood of an (early) autism diagnosis.”

It also did not investigate the use of acetaminophen.

Kennedy’s remark came just after he flipped the scientific method on its head by announcing his effort to “make the proof” for the administration’s unproven Tylenol-autism connection.

Judge Orders ICE to Stop Injuring Journalists Reporting on Them - 2025-10-09T21:02:37Z

A federal judge in Illinois has ordered the Trump administration to stop beating, shooting at, and generally using violence against journalists and peaceful protesters.

The Thursday ruling comes as ICE and the National Guard tear through the streets of Chicago, shooting at and arresting journalists, protesters, and immigrants alike.

Judge Sara Ellis, the Obama appointee overseeing this case, has suspended federal agents from “using riot control weapons,” “firing [tear gas] canisters,” “using force, such as pulling or shoving a person to the ground, tackling, or body slamming an individual,” “striking any person with a vehicle,” and more abuses of power. The order applies to all agents from the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Border Patrol.

Federal agents have done all of that in recent weeks. In September, an ICE agent shot a pepper ball inside CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei’s car completely unprompted, in just one of many recent attacks on journalists. Also last month, ICE shot Reverend David Black in the head with a pepper ball while he was praying outside of an ICE facility in Broadview. In yet another incident caught on camera, a CBP agent shot a woman five times, and then arrested her.

“Federal agents have responded with a pattern of extreme brutality in a concerted and ongoing effort to silence the press and civilians. Dressed in full combat gear, often masked, carrying weapons, bearing flash grenades and tear gas canisters, and marching in formation, federal agents have repeatedly advanced upon those present at the scene who posed no imminent threat to law enforcement. Snipers with guns loaded with pepper balls, paintballs, and rubber bullets are stationed on the roof of the Broadview ICE facility with their weapons trained on the press and civilians,” read the original complaint, made on behalf of the Chicago Headline Club, Block Club Chicago, and Chicago Newspaper Guild Local 34071, among other local media organizations.

Judge Ellis also noted that federal agents “must have visible identification (for which a unique recognizable alphanumeric identifier sequence will suffice) affixed to their uniforms or helmets and prominently displayed, including when wearing riot gear,” although she did not say they couldn’t still wear masks.

The Temporary Restraining Order will last for 14 days, after which the case will move forward.

IRS Suddenly Says It’s Following Trump’s Plan for Shutdown Back Pay - 2025-10-09T20:53:48Z

The IRS is walking back an earlier promise to provide its furloughed workers back pay.

The tax agency had notified its employees on Wednesday that they would be “compensated on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends” in accordance with the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019. But that was apparently an overstep: The IRS corrected itself the following day, stating that it would defer to the direction of Russel Vought’s Office of Management and Budget.

“An earlier memo circulated on furlough guidance incorrectly stated the nature of the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 as it relates to compensation for non-pay and non-duty status,” the IRS posted on its X account Thursday. “OMB will provide further guidance on this issue, you will be updated accordingly.”

An IRS employee that spoke with Federal News Network said that the initial email was automatically deleted from staff email inboxes by Thursday.

Back pay for furloughed workers has been a point of contention throughout the eight-day government shutdown, despite the fact that it’s legally mandated. Donald Trump himself signed the bipartisan-supported law after the last government shutdown, which lasted a record 35 days from 2018 into 2019.

On Tuesday, OMB tested the waters with potentially flouting the law, circulating a draft legal opinion indicating that furloughed federal workers would no longer be guaranteed back pay. Instead, the agency announced that members of Congress would need to specifically address the back pay provisions in a stopgap spending bill.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who voted in favor of the 2019 law, told reporters Wednesday that it was his “understanding that the law is that they would be paid.”

“There is some other legal analysis that’s floating around. I haven’t yet had time to dig into and read that. But it has always been the case—that is, tradition and I think statutory law—that federal employees be paid,” Johnson said in a news conference.  “And that’s my position. I think they should be. They should not be subjected to harm and financial dire straits.”

White House’s Chicago “Chaos” Video Is Really From a Red State - 2025-10-09T20:45:31Z

The White House is using footage from Florida to make propaganda about the supposed “chaos” in Chicago, Illinois.

As the National Guard troops have entered Chicago to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the Trump administration posted a video on X Wednesday to hype up its federal law enforcement operations in Chicago. “An incompetent Mayor. A delusional Governor. Chicago is in chaos, and the American people are paying the price,” the post read. “Chicago doesn’t need political spin—it needs HELP.”

But spin was all that the White House had to offer—because the video contained some footage that had nothing to do with Chicago at all.

The promotional video devolved into an onslaught of chaotic arrest footage, showing officers clad in tactical gear moving through the night to kick down doors and drag people out of their cars as Chicago Pastor Corey Brooks’s voice urged the city to welcome Trump’s advances.

But The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that some of the footage was actually from Operation Tidal Wave, a state-wide operation in Florida that led to the arrests of 1,120 people, only 63 percent of whom had a criminal record.

In fact, one shot that was used twice in the video about Chicago could be spotted in footage the DHS published in May of their work in the Sunshine State. Palm trees were visible in some of the shots included in the new video, clearly demonstrating that the footage was not all from the Windy City.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s spokesperson slammed the White House for their fake video. “We are proud that Chicago was just ranked the best big city in the United States. We are proud of its beautiful beaches, booming businesses, and decent people. However, we cannot claim credit for many palm trees here,” spokesperson Matt Hill told the Beast.

“We know the lies don’t just come out of their mouth. So it’s not surprising that the Trump team spends more time producing videos purporting images of Florida as Illinois—rather than spending any time to lower prices or protect healthcare for hardworking Americans,” Hill added.

The video also included footage of the Chicago skyline and streets from above, and images of Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Earlier this week, Trump claimed the two Democratic officials ought to be imprisoned.

Clearly, Trump’s attempt to wage war on American cities requires a subsequent disinformation campaign. Earlier this week, the Oregon Republican Party shared a graphic about dangerous riots in Portland—but the images weren’t from that city either.

The Trump administration has also used its excessive federal law enforcement response to make content that pushes the narrative that the United States has descended into chaos at the hands of Democratic leaders. Earlier this month, DHS used footage from a horrific raid on a Chicago apartment building where ICE officers dragged young children from their homes in zip-ties to make another promotional video.

Trump Gets One Step Closer to Taking Revenge on Letitia James - 2025-10-09T20:34:47Z

New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted Thursday for alleged mortgage fraud, following President Donald Trump’s months-long campaign to remove his outspoken critic from office.
Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan for the Eastern District of Virginia reportedly personally presented the government’s flimsy case alleging that James committed mortgage fraud. Halligan, who was previously Trump’s personal attorney before becoming special assistant to the president, recently replaced Eric Siebert, who Trump officials had pressured to seek an indictment against James.
James was indicted on one count of bank fraud, according to MSNBC.
Multiple sources told ABC News last month that investigators had yet to produce a shred of evidence that James falsified bank documents to secure favorable terms on a mortgage for her Virginia home. Two Trump stooges, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, and Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s Working Weaponization Group, have staked their claim that James committed mortgage fraud on a single document claiming that the home she purchased in 2023 would be her primary residence.
But investigators haven’t been able to prove she knowingly lied, or that the document was even considered by loan officers. Lawyers that drafted the document said the error was the result of a template that wasn’t corrected, sources told ABC News. Every other document submitted for James’s mortgage accurately stated she would not reside at the home.
Pulte and Martin reportedly urged Siebert to seek an indictment against James at Trump’s direction. When Siebert declined, Pulte reportedly encouraged Trump to fire Siebert and have him replaced with someone else.
In a bizarre post on Truth Social last month, which was revealed to be an errant DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump wrote: “Lindsey is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot.” He later reposted this rant, clarifying that he was writing about Halligan, and Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney suggested that Trump hoped to replace Siebert with Halligan to pursue his supposedly “GREAT case” against James.
This story has been updated.

Norway Is Scared of What Trump Will Do If He Loses Nobel Peace Prize - 2025-10-09T19:40:42Z

Norway is bracing for Donald Trump’s reaction should he not be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Norway simply hosts the prestigious award ceremony—its government has no involvement in deciding who wins. But with hours on the clock before the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is named, Norway’s politicians are sweating that Trump may not know the difference.

Kirsti Bergstø, the leader of Norway’s Socialist Left Party, told The Guardian that Oslo must be “prepared for anything.”

“Donald Trump is taking the U.S. in an extreme direction, attacking freedom of speech, having masked secret police kidnapping people in broad daylight and cracking down on institutions and the courts. When the president is this volatile and authoritarian, of course we have to be prepared for anything,” Bergstø told the international newspaper.

“The Nobel Committee is an independent body and the Norwegian government has no involvement in determining the prizes,” she continued. “But I’m not sure Trump knows that. We have to be prepared for anything from him.”

The Nobel Prize Committee announced Thursday that it had decided the prize winner at the beginning of the week, before the Trump administration brokered a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Gaza. Timeframe considered, “most Nobel experts and Norwegian observers believe it is highly unlikely that Trump will be awarded the prize,” The Guardian reported.

It’s no secret that Trump has pined for the international honor: The U.S. president phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” back in July to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of prize recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the contention could be that Trump’s supposed political nemesis, former President Barack Obama, received the award in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Three other U.S. presidents have also won a Nobel Peace Prize.

“They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country,” Trump said, during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb Thursday. “My election was much more important.”

Trump’s obsession with obtaining the prize has led to some odd boasts over the last several months, including that he has resolved eight wars around the globe in his second term alone. Trump has so far claimed responsibility for peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda, between Cambodia and Thailand, between Israel and Iran, between India and Pakistan, between Serbia and Kosovo, between Egypt and Ethiopia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and for “doing the Abraham Accords,” all while complaining about a lack of recognition by the Norway-based judges’ panel.

As Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan pointed out last month, all of Trump’s war-solving braggadocio is “demonstrably untrue,” to the extent that several of the listed examples were never even at war.

“Nobody in history has solved eight wars in a period of nine months. And I’ve stopped eight wars, so that’s never happened before. But they’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that, I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday while answering a barrage of questions about the prize. “But nobody’s done eight wars.”

Trump Refuses to Answer One Key Question on Palestinians in Gaza - 2025-10-09T19:14:32Z

President Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal seems to be more geared toward preparing the region to be his “Riviera of the Middle East” than offering self-determination to Palestinians.  

“Can you promise Palestinians they will be able to stay?” a reporter asked Trump at his Thursday Cabinet meeting, just a day after he announced the ceasefire deal. 

“Well, they know exactly what we’re doing. We’re gonna create something where people can live, you can’t live right now in Gaza,” Trump replied. “It’s a horrible situation, nobody has ever seen anything like it. So yeah, we’re gonna create better conditions for people.” 

A deal that forces Palestinians out of their homes and puts redevelopment into the hands of the U.S., Israel, and Tony Blair isn’t a deal—it’s ethnic cleansing. This deal is also contingent upon Israel lifting the aid blockade and ending its genocidal attacks once the hostages are returned, but even that is not a guarantee. 

“Looking ahead, what guarantees Hamas disarms, and that Israel doesn’t resume bombing once the hostages are released?” another reporter asked. 

“Well the first thing we’re doing is getting our hostages back, OK? And that’s what people wanted more than anything else, they wanted these hostages back that have lived in hell like nobody has ever even dreamt possible,” Trump said. “After that, we’ll see. But they’ve agreed to things, and I think it’s gonna move along pretty well.” 

Israel “agreed to things” in the short-lived ceasefire of November 2023, which it broke on the very first day when the IDF opened fire on Gazans returning to their homes. When asked how this time would be any different, all the president could say was, “We’ll see.” 

RFK Jr. Admits He’ll “Make” Proof for His Bogus Tylenol Conspiracy - 2025-10-09T19:00:08Z

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has drawn widespread criticism for manipulating science to fit his agenda, admitted that he is working to “make the proof” to support his controversial claim that the use of acetaminophen, or Tylenol, during pregnancy causes autism.

Kennedy mentioned Tylenol at a Thursday Cabinet meeting because, he said, he’d been disturbed by a social media video: “Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at eight months pregnant—she’s an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School—and she is saying ‘F Trump’ and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta,” he recalled. It is not immediately clear what video he was referring to, and babies are not in the placenta, but attached to it, in pregnancy.

The health secretary went on to cite a number of studies that allegedly support his Tylenol suspicions. Then he made an eyebrow-raising statement about the existing evidence: “It is not proof,” Kennedy said. “We’re doing the studies to make the proof.”

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, it is safe for women to use acetaminophen occasionally “as directed for fever and pain relief during pregnancy,” and patients should talk with their obstetrician about pain relief, as with all medications, during pregnancy.

RFK Jr.’s stated plan to invent evidence to back up his controversial claim to the contrary has already drawn ridicule online. “Ah yes,” wrote Dr. Michelle Au, a physician, public health advocate, and Democratic state legislator in Georgia, “the scientific method famously instructs us to predetermine a conclusion and then do studies to ‘make the proof.’”

But “make the proof” is a fitting credo for a man reshaping the public health system as Kennedy is now. The health secretary in June dismissed the CDC’s entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; installed his own hand-picked members, including vaccine skeptics; and fired Susan Monarez, the former director of the CDC, for refusing to “commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation, regardless of the scientific evidence,” as Monarez testified last month.

The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now - 2025-10-09T17:45:40Z

Men: What’s their deal? It’s an inescapable question nowadays. Men! They’re failing at school and at work. They have lost the ability to work with their hands, like the men from Way Back When who were carpenters and made nails and screws out of wood, with their hands. Men today don’t do any of that. They podcast. They livestream. They gamble—not just on sports, which is virtuous and noble, but on all kinds of crazy shit, like the results of Belgian regional elections and the timing of the next Doritos flavor drop. Today’s men are covered in Dubai chocolate. They’re watching someone livestream about another stream.

Over the past two years, every magazine in this country—all seven of them—has devoted hundreds of thousands of words to the ever-present and all-important subject of men and why they are failing. They have provided dozens of possible explanations: the decline of manufacturing, unions, and the American middle class; the feminization of American culture; the rise of wokeness; the existence of women; fluoride.

But are men actually losing? Look past the smears of Dubai chocolate, and you’ll notice that men have spent the past 11 months notching some serious wins. They delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. They made Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another the number one movie in the world. They have produced literally millions of hours of podcasts—more hours of podcasts than the total number of wooden nails and screws produced by their ancestors. And now, at long last, they have their own Nobel laureate: Hungarian novelist, screenwriter, and all-around dark wizard of ennui, László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. That’s right—for the first time in history, a man has won the Nobel Prize. That sound you hear? It’s a graduate student sobbing with joy. Big, manly sobs.

Krasznahorkai’s victory should hardly come as a shock. He is, by the meager standards of contemporary literary fiction, a global superstar. Serious young men, it seems, are everywhere, and, while their cumulative student debt varies from country to country, they are pretty much the same (glasses, a Letterboxd account, an almost staggering inability to talk to women) whether you’re in New York, Budapest, or Seoul. To the extent that it’s surprising, it’s only because there was a general expectation that the Academy would first reward Péter Nádas, Hungary’s other author of challenging, exportable fiction, because he is older. But it turns out that every copy of Parallel Stories in Sweden is being used to stabilize wobbly Ikea tables. And Krasznahorkai’s eventual victory has been treated as all but assured for years. Why wait?

Krasznahorkai is, after all, a consummate laureate, a writer of novels people not unreasonably like to describe as challenging, difficult, elusive—and other words that could also describe the possibility of social democracy in the United States. Krasznahorkai has famously collaborated with the challenging, difficult, elusive filmmaker Béla Tarr and probably has a superlative collection of György Kurtág records. In the Swedish Academy’s phrasing, his is a “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” Fair enough. Krasznahorkai described it better when he said his work was “reality described to the point of madness.”

So: a victory for high literature, for inevitability, for oppositional culture, for men. But for the obsessives who have been attending to the saga of the Nobel Prize in literature over the past decade, it’s also something of a bummer.


Not that long ago, the Nobel was fun. It was a topic of metaphorical watercooler conversations (metaphorical because the watercooler industry cratered after the rise of “alternative seltzers” and also because nearly everyone who cared about it was unemployed) and metaphorical drawing-room chatter (metaphorical because the only people who can afford drawing rooms are venture capitalists who have lost the ability to communicate verbally). In a given year, the prize could be won by an oral historian whose work was necessarily given over to the voices of other people; a writer whose perspective on Serbian culpability in the 1990s was more avant-garde than his boundary-shifting prose; and a self-described “song and dance man” whose first and third-eldest sons produced arguably more deserving work (How High and “One Headlight,” respectively).

This was the Nobel Prize’s weird era, and it was exciting. It was easy to project all kinds of political and cultural arguments onto the Swedish Academy’s decision-making (high art vs. popular art, inclusiveness vs. whatever it is Peter Handke represents, Eurocentrism vs. internationalism, poets vs. normal writers)—because the Swedish Academy itself was a site of insane contestation.

The Nobel’s weird era was also a reflection of the absurdity of the prize itself. The prize bills itself as the definitive literary award, one that ensures canonization—and who hasn’t had the experience recently of seeing someone reading a novel by a past laureate like Henrik Pontoppidan or Dario Fo on the subway?—but is decided by a group of obscure Scandinavian eggheads. Their status comes not from merit or authority but from tradition: 125 years ago, Alfred Nobel put some of his dynamite money toward a literary prize and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.

That the Swedish Academy was routinely beset with scandal, infighting, and controversy only drove the point home: What business does a group of people from a country whose lone contribution to global culture over the past century is ABBA Gold have deciding the global literary canon? (To be fair, that is also the greatest contribution to global culture over the past century.) Sure, the winners were usually pretty solid, but it was hard not to feel that they were less interesting than the processes, decisions, and controversies that got them the, uh, gold.

One upside of the Nobel’s weird era was that it was easy for, say, a couple of guys to write about in, say, The New Republic. Easy to make jokes about Philip Roth sitting around waiting for the phone call that never arrived; easy to make jokes about Mircea Cărtărescu’s rabid, virginal fan base; easy to make jokes about deciding that writing a novel about a goalie who kills someone is as important as speaking at Slobodan Milošević’s funeral. Maybe even more important. (We are committed to making jokes about the Handke thing until the final death of American civil society.) As cultural politics got amped up in the first Trump era, extrapolating from the Nobel Prize’s shenanigans felt totally effortless—and any time it got a little harder, the Swedish Academy itself would do something nutty to move things along. All prizes are dumb, but literary prizes are especially stupid. And the Nobel Prize was the most ridiculous of all.

Sadly, a close or even distant reading of the past few winners suggests that the Nobel’s weird era is over. After the batshit run of Alexievich, Dylan, Ishiguro, Tokarczuk, and Handke (the latter two awarded in a single year because of a #MeToo/gambling controversy that embroiled the Academy in 2018—a combination of factors that in retrospect stands in for much of what ails the world today), things have been normal, solid, and respectable. No gripes with Glück and Gurnah, no errors with the choice of Ernaux, no fault with Fosse, all kredit to Kang and, now, Krasznahorkai. How respectable! How solid! But—crucially—what are two unprofessional Nobel commentators to do?

Making it all worse is the fact that members of the old guard of deserving and mockable candidates have, annoyingly, been dying. Their passing has been a loss for literature, sure, but mostly it’s a loss for your humble Nobel speculators. Those guys (obviously, they were all guys) were so easy and fun to pick on. (Roth was desperate … and horny! McCarthy was pretentious … and horny! Amis was self-important … and horny! Marias … well, Marias was just horny.) It’s true that we still have Michel Houellebecq and Gerald Murnane to kick around (the former is currently chain-smoking, hard at work on a novel called Caliphate: An Epiphany; the latter is eight beers deep at the Men’s Shed in rural Australia). But let’s be real: It’s just not the same.

Not only that, the Nobel Prize has become almost predictable. There are still surprises, sure—no one saw Han Kang coming—but on the whole you can presume that if a writer’s book is wrapped in a dust jacket with the word “visionary” somewhere on the flap and a silver medal on the front cover (a lesser prize, like the Man Booker), you’re dealing with a future laureate.

Jens Liljestrand, Nobel watcher, novelist, and longtime friend of this column, had this to say about Krasznahorkai: “Very expected. Very popular name among critics. Also very typical Academy choice: serious, epic, dark-but-humanistic narrator of the apocalyptic European 20th century.” Not only that, but Liljestrand already knows who next year’s winner will be: The new Swedish Academy has reliably rotated between awarding men and women, which means we can get started on next year’s column right now, a piece in celebration of 2026 Nobel Prize–winner Joyce Carol Oates. (The 2026 prize will be specifically awarded for Oates’s tweets about ISIS and dinosaur hunting and “wan little husks,” masterpieces of deadpan humor that were, like all great art, misunderstood upon first appearance. There will be no mention of any of her 157 books—or the fact that she is the greatest boxing writer ever.)

After that it will be another man. Call it the Liljestrand Theory: a woman and then a man. Usually a European man. “Every other year or so it has to be old, male, European and laundry-list,” Liljestrand said—referring to the rapidly diminishing list of canonical writers the Academy regularly plucks from. In this sense, the Academy is honoring tradition: The Nobel Prize “continues to be basically be a European prize, with varying degrees of curiosity regarding the rest of the planet.”

But if the Nobel is no longer fun, at least there’s still a fan base to pick on. The New Republic’s statisticians are indisposed (they’re still crunching the numbers—Kamala Harris can still win Pennsylvania!), but we’ve done our own calculations and they’re definitive: No readers have been made fun of in these pages as much as the fans and champions of László Krasznahorkai. They are self-serious, self-important, and very online; the line for the men’s bathroom when he makes his biannual appearance at a New York bookstore is longer than it is at a Steely Dan concert.

Before you freaks start posting about us on Reddit, however, we will be pedantically clear: We are you. We love Krasznahorkai and his hypnotic gloom. He has far more range than he’s given credit for (by us). He’s funny. The Béla Tarr alliance was an extraordinary moment in culture. OK? Happy? Now we can address more important subjects, like how you live in a basement and spend more time watching pornography than reading books. The basement is owned by your parents, who are worried about you. They’re not thrilled about the OnlyFans bills, either. And, ugh, what’s that all over your copy of Seiobo There Below? Is it mold? We hope it’s mold ...


In an age of rising fascism and tyranny-via-Medbed-meme, the truth is that fun is probably too much to ask for. Today’s literary culture is obviously more imperiled than it was when The New Republic first became a Nobel analysis outfit a decade ago. Subtle and blunt-force censorship is on the rise everywhere, and more people are spending more money than ever on technologies that claim to make art, definitely don’t make art, harvest art’s raw materials, and are ultimately invested in the project of destroying art altogether. They won’t win, but they’re damaging and extremely tiresome. Which is all to say that as much as we’d prefer to make jokes about @krasznahorguy1954, we have to acknowledge that, in the age of ChatGPT, there is almost something heroic about never shutting the fuck up about The Melancholy of Resistance. The Nobel Prize got it right, and literary life is far better for having the Nobel be a part of it, as esoteric, imperfect, and eerily Swedish as it might be.

If you asked ChatGPT nicely, it could write a single sentence that stretched on forever. But it couldn’t produce the disorienting effects that Krasznahorkai’s winding, restless sentences generate with total consistency. This the right moment for “reality examined to the point of madness.” It’s hard not to feel immensely grateful for Krasznahorkai’s ceaseless examination, and hard not to feel grateful to the Nobel for endowing it with visibility and credibility. It is, first and foremost, a victory for men: No one can say we don’t read books again! But—and it certainly doesn’t work out this way most of the time—it is a victory for all serious readers as well.

This is how bad life in the early days of the ChatGPT Era is: Even we have to admit that the Nobel Prize is good for something.

ICE Barbie Says an Entire State’s Worth of Officials Are “Lying” - 2025-10-09T17:31:38Z

Homeland Security Secretary Krisit Noem accused local leaders in Portland, Oregon, of “lying” because they wouldn’t back up her baseless claims that the streets were overrun with terrorists.

Speaking at a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Noem excoriated Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Portland Police Chief Bob Day, after her surprise visit to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the South Portland neighborhood earlier this week.

“I … met with the governor, met with the mayor, met with the chief of police, and the superintendent of the highway patrol. They’re all lying, and disingenuous, and dishonest people,” she said. “Because as soon as you leave the room, then they make the exact opposite response.

“So, we’re looking at new facilities to purchase there in Portland too. And we’re gonna double down. And I told them if they didn’t meet our demands for safety and security on the streets then we’re going to bring in more federal law enforcement,” she added.

But Noem’s trip Tuesday revealed that Portland isn’t the war zone the president claims.

Local officials have continued to undermine the Trump administration’s outlandish claims about Portland. Kotek, who got wind of Noem’s visit, reportedly met her at the airport, where the governor said she “reiterated again that there is no insurrection in Oregon.”

Outside the facility Noem visited, there were no hardened terrorists, only a handful of reporters and a guy in a chicken costume. By midday, there were about two dozen protesters, but they were still outnumbered by reporters, according to Oregon Live. And across the city, organizers threw a puppy parade to tell ICE to get its paws off Portland. Still, appearing on Fox News later, Noem called local leaders “a bunch of pansies” and said she wanted even more security at the ICE facility.

Wilson said that the quiet day Noem witnessed was proof that “Portland continues to manage public safety professionally and responsibly, irrespective of the claims of out-of-state social media influencers.”

It seems that Noem now hopes to punish Portland officials for their repeated assertions that they were doing a fine job of managing public safety on their own.

On Wednesday, during a roundtable of right-wing influencers talking about anti-fascist resistance to the president, Noem accused Wilson and Kotek of “covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”

Noem also claimed that Portland police officers were “cheering” on protesters that were saying slogans such as “kill ICE agents” and “Molotov cocktails melt ICE.”

Day told KGW8 that Noem’s claim was an “abhorrent allegation.”

“Since the secretary had several people documenting her movements, we urge her to provide video evidence to support this claim,” he said. “Such inflammatory rhetoric undermines trust and distracts from our goal to ensure safety in the South Waterfront area. Our officers remain professional, dedicated, and committed to serving the people of Portland with integrity.”

Trump Proudly Announces His Shutdown Revenge on Democrats - 2025-10-09T17:05:48Z

Donald Trump could not be more plain: He is planning to use the government shutdown to take revenge against Democrats.

During a Cabinet meeting Thursday, the president announced that the White House would be cutting congressionally approved programs during the government closure—but only those supported by America’s liberal party.

“We’ll be making cuts that will be permanent, and we’re only going to cut Democrat programs, I hate to tell you,” Trump said. “I guess that makes sense, but we’re only cutting Democrat programs.

“We’ll be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly, that’s the way it works,” he continued. “They wanted to do this, so we’ll give them a little taste of their own medicine.”

For the record, that’s not how the government is supposed to work. The Impoundment Control Act was passed in 1974 for exactly this purpose: to prevent the executive branch from withholding funds in a way that would undermine Congress’s “power of the purse.” Regardless of Trump’s bravado, a government shutdown doesn’t suddenly suspend the law.

It’s not the only law that the Trump administration has decided could be flouted. So far, the shutdown has furloughed more than half a million federal employees, according to a New York Times monitor. That includes 89 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency, 87 percent of the Education Department, and 71 percent of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Forty-five percent of the civilian workforce of the Defense Department has also been temporarily let go.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has insinuated that not every furloughed federal worker will be eligible for back pay, despite a bipartisan-supported 2019 law that mandates they are.

In other seismic executive oversteps, the White House has promised to target liberals in a forthcoming mass firing and, last week, issued ideological messaging via executive agency heads to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the Hatch Act.

DOJ in Trouble After Lawyers Reposted Trump Rant on Luigi Mangione - 2025-10-09T16:49:07Z

Justice Department lawyers reposting President Trump’s statements may have inadvertently endangered their prosecution of Luigi Mangione, who is on trial for the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.

On September 18, Trump said in a Fox News interview that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me.... He shot him right in the middle of the back — instantly dead.... This is a sickness. This really has to be studied and investigated.” All of what Trump said was only alleged. 

A clip of the interview was posted by conservative page Rapid Response 47. DOJ Public Affairs head Chad Gilmartin retweeted it, commenting that the president was “absolutely right,” violating the judge’s explicit orders that DOJ employees refrain from public comment about the  case. 

Mangione’s defense team promptly notified the court that they will be filing a motion to dismiss and a suppression motion on Friday. 

Federal prosecutors are defending Gilmartin’s actions, saying he and other department employees “operate entirely outside the scope of the prosecution team, possess no operational role in the investigative or prosecutorial functions of the Mangione matter, and are not ‘associated’ with this litigation,” according to the filing, as reported by NBC News. 

Mangione has pleaded not guilty, and already had charges of state terrorism dismissed in September. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene Slams Mike Johnson Over Epstein Delay Tactic - 2025-10-09T16:38:19Z

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia MAGA Republican, criticized Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday for delaying the swearing-in of Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat.

Amid the ongoing government shutdown, Johnson has cancelled regular House sessions and held off on swearing in Grijalva—who was elected more than two weeks ago—during the brief pro forma sessions taking place in the meantime.

But since Johnson previously swore in GOP representatives during pro formas, Democrats are accusing the speaker of dragging his feet due to Grijalva’s stance on releasing all unclassified documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. The Arizona Democrat would provide the deciding, 218th signature on a petition to force a House vote on the Epstein files’ release.

Johnson denies that the petition—currently signed by 213 Democrats, as well as Greene and three fellow Republicans—has anything to do with his reluctance vis-à-vis Grijalva.

“I can’t conclusively say if that’s why the House is not in session, but the House should be in session,” Greene told CNN on Thursday. “And the House should be in session for many reasons. We have appropriation bills that need to get passed. There is a new Democrat that’s been elected that does deserve to be sworn in. Her district elected her. We have other bills that we need to be passing.”

If Johnson is indeed just hoping to avoid the discharge petition, Greene said, “Why drag this out? That is going to have 218 signatures, and I say go ahead and do it, and get it over with.”

The Georgia Republican has proven very willing of late to defy her party’s leadership. Also during her CNN interview, for example, Greene said Johnson and the Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune “absolutely” deserve the blame for the shutdown. “We control the House, we control the Senate, we have the White House,” she added. “This doesn’t have to be a shutdown.”

GOP Rep Says Rural Areas Will Just Have to Deal With Hospitals Closing - 2025-10-09T16:19:39Z

Republicans are already working to downplay rural hospitals shutting down as a result of President Donald Trump’s behemoth budget reconciliation bill.

During an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday, Nebraska Representative Mike Flood didn’t deny co-host Joe Scarborough, who told him that six rural hospitals would likely shutter as a result of the massive cuts to Medicaid he voted for. In fact, Flood didn’t seem the least bit concerned.

Flood claimed that the Senate’s supplementary $50 billion fund for a rural health transformation program would offset some of the squeeze, but admitted that many rural hospitals would need to prepare to be stripped of essential services.

“Here’s the deal: Some hospitals in America, that are rural hospitals, are going to eventually have to transition from being acute bed hospitals into, like, an emergency room model,” Flood said.

The Senate’s $50 billion fund—which is little over one third of the estimated loss in federal funding to rural hospitals—-would force hospitals to “think creatively about what kind of services we need in really small towns,” Flood explained.

But it’s still unclear how exactly the money would be distributed, according to KFF. The law did not offer specific criteria that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would use to approve or deny applications for funding, rules about how cash would be allocated, or language requiring transparency about how the decisions are made. One can easily imagine that if the decision is in the hands of Trump, who has already moved to gut programs in blue states, total compliance with his agenda would be necessary to receive support.

Trump’s behemoth budget bill will cut nearly one trillion from Medicaid funding over the next 10 years, resulting in the mass closure of rural hospitals, which are already struggling to survive.

Because more people receive and rely on Medicaid coverage in rural communities than in urban areas, cuts to Medicaid would force rural hospitals, which already operate on razor thin margins, to absorb skyrocketing rates of uncompensated care, according to the National Rural Health Association. The continued strain will force them to cut services and personnel, and eventually close. More than 45 percent of rural hospitals in the United States operate with negative margins, and more than 300 rural hospitals are at risk of closing as a result of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”

And Nebraska, Flood’s home state, is no exception. The Nebraska Rural Health Association found that 39 of the state’s 71 rural hospitals have a two percent or less operating margin. Of those hospitals, 29 had negative operating margins in 2018, and 22 of them had a -3 percent margin or less.

The University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health published a report in May that found that cuts to Medicaid would cost 110,000 Nebraskans their health insurance and put 5,000 Nebraskans out of their jobs.

But when asked whether the Medicaid cuts would hurt rural hospitals, Flood claimed that his state was on an “upward trend” in terms of health care access. “We do have resources here, and our hospitals and doctors are providing great care. I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t live it. I live it, I live in it, I love it,” he said.

But it’s not whether the high quality care already exists, but how long it will be accessible that is concerning health care experts and constituents.

MTG Gives Her Party the Middle Finger Over Ongoing Shutdown - 2025-10-09T15:42:59Z

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is exhausted with Republican leadership as they fluster and flounder the government shutdown.

So far, the government has been shut down for more than eight days—the result of a boiling disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, left over from the spring, about how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget.

Republicans want to pass a “clean” continuing resolution, which would provide the executive branch with unfettered funds to advance the president’s agenda as outlined in his July legislation. That would include ruinous cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid, a position that Democrats have demonstrated for months is a nonstarter.

In the eight days since discussions broke down, conservatives have overwhelmingly blamed Democrats for the federal failure. But in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, one of the party’s most far-right figures argued that Republicans’ blame game won’t get them very far with the American public—especially as the GOP clutches every branch of the federal government.

“There’s a lot of things we can be working on in the House, and that’s our appropriation bills. There’s many other bills we could be passing right now,” Greene said on the paper’s podcast Politically Georgia.

“I don’t think it’s believable to tell the American people that while we control the White House, the House, and the Senate, that we can’t return to work in Washington, D.C., because Chuck Schumer and six other Democrats won’t vote to open the government,” Greene continued. “I know people. They don’t believe that.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled chamber votes and sent lawmakers home earlier this month as party leadership works to negotiate with Democrats, but the decision hasn’t gone down well with members of his caucus.

“I’m against the [continuing resolution] and I’m for appropriations,” Greene said. “I really don’t see how we’ll ever pass the appropriations if we continue to sit at home and then we have another deadline coming on November 20.”

Beyond that, Republicans have failed to align their messaging on the shutdown, making for a messy public spectacle. Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have repeatedly flubbed attempts to coordinate their priorities with the White House, which has so far been more absorbed in punishing Trump’s political allies than in coming to a congressional resolution.

Still, none of Greene’s criticism was directed at Trump. Reacting in a separate interview to a Washington Post poll that found that the majority of Americans believed that Trump and Republicans in Congress were at fault for the shutdown, Greene said that she wouldn’t put the “blame on the president.”

“I’m actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader Thune in the Senate,” Greene told CNN Thursday. “This should not be happening. As a member of Congress, we already have a low enough job approval rating. This shutdown is just going to drive everybody’s approval rating that much lower.”

The Georgia lawmaker has somewhat divorced herself from the MAGA brand in recent months.

Greene, who won her district in 2020 without the president’s endorsement, has publicly broken with Trump several times since his inauguration. She’s differed from her “favorite president” on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and has also sparred with the White House over the executive branch’s apparent hostility toward demands to release the Epstein files. Now she appears to vehemently disagree with Trump’s position on the shutdown, which has thus far involved a blame campaign that legal experts argue is in violation of the Hatch Act.

“My Kids Could Die”: Republican Caller Begs Mike Johnson Live on Air - 2025-10-09T15:18:09Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared on C-SPAN’s morning call-in program on Thursday, where he took heat from callers on both sides of the political aisle.

Samantha, a Republican caller from Virginia, told Johnson she lives “paycheck to paycheck” with “two medically fragile children” and a husband who serves in the military.

“If we see a lapse in pay come the 15th, my children do not get to get the medication that’s needed for them to live their life,” she said, her voice shaking. “As a Republican, I am disappointed in my party and I’m very disappointed in you because you do have the power to call the House back.… I am begging you to pass this legislation. My kids could die.”

In response, the speaker placed the blame for the ongoing government shutdown on Democrats: “Republicans are the ones delivering for you,” he assured her, whereas, “Democrats are the ones preventing you from getting the check.”

Pat, a Democrat from New York, called in and criticized the ongoing shutdown and Trump’s so-called “one, big, beautiful” tax and spending plan. She also asked about “the war being caused here in America,” with Trump deploying troops to American cities, using them as “war zones,” and telling “the military to shoot Americans.”

Johnson replied that he has “no idea” where the idea that Trump “wants to have a war on American citizens” comes from. (In a speech to military leaders last month, Trump called American cities “training grounds for our military.”)

Johnson insisted that, after the federal takeover of D.C., “everybody is smiling here. The sun is shining again.” A subsequent caller, a Colorado Democrat named Sam, took issue with that remark: “Hearing you say that everyone is smiling in the cities where troops, our National Guard, has been rolled into feels dystopian and insane,” Sam said.

Collin, a Republican in Texas, said he doesn’t have health insurance and pays out-of-pocket, asking, “What is the plan to fix Obamacare?” Johnson provided little more than the president’s notorious promise of “concepts of a plan”: Republicans, the speaker said, “have a lot of ideas to fix it.”

Prodding Johnson for something less vacuous, C-SPAN host Mimi Gergees asked, “Is there a plan that we can read and find out more about?” to which Johnson gave a similarly vapid response: Republicans “have been producing plans over the last few years” and “are setting up the conditions right now to do that.”

Hegseth Launches Chilling Charlie Kirk Witch Hunt at Pentagon - 2025-10-09T14:52:23Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a witch hunt of 300 of his own employees to suppress any statements about Charlie Kirk he didn’t like. 

The Washington Post has reported that 128 military members and 158 nonuniformed personnel—including 27 Defense Department civilians— have been “aggressively hunted” since Kirk’s assassination on September 10. Two of the nonuniformed were “removed from employment,” and three service members received “nonjudicial punishment.” Five former DOD employees have also been placed under investigation.

These free speech restrictions align with the administration’s broader rhetoric that anyone who acknowledges the often racist and hateful things Kirk said is anti-American. They also feed into the frantic, paranoid mania that the high-strung Hegseth is reportedly experiencing.   

“We WILL NOT tolerate those who celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American at the Department of War,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X in September. “It’s a violation of the oath, it’s conduct unbecoming, it’s a betrayal of the Americans they’ve sworn to protect & dangerously incompatible with military service.”

The Post also reported that Hegseth last year made light of Representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband being beaten with a hammer in 2022. Hegseth says the situations are not comparable. 

The man who endlessly laments the so-called “war on warriors” is now trying (and mostly failing) to punish those warriors for offering their opinions on the killing of a public figure. Meanwhile, the president demonizes the entire political left wing for doing the same thing. This administration has no right to speak on free speech. 

DOJ Has No Clue What It’s Doing With Comey Case, Legal Expert Warns - 2025-10-09T14:37:37Z

Members of the Justice Department team prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey are so green that they don’t actually know what they’re supposed to do with the case.

The former FBI chief was charged last month with lying to Congress regarding his testimony to Senator Ted Cruz in a 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Comey has maintained his innocence and denied any wrongdoing. He could face a maximum of five years in prison if convicted.

Going against the grain of official statements by FBI leadership, Donald Trump has all but admitted that he was behind Comey’s indictment. But in order to make the case happen, certain people needed to be pushed out of the way and replaced. That included the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, whose replacement was handpicked by the president himself: White House aide Lindsey Halligan.

Ignoring protocol, Halligan has moved full steam ahead on prosecutions under the banner of Trump’s approval, despite the fact that she still needs to be confirmed by the Senate. (In fact, Trump has just two Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys in place.)

Halligan’s team is even less familiar with the former FBI director’s case. Halligan was reportedly “silent” during court proceedings Wednesday, while the two attorneys she recruited from the Eastern District of North Carolina agreed to a timeline on Comey’s terms. Their rationale, as recalled by MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin, was telling.

“Why? ‘Because we’re trying to give the defendant all the time he needs to prepare for trial,’” Rubin told the network Wednesday night, speaking from the perspective of Halligan’s team. “But also there’s a substantial amount of discovery in this case, your honor, including classified materials.”

“That’s a very, very nice, thinly disguised way of saying, ‘We’re brand new to this and we got to get our arms around it, too, because guess what? We’re not the ones who investigated this case. We’re not the ones who charged this case,’” Rubin continued. “‘And we got to learn what it is that we’re supposed to do here by some point in January.’”

Comey, who worked as a longtime federal prosecutor and even served as the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the office prosecuting him now, has already challenged Halligan’s appointment.

“If Halligan was named as an interim U.S. attorney, Comey has an argument that she is not legally serving because the law does not permit successive appointments of interim U.S. attorneys by the attorney general,” Nina Mendelson, professor of law at University of Michigan, told CNN.

Photographer Captures Marco Rubio’s Notes, Exposing Trump’s Narcissism - 2025-10-09T14:25:36Z

President Donald Trump got caught trying to make the peace deal between Israel and Hamas all about him.

During a roundtable discussion Wednesday with right-wing influencers to discuss antifascist resistance to Trump’s reign, Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to pass a note to the president. 

The Daily Beast reported that Trump appeared to read the note before motioning Rubio over. The secretary whispered in the president’s ear and then returned to his seat. Trump answered a few more questions, before informing the pitiable right-wing shills he’d assembled to discuss antifa that he had to go “solve some problems in the Middle East.” Rubio took remaining questions on his behalf.

Evan Vucci, AP’s chief photographer in Washington, snapped a photograph of the note and posted it on X. “Very close. We need you to approve a Truth Social post so you can announce deal first,” the note said. 

Screenshot of a tweet

Two hours later, after a lengthy call with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and nepo-hire Jared Kushner to review his social media post, Trump announced a deal between Israel and Hamas.

“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan. This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace. All Parties will be treated fairly!” he wrote on Truth Social. 

Per the terms of the deal, all remaining hostages will be released from Gaza, and scores of Palestinians may be released from Israeli prisons. Israel is reportedly in talks to release as many as 2,000 prisoners. 

It seems clear that Trump wants to be the savior of the Middle East. His 20-point peace plan places himself in charge of the so-called “Board of Peace” that will oversee Gaza’s “redevelopment” and governance. Trump’s group would theoretically run things until the Palestinian Authority implements its own reform plan that satisfies Trump’s standards and “is conducive to attracting investment.” 

It’s more clear than ever that in Trump’s White House, a peace deal is indistinguishable from a P.R. stunt, or a power grab. Trump’s announcement came just two days before this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient will be revealed—an honor for which Trump has fiercely lobbied, though still could never deserve.  

Pastor Shot in the Head by ICE Sues Trump Over First Amendment - 2025-10-09T13:19:21Z

A Chicago pastor is suing the Trump administration after ICE agents shot him in the head with pepper balls. 

Last month, Reverend David Black, the senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was shot right in the face with a pepper ball by an ICE agent standing on a rooftop above him while he was protesting at the Broadview ICE facility. Black can be seen with his arms spread wide, praying at the masked, armed agents above him, before being shot in the head at least twice and falling to his knees. Black said he could hear ICE laughing at him when it happened.  

The video has now gone viral. 

“I invited them to repentance,” Black told Religion News Service. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

The lawsuit hinges on ICE infringing upon protesters’ First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religion, as agents have displayed “a pattern of extreme brutality” aimed to “silence the press and civilians.”

Black is not the only clergy member involved in the lawsuit. Unitarian minister Beth Johnson was “fired upon without warning or justification as she and other protesters and clergy members stood on the sidewalk singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and other traditional songs of protest,” according to the lawsuit. United Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was also shot at with pepper balls. 

It’s obvious in the video that Black—standing out among the crowd in his preacher’s garb—was absolutely a target, and it’s likely that the other faith leaders can say the same. 

The Trump administration accuses Black of trying to “dictate crowd-control policy in ways that would tie the hands of federal law enforcement officers,” while online MAGA has dismissed him as “antifa” for his vocal support of equal rights in Chicago. 

Trump Accidentally Posted Message That Could Destroy Entire Comey Case - 2025-10-09T13:13:49Z

Donald Trump’s reckless social media use could imperil his administration’s already flimsy case against James Comey, the former FBI director and enemy of Trump who was indicted last month on evidently politically motivated charges.

On Wednesday evening, The Wall Street Journal revealed a striking detail about the president’s September 20 Truth Social post ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to make haste in prosecuting Comey and other MAGA enemies, i.e., Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

As many suspected, that message was actually meant to be sent privately to the attorney general.

“Trump believed he had sent Bondi the message directly,” the Journal reports, “and was surprised to learn it was public.” Chagrined, the attorney general called the White House, and Trump provided a balm in a subsequent post praising Bondi.

“The misfire provided a window into how, through command and chaos, Trump has executed a wholesale transformation of the Justice Department,” the Journal reports. It also raises a host of legal troubles for the department’s case against Comey.

As former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki following the revelation, this could pose “a big problem, legally and substantively” for Trump and the DOJ, giving Comey and the others mentioned in the message “viable motions to dismiss indictments.”

Comey’s attorney is reportedly looking to dismiss the case for “vindictive prosecution.” His trial is set for January, but before that, he can file a request to dismiss charges, on the ground that they were brought due to animus rather than legitimate legal reasons. As CNN’s Aaron Blake noted, if the Journal’s reporting is accurate, “it’s not inconceivable that an errant DM from Trump could be a big reason why Comey’s case is dismissed for vindictive prosecution.”

Though motions for vindictive prosecution are rarely successful, Bharara noted that Comey already has a better-than-average case for one, given Trump’s long record of public animosity toward him. What’s more, Bharara notes that the Journal’s reporting strongly suggests that additional communications between Trump and DOJ officials have taken place, which could help further determine the vindictiveness of the prosecution.

If the defense team acquires such messages in discovery, “that’s very, very bad for the prosecution,” he observed. Even worse would be if messages were deleted, which could potentially lead to an “adverse inference,” or the assumption that destroyed evidence would have been unfavorable to whoever destroyed it.

Further, Bharara said, “There is an argument that those communications and the destruction thereof by themselves are a basis to dismiss an indictment.”

Transcript: Trump Threats to Jail Foes Darken amid Damning DOJ Leaks - 2025-10-09T11:54:03Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. 

President Trump’s lawlessness has just gotten worse on many fronts at once. We just learned that the Justice Department’s prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey has been undercut by a key witness, making it look even more corrupt. Meanwhile, Trump just called for the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago to be thrown in prison. And when Mike Johnson was asked about Trump’s call for their jailing, the speaker evaded and dodged. It’s becoming jarringly clear that there’s very little in the way of defenses standing in the way of Trump’s escalating authoritarianism. And yet, at the same time, there is resistance developing inside places like DOJ. And that matters, even if it doesn’t seem like it at this fraught moment. How do we make sense of all these conflicting signals? We’re trying to dig through all of it today with Kristy Parker, who knows DOJ from the inside as a former federal prosecutor and is now counsel at the group Protect Democracy. Hey, Kristy, thanks for coming on. 

Kristy Parker: Hi Greg. Thanks for having me. 

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s deranged attack on Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Here’s what Trump’s tweet said: “Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers. Governor Pritzker also.”  

Kristy, this comes after the Illinois governor Pritzker has resisted Trump’s corrupt efforts to send the National Guard into Chicago. Trump is now in effect threatening to jail them for not acquiescing to his bidding. Your response to that? 

Parker: Well, unlike the speaker of the House, it’s fairly easy for me to come up with a response to that. There’s absolutely no basis for the president to threaten to put the governor of a state or any other American in jail for simply resisting one of his policies. And even if there were some basis for investigating a person based on any of that, it would not be appropriate for the president to be announcing from his social media account that any person who has not been formally accused of a crime should go to jail. So that’s an easy one. 

Sargent: Yeah. And he’s really doing it precisely because the Illinois governor is standing in his way. There’s been this very public fight over whether Trump can send the National Guard into Chicago. Pritzker has been resisting it. The Chicago mayor has been resisting it. And he is, in essence, calling for their jailing for not rolling over and doing what he wants them to do. 

Parker: That’s right. It’s just another layer in his overall scheme of attempting to chill and squelch all of the opposition to him and his administration by deploying the levers of government power to punish people. 

Sargent: Yeah. And we should be clear that the Illinois governor has strongly responded to this as well. He’s not getting pushed around by it. But the point is, this is a message to all other actors in the constitutional system from Donald Trump—“If you don’t do my bidding, I will threaten to prosecute and jail you.”

I mean it’s just almost inconceivable. It’s so hard to really process it. It seems like there’s like this major degradation going on in which Trump is just trying to almost make it seem normal that he’s doing these things, just by doing them day in and day out, and yet they’re obviously highly abnormal and in fact, symptomatic of a deeply sickened system, I think. What do you think? 

Parker: Well, I think that’s exactly right. I think you’re right to focus on his effort to normalize all of this just by the dailiness and, quite frankly, even the hourliness of it. He threatens somebody on a nearly daily basis with some form of retribution for opposing him—whether it’s a person, whether it’s an organization, whether it’s a powerful person, whether it is an undocumented immigrant.

He does it all the time, to the point where people become used to hearing it. And I think what’s really important to do is to take a step back and ground ourselves in the fact that this is the United States of America. We have a Constitution. We have a democratic form of government based on the rule of law.

And central to all of that has always been that people have a right to criticize their government, have a right to criticize the policies of the president. And even government officials have a right to push back and resist certain policies within the legal system. And the manner for the president to respond to that is through the legal system—and not by extrajudicial threats to just summarily put people in jail.

These are things that strike at the very heart of the system that we need to remind ourselves we still have and that is still operative in this country.

Sargent:  So reporters tried to talk to House Speaker Mike Johnson about this. He was asked whether it’s appropriate for Trump to be calling for the jailing of those Illinois officials. And here’s Mike Johnson’s answer. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson: “Should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison? I’m not the Attorney General. I’m the Speaker of the House and I’m trying to manage the chaos here. I’m not following the day to day on that. I do know that they’ve resisted the introduction of or the offering of National Guard troops.”


Sargent: After this, Johnson went on a long ramble about crime in cities, which was just loaded up with bullshit. Kristy, what I take from this is that Republicans will at no point ever stand up and say that Trump’s lawlessness is too much. He could be arresting Democrats by the hundreds and you’d hear rhetoric like that coming from Republicans. Is that too pessimistic? Do you think? 

Parker: Well, I think it’s not too pessimistic when it comes to the speaker of the House. Notable that the speaker of the House decided to engage in the Senate filibuster tactic instead of answering the question that he was asked there. He didn’t want to answer the question.

But, you know, the right thing for him to do—and for any other American leader to do—would have been to do what Republicans did back when Richard Nixon was weaponizing the government in this manner. And that is to stand up and say, you know, that’s an abuse of power. And that actually, in fact, is an impeachable offense.

So no, we’re not really seeing that right now from any of our elected Republican officials. And that is a large part of the reason why we are in the situation we are in right now, with these rampant abuses of power.

Sargent: Well, let’s switch to former FBI director James Comey. When you look at something like that from Mike Johnson, you kind of get the sense that there are absolutely no bulwarks whatsoever against Trump’s lawlessness. 

But the Comey case is telling a bit of a different story. He’s being prosecuted for supposedly lying to Congress. He just pleaded not guilty and his lawyer said he will seek to get the case dismissed as a vindictive prosecution. Kristy, can you walk us through what a vindictive prosecution is and the prospects for it succeeding here given the facts set? 

Parker: Sure. So every person who’s accused of a crime in this country you know, has all of the rights afforded to them in the Bill of Rights and in the due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitution. So a vindictive prosecution is something that violates due process. And it’s a prosecution that is essentially a retribution for the subject doing something that they had a legal right to do. And here you could absolutely argue that the prosecution is Trump’s vindictive effort to retaliate against James Comey because Comey oversaw the 2016 investigation into Russian interference and potential collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. And he’s been calling for that long since before the facts of the particular case in which Comey is charged ever crossed anybody’s radar screen. 

Sargent: Yes. And the Comey story has this new bombshell coming out from ABC News, which just reported that federal prosecutors have concluded that a central witness against Comey is very “problematic” for their case. His name is Daniel Richman. He’s a law professor. He has told prosecutors unequivocally that Comey never authorized him to leak information to the media. According to ABC News, this would badly complicate the prosecutor’s efforts to show that Comey lied to Congress about authorizing such leaks. Kristy, can you walk us through the details of this new turn? 

Parker: Well, so let me just start by saying that, you know, it’s important for people to understand that we don’t have a great sense of what it is that Comey is supposed to have specifically lied about to Congress. The indictment is very vague on that. You heard Comey’s lawyer reference that at the legal proceedings today, saying, you know, we don’t really have a clear sense of what my client is even being charged with here.

But based on what we are given to understand, it has something to do with Comey supposedly lying to Congress about whether or not he authorized another person to talk to the media about a case the FBI was investigating. The person involved in that potentially is this friend of Mr. Comey’s named Daniel Richmond.

And what we’re hearing in this reporting is that Richmond has undermined completely any notion that Comey instructed him to give information. And in fact, according to the ABC report, he’s saying not only did he never tell me to give information about this particular case, he explicitly told me not to talk to the media about FBI cases.

So unless they’ve got something else to establish that Comey’s statements were false—undermining the central witness in the case—then that’s not a very good case. And it stands to reason, because we’ve also heard that numerous lawyers, prosecutors, experienced prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, and even at Main Justice, have looked at this case and said that it wasn’t prosecutable. And that’s the reason that Trump’s own appointed U.S. attorney had to resign a couple of weeks ago.

Sargent: To your point, I think we should also note that Trump removed a top prosecutor from that office, which is the U.S. attorney’s office for Virginia’s Eastern District, precisely because he wouldn’t bring bogus prosecutions against Trump’s enemies. And Trump put in this handpicked stooge, Lindsay Halligan, and she’s the one who brought this case against Comey, even though, as you say, other prosecutors thought it was weak. So now that we’ve learned that the prosecutors are saying that the key witness is problematic, doesn’t that underscore just how corrupt Lindsay Halligan’s prosecution of Comey really is? 

Parker: Well, there’s nothing about this that has any appearance of anything other than corruption. I mean, all the reporting that we have gotten, assuming that it is true, is that career professionals and political appointees alike looked at the evidence in this case and concluded that it was not sufficient to meet DOJ standards for bringing an indictment.

Trump then publicly forced out that U.S. attorney and then, whether it was meant to be public or not, in a statement on his social media account that was published to the entire country, he made it very clear to the Attorney General that he wanted Comey, Letitia James, and various other people prosecuted—that it needed to be done, that it needed to be done because he had been himself indicted by these people and that his credibility was being destroyed as a result of all of it.

So all of that certainly gives rise to the inference of vindictiveness on his part. And then he installs a loyalist who has no experience to lead any U.S. attorney’s office, much less one of the most important ones in the country. And just, you know, literally hours after taking the position, she goes by herself and is the only person to sign this indictment.

So, you know, none of that looks normal. None of that looks regular. None of that looks anything like the Department of Justice that I served. And I think that you’re seeing that in the departures of all of these folks who understand their own ethical obligations not to bring baseless charges.

Sargent: And I think we should point out on top of all that, that even if you get rid of this crazy stuff, it would still be highly unusual to be prosecuting a former FBI director, particularly after the president spent years saying he was going to get his revenge on this person. So the whole thing is just one layer after another of abnormality, it seems to me. 

Parker: Well, right. And, of course, you know, no one is above the law, and any public official who, you know, abuses their office to do illegal things should be subject to criminal prosecution—as I and many others argued with respect to Mr. Trump.

But if you just look at what is available to us to understand the situation regarding Mr. Comey, yes, I mean, President Trump started calling for Comey to be prosecuted and jailed during his first term years ago—just for, so it seemed, you know, based on the circumstances, just for doing his job as the FBI director to investigate what has been a substantiated claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

So, yes, you know, when you link all of the things together that have gone on here, not two weeks ago but starting years ago, then yes, you know, this is — this every aspect of this is—is, you know, off the beam from what it is supposed to be. And again, I think you don’t need to look further than all of the people who have left their jobs as DOJ prosecutors in order to get away from doing something they clearly would believe would be inappropriate and legally unethical in this case.

Sargent: And I can actually add yet another link to this chain, which is that NBC just reported that another prosecutor in that office is resisting bringing a case against New York Attorney General, Letitia James, another Trump enemy on bogus mortgage fraud charges. That comes after the extraordinarily corrupt spectacle of a senior official in Trump’s administration, William Pulte trumping up these charges of mortgage fraud precisely in order to give DOJ something to investigate to make Trump happy. The whole thing is in collapse. they just none of these cases are real. They’re like houses of cards that are falling. 

Parker: I mean, again, the red lights don’t flash any brighter. The blue lights and red lights don’t flash any brighter than when federal prosecutors go to the point of saying, I’ll quit my job if they try to tell me I have to indict this case. I’m writing a memo saying why we can’t indict this case.

And I recognize that the reporting with respect to this other attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, with respect to the Letitia James case, is like—she looked at the evidence, she did not see any evidence to bring a case against Letitia James for mortgage fraud. She wrote a memo, made a recommendation to that effect, and it’s reported that she told her colleagues there, I recognize this is probably going to get me fired. She’s willing to do that.

So again, when you’re getting that kind of reporting and you’re seeing it come to fruition with people walking out the office door because they won’t go seek an indictment, that really tells you all you need to know. Because, we’ve talked about this before—Trump was given broad immunity for abusing his power with respect to the Department of Justice by the Supreme Court. And he’s clearly taken that and run with it.

But the people below him don’t have that immunity. They’re not immune. And they also, if they’re lawyers, they have to have licenses to practice law. And what we’re seeing is people actually caring to keep their law licenses and to keep themselves out of trouble, which is still something of a bulwark against bringing baseless cases forward and trying to get them indicted.

Sargent: Well, if you add all this together, you kind of have a split-screen effect. So on one screen, you’ve got someone like Mike Johnson committing a homina homina homina about something as extraordinarily corrupt as Trump essentially calling for the jailing of a governor and a mayor, which suggests that there really aren’t any bulwarks. The Republican Party won’t act as a bulwark against Trump’s lawlessness and abuses of power.

But then on the other, you’ve got story after story coming out of the Justice Department in which career prosecutors are saying, no, the facts matter. We’re not going to bring prosecutions against your enemies, Mr. President, simply because you tell us to. And we’re not going to throw away the rule of law and throw away our careers for you.

So what I wonder is, should we take some heart from this second screen? You know DOJ—is it really striking that we’re seeing this level of resistance? And can that level of resistance actually, you know, hold back some of the terrible things from happening?

Parker: You know, I think we can take some heart. I frankly was someone who was very concerned about, you know, Mr. Trump’s agenda with respect to the DOJ and his desire to use the levers of law enforcement to retaliate against people is so clear that I have been a little bit concerned that people willing to stay and work on cases that involve these individuals that Mr. Trump has targeted, you know, might result in some people being willing to carry his water.

But I do think we can take heart that people are paying attention to the fact that they have to protect themselves. Like, they have to think about whether what they are doing is legal and whether or not it is ethical. And they have to be willing to sacrifice their own careers and possibly put their own liberty in future jeopardy if they’re going to go forward with cases for which they just can’t find the evidence to prove a charge.

So I would say, yes, that it is heartening to see that that is still something that is holding—that the lawyers are still looking at their own professional obligations and taking them seriously when it comes to moving forward, again, with cases where all the reporting suggests there just is not the evidence to put them forward.

And I would tie that together with that even if you find people who will do that, they still have to get it past juries. They still have to get it past twelve Americans to unanimously say that these are crimes. And I think we’re seeing at the grand jury level already that even, you know, that a lot of grand juries are saying, no, you don’t even have probable cause for this, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

So there are still a lot of roadblocks that even somebody who has shown himself as willing to bulldoze through laws, norms, procedures, rules as President Trump, are going to still find to be significant roadblocks.

Sargent: Well, Kristy Parker, I am going to choose to feel optimistic and end on that note with you. Thank you so much for coming on with us today. 

Parker: Thank you for having me.

The Trump Administration Is Rushing to Implement SNAP Cuts - 2025-10-09T10:00:00Z

It was barely three months ago, on Independence Day, that President Trump signed his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. The budget law was gargantuan indeed: 330 pages of handouts to the rich and de facto cuts to critical programs for poor and working-class Americans. Among the latter: strict new work requirements for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program that were patently designed to deprive people of the benefit.

It takes federal agencies and states many months, at minimum, and in some cases years to adjust to changes in such massive legislation (look no further than the implementation of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act). And yet, late last Friday, the administration quietly published guidance from the Agriculture Department saying that states must implement the new SNAP requirements by November 1, an impossibly tight deadline. The fast turnaround almost certainly means states will struggle to meet it and could make mistakes, kicking people off SNAP—commonly, if anachronistically, referred to as food stamps—even if they are still eligible to receive it.

“All of this will lead to unnecessary chaos and confusion in the midst of widespread uncertainty, record inflation, and a government shutdown,” the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger nonprofit, said in a statement. That’s unlikely to bother Republicans, because almost every change they’ve made since taking control of the federal government this year has ensured that more Americans will go without the basics, including food. As with cuts to other anti-poverty programs like Medicaid, kicking people off SNAP won’t just be bad for the people who lose access to the program. It will be bad for the communities they live in and, ultimately, for the United States as a whole.

Trump’s budget law cut some of the exemptions for meeting the program’s work requirements. Right now, a childless adult aged 18 to 54 must work or volunteer at least 80 hours a month or be kicked off SNAP after three months. But there are broad exceptions for people with children under 18 in their households, people with disabilities, pregnant women, the unhoused, veterans, and young adults up to age 24 who exited the foster care system at 18. The “one big, beautiful bill” lowers the age of dependent children to 14, raises the age of the work requirement to 64, and ends the exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and young adults out of foster care.

As the Food Research and Action Center points out, this means that families with teenagers older than 14, or grandparents who retired early to help care for their grandchildren, will suddenly find themselves without food. So will many veterans and the unhoused population. A Congressional Budget Office report estimates that 2.4 million people could lose their food assistance.

But the rushed implementation likely will mean even more people who aren’t subject to the stricter requirements will get kicked off because they have to complete new paperwork or verify their status, all while states are overburdened rushing to implement the changes. That’s what work requirements to anti-poverty programs do more than anything else: They increase paperwork, and more paperwork means more opportunities for mistakes and lost applications. States were already struggling to be able to make the changes even without the deadline, and now their job is even harder.

States will also face increased pressure to get everything right because the mistakes they make could count against them in the future. Beginning in 2028, they will have to share some of the costs of SNAP with the federal government, and their error rates will determine how much. Funding anti-poverty programs like SNAP is harder for states than the federal government, which means the program will be further jeopardized.

This is coming at a time when grocery prices are much higher than they were five years ago, Trump’s tariffs are only beginning to kick in, and a government shutdown has jeopardized another big nutrition assistance program for women, infants, and children, WIC. And we might not even understand the scale of the damage in the coming months because the administration has scrapped an important food insecurity report that provided data on hunger in the United States.

But the cuts to programs like SNAP are bad for everyone—not just those who currently receive food assistance. SNAP is one of the few entitlements left: Anyone who needs it can access the program as long as they fall below the income limits, and program spending grows to cover the need. That means that families don’t have to stay on waiting lists because there aren’t enough funds to help everyone who qualifies, as they do now with other programs like childcare subsidies or rental assistance. When a job loss, divorce, or death in the family upends their financial stability, food aid is usually there for them relatively quickly.

SNAP thus performs the critical function of helping to prop up the economy during times of crisis, like a recession, or in local areas when a factory closes and unemployment spikes. Even in normal times, communities that experience high rates of hunger, like rural areas, rely on the nutrition programs to buoy the local economy, keeping grocery stores and small farm stands in business. By some estimates, every dollar spent on food stamps results in a $1.54 boost in the economy. During more dire times, the program pumps even more money through the economy.

Republicans have, per usual, portrayed these work requirements as commonsense reforms to reduce fraud and waste. But many of the people who receive SNAP are already working, yet can’t make enough to feed their families and can’t do anything to improve the job market where they live. Many others have caregiving duties that are more pressing than work, or health problems that will only be made worse if they don’t have enough to eat. And SNAP actually has the opposite problem: Only an estimated 88 percent of the people eligible for it apply and receive the benefit, so the issue is not that too many people are benefiting from the program but that too few are.

Making work requirements stricter also misses the fundamental point of SNAP and other anti-poverty programs. The goal is not to get people into jobs, or even to end poverty. Programs like SNAP and WIC are based on a simple, noble belief: No one in the wealthiest country in the world, with such agricultural abundance, should worry for food or go hungry. But it’s also based on a practical—even commonsense, you might say—idea: It’s hard to find a job, or do your existing job well, when you’re worried about where your next meal will come from.

What Happens When the True Crime Story Is Over? - 2025-10-09T10:00:00Z

In February 2014, veteran journalist Bill Keller announced that he was leaving The New York Times, where he had worked for three decades, to helm a new nonprofit newsroom focused on criminal justice. As founding editor in chief of The Marshall Project, Keller said he sought to produce journalism that would provide “a bit of a wake-up call to a public that has gotten a little numbed to the scandal that our criminal justice system is.” The publication launched in November 2014 with a two-part feature on 80 death-row inmates whose lawyers missed a crucial deadline to file last-resort federal habeas corpus petitions. Though the investigation, by Ken Armstrong, employed individual men’s stories to hammer home the stakes, its focus was the intersection of two systemic faults—an “unforgiving” law signed by President Bill Clinton that set a one-year deadline for people condemned to death to file habeas petitions and the “lack of oversight and accountability” for incompetent lawyers who miss the deadline.    

That same month, millions were tuning in to the first season of Serial, a 12-part podcast series unraveling the case of Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore County, Maryland, who was killed in 1999. Her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted of her murder in 2000 and sentenced to life in prison. The series was sparked by Syed’s claim of innocence, and the narrative was strictly focused on whether this particular man ought to have been convicted of this particular crime.

In an interview with Vox at the time, Keller said that the entire newsroom was obsessed with Serial. But, he said, “I don’t look at Serial as a sort of reflection on the state of the criminal justice system, or the state of public support for criminal justice reform. It’s just a really well done mystery story.”

In turning the story of a 15-year-old murder into a high-gloss mystery, Serial launched a new era of true crime, coating morbid entertainment with an intellectually serious veneer. But where The Marshall Project prods readers to confront a fundamentally broken criminal legal system, rarely does even the most nuanced and rigorous true crime push the consumer to reflect on how the case under consideration intersects with wider issues. And along with prestige TV offerings like Netflix’s Making a Murderer and HBO’s The Jinx came a barrage of slop. In 2017, the cable channel Oxygen pivoted to offering 24/7 true crime, sating viewers’ appetites for sensational stories of humanity at its most gruesome. Current programming includes Buried in the Backyard (“stories of homicide victims left hidden underground in idyllic places”).

For Marshall Project contributing writer John J. Lennon, the public’s hunger for true crime raises urgent questions: “What are the consequences of illuminating human darkness? Does it increase our desire for punishment? Does true crime hinder the progress of criminal justice writers and activists and reformers and policymakers?” This line of inquiry is personal, as Lennon explores in The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories that Define Us; depending on how you tell his story, he is either an irredeemably evil murderer or a man capable of genuine remorse and reinvention.


In December 2001, when he was 24, Lennon murdered a friend and fellow drug dealer who was rumored to be robbing other dealers. They had grown up in the same Brooklyn project in the late 1970s and early 1980s; Lennon is white, his victim Black. In his book, Lennon explains both his mindset at the time and his current perspective: “I told myself that killing him was the only solution. (This is the absurdity of the drug game: We betray and kill our friends).” He also realizes now that he was not influenced solely by drug-game logic. “I feared others would learn about things I did that conflicted with who I wanted to be in ‘the life,’” Lennon writes. “Many of us who commit terrible violence struggle internally with something that guts us hollow.” Across The Tragedy of True Crime, he identifies fear as the catalyst of his violence.

When he was charged for the killing in early 2002, Lennon was already in jail at Rikers Island for gun possession and selling heroin. Two years later, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. It would take years for Lennon to begin to understand why he committed such terrible acts. “Deep reflection can only arrive, if it ever does, when you feel removed enough from all the madness, from the version of yourself that you once were,” he explains. “And sometimes that takes years, because after the crime comes the arrest, the jail time, the trials, and prison—watching television in the cellblock or getting high with the guys in the yard, telling one another how the system fucked each of us respectively.”

For Lennon, it was a creative writing workshop that he fought to get into in Attica in 2010—along with twice-weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—that pushed him out of the numbing so common in prison and toward cultivating reflection and remorse. He has since become a leading prison journalist, writing for outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire, where he is a contributing editor. In his book, Lennon weaves reflections on his own past, crime, and time in prison throughout the stories of three other men guilty of taking a life, whom he has served alongside in New York prisons. With his personal reflections, he writes, he hopes to “explain why people like me do what we did.” He has come to this insight in large part despite being on his twenty-fourth year in prison, which is not an environment that fosters deep thinking. It is Lennon’s writing career, eked out under extraordinary circumstances and with the assistance of many editors and writers on the outside, that has allowed him to explore his guilt and, as he writes, “develop more of the thing I’ve always lacked: empathy.” That empathy allows him to “offer the felt lives of men who have taken a life … to show you who we are, hopefully without diminishing the lives of the people we’ve killed,” in The Tragedy of True Crime. 


Lennon uses his incomparable access to fellow incarcerated men to highlight the context behind their crimes and to paint portraits of how prison changed them, but he does not excuse their killings—or his own. Most sympathetic is Michael Shane Hale, a white gay man from Kentucky, who was 23 in 1995 when, after years of being controlled, physically and sexual abused, and harassed, he murdered his 62-year-old partner, Stefan Tanner. On the night he killed Tanner, Hale was trying to collect his belongings and leave Tanner’s Brooklyn apartment when Tanner called 911 and falsely claimed he was being attacked. The NYPD officers who answered the call declined to file a domestic incident report. Later that night, Hale returned to the building to retrieve the rest of his clothes and confront Tanner. The two got into a physical fight in the garage and Tanner died after Hale knocked his head repeatedly on the concrete floor. Hale immediately expressed remorse.

Lennon’s other two subjects—Milton E. Jones, a Black man convicted of murdering two priests in Buffalo, New York, in 1987 at age 17, and Robert Chambers, the notorious “Preppy Killer,” who killed 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986—are more challenging. Jones killed the priests alongside a friend from juvenile detention who suggested they rob rectories; Jones was a “follower,” whose biggest role models were his uncles—two pimps and a drug dealer. Lennon writes of learning of Jones’s crime before getting to know him, in a passage that preempts the reader’s response: “Milton’s laugh was loud and jolly, but it sounded almost filthy to me. When you learn about the crime before you meet the person, it makes you recoil; it colors everything about them.”

Of course, in true crime, the crime always precedes the perpetrator. In 2020, Lennon watched the docuseries The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park on A&E in Sing Sing—inmates pay for cable through fundraisers, and true crime is popular in prisons too, where it provides both entertainment and intel on peers’ crimes. A few months later, he transferred to Sullivan and met Chambers, who was back in prison for drug charges years after completing his original 15-year bid for manslaughter. Chambers’s continuing resistance to admitting his full culpability for strangling Levin when he was 19 frustrates Lennon. “You already did the time,” he challenges Chambers. “Why not just cop to it?”

Lennon forces readers to consider the consequences of our current system of punishment and what it might mean to allow admitted violent criminals to be given second chances. Though Chambers struggled to take accountability for his guilt, he kept busy in Sullivan, working as a sign language interpreter for his peers and doing his best to avoid the unrelenting press interest in his case. “His life has become a public spectacle,” Lennon asserts, “and the narrative about him has grown so large it has outstripped any sense of self.” 

Hale, serving a sentence of 50 years to life in Sing Sing, has carved a meaningful existence for himself there, serving as an inmate program assistant in a reentry facilitation program, though he fears he will die in prison. He has earned a master’s degree from the New York Theological Seminary and participates in a theater group, a competitive-to-access program funded by philanthropy, not the state or federal government. Jones, also serving 50 years to life in Sing Sing, has similarly managed to complete a theological master’s degree, despite a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, which has waxed and waned throughout his time in prison and has rarely been adequately treated. Both Hale and Jones have directly expressed their remorse to their victims’ families. Through these men’s stories and Lennon’s own, The Tragedy of True Crime provides a challenging and bracing reckoning with guilt and the possibility of changing the narrative of one’s life.


Some readers will immediately dismiss The Tragedy of True Crime. After all, what does it mean when the murderer is the journalist, telling fellow murderers’ stories? Lennon brings such critiques to the surface throughout the book. The epigraph for his first section comes from Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, a study of journalistic ethics through the case of bestselling true crime writer Joe McGinnis: “The characters of nonfiction, no less than those of fiction, derive from the writer’s most idiosyncratic desires and deepest anxieties; they are what the writer wishes he was and worries he is.” Lennon sees something of himself in each of his subjects, and he is not afraid of laying bare his most unappealing traits and behaviors. “While journalism pushes me to feel deeply for others, I’m still self-absorbed and coarse,” he writes. “Cells will open, and I’ll say hello to my neighbor one day, then walk right by him the next.… My lip will snarl a bit when I hear something I don’t like.”

It is this honest self-reckoning, along with Lennon’s intimate, deeply reported treatments of his subjects’ stories, that makes The Tragedy of True Crime an indispensable addition to the recent literature of incarceration that kicked off with Michelle Alexander’s 2010 The New Jim Crow. While Alexander’s book and the titles that followed—including Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Ben Austen’s Correction—have offered insight into the foundations and consequences of mass incarceration and mandatory sentencing laws, The Tragedy of True Crime plunges the reader into the lived reality of incarceration and guilt for violent crime.

At its best, life in prison is monotonous. Lennon describes his daily routine of waking up with the 6:30 a.m. “count” (when correction officers account for the location of each inmate), brewing coffee through a homemade strainer, reading “Daily Reflections” from A.A., and getting to work on his writing before walking laps around the yard in the afternoon. But Lennon’s relative peace is fragile. He writes about his cell’s electricity being cut before C.O.s rifle through his belongings in search of contraband—iPhones, “exotic weed,” and heroin, which C.O.s themselves allow into prison—and being faulted for being over the “book limit.” And life inside was once far more dangerous for Lennon, even though as a drug dealer he was at the top of the “prison pecking order.” In 2009, a friend of his victim stabbed him six times in the chest with an ice pick in the yard at Green Haven prison, and he was transferred to Attica, “the worst prison in New York,” for refusing to identify the perpetrator.

Lennon connects his subjects’ stories to the larger forces shaping their crimes and their sentences, without ever losing sight of their individual culpability. Hale was routinely sexually abused as a boy growing up in Appalachia, and though Tanner began sexually assaulting and trafficking him early in their relationship, Tanner was the first and only person to make Hale feel “worthy of love.” The district attorney sought the death penalty in his case—for the first time since its reinstatement in New York in 1995—rejecting the defense’s argument that Hale’s case was a domestic tragedy. Hale is currently seeking post-conviction relief under the Domestic Violence Survivor’s Justice Act, which passed in New York in 2019 and allows judges to resentence offenders who demonstrate that their abuse was a “significant contributing factor” to their crime. 

Jones is part of an overrepresented demographic in prison—as Lennon points out, prisons have become “America’s de facto asylums” in the aftermath of the 1960s movement against institutionalization. Jones also represents the generational trauma of incarceration in Black families—when he was a toddler, his father was in Attica on a robbery bid and was injured in the notorious 1971 Attica Uprising. Chambers, who started using drugs as a teenager in boarding school, has been in active addiction for much of his life and used heroin throughout his first stint in prison. Lennon, who admits to using dope in prison, understands its numbing appeal. “You don’t know what to do with your crime,” he writes. “Your future is lost. You’re miserable and fearful. So you do dope.” 

At times, Lennon sacrifices depth for breadth—The Tragedy of True Crime is a near-encyclopedic window into life for men behind bars, touching on everything from conjugal visits to the politics of communal showers to the distinction between being placed in voluntary or involuntary protective custody. This blow-by-blow, though revelatory, at times interrupts the opportunity for sustained analysis of policies, like the 1994 crime bill, that have negatively impacted nearly every aspect of incarceration, from lengthening sentences to defunding higher education in prisons. 


Though Lennon, Hale, and Jones have managed “to find a sliver of rehabilitation” through educational programs, their cases are exceptional. In one of the book’s most eye-opening passages, Lennon argues that the punishments of prison land harder on those who have managed to cultivate remorse—a rare feat, in his telling. “When I started writing, thinking deeper and feeling genuine remorse for killing E., the time in prison got harder,” Lennon writes. “Maybe it’s because I was becoming a better man. The more you strive to be decent in prison, the more you see and feel the cruelty of it.”

It is in these moments of reflection that Lennon illuminates the most disturbing parts of our culture’s obsession with true crime. True crime, he argues, “turns back the clock and replays the worst moments of someone’s life, reconstructs and reenacts it all for entertainment, usually by exploiting the people most affected by the violence—victims whose wounds haven’t healed, perpetrators who haven’t reckoned with their guilt.” In constantly reprising what cannot be changed—the violent crime—these narratives justify the punishment and lack of rehabilitative measures for people who can change—violent criminals. We live in a culture where people lull themselves to sleep with true crime stories of good versus evil droning out on their televisions.

Lennon believes that one such story is keeping him in prison. In 2019, he was featured on an episode of Inside Evil, a show on HLN hosted by Chris Cuomo. He ended up on the show after contacting a producer at CNN, seeking to promote a story he had written for The Marshall Project in collaboration with Keller. Instead of treating Lennon like a journalist, the producer referred him to Chris Cuomo’s show, which was at the time called Inside. Lennon learned of the name change the morning of his interview with Cuomo; he proceeded because at the time Cuomo’s brother was the governor, “the one elected official with the power to commute your sentence and set you free.”

The episode, “Killer Writing,” juxtaposed their interview with “scenes of shadowy, faceless reenactments of the shooting and photos of my mug shot, with close-ups of my eyes, bloodshot from all the drugs.” Lennon writes, “I can no longer separate these images from my actual memories of what happened that night.” For some of the New York State officials responsible for reviewing Lennon’s clemency petition, the images from Inside Evil seem to override anything else they have learned about how he has changed during his time in prison. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was reportedly “really spooked” by the episode, and the governor’s clemency bureau “fixated” on “Killer Writing” in a meeting with Lennon’s legal team. “I couldn’t believe that people at the highest levels of government were so influenced by this lurid rendering of my story,” Lennon writes. But government officials are just as susceptible to true crime’s simplistic storytelling.     

Gold Is Booming and That’s Really Bad News - 2025-10-09T10:00:00Z

If you doubt that we’ve entered a new Gilded Age, check out the price of gold. Since President Donald Trump took office, it’s risen by 50 percent; as I write this, gold futures exceed $4,000 per ounce. If the price rises any higher, we may have to melt down the Oval Office.

This is not a sign of a healthy economy. When gold prices shoot up, it’s a sign that people are losing faith in the dollar, which undergirds the global economy in roughly the same way that gold did before President Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971. Investors call wealth transfers into gold a “debasement trade,” where what’s debased is the asset from which investors flee. In this instance, that’s dollars and U.S. bonds.

My more paranoid self says the whole thing’s a conspiracy engineered by Fox News and Newsmax. I’ve long maintained that Fox and Newsmax ought to be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission as elderscams. These aren’t news networks; they’re transmission belts that use moronic agitprop to sort the elderly population for maximum credulity (median viewer age: 55), then deliver the most gullible to advertisers who sell them dubious diet supplements and retirement strategies. The latter typically involve investing heavily in gold, which is a bad idea. But this week it looks like a good idea.

Don’t worry, I don’t actually believe the price of gold is a conspiracy by right-wing media. Rather, it’s a vote of no confidence in the U.S. economy. Debasement trades usually happen in bad economic times. Gold prices jumped during the Covid recession and the Great Recession of 2007–09. This time they’re rising faster. Gold futures haven’t risen so fast since 1979, when the misery index (unemployment plus inflation) reached 19 percent.

The puzzle here is that most of the underlying economic indicators aren’t that bad. Unemployment is a manageable 4.3 percent (or at least it was two months ago; the shutdown has thus far prevented us getting a number for September), and the consumer price index is a tolerable 2.9 percent. Granted, job creation has cratered; the reason that hasn’t driven up unemployment, according to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, is that deportations are shrinking the labor market. Also, growth in gross domestic product was slower during the first two quarters of 2025 than during the same period in 2024. But even these unfavorable signs aren’t terrible—yet—especially when compared to the calamities that accompanied the last two surges in gold prices.

What’s causing gold to rise is a falling dollar. After rising during the final three months of President Joe Biden’s administration, the dollar started falling the week before Trump’s inauguration, and today it’s down about 10 percent. We haven’t seen the dollar fall this fast since Iran was ruled by a shah. There are some benefits. When the dollar’s value falls, imports become more expensive and exports become less so. When Trump entered office, the consensus was that the dollar was overvalued. Some people think it still is.

More important is a related indicator, the bond yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds. That’s been rising since the start of this decade, due largely to concerns about the federal deficit. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s doubling of the deficit through tax cuts didn’t help matters. Neither have Trump’s attempts to acquire control of the Federal Reserve or the shutdown of the federal government. The ability of the United States to run large deficits depends on other countries’ willingness to buy our debt. But foreign central banks now hold more gold than they do U.S. Treasuries. That hasn’t happened since 1996.

Why are people buying gold instead of government bonds? Paul Krugman says it may be because

many previously inconceivable possibilities are now quite conceivable given the Trump administration’s radicalism. Runaway inflation hidden by rigged official statistics? Expropriation of the reserves of governments Trump doesn’t like? Forced conversion of foreign assets into 100-year bonds? Given the administration’s record so far, how confident are you that none of these things could possibly happen?

Krugman didn’t even mention Trump’s habit of threatening periodically to default on U.S. Treasuries, a proposition the business press copes with by pretending it doesn’t happen. Perhaps most alarming of all, billionaire oligarchs—which is to say, the people whose livelihood is most dependent on the health of the financial sector—are going long on gold, according to Axios. That’s like a restaurateur deciding not to eat at his own restaurant.

None of this means the economy is on the brink of collapse. The patient is not going to die. But it has acquired the new chronic disease of gold hoarding, and Trump is largely to blame. The “gilded rococo nightmare” of Trump’s Oval Office, in addition to being vulgar and undemocratic, is now becoming a symbol of his gross economic mismanagement.

Trump Is Waging War on an American City - 2025-10-09T10:00:00Z

Months ago, Donald Trump claimed that Los Angeles “would be burning” if not for the federal troops he was sending there. On Sunday, in a similarly pathetic attempt to justify his demand to send in the National Guard, he told reporters that Portland was “burning to the ground.” On Monday, he declared that Chicago was “like a war zone.” Is this city burning? There is a definite answer to the question. In all these cities, the answer is no. No American city is currently on fire, and if Chicago is a war zone, it’s because it’s being invaded by the president.

There is no clever plan behind Trump’s lies. The administration does not even bother to lie well. Trump need only count on others who will help him distribute distrust. In the case of Portland, rather than state facts it could easily verify, Axios called Trump’s lie “a claim local officials reject,” while Reuters has referred to “Democratic mayors and governors, who say Trump’s claims of lawlessness and violence do not reflect reality”—as if the existence of a mass conflagration or armed conflict were merely a matter of opinion, with two sides deserving equal consideration.

The actual threat to people in cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago comes from the Trump administration, as it attempts to turn the military and federal law enforcement into the president’s personal enforcers. Trump’s lies about this project—and his broader project of mass deportation—are not meant to sound convincing; they are a means of getting other people to cast doubt on reality. Now, with his brutal immigration crackdown in Chicago, Trump is using lies and propaganda as tools alongside the masked officers and the midnight round-ups. All this is meant to cover up the obvious reality that may still be too much for many people to accept: The president is trying to wage war on an American city.

The Texas National Guard arrived outside Chicago on Tuesday—after a judge declined the city and state’s request to immediately block them—and on Wednesday, Trump threatened to arrest Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. As federal troops arrive in the city, a federal court is considering a case brought by Chicago journalists, among others, who together have sued the Department of Homeland Security; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Customs and Border Protection; the Department of Homeland Security; the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF; and other agencies, along with Trump, for impeding the public’s First Amendment rights to protest and for obstructing their work as press. (Among the plaintiffs are Chicago News Guild, it should be noted; The New Republic is a NewsGuild of New York shop.) “Plaintiffs endeavor to protect their basic constitutional rights to express their views opposing the lawlessness unleashed on the Chicagoland area, and to safely report on that public outcry, without fear of again being shot, gassed, and beaten by federal agents,” their complaint stated. The “lawlessness” is coming from federal agents, directed by the federal government.


These events in Chicago kicked off one month ago, when Trump launched “Operation Midway Blitz,” a campaign predicated on more lies about the city that are not worth repeating, except to say that the Department of Homeland Security has described its anti-immigration raids there as being carried out in “honor” of a dead young woman. According to one Chicago alderperson, among the first people taken by anti-immigrant enforcement was a flower vendor. In response to the operation, activists called for daily protests at an ICE “processing” facility in nearby Broadview. Then, in mid-September, Border Patrol arrived in Chicago to launch “Operation At Large,” modeled on raids in Los Angeles, in which courts have found agents to have engaged in racial profiling (though the Supreme Court allowed them to continue making what have since been dubbed “Kavanaugh stops,” for the justice who claimed such stops were lawful). A Border Patrol commander has since admitted that in Chicago too, people are being detained based in part on “how they look.” Immigrants’ rights groups have said for weeks that the ongoing arrests are terrorizing whole communities. In some neighborhoods, people have stopped going to work, kids are not going to school, and streets are “dead.” Faith leaders have encouraged their communities to carry identification documents when they go anywhere and tell people where they’ve gone, in case they disappear.

Over the last week, ICE and Border Patrol have considerably escalated the violence. Hundreds of agents stormed an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side. DHS said that in addition to ICE and Border Patrol, the FBI and ATF also took part in the raid. “My building is shaking,” one witness told ABC7 Chicago. “Then I look out the window, it’s a Blackhawk helicopter.” Another witness, who captured the raid and its aftermath live on her phone, told local independent media South Side Weekly and the Invisible Institute that she spotted vans parked in an adjacent school parking lot. Inside, she saw “Black U.S. citizens, women, and children” who had been “grabbed from their beds” and then “zip-tied and brought down to the waiting vans” without having been allowed to dress. “They are snatching up anybody,” she said—immigrants and citizens alike. (DHS even admitted they took four children who were U.S. citizens away from their parents.) One resident said that agents had tried to break down his door but were stopped by his double locks. When he headed to work hours later, his neighbors had disappeared.

On Friday, amid international outcry over the operation, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem returned to Chicago and joined a raid on a Walmart, taking with her the far-right content creator Benny Johnson. “Tons of cars just pulled up speeding and there was a ton of yelling and commotion,” a Walmart employee told the independent media outlet Block Club Chicago. “They just grabbed a random shopper.” That same day, Border Patrol’s go-to camera-ready tough guy Greg Bovino led federal agents marching on the ICE facility in Broadview, the site of regular demonstrations and vigils. Bovino himself yelled at protesters to leave, threatening a “final warning” before agents surged into them. As agents began physically forcing protesters from the site, a pastor reported, one grabbed at his nipple and placed his hands on his throat. For weeks, anti-immigration agents have tossed smoke bombs at people in cars, used so-called “less lethal” weapons like rubber bullets and pepper balls on protesters, and deployed a staggering amount of tear gas, sometimes unleashing it almost casually into streets crowded with passersby.

As forecast, Trump’s anti-immigrant force lacks the resources to deport the promised millions of immigrants. But the administration’s goal is to spread fear and project power just as much as deport people. Violent raids in Chicago have been accompanied by puerile social media content of federal agents posing and driving and grabbing people, aerial night-vision shots of people fleeing, and footage styled as if it were filmed by bodycams showing agents outfitted for an invasion and aiming weapons at people in their homes. Sometimes the propaganda is absurdly direct: a handful of guys in khakis, fleece vests, and baseball hats, for example, standing outside an ICE facility, pumping their fists and chanting “USA! USA!” as agents watch from the roof. DHS’s caption: “America for Americans. We are asleep no longer.”

It does not dispel the fear to view this material alongside the many videos captured by residents and activists, those that record the federal agents they see stalking people in their cars and outside businesses, but it does lend some reality to what are supposed to be overwhelming displays of force and discipline. Sometimes, the agents are just running alone or in pairs, plastic flexicuffs dangling from their waist, or ducking into their own cars, followed by other people’s cameras and shouts of “La migra!” as they drive away.

There’s a kind of truth to the propaganda: Trump and his enforcers would like us to perceive them as warriors against his enemies, as saviors of his supporters. It is difficult to come away from such imagery without the message that this is a president at war. Ahead of the Chicago operations, Trump posted what looked like an AI-generated image of himself as the Army lieutenant colonel from Apocalypse Now—here, styled as “Chipocalypse Now”—who blasted “Ride of the Valkyries” from helicopters before burning villages and killing civilians. “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump added, along with three helicopter emojis. The meme was cited this week in the lawsuit filed by the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago that sought to block Trump’s deployment of the National Guard. “The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military,” the complaint begins, “simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor.” In their minds, however, the aggressors imagine themselves as the ones under attack. Stephen Miller, long the frontman for Trump’s anti-immigrant plans, has claimed that there is “an ongoing legal insurrection,” by which he means court rulings unfavorable to the administration. The language is meant to conjure up an enemy within. In this case, that enemy is the federal judiciary, but just as often it is protesters or any resident who does not meet them with enthusiastic compliance.

Federal agents have lashed out at people who have followed them to alert others and witness arrests. On Saturday, when a group of vehicles was following a group of federal agents, a Border Patrol agent pulled over to shoot one of the drivers, firing on her five times. Before he left his vehicle, a body camera captured him saying, “Do something, bitch.” The government claimed she fired at them, an assertion the video contradicts. When a part-time gas station worker heard the gunshots and saw masked officers outside, he rushed to the scene to help, passing out free cases of water and paper towels to the people who had gathered there, whom the officers had gassed and shot with pepper balls. The worker told Block Club Chicago that he is also an immigrant.

The safety and freedom of Chicagoans, right now, does not hinge only on whether Trump succeeds in deploying the National Guard. Its residents are already living under grave threats of violence from federal agents. But as long as ICE and other federal agents are in Chicago, people have committed to watch out for one another, to “make it as costly as possible for this administration to wage war on our neighbors and our communities,” as Eman Abdelhadi, a scholar who studies gender in Muslim communities in the U.S., told the Movement Memos podcast, after a protest outside the ICE facility in Broadview. Trump’s war will roll on, even if the guard is turned away from Chicago; it is set to go next to Memphis. I don’t think it will stop there. Chicago may give us a glimpse of what fire Trump will declare next, and offer a model for how to refuse.

Trump Threats to Jail Foes Take Darker Turn With Damning New DOJ Leaks - 2025-10-09T09:00:00Z

President Trump’s efforts to prosecute his enemies are suddenly looking even more lawless. Leaks to ABC News just revealed that Justice Department insiders doubt the validity of the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey. This comes after inside sources told MSNBC that a senior prosecutor is resisting indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James because the case against her is so weak. Trump is demanding prosecutions of both, and the bucking of his pressure reveals just how corrupt his directives truly are. Meanwhile, Trump just called for the jailing of the governor of Illinois. We talked about all this with former federal prosecutor Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy. She explains why Trump’s prosecutions are so baseless, what we can read into the resistance inside DOJ, and how it might slow our slide into lawlessness. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

MAGA Influencer Whines to Trump About “Homeless Industrial Complex” - 2025-10-08T21:53:00Z

A self-described journalist briefed the president and top U.S. officials Wednesday on the threat of the “homeless industrial complex.”

During a White House roundtable on antifa, Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s newsroom Frontlines, claimed that political extremism on the ideological left intersects with the “homeless drug crisis.” As evidence, he shared a recent report from the Discovery Institute, a conservative propaganda mill that, among other things, has advocated for ending classroom instruction on evolution.

The complex, according to those on the right who believe it’s real, is effectively a vast network of nonprofits and their beneficiaries who guzzle up federal funds intended for the homeless.

“In many cases, the homeless industrial complex is running cover for antifa, and antifa is benefiting from American tax dollars, and they’re essentially being used as the muscle,” Choe said.

He then pointed to Stop the Sweeps, a franchise-like, community-coordinated campaign that aims to prevent state violence against homeless encampments. People actually wanting to help the homeless is, apparently, not believable for Choe. Instead, he told the president and his allies that this organization’s ultimate intention was to create a P.R. crisis for law enforcement.

“What they’re doing quietly, is they’re bringing in antifa militants to manufacture a crisis to make the police look bad,” Choe said. (Of course, police don’t have to brutalize and violently evict the homeless.)

Some recent actions by supposed “antifa militants” include tossing a bucket of paint, protesting ICE facilities, and flag burning.

But Choe didn’t stop at antifa—instead, he lumped the famously decentralized antifascist organization in with the Democratic Socialists of America, placing a target on the back of a bona fide political party.

“These far-left, progressive groups tend to be aligning themselves with antifa,” Choe said. “There is a deeply embedded connection between the homeless housing nonprofit game in America, connected to antifa, and the far-left activists.”

For years, Donald Trump and his allies have pushed the idea that violent, far-left radicals are wreaking havoc in cities across the country, but their rhetoric has been noticeably devoid of evidence. To quell the noise, members of the House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA and FBI in 2020 to investigate false intelligence campaigns and find proof of the anti-fascist group’s “invasion.” Despite reports contradicting Trump’s rhetoric, the noise did not die down.

The reality is that homelessness is on the rise in the United States. An unprecedented national housing shortage, coupled with shallow social safety nets, has turned into an equally unprecedented rise in those experiencing homelessness. Rates spiked by 18 percent in 2024 compared to the year before, per data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But those figures are apparently just a launch pad for building more confounding conspiracies, as showcased by the work of the president’s cadre of far-right influencers.

Pizzagate Guy Compares Trump Fighting Antifa to Rise of Hitler - 2025-10-08T21:05:56Z

Did MAGA activist Jack Posobiec just accidentally compare President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler?

During a Wednesday roundtable discussion on antifa populated by pitiable right-wing shills, the conspiracy theorist took a moment to claim that the so-called domestic terrorist group had historical roots in Germany.

“Antifa is real. Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost a hundred years, in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany,” Posobiec whined.

Indeed, there were multiple groups that opposed fascism in the Weimar Republic and voiced strong opposition to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, including the Communist Party of Germany’s Antifaschistische Aktion group and the Iron Front, which partnered with the Democratic Socialists. Posobiec seems to think that comparing modern-day antifascists opposing Trump’s reign to these groups opposing Hitler should demonstrate how terrible antifa is—when in fact, it did just the opposite.

Posobiec, perhaps better known as the Pizzagate guy, fancies himself a historian but appears blind to the most obvious comparison to the present day.

The antifascist groups in Weimar Germany were staunchly ideologically opposed, with little connecting them other than their opposition to authoritarianism. Ironically, that’s the case for many of the so-called members of antifa, which is short for “anti-fascist” and is a movement, not a group. The so-called organization lacks a central structure and is instead a loose network of individuals and groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism.

Posobiec previously co-wrote a book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). The book supposedly tracks the opponents of conservatism throughout history, and endorses a modern-day McCarthyism to root out the “radicals” from American institutions. It’s worth noting that Vice President JD Vance provided a glowing promotional blurb about the book.

“On a base level, unhumans seek the death of the successful and the desecration of the beautiful,” Posobiec and his ghostwriter claimed, later adding, “Take the path of the hunter, and with one singular voice, we are going to make them the prey.”

In the end, Posobiec is a facism fanboy who likes to vote in a swing state he doesn’t even live in, and Trump’s roundtable on countering antifascism is exactly the political farce it presents as.

Trump Literally Brags About Taking Away People’s Free Speech - 2025-10-08T21:03:32Z

“We took the freedom of speech away,” President Donald Trump boasted in his opening remarks at his “antifa roundtable” Wednesday.

The remark came as Trump touted an August 25 executive order seeking to crack down on the practice of flag burning, a form of protest that the Supreme Court has previously ruled is protected by the First Amendment.

“We’ve made it a one-year penalty for inciting riots. We took the freedom of speech away, because that’s been through the courts,” Trump said before making other addled statements about his unconstitutional stance on flag burning.

It was a jarring admission—perhaps a Freudian slip—from a president who is, indeed, evidently intent on eliminating free speech.

Supreme Court precedent firmly establishes flag burning as a form of First Amendment–protected symbolic speech. And for what it’s worth, Trump’s executive order did not specify a one-year jail sentence. It did, however, direct the attorney general to prosecute flag burners under existing laws—this being a tacit acknowledgment that his desired ban would unambiguously run afoul of the First Amendment.

After claiming credit for rolling back freedom of speech, the president went on to seemingly admit that he cannot completely ban flag burning, but expressed his hope to clamp down on the practice—which he says stirs up violence, as if by magic—nonetheless.

“What has happened is, when they burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds—they’ve never seen anything like it—on both sides, and you end up in riots,” he said. “So we’re going on that basis. We’re looking at it not from the freedom of speech, which I always felt strongly about, but never passed the courts.”

ICE Barbie Says Antifa Is as Bad as ISIS in Deranged White House Event - 2025-10-08T20:49:09Z

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem believes antifa is “just as dangerous” as ISIS.

In a White House roundtable discussion on “antifa” Wednesday, Noem spoke alongside President Donald Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and a number of right-wing journalists and influencers about the president’s order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

“Their agenda is to destroy the American people and our way of life,” Noem said. “This network of antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as [Tren de Aragua], as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years, and today is the day that we have a president that won’t tolerate it.”

Just to catch everyone up, “antifa” is not an organized group, certainly not one with a “network as sophisticated as … ISIS.” During Trump’s first term, FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress that antifa was “not a group or an organization,” but a “movement” or “ideology.”

That hasn’t stopped the president’s sycophantic circle from blaming the movement for everything from the “decimation” of cities like Portland to the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Popular MAGA Influencer Illegally Donated to a Political Campaign - 2025-10-08T19:58:15Z

A prominent MAGA influencer with millions of followers who has “never stepped foot in the United States” illegally donated to a QAnon congressional candidate, independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet reported for Rolling Stone Wednesday.

Rumen Naumovski is behind Resist the Mainstream, a right-wing content farm that has accrued more than 450,000 followers on X since September 2021. He also runs the X account Defiant L’s, a right-wing meme and news account with more than four million followers that has been lauded by X owner Elon Musk as “one of the best accounts.”

In 2022, Naumovski illegally donated more than $3,000 to support far-right congressional candidate Ron Watkins, who has been accused of being “Q” himself. While Naumovski owns an American-based media company, he still resides in North Macedonia, and admitted in a February opinion piece for The Daily Wire that he’d actually “never set foot in the United States.”

Naumovski’s two donations totaling $3,127 were the largest reported contribution to Watkins’s campaign in the first quarter of 2022, according to Open Secrets. And in the weeks following the donations, Watkins urged his followers on social media to join Resist the Mainstream’s Telegram channel multiple times.

Both donations were made in February 2022 and are attributed to an address in St. Petersburg, Florida, at a registered agent’s office for Raww Digital LLC, the marketing firm that owns Resist the Mainstream. Naumovski owns Raww Digital LLC, but his personal address is listed in Veles, North Macedonia.

Watkins eventually returned the money in April 2022. Naumovski told Rolling Stone that he had no idea he’d needed a green card to make donations to a political campaign. Foreign nationals are in fact barred from making contributions for a political campaign.

Media Matters reported in 2023 that a dozen influencers connected to the QAnon movement boosted Resist the Mainstream and that, despite being taken on and off mainstream social media platforms, the right-wing network had accrued a massive following in alternative spaces—platforms such as Truth Social, Rumble, Gab, and Gettr.

Naumovski’s social media accounts have become fixtures in the online landscape of MAGA Republicans, and their posts have been shared by figures including Andy Biggs, Dan Crenshaw, Eli Crane, Mike Lee, and Nancy Mace, as well as other prominent MAGA influencers. The accounts have shared content pushing election fraud conspiracies about noncitizen voting, a nonissue that has been repeatedly debunked.

In Naumovski’s case, it’s more than clear that there are some noncitizens attempting to interfere in U.S. politics—but they come in the form of anonymous influencers churning out right-wing content and conducting hordes of followers.

Guess Which Two Cabinet Members Trump Advisers Hate the Most? - 2025-10-08T19:21:28Z

Even the Trump administration doesn’t like Pam Bondi.

The attorney general has been at the epicenter of some of Trump 2.0’s biggest scandals. In the last several months, Bondi has purged antitrust officials at the Justice Department, refused to answer critical questions in defiance of Senate oversight hearing protocol, and—most egregious to the White House—sparked MAGA outrage when her own agency issued a memo contradicting her on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called “client list.”

All considered, Bondi now ranks as the White House’s least favorite Cabinet secretary, according to an informal survey of several presidential advisers by Wired’s Inner Loop newsletter.

“Worst, Bondi,” they begin. “2/ Bondi. 3/ Bondi. 4/ Bondi. 5/ HegsethRFKTulsiNoem.”

Just one secretary shared the unwelcome spotlight: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who, like Bondi, has also fumbled the administration’s talking points about the president and his pedophilic sex trafficker ex–“best pal.” Breaking from the DOJ’s narrative, Lutnick described Epstein to the New York Post podcast as “the greatest blackmailer ever.” He also didn’t bother trying to make Trump’s cozy association with Epstein more palatable. Lutnick referred to Epstein as a repugnant creep while recalling an instance in which he was invited by Epstein to tour his infamous East 71st Street townhouse.

“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” Lutnick told the Post. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.’

“In the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he added.

None of the Trump advisers surveyed by Wired were willing to speak about the Trump-Epstein connection, or connect the dots between Bondi and Lutnick’s sagging popularity with their handling of the scandal.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and the disgraced financier’s heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

The White House’s official spokesperson brushed off the Wired story, suggesting instead that Trump’s Cabinet are beyond reproach within MAGA’s inner folds.

“The entire premise of this story is ridiculous—which is to be expected for Wired,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President’s entire cabinet is working to flawlessly execute his agenda to Make America Great Again and he is pleased with each of their successes and hard work.”

Why Was The Atlantic’s David Frum Working With Israel’s Ambassador? - 2025-10-08T19:20:04Z

David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic, helped ghostwrite a speech for the Israeli U.N. ambassador in 2014—at the same time as he profiled the ambassador for the magazine.

Frum’s galling, undisclosed conflict of interest was exposed via the ambassador’s hacked emails, first reported by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain for Drop Site.

In 2014, Israel was in the midst of waging war in Gaza, ultimately killing over 2,200 Palestinians and wounding over 11,000. It was Israel’s most devastating campaign against the Palestinians since the 1967 war, according to UNRWA. As the country faced criticism for its conduct, allies like Frum reached out to Israeli government officials to offer their support in spinning the narrative, according to Drop Site.

In Frum’s case, he could offer more to the Israeli cause than just money or positive news coverage: Before coming to The Atlantic, he had been a speechwriter for George W. Bush.

Frum contacted Ambassador Ron Prosor on July 31, 2014, during the height of the war, in an email titled, “an earlier draft of that speech I sent you.” The speech, seemingly meant to be delivered to the U.N. Security Council, described the war as “the most tenacious challenge to the free world in decades,” and asked Americans to continue to support Israel. “This version was drafted by Seth Mandel of Commentary, with whom I’ve been working,” Frum wrote in his email.

Only one day before, Frum had contacted Prosor from a different email address, with a different request: to interview him for The Atlantic. The ensuing profile praised Prosor for his “toughness,” and painted a sympathetic portrait of Israel as unfairly maligned on the global stage. “In many ways, and on many days, it feels as if the whole UN system is concerned with the monitoring and critiquing of one small member nation,” Frum wrote.

It’s not known whether Prosor delivered Frum’s speech at the U.N. (Frum was competing with British journalist Douglass Murray for the honor, the leak also reveals). But to secretly draft a speech for a foreign government official, all the while rapturously profiling him from a place of presumed journalistic objectivity, is an egregious ethical breach.

Frum is still at The Atlantic, where he recently published a piece arguing against recognizing Palestine as a state.

In response to this story, The Atlantic’s Anna Bross told TNR in a statement, “David was not an employee of The Atlantic in 2014. He did not write the speech referenced in the 2014 email. He advised a friend, pro bono.

“This was 11 years ago. David has since become an employee of The Atlantic, and like all our editorial staff, follows our rigorous standards for the disclosure of potential conflicts. Of course, our staff writers are not allowed to advise political, corporate or diplomatic figures, pro bono or otherwise.”

While Frum may not have technically been an employee, as The Atlantic claims, he did hold the title of Senior Editor at the magazine while working on contract in 2014, at the time that he sent those emails to Prosor.

This story has been updated.

The New York Times Wins Right to Obtain Info Musk Wanted Kept Private - 2025-10-08T19:02:31Z

The Pentagon has to provide The New York Times information about Elon Musk’s security clearances, a federal judge ruled Wednesday—and the billionaire’s own posting habits helped decide the case.

In September 2024, the Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking “a list of security clearances” granted to Musk, including “any details about the extent and purview of each of the clearances.”

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which handles security clearances, denied access, arguing that the “privacy interest” of Musk “outweighs disclosure.” Shortly thereafter, the Times took the DCSA to court.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled that Musk himself had reduced his privacy interest by publicly boasting that he holds a “top secret clearance”—and discussing his drug use (including ketamine and marijuana) and contacts with foreign leaders (including Russian President Vladimir Putin), both of which are factors that the DCSA is supposed to consider for security clearance decisions.

“His posts on X on these topics have collectively garnered over 2 million views,” Cote observed.

Moreover, the judge noted, the Times’ request was far from sweeping, covering only a single two-page list of the security clearances of the billionaire, who, as the former head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, was granted “special government employee” status.

Outweighing Musk’s privacy interests is public interest in “whether the leader of SpaceX and Starlink holds the appropriate security clearances,” Cote said. Also, “courts have repeatedly recognized a public interest in understanding the thoroughness, fairness, and accuracy of government investigations and operations.”

Musk’s admissions about ketamine and the Kremlin “only enhance the public interest in disclosure,” the judge wrote, and the document could “provide meaningful insight” into the DCSA’s vetting processes.

If there are any further concerns about Musk’s privacy, Cote stated, the government can propose redactions for a private review by the court by next Friday.

Adam Schiff to Force Senate Vote on Curbing Trump’s Powers - 2025-10-08T17:01:39Z

Senate Democrats said Wednesday that they plan to force a vote on President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial military strikes on foreign vessels he claims are smuggling drugs.

Senators Adam Schiff and Tim Kaine announced their intention to force a vote on the Trump administration’s decision to execute military strikes on vessels in the Caribbean. The government has provided no evidence that the vessels were linked to drug cartels, or that the individuals on board were drug smugglers. Having conducted no searches, no arrests, and no trials, the military had them summarily executed.

“If a president can unilaterally put people or groups on a list and kill them, there is no meaningful limit to his use of force,” Schiff wrote in a post on X.

Last month, the duo introduced a privileged resolution to stop the strikes under the War Powers Act, which grants Congress sole authority to decide whether the United States is at war.

But Trump seemed unbothered by the resolution. Last week, multiple congressional committees received a memo asserting that the president had declared a state of “non-international armed conflict” against boats that are part of “designated terrorist organizations.” But if the U.S. is at war, that’s for Congress to decide—not Trump. And if allowed to use this justification, Trump could potentially declare war against any group he wants.

While the issue may have some difficulties making its way through the GOP-controlled House and Senate, it seems that the Democratic effort already has some bipartisan support, at least from Republican Senator Rand Paul, an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s policy on the strikes.

“I think blowing up speedboats in the Caribbean isn’t the answer,” Paul said on Newsmax Wednesday. He pointed out that 25 percent of searches of suspected drug-trafficking boats yielded no actual drugs. Using that logic meant it was more than likely one of the boats the military had blown up wasn’t actually a smuggling vessel.

The Trump administration has been less than forthcoming about the details of the extrajudicial strikes—for starters, how many there have actually been.

Speaking for the U.S Navy’s 250th anniversary Sunday, Trump claimed that there had been yet another strike the day before—a claim that the Pentagon has not confirmed, according to Reuters. Two U.S. officials told the outlet they were unaware of any such operation that day, though it’s possible the president could have been referring to a strike that occurred on Friday that killed four alleged drug traffickers. And last month, when speaking about a previous strike that he had posted about on social media, Trump claimed that the military had struck three boats, not just the two shown in the video.

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have only formally announced four strikes, but the actual number could be as high as six. It seems it’s proven difficult to obtain accountability when the president so readily lies.

“What’s Going On With Marjorie?”: Trump Stunned by MTG’s Flip - 2025-10-08T17:00:29Z

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t quite the MAGA acolyte she once was.

Greene has publicly broken with Donald Trump several times since his inauguration, differing from her “favorite president” on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to Russia’s assault on Ukraine. She’s also sparred with the White House over the executive branch’s apparent hostility toward demands to release the Epstein files.

Even Trump has started to notice the Georgia lawmaker’s lone agent status among her far-right peers in recent months, even calling senior Republicans to inquire about her loyalty.

“What’s going on with Marjorie?” the president has asked, two GOP sources with direct knowledge of the conversations told NBC News.

The initial fissure point traces back to May, when the White House corralled Greene away from a Senate bid in Georgia. At the time, Trump’s political team had commissioned a poll that indicated Greene would lose the race to Democrat Jon Ossoff by double digits.

“I’m not some sort of blind slave to the president, and I don’t think anyone should be,” Greene told NBC Wednesday. “I serve in Congress. We’re a separate branch of the government, and I’m not elected by the president. I’m not elected by anyone that works in the White House. I’m elected by my district. That’s who I work for, and I got elected without the president’s endorsement, and, you know, I think that has served me really well.”

Greene, notably, won her district in 2020 without the president’s endorsement. Viewed as something of a joke when she first arrived on Capitol Hill in 2021, the renowned conspiracist has since become a powerful independent agent, apparently beholden to no party and no man.

“So I get to be independent as a Republican,” Greene said, “and I think what helps [Trump] the most is when he has people that are willing to be honest with him and not just tell him what they think he wants to hear.”

Now, Greene claims she has zero interest in serving in the Senate, blaming the upper chamber for the current federal failure.

“I don’t want to serve in that institution. Look at them. They’re literally the reason why the government is shut down right now,” Greene said. “I think all good things go to die in the Senate, and I certainly don’t want to go there. But I think those are just attacks to try to marginalize me or try to sweep me off, so to speak. And I really don’t care.”

Jim Jordan Loses It as Shutdown Interview Goes off the Rails - 2025-10-08T15:45:12Z

Republicans are running out of excuses for refusing to swear in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva.

Ohio Representative Jim Jordan was left grasping at straws to explain away the delay during an interview with CNN’s The Source Tuesday night. While claiming that Grijalva couldn’t possibly enter the lower chamber due to Congress’s current pro forma session, he also admitted that he forgot that two of his Republican colleagues were sworn in during a pro forma session in April, just one day after they won their special elections.

“There’s two people on the floor, or, you know, whatever, there’s—but normally, it’s done in front of the full House, so that new member in a special election gets a, I think, in some ways, a kind of a neat experience, where they get to talk to the House, their first day, getting sworn in,” Jordan told CNN. “And that’s happened every single time that I can recall, with any new member elected in a special, in the middle of a congressional session.”

“But a couple months ago, he swore in Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine in a pro forma session,” pressed host Kaitlan Collins.

“I didn’t—I actually didn’t even know that, when they were sworn in,” Jordan said. “But I always remember when it happens, the delegation is up front, and that person is sworn in.”

“Do you think it has anything to do with the discharge petition, and that she could be the 218th signature, for the Jeffrey Epstein files?” asked Collins.

“No, I think it’s—I think it’s—to make the clear point, we have voted to fund the government at levels, all the Democrats supported, and they now won’t support it, because they’re bringing up an issue that, frankly, was not even part of the campaign last year,” Jordan said.

Grijalva won the special election in Arizona last month to replace her late father, Raul Grijalva, making her the first Latina the Grand Canyon State has sent to Congress. She’s also the last signature that the House needs on a petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.

Grijalva had already vowed to sign the bipartisan petition advancing the immediate release of the Epstein files. Just four Republicans have penned their signatures on the petition, demanding more transparency from the Trump administration regarding the investigation into deceased pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his potential associates. Those conservative lawmakers include Representatives Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene—the last of whom told NewsNation Tuesday that she’s faced more pressure on the petition than any other issue.

Jordan’s interview was a long clash with Collins, as they also butted heads over health care subsidies, immigration, and government spending.

Mike Johnson Cops Out Over Trump Demand to Jail Illinois Leaders - 2025-10-08T15:39:28Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t seem the least bit disturbed that President Donald Trump wants to lock up Illinois Democrats amid his federal takeover of Chicago.

During a press conference Wednesday, Johnson was asked whether he agreed with Trump’s outlandish plea to imprison Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker for supposedly failing to protect ICE officers.

“Should they be in prison? Uh, should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison? Um, I’m not the attorney general, I’m the speaker of the House, and I’m trying to manage the chaos here, I’m not following the day to day on that,” Johnson said.

But the Louisiana Republican didn’t settle for a simple nonanswer, and how he felt about the president’s threat became all too clear.

“I do know that they resisted the introduction, or the offering of National Guard troops in Chicago, which is a terribly dangerous city, which has been destroyed—in the process of being destroyed under liberal, Democrat governance and their terrible polices,” Johnson continued.

He cited Trump’s federal crackdown in Washington, D.C., claiming that the streets of the nation’s capital were finally safe because Trump had “used the resources that were available to him to bring order to the chaos.”

“If we can do that in the other major cities in the country where they’re having crime crises, that should be seen as a positive, and I think most Americans see it that way,” he said.

Clearly, Johnson thinks Illinois Democrats should be grateful that Trump has decided to invade their cities with National Guard troops and immigration enforcement officers, rather than sue the federal government to stop the deployment of federal forces. A judge declined to immediately block the administration but warned, “If I were the federal government, I would strongly consider taking a pause on this until Thursday.” The National Guard has landed in Chicago nonetheless.

Over the weekend, a protest broke out after a fuming Border Patrol officer fired multiple shots at a protester who was part of a convoy of vehicles trailing agents on patrol. The Department of Homeland Security blamed “JB Pritzker’s Chicago Police Department” for refusing to help secure the area. The Chicago mayor has also moved to establish “ICE-free zones” that have infuriated the White House.

Notably, this isn’t the first time the president has threatened to imprison his political enemies, or anyone who stands in the way of what he wants.

Stephen Miller Gives Strange Interview on Trump’s “Plenary Authority” - 2025-10-08T15:34:22Z

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is facing scrutiny online for his claim about the president’s possession of “plenary authority” in an odd CNN interview earlier this week.

Asked Monday if the Trump administration would abide by U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut’s ruling temporarily blocking the deployment of National Guard troops in Portland, Oregon, Miller abruptly stopped an answer after invoking that legal concept.

The White House aide noted that the administration was appealing the decision. “Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has plenary authority, has—” Miller added, before stopping short and staring into the camera, blinking silently, as CNN host Boris Sanchez asked if he could hear him.

Returning after a commercial break, the interviewer said the moment was spurred by a “technical difficulty,” telling Miller, “It seems like some wires got crossed.” Returning to his answer, Miller did not mention “plenary authority” again.

“I was making the point that under federal law, Section Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has the authority, anytime he believes federal resources are insufficient, to federalize the National Guard to carry out a mission necessary for public safety,” Miller said.

The clip has gone viral online, with many social media users speculating that there was no technical malfunction; Miller, they claim, had glitched out of panic, after accidentally revealing the authoritarian designs of the administration.

The term “plenary power,” after all, refers to “complete power over a particular area with no limitations.”

CNN’s statements cast doubt on the internet theories, as does the fact that Miller has used the phrase before. Nonetheless, his apparent claim that the president enjoys absolute, unfettered power to federalize the National Guard is indeed eyebrow-raising—and incorrect. As evidenced by Immergut’s ruling, the president’s power in that area is subject to certain constraints.

Under the statute to which Miller seemingly referred, the president can federalize the National Guard under narrow circumstances: to “repel” an “invasion,” “suppress” a “rebellion,” or execute laws that he is unable to “with the regular forces.” But, according to Immergut, these conditions were not satisfied in Portland—despite the administration’s hysterical claims—and the deployment would injure Oregon’s state sovereignty.

In decrying the ruling throughout the week—including equating it with “illegal insurrection”—Miller has shown his disdain for the entire concept of judicial review.

Miller has previously mused about “plenary authority.” After the president attempted to fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, Miller told reporters that “the president’s authority, as the head of the executive branch, to terminate executive branch employees is a plenary authority”—overlooking certain constitutional and statutory constraints.

Even if not for the exact reasons social media users believe, the “plenary authority” clip was indeed revealing, exemplifying the maximalist conception of presidential power pushed by Miller and the Trump administration.

Russ Vought Is Going to Damage Trump Even More Than Elon Musk Did - 2025-10-08T15:10:13Z

Russell Vought has been “dreaming” of a government shutdown “since puberty”—at least according to Utah Senator Mike Lee, who boasted about the head of the Office of Management and Budget’s mastery of the dark arts shortly after the shutdown began a week ago. “This is going to empower [President] Trump—and the American people,” Lee concluded.

That’s been the Republicans’ shutdown message for some time: raising the specter of Vought as a thinly veiled threat to Democrats. Practically since Vought was confirmed as OMB director in February, Republicans have suggested that he would use a shutdown to inflict maximum damage to the administrative state. Last week, as anxiety was spiking about what increasingly looks like a lengthy shutdown, President Trump posted an AI video of Vought as the Grim Reaper. The Project 2025 architect has lived up to the billing, cutting billions in federal funding to blue states, threatening to cull entire agencies, and even mulling—in clear violation of federal law—not giving shutdown workers back pay.

Trump and Vought have clearly come to two conclusions. The first is that they have the upper hand in negotiations to reopen the government. As federal workers sit at home or work without pay and government services further deteriorate, the Democrats will be forced to cave—accepting a deal to fund the government that doesn’t extend the enhanced Obamacare subsidies. The second is that it’s a win-win. They want to gut the government anyway; if the shutdown drags on for weeks or even months, so be it. But the administration is already overplaying its hand, and moreover it’s repeating mistakes that it made just a few months ago when it gave free rein to a different nihilist—Elon Musk—to take a hammer to the government.

Trump lives in a bubble where everything he does is rapturously received and any criticism or pushback is inherently illegitimate. So the president and his White House minions probably don’t believe—or don’t care—that the public blames the GOP more than Democrats for the shutdown. A second-term administration has that luxury, but other Republicans are not so fortunate. There are suggestions that Republicans in the Senate—where the shutdown is currently stuck—are particularly frustrated.

The administration was roundly criticized Tuesday for an OMB draft memo arguing that, contra a law passed after the 2019 shutdown, federal workers are not guaranteed back pay. Susan Collins, a moderate who has been instrumental in negotiations to reopen the government, said that Congress had “settled” the issue when it passed a law guaranteeing back pay in 2019; John Thune, the chamber’s Republican leader, pretty much concurred. Thom Tillis, another key Republican vote, was blunt: “I’m not an attorney,” he said, “but I think it’s pretty bad strategy to even say that sort of stuff.” Later on Tuesday, as is his wont, Trump hung his Senate peers out to dry by precisely saying that sort of stuff. “I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” Trump said when asked about back pay for furloughed workers. “For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

It isn’t just open threats like this that invite public ire; Trump’s and Vought’s actions are unpopular too. The decision to use the shutdown as an opportunity to cut federal jobs and spending is likely playing a crucial role in the public perception that this shutdown is the GOP’s fault, even if it was technically started because Democrats didn’t vote for a funding bill. It’s hard to suggest that the administration wants or is even trying to reopen the government when it is also gleefully boasting about its hatchet man running around firing people.

Even if the shutdown doesn’t have long-term political ramifications—it will likely be forgotten by the 2026 midterms—Vought’s actions may play decisive roles in 2025 races, such as close gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey. The threat to deny back pay to federal workers (and the shutdown more broadly) will hit particularly hard in Virginia, a state with a disproportionately high number of federal workers thanks to its proximity to Washington, D.C. Vought also suspended billions in funding for the Gateway Tunnel, which would connect Newark, New Jersey, and New York City—a project that is very popular with commuters.

The Trump-Vought shutdown is already affecting everyday life across America. More than 620,000 federal workers have been furloughed, a number that will rise considerably as agencies run out of carryover funds. Services at national parks are being cut, and some locations are being forced to close. There have also been significant disruptions in air travel: Hollywood Burbank Airport was without air traffic controllers for part of Monday, and there were significant flight delays at major airports across the country on Tuesday.

This is a lot like what happened a few months ago, when Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was moving fast and breaking things in the federal bureaucracy—and one of those things was airline safety. Funding cuts and an associated exodus of air traffic controllers led to widespread shortages in the spring and may have contributed to disasters, accidents, and near misses. Within three months of DOGE’s launch, nearly 60 percent of the public disapproved of its actions—particularly its rapid pace—a number that is even more devastating considering that the effort was broadly popular when it was launched in January.

One person in the administration was especially peeved about DOGE. Last month, in a profile on Vought, The New York Times reported that he “could barely contain his frustration” with DOGE for “unilaterally axing items” that he had “intended to keep.” Reportedly, “during one flash of irritation,” Vought told staff, “We’re going to let DOGE break things, and we’ll pick up the pieces later.”

And yet, that is exactly what Vought is now doing. It must feel like déjà vu for some Republican senators. Thune, who back in March had urged Musk to hand off DOGE’s work to the Senate-confirmed “leaders” in Trump’s Cabinet, now appears equally frustrated with the Cabinet member to whom this work has been handed off. “We don’t control what he’s going to do,” he said. “This is the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought.”

Vought is, to be clear, nowhere near the buffoon that Musk is. But it’s undeniable that people like the idea of federal spending cuts more than they do the reality of them. It also seems clear that Musk’s constant need to draw attention to himself meant that he—not Trump or his administration—took much of the blame for DOGE’s bumbling sociopathy. DOGE was seen by a slice of the public as its own thing, as many voters gave it a thumbs-down while still broadly approving of the Trump presidency.

But Trump has little to insulate him now. Vought is not some temporary White House employee who’s dabbling in the art of sabotaging the government before he returns to his “job” as the world’s richest man. He is Trump’s personal hatchet man and, according to the president himself, the Grim Reaper personified. Decking the dorky, bespectacled Vought in a hooded robe and handing him a scythe may seem amusing to Republicans in the early days of the shutdown, but as the cuts get deeper, the mood will quickly turn sour.

Photographer Captures Pam Bondi’s Notes—and They’re a Doozy - 2025-10-08T14:37:44Z

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi needed a cheat sheet of attacks to dodge Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s tough questions.

While sitting before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Bondi repeatedly refused to answer questions from the Rhode Island Democrat about what happened to the $50,000 cash bribe border czar Tom Homan received from undercover FBI agents in 2024.

Reuters photographer Jonathan Ernst captured an image of the inside of a folder of notes Bondi referred to during questioning by Whitehouse. But her notes had nothing to do with her work as leader of the Department of Justice, or even the embattled border czar. Rather, Bondi had collected screenshots of social media posts, prewritten comebacks, and handwritten notes she hoped could give her a good “gotcha” moment.

The top of the folder showed a July X post from Whitehouse in which he’d called for an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “No government official should be above the law,” he wrote.

Also included in the folder was a bulleted list of comebacks. Apparently, Bondi needed to prepare the remark “You are a total hypocrite” in advance.

Screenshot of a tweet

She employed another one of her prewritten attacks when asked about Homan’s tax returns. “Senator, I would be more concerned if I were you when you talk about corruption and money, when you pushed for legislation that subsidized your wife’s company!” Bondi sneered.

“The questions here are actually pretty specific,” Whitehouse replied, undeterred. “So, having you respond with completely irrelevant far-right internet talking points is really not very helpful here.”

Below her catalog of clapbacks, Bondi had written a handwritten note “On Epstein” positing whether Whitehouse had ever accepted money from Reid Hoffman, who once invited Epstein to dinner. She used the tidbit to deflect from a question about whether the FBI had seized photos of President Donald Trump with half-naked young women from the safe at Epstein’s estate, as reported by author Michael Wolff.

“Do you know if the FBI found those photographs in their search of Jeffrey Epstein’s safe or premises or otherwise? Have you seen any such thing?” Whitehouse asked.

“You know, Senator Whitehouse, you sit here and make salacious remarks, once again trying to slander President Trump left and right, when you’re the one who was taking money from one of Epstein’s closest confidants, Reid Hoffman,” Bondi replied.

Again, Whitehouse continued unbothered. “The question is, did the FBI find those photographs that have been discussed publicly by a witness who claimed Jeffrey Epstein showed them to him. You don’t know anything about that?” he asked, and Bondi fell silent, having exhausted her scant notes.

It’s disturbing, but not surprising, that Bondi didn’t make actual preparations to answer tough questions from senators. It appears that the attorney general felt no obligation to be accountable to the American people about alleged efforts to cover up for Trump or his underlings, believing them all to be above the law.

Mike Johnson and John Thune Can’t Keep Up With Trump on Shutdown - 2025-10-08T14:22:18Z

Fractures atop the Republican Party are further complicating negotiations to end the government shutdown.

President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have not only failed to conjure a resolution to the ongoing shutdown, but they have also failed to conceal the tension bubbling beneath the surface.

So far, Trump’s strategy—which prioritizes punishing his political allies—has only tripped up his congressional counterparts.

On Monday, Trump stepped over his allies’ messaging when he told reporters he was “talking to Democrats” about cutting a deal on health care. He quickly walked it back, posting to Truth Social: “I am happy to work with the Democrats on their Failed Healthcare Policies, or anything else, but first they must allow our Government to re-open.”

On Tuesday, Johnson said that he had spoken with Trump “at length” about the urgent need to reopen the government—but Thune didn’t seem to be on the same page. That same day, the South Dakota lawmaker told reporters that there were “ongoing conversations” among party leadership.

Hours later, a draft White House memo reported by Axios revealed that the Trump administration was questioning the legality of the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, which guarantees back pay for furloughed federal workers. Both Thune and Johnson had voted for it, but the Senate majority leader struggled to contain his frustration at Trump’s attempt to undermine it now.

“All you have to do to prevent any federal employee from not getting paid is to open up the government,” Thune told reporters Tuesday. “I don’t know what statute they are using. My understanding is, yes, that they would get paid. I’ll find out. I haven’t heard this up until now.

“But again it’s a very straightforward proposition, and you guys keep chasing that narrative that they’ve got going down at the White House and up here with the Democrats,” Thune added.

Johnson told reporters that he supported federal back pay and believed that the White House did, as well—but Trump quickly poured cold water on that.

“I would say it depends who we’re talking about,” Trump told reporters, just hours later. “For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people, but for some people they don’t deserve to be taken care of.”

Trump Calls to Imprison Illinois Democrats as Troops Land in Chicago - 2025-10-08T14:05:37Z

President Donald Trump on Wednesday called for the jailing of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” Trump wrote in a brief Truth Social post. “Governor Pritzker also!”

The threat comes as National Guard troops have landed in Chicago at the direction of the president, over Pritzker’s and Johnson’s objections. Johnson also received the White House’s ire Monday for an executive order establishing “ICE-free zones” in the city.

Illinois sued the administration on Monday in hopes of halting the troops’ deployment. Scheduling a hearing for Thursday, U.S. District Judge Judge April M. Perry, who is overseeing the case, declined to immediately block the administration, but warned, “If I were the federal government, I would strongly consider taking a pause on this until Thursday.” The National Guard arrived this week nonetheless.

Prosecutors Warned Main Comey Witness Would Doom Entire Case - 2025-10-08T13:15:29Z

A Justice Department memo found that a key witness in the Trump-ordered prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey will actually undermine the entire case, reported ABC News Wednesday.

It was previously reported that prosecutors in a September memo warned Lindsey Halligan, Donald Trump’s hand-picked U.S. attorney leading the case, against pursuing it due to insufficient evidence. Defying that warning, Halligan got Comey indicted last month, including for allegedly misleading Congress when he denied having authorized others at the FBI to leak information anonymously to the media.

Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor, was supposed to be a major witness—apparently as someone Comey allegedly authorized to speak to reporters anonymously—but investigators found that his testimony would actually be “problematic” and pose “likely insurmountable problems” for the prosecution, according to ABC News sources.

In a September interview, Richman told investigators that the former FBI director “instructed him not to engage with the media on at least two occasions” and “never authorized him to provide information to a reporter anonymously ahead of the 2016 election.” ABC News sources also said a review of Comey’s emails, including with Richman, “could not identify an instance when Comey approved leaking material to a reporter anonymously.” The memo recommended that prosecutors not move forward with the case.

It is the latest of several blinding neon signs indicating that Comey is facing trumped-up charges simply for being on Trump’s bad side.

Transcript: Marjorie Taylor Greene Tirade Wrecks Trump Shutdown Stance - 2025-10-08T11:33:48Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

With the government shutdown fight dragging into its second week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene basically rolled a grenade right into the Republican camp. She erupted on Twitter, demanding to know why Republican leaders have no plan to help the millions of people who will be hurt when expanded Obamacare subsidies expire. Whether Greene knows it or not, this wrecks President Trump’s whole strategy in this fight, which rests on the idea that only Democrats are to blame for the standoff. And this sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling.

But we think this fiasco goes even deeper. Greene has exposed serious cracks in the MAGA coalition and revealed why Trump’s stance in this battle is weaker than it first appeared. We’re unraveling all this today with congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, author of a new piece urging Democrats to hold the line in this battle. Norm, good to have you on.

Norman Ornstein: Great to be with you again, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start here. Democrats are demanding that Trump and Republicans agree to extend the expanded ACA subsidies, Affordable Care Act subsidies, that were enacted under President Biden. If they expire, millions will be hurt. Norm, a lot of pundits reflexively predicted at the outset of this that Trump would win any protracted standoff over it. Yet as of now, that hasn’t happened. What’s your explanation for this?

Ornstein: So there are a couple of things to keep in mind, Greg. One is, if you look at many of the previous shutdowns that occurred, they often worked to the benefit of the president because they’ve been under divided government. So go back to when Newt Gingrich, in a fit of pique, shut down the government when Bill Clinton was president.

And Clinton—and the clever people around him, but also the things that Gingrich said—put the blame very squarely on Republicans. And there were a lot of Republicans in the country whose businesses were hurt and whose lives were disrupted by the shutdown.

Now, we had one instance where this backfired, and that is the biggest or longest shutdown ever, which was under Donald Trump. And that’s because Trump said flat out, “I’m responsible for the shutdown.”

Well, what we have now is an unusual circumstance. It’s one where there’s not divided government. The Republicans—as Americans, even those who don’t follow things very closely, know—have the reins of power. This is Donald Trump, who is proclaiming all the time that he’s running things, that he is all-powerful. So I think that puts them a little bit on the defensive.

Just as important are the positions that the two parties are taking as a whole. And what you have is Democrats with, I think, a simple, powerful message—which they need to, as I wrote, proclaim over and over again in every venue possible: They want to take away your health care. We won’t let them. And Republicans basically not defending in any significant way the reality, which is they do want to take away their health care.

Sargent: Well, that’s the thing, Norm. They do want to take it away. And that’s why Marjorie Taylor Greene’s grenade blew up so resoundingly. She did this extended tweet that included this: “I’m absolutely disgusted that health insurance premiums will double if the tax credits expire this year.” She added, “Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums doubling.”

Do tell, Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s as MAGA as you can get. And she’s admitting that Republicans are utterly derelict when it comes to the expiration of these subsidies, which will in fact, jack up premiums for millions and cause millions more to lose their insurance. Norm, doesn’t this just shift the whole debate right onto Democratic terrain?

Ornstein: It certainly does. And let’s also add, Greg, that far more people in red states and districts rely on Obamacare. So far more people would be screwed completely if these subsidies disappear that Republicans rely on even more than Democrats.

But that raises another key point about why Democrats are on sounder ground with the shutdown. If you go back to previous shutdowns, Democrats were united. They were united when Bill Clinton was president and saying, We want to reopen the government and provide services again for people. They were united back during the first Trump shutdown when Trump took responsibility for it.

Republicans are divided now. I’ve seen many statements from Freedom Caucus Republicans saying, No, let those subsidies disappear. A lot of their allies out there are saying, We’re for fiscal discipline—which of course is farcical in and of itself—but these were supposed to be temporary, and if you make them permanent, it’s gonna cost so much money.

So they’re putting themselves into a position where they have no coherent stance, other than trying to say over and over again, It’s the Democrats doing this. And when you have the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, look in the camera and say, We’re the ones who care about health care, when they have nothing to say about it except We want to cut, that makes it harder for them.

You know, there’s another point here, Greg, which is this isn’t just about the subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as we know it. It’s also about the meat-ax—the giant meat-ax—that Republicans took in their so-called “big, beautiful bill” to Medicaid, which is putting not just rural hospitals but all hospitals in a terrible place, which is going to cost even more, in terms of the health burdens on Americans—which will cost lives.

Now, what Republicans did, knowing the pain that that would cause, is to put off some of those deeper cuts until after the midterm elections. But they can’t do that with the subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which would take place in January.

Sargent: Right, Norm. So it seems that even health insurance commissioners across the country are essentially suggesting that Republicans really can’t do this, yeah?

Ornstein: And most of the insurance commissioners—the ones in red states—are Republican. So the conservative Republican insurance commissioner in North Dakota, one of the reddest states in the nation, said, All of us are together. You cannot do this. Because they know what havoc it will wreak.

And remember, if people lose their insurance, they’re going to end up going to emergency rooms when they have problems. They’re going to have diseases that are untreated and will end up costing more. And what this insurance commissioner said is every insurance company now preparing for this has two sets of rates: one is what they’re gonna do come January 1 if the subsidies are continued; the other is what they’re gonna do if they’re not.

The second means doubling or tripling of most of those premiums. But they are not gonna do it just as of January 1. The notices of what your insurance costs will be are gonna go out well before January 1. So Republicans are sitting on a ticking time bomb that will backfire for them unless they come to the table and agree to cut a deal.

And Democrats—let me add, Greg—need to find a way—it’s much better, frankly, if we can do something to help people who are in need and have them back off of their belligerence. But we also need a commitment that there will be no bait and switch—that we can’t do this and then have Trump, after there’s a bipartisan agreement with the Senate and then with the House, go back and use his rescissions to eliminate a lot of the spending that they agree on.

Democrats, I think, have the upper hand here now, despite what much of the press commentary says.

Sargent: Well, I think there’s another thing worth focusing on here. Trump and Republicans want this debate to be all about the supposed desire of Democrats to give health insurance to undocumented immigrants. That’s a complete lie. But the entire GOP and MAGA propaganda apparatus has been blaring it out for weeks now.

In her tweets, Greene does repeat some of this, as well, but by saying Republicans don’t have a plan on subsidies, it makes this whole thing all about the GOP desire to take health care away from Americans rather than the supposed Dem desire to help the undocumented, which I guess is bad in Republican-speak. And Republicans can’t let that debate shift this way.

Ornstein: So all of that nonsense, that set of lies, is aimed at that Republican base. And it’s repeated ad nauseam on Fox and on all of their right-wing shows. OK, fine. It’s a lie. We should refute the lie.

When subsidies disappear, and a lot of these people find that their health insurance is suddenly unaffordable, you’re not going to have very many of them saying, It’s OK, because at least we’ve kept those illegal aliens from going to the emergency room. They’re going to scream bloody murder.

So this is, I think, you know, it’s a way of mollifying their rabid, cultist base. It will do nothing to alter the political consequences. And what has to happen here, what Democrats were able to do, is to make sure that, if subsidies disappear and rates go up, it’ll be clear who’s responsible.

Sargent: Indeed, and that’s why Mike Johnson is kind of scrambling right now to deal with this broadside from Greene. Johnson said that Greene is simply out of the loop as other House Republicans discuss solutions to the expiring subsidies. Johnson said that the committees of jurisdiction are dealing with that. Gosh, it sounds so responsible and hands-on.

Norm, what do you know about where Republicans actually are on this? It does seem like the ones who are vulnerable in 2026 would like to find a way out of this. But on the other hand, as you say, the Freedom Caucus lunatics really are just salivating for Obamacare to implode or whatever they think is going to happen. Is there any chance the party can get behind anything at all worthwhile?

Ornstein: I would be stunned if they did, Greg, because remember, we have had a mantra now for years, “Repeal and replace.” And there’s never been a “replace.” They’ve got no way of dealing with this other than a sham set of proposals, which will give you really cheap insurance, but it’s really cheap because it doesn’t cover anything, and if you ever try to invoke it, the insurance companies will say, sorry, either you have a preexisting condition because you had a hangnail, which is what we had before the Affordable Care Act, or look at the fine print: That’s not covered. So they’ve got no plan.

So we’re not going to see anything other than a sham unless they ultimately have to cave and give in on those subsidies. And whether they’re going to give in on some of the horrible changes in Medicaid, I don’t know. Democrats, though, have to get out there, and they need to go to hospitals and they need to go to red districts and states and they need to make it clear, day after day after day, what the stakes are here and where the parties are. And if that happens, Republicans are in a bad place, I believe.

Sargent: Yeah. And I think Marjorie Taylor Greene actually exposed something else, as well, which is that there are really serious cracks in the MAGA coalition about this. If you think about the two pieces of policy, the big pieces of policy that are on the table right now: one, whether the expanded Obamacare subsidies will expire, and two, whether Democrats can somehow get Republicans to roll back their Medicaid cuts from the big, ugly bill that Trump signed: Those are very hyper-directed at the MAGA base, in the sense that MAGA voters, Trump voters, will get very badly hurt by the expiration of the subsidies and also by the Medicaid cuts, which are looming in the distance.

And I think Greene, by sort of exposing the truth about the Republican Party stance on this, kind of gave Democrats a wedge that they can use to really split the MAGA coalition on this. What do you think?

Ornstein: I agree completely. And it’s a wedge that I think even has a broader swath. And it’s this: If you look at Democratic candidates running and winning in—let’s take a good example—an Iowa state Senate seat that had gone overwhelmingly for Trump, that opened up and the Democrat won on one issue: affordability.

That’s the issue that propelled Mamdani to a place where he is likely to be the next mayor of New York City. It’s affordability because this isn’t just about the costs of health care, although that’s the prime mover. It’s about how that fits in with every cost that working Americans face, now under siege because of Trump’s tariffs.

So people—that working-class base that voted for Trump—these are people who are struggling. All of their costs are going up. Trump keeps saying, you know, another big lie, as he is so wont to do: Everything’s great, the cost of eggs are down, everything is coming down, the economy is booming. The people out there know that that’s false because they know what their daily reality is.

And if you take the fact that rents are going up, food costs are going up, back-to-school costs are enormous, all of these tariffs—cars are going to be more expensive—and then you get a doubling of your health care premiums—and that’s all on Trump and Republicans right now.

Sargent: Norm, what’s the way out of this whole thing? It does appear that Democrats are finding themselves in a somewhat unexpectedly strong position, and they’re like, Hey, this is kind of cool. We can actually fight. And it also appears that Republicans are kind of on their back foot here, on their heels. But it’s still a little hard to envision what some sort of deal at the end of the day looks like. Is there a scenario where Republicans actually do cave, in some sense; obviously, they’re not going to give Democrats everything they want on the ACA subsidies and on Medicaid. But is there a scenario where Republicans do concede something to Democrats that’s actually kind of a decent outcome?

Ornstein: So I don’t think we’re going to find Republicans agreeing to permanently extend the subsidies or do it, say, over a 10-year period. What I do think is possible is that Republicans agree to have a one-year or two-year extension of those subsidies so that they can say, Look at the 10-year window, we’re being less fiscally irresponsible than we were, and maybe ameliorate some of the bad impacts of the Medicaid changes.

I think we can find a deal here. But the cautionary note is we did have three Democratic senators who broke with all the rest to vote for that seven-week extension of current levels of spending with the, you know, false promise by Republicans that during that time they would talk. So what I would worry about is, as this shutdown continues for any length of time, and lots of people are hurt by the shutdown—and, you know, the president has some power to decide where the programs will continue and what will be completely shut down—you may see some slippage among Democrats.

But having said that, Greg, I’d make one other point, which is the longest shutdown we’ve had was 35 days. Why didn’t it go longer? Why don’t they go longer? Employees of the government—whether they’re working because it’s essential or not—do not get paid during a shutdown. The law written in 2019, after that last big shutdown, says unequivocally they all get back pay.

But if you are, you know, let’s take somebody in ICE or in the FBI, and you’re working and basically living, if not paycheck to paycheck, pretty damn close to that—and you have to go a month or two months and you’ve got a rent payment due or a mortgage due, and you’ve got to buy food and take care of other necessities—after a while, and it won’t take long, they’re going to be going, including those who are part of that, you know, MAGA shock troop, they’re going to be going to their Republicans and saying, You can’t let this go on anymore.

So the pressure is going to be great. One of the reasons that the last shutdown ended when it did is a very large number of TSA workers—and remember, they’re paid a pittance—started to call in sick because they were required to work. You know, if you’re not working for the federal government, you’re on a furlough. At least you might be able to bring in a little money by taking a job at a Walmart or at a gas station or doing something else.

If you are an essential employee, you’re not getting paid, you’re having to go into work sometimes 40 or 60 hours a week, you’ve got nothing coming in. So I think there’s gonna be some pushback that will hit Republicans at least as much as those Democrats.

Sargent: Well, Norm, I will say one thing about your scenario in which there’s sort of a deal for a short-term extension of the subsidies. Let JD Vance explain to the public, as he’s running for president in 2028, that the ACA subsidies are about to expire because of his party. So it’s a it’s small consolation maybe, but there may be poetic justice at the end of this whole thing.

Ornstein: Well, let me just add, Greg, that if we have to go every year with facing a cliff where it’s once again Republicans saying, No, let’s get rid of the subsidies and double your insurance premiums. If that’s the debate we’re gonna have, I’m perfectly happy with a one-year extension, because it’s gonna be extended again.

Sargent: Well said, Norm. Norm Ornstein, thank you so much for coming on with us. Always great to talk to you.

Orinstein: Good to talk to you too, Greg.

Is the Supreme Court Teeing Up a Broader Attack on LGBTQ Rights? - 2025-10-08T10:00:00Z

Thursday’s oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar were a textbook example of how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, when it’s aligned with right-wing legal groups, never fails to frame cases, laws, and issues in topsy-turvy ways.

“There is irreparable harm going on right now,” attorney James Campbell, who argued on behalf of Chiles, said in response to a question from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Miss Chiles is being silenced. The kids and the families who want this kind of help that she’ll offer are being left without any support.”

The “help” to which she referred is conversion therapy, a discredited treatment that seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. More than 20 states have enacted some form of ban on it. Major medical organizations have unanimously said that these “therapies” are not only ineffective and unsupported by scientific evidence but can do immense psychological harm to gay and transgender patients.

The Supreme Court now appears skeptical of bans on the practice. The conservative justices in the majority appeared to sympathize with a counselor who claimed that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy violates her First Amendment rights to free speech. Among them was Justice Samuel Alito, who suggested that the state must treat therapists who practice conversion therapy on equal terms with those who help LGBTQ youth come to terms with their identity and/or orientation.

Alito posited a hypothetical scenario where one gay adolescent man “says he’s attracted to other males, feels uneasy and guilty about those feelings, and he wants the therapist’s help so he will feel comfortable as a gay young man,” and another scenario where the same young man “wants to end or lessen them, and he asks for the therapist’s help in doing so.”

“It seems to me your statute dictates opposite results in those two situations based on the viewpoint expressed,” he concluded. Viewpoint discrimination rarely survives judicial scrutiny when challenged under the First Amendment. Alito’s framework, if adopted by the court, would effectively decide the case in Chiles’s favor. It is also based on an impractical and unrealistic view of the issue.

“The harms from conversion therapy come from when you tell a young person you can change this innate thing about yourself, and they try and they try and they fail, and then they have shame and they’re miserable, and then it ruins their relationships with their family,” Shannon Stevenson, the solicitor general of Colorado, told the justices. Increases in depression, self-harm, and suicidality can often follow.

If the Supreme Court strikes down conversion-therapy bans, the results will be dire for gay and transgender Americans who will feel pressured by their families and/or communities to engage in dangerous and unscientific “treatments.” More ominously, such a ruling could also form the spear tip of a much broader assault on LGBTQ rights as they currently stand.

The case comes from Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado Springs with a master’s degree in clinical mental health. She practices talk therapy and does not prescribe medications or other medical treatments. The conflict arises from the fact that her religious beliefs are inextricably linked to her therapeutic practices. “Chiles views her work as an outgrowth of her Christian faith,” her lawyers told the court in their brief. “Many of her clients are also Christians who seek her help because of their shared religious beliefs.”

Among those whom Chiles treats are, in her words, “young people with various mental-health struggles, including issues related to trauma, personality disorders, addiction, eating disorders, gender dysphoria, and sexuality.” Some of those young clients “desire counseling—sometimes based on their faith—‘to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] physical body,’” she told the court, and she helps them pursue those “desires and objectives.”

In 2019, Colorado enacted a law that banned conversion therapy for minors. Licensed therapists and other medical professionals in the state who use treatments that attempt to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity can be punished with fines and disciplinary measures by the relevant medical boards. The law included exceptions for both religious ministers and for unlicensed counselors.

Chiles sued the state in 2022 with the support of Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, a right-wing Christian legal organization. A federal district court and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals both rejected her claims, concluding that Colorado acted well within its authority to regulate medical practices in the state. Chiles and ADF then urged the high court to intervene, framing her as a victim of government censorship.

“Colorado forbids counselors like Kaley Chiles from helping minors pursue state-disfavored goals on issues of gender and sexuality,” Campbell told the court. “This law prophylactically bans voluntary conversations, censoring widely held views on debated moral, religious, and scientific questions.” Hashim Mooppan, who argued on the Trump administration’s behalf, compared it to “prior restraint,” a phrase that is blasphemous in First Amendment contexts.

The state of Colorado strenuously opposed Chiles’s appeal. “If adopted, [Chiles’s] position would gut states’ power to ensure mental healthcare professionals comply with the standard of care,” the state warned in its brief for the court. “Moreover, because so much health care—regardless of the field—is delivered exclusively through words, [her] efforts to distinguish substandard treatment involving words from substandard treatment that does not involve words would destabilize longstanding and sensible healthcare regulation.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared to recognize that a ruling for Chiles would be incongruous with the court’s decision last term in United States v. Skrmetti, where the court’s conservative majority upheld a Tennessee law that banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

In Skrmetti, the court said that the challenged law only had to survive the extremely lenient standard of rational-basis review, which would doom Chiles’s challenge in this case. “Can a state pick a side?” Barrett asked Stevenson. “I want to be clear, it’s not that the medical community says we just don’t know. It’s that there are competing strands, and some states like, say, Tennessee, which was the state at issue in Skrmetti, picks one side, [and] Colorado picks another side.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court in Skrmetti, appeared to be searching for a way to distinguish this case from that one. His questions for the lawyers focused on Chiles’s assertions that her therapeutic methods were purely speech-based and did not involve “conduct” like prescribing drugs or administering “treatments” like aversion therapy. That would theoretically allow the court to distinguish between purely verbal forms of conversion therapy and more dangerous pseudo-medical techniques.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh notably asked no questions during Thursday’s roughly 90-minute session. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch appeared to lean in favor of siding with Chiles in full. But it was Alito who was the most forceful justice when it came to challenging Colorado’s law. Along the way, he also seemed to implicitly reject the notion of deferring to medical professionals’ expertise.

Among Alito’s questions for Colorado’s solicitor general were two troll-ish ones about past errors by the medical community. The implied point that he appeared to be making was that doctors have been wrong in the past, and they might be wrong now.

“Was there a time when many medical professionals thought that certain people should not be permitted to procreate because they had low IQs?” he asked. When Stevenson brushed off the question, he continued. “Was there a time when there were many medical professionals who thought that every child born with Down syndrome should be immediately put in an institution?” Alito asked.

If Alito meant for this to be remotely persuasive, then it didn’t work. One of the greatest moral and constitutional failures in the high court’s history is when it embraced eugenics in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell. “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously wrote for the court in the decision, which upheld the compulsory sterilization of an intellectually disabled woman. (Alito even paraphrased that statement at one point in mockery.)

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Buck encouraged eugenicists to pursue similar strategies nationwide; the Virginia law in question even influenced Nazi racial policies. One could read Buck as a warning for the court to not endorse pseudoscientific medical treatments with a proven track record of harmful effects on ideological grounds. Alito’s implication appears to be that the court should avoid deferring to state officials on these medical questions as well if it implicates a fundamental right.

That line of reasoning (and the Buck comparison in general) only really makes sense if one thinks that conversion therapy is real and gay and transgender people, at least for constitutional purposes, are not. In its brief for Chiles, ADF attempted to slip a broader attack on LGBTQ rights into the case by arguing that sexual orientation and gender identity were mutable. “To deny and suppress the reality that gender identity and sexual orientation can change, Colorado put its licensing power to a speech-censoring use that’s inconsistent with history and tradition,” the group argued.

The overwhelming medical consensus is that sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic. To suggest otherwise, ADF paraphrased from an academic paper to assert that “respected researchers of LGBT issues have long observed that ‘longitudinal, population-based studies’ show ‘changes in the same-sex attractions of some individuals over time.’” Those scholars filed a friend-of-the-court brief to accuse ADF of profoundly misinterpreting and misquoting their work.

“That argument collapses two fundamentally different phenomena—naturally occurring fluidity and therapist-directed attempts to change sexual orientation—into a single concept, and it does so in direct opposition to the scientific record,” they argued. They also strenuously objected to using their work in support of conversion therapy, which they described as a “well-documented public-health threat.”

The problem goes beyond merely misrepresenting academic research to the court. While the Supreme Court delivered multiple victories for LGBTQ rights over the past quarter-century, it never took the step of recognizing sexual orientation as a “suspect classification” under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Laws targeting other suspect classifications, like race and religion, receive the highest level of judicial scrutiny when challenged in court.

One prong in the court’s traditional test for identifying a suspect classification is whether or not the protected trait is an “immutable characteristic.” Three of the court’s conservatives—Thomas, Alito, and Barrett—said in Skrmetti that they would have upheld the Tennessee law because gender identity was not immutable and therefore failed the court’s traditional test. Their interpretation, which was not adopted by the court itself, would make it impossible for transgender Americans to challenge discriminatory laws against them on equal-protection grounds.

If ADF gets the court’s conservative majority to say that sexual orientation isn’t an immutable characteristic, even in passing, then it would be a significant reversal for LGBTQ rights in future cases. Congress and the states would still be able to enact antidiscrimination protections for gay and lesbian Americans by statute, but the doors of the courts would close in places where lawmakers took no such steps.

The Supreme Court can resolve this case on other grounds, and it most likely will. The question is whether it will lose sight of the real stakes in this case—the well-being of the LGBTQ youth who will be pressured by unsympathetic families and communities to “change” their sexual orientation or gender identity through unproven and unscientific “treatments”—or the broader implications that a ruling for the plaintiff could have for LGBTQ rights in general. A decision will likely come in the first half of next year.

The Case for the Forever Shutdown - 2025-10-08T10:00:00Z

There is no other way to put it: When the executive branch of the current U.S. government is using the tools and resources of the government to attack its own citizens, to launch chemical munitions at reporters and protesters, to zip-tie children and extract them from their apartments in the middle of the night, and to capture those extra-constitutional assaults on video to create social media content for hate clicks, the U.S. government has failed.

I cannot begin to tell you how difficult and unnerving it is to have been in Chicago these past few weeks; to exist indefinitely in the contradictory space between knowing and living. To see video of masked agents in an unmarked car tossing a tear gas can into a busy intersection outside a grocery store and elementary school less than two miles away from your home, and then go to a block party the next day and watch your 5-year-old run continuous loops around a giant inflatable bounce-house playground. To drop him off and pick him up at daycare every day while scanning the latest ad hoc Google doc created by organizers to see which schools need volunteer escorts to ensure that unaccompanied children can enter and leave their schools safely. I dread Fridays because I know they will be filled with doomscrolling videos of reporters getting pelted with pepper balls outside the Broadview ICE facility, and yet the daily work of participating in Zoom meetings, sending meaningless emails, and buying groceries persists because it simply must.

But what I need you to know is that the inherent contradiction of everyday life in Chicago for any one person of privilege like me—of living in and loving this vast, vibrant city while it gets besmirched and infiltrated by racist goons—pales in comparison to the inherent contradiction that is congressional Democratic leadership in Washington right now.

We are in week two of a federal government shutdown. Perhaps Beltway reporters have become inured to the extraordinary idea of a government shutdown, given how many they have covered. My boredom with the dysfunction and destruction of these sorts of events inspired me to leave my work as a congressional reporter, but many of the colleagues I left behind simply live for the “intrigue” of rank incompetence. Worse than how these legislative impasses have become commonplace in the rhythms and cadence of D.C., though, is how Democrats do not seem to know how to use them to build political capital, leverage, and public consensus.

Yes, Republicans control the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives. They undoubtedly own this shutdown, despite their cartoonish protestations on every government website, which skirt federal law. These missives are giving “clunky dictatorship” vibes—only underscoring how unworthy our would-be oppressors truly are. But Democrats control their own behaviors, words, and actions. They have been living with these mendacious Republicans and this dysfunctional media since the Tea Party takeover of 2010.

The rise of right-wing extremism in the corridors of the Capitol aligned almost perfectly with the rapid ascent of social media. And yet Democrats struggle to accept that the information environment has changed into a Hobbesian wilderness, even now. They have failed to figure out that there are two kinds of conflict: the real conflict I’m seeing my neighbors endure as they fight for the collective safety of the people of Chicago and the rhetorical jousting the Beltway media lives for; the “he said, she said” fighting that defines the corrosive paradigm of the nationalized bothsides journalism that shapes our public understanding.

Every time Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York—the Democrat with the most power in a shutdown because his withholding of seven senators toward a procedural vote keeps Republicans from proceeding—says that Democrats are looking to open the government through a negotiation around and deal on Affordable Care Act subsidies, he is acquiescing to the idea that a government in which Border Patrol agents paid with our tax dollars can shoot real bullets at protesters in Chicago after screaming “Do something, bitch!” can and should be deemed legitimate.

The truth is that Democrats can pay a million consultants to come up with a million different talking points on health care subsidies. They can keep holding press conferences in the Senate studio like every other press conference before it, talking to the same reporters, pretending like we live in a redeemable timeline where if they just keep on acting like it’s 2007, we might fall through a time portal that makes it so. But we live here in a country with a co-opted executive branch led by racist, xenophobic idiots who do not believe in law, empowered by a slavishly devoted Supreme Court that has decided shoveling unlimited power to said executive is more important than the law it disregards, and where the president thinks he can send national guardsmen from red states to blue states just because people of color live here and Fox News hosts hate that.

Who is served by pretending we live in an America different from this one? It’s certainly not the people being attacked in the streets in Chicago’s Logan Square, Humboldt Park, South Shore, Brighton Park, and Little Village, among many other diverse neighborhoods.

Democrats thought they could ride out the first Trump administration like it was any other Republican administration. Events since should have disabused them of the possibility of doing it a second time—as if January 6 did not happen, as if the people who tried to destroy our government would not come back and be serious about finishing the job, as if they actually hadn’t written it all down in a manifesto and published it.

The result is that, as In These Times reported this week, the United States now has an immigration enforcement apparatus that, if it were its own national military, would be the thirteenth-most-heavily funded military in the world. And the president of the U.S. wants to turn that heavily funded, extramilitary military into a force to be unleashed against the American people, to do war crimes against us. Who authorized and appropriated that funding? Was it Congress? (Spoiler alert: It was.)

I was shocked but not surprised to see that Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent last week that the thing he hears most often from his colleagues is: “Well, we ran on democracy in 2024 and we lost. And so, let’s not do democracy, let’s do economics and health care.”

It is certainly self-evident that Democrats do not care to “do democracy,” but what I would argue is that speeches about democracy do not carry the weight of collective action in support of democracy. In 2024, President Joe Biden told us repeatedly that “democracy was on the line,” and yet three years earlier, Senate Democrats prematurely ended the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump because top Biden ally Chris Coons of Delaware wanted to go home for Valentine’s Day. Congressional Democrats, despite their supposed 2024 warnings that democracy was on the brink, almost all attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025 as if it were normal and acceptable, and Biden himself welcomed the Trumps back into the White House with open arms.

When you utter words aloud but then act in opposition to the intent of those words, you are not, in fact, running or standing on anything. You are just complicit in the subversion of government that is getting people killed. Affordable health care is important, but it is not more important than refusing to normalize this government.

If congressional Democrats believe in government, they should never vote to fund this one. Make Senate Majority Leader John Thune blow up Senate rules to have Republicans reopen the federal government all on their own. Let Republicans have the literal blood of American citizens on their hands—and make that the central issue of the shutdown. Otherwise, enjoy having your health care subsidy debate in the gulags these people would happily send us all to. I hear that poll-tests great.

How Trump Became the Ringmaster of Left-Wing Violence - 2025-10-08T10:00:00Z

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a terrible act of violence that cut short the life of a 31-year-old human being. It was also a political opportunity—not for the left, as Kirk’s mentally disturbed killer may have believed, but for the right, which, as many have noted, instantly turned him into the Trumpian version of Horst Wessel.

Two weeks after Kirk’s killing, Trump issued a presidential memorandum criminalizing opinions that are “anti-capitalism” or “anti-Christianity”; that represent “extremism” with regard to “migration, race, and gender”; or that express “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” These thought crimes are to be prosecuted in the name of “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It’s the most sweeping government crackdown on dissent since J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious COINTELPRO—and it may end up being much more harmful.

A powerful myth has long existed in the United States that the political left is historically more violent than the political right. In fact, the opposite is true, as documented by many sources, including a 2021 report by The Washington Post in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS; a 2022 University of Maryland study; and a 2022 study by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.  

Right-wing political violence is not only more common, it’s also more likely to be judged legitimate by those in whose name it’s committed. A November 2021 poll by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute found three times as many Republicans as Democrats agreed with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” In November 2022, I posted a piece here under the headline: “‘We’ Don’t Have a Political Violence Problem. Republicans Do.”

That may no longer be true. Trump has been riling the left through a decade of hateful provocations, starting with his 2015 presidential announcement’s assertion that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” CSIS reported last month that these efforts have finally borne fruit:

Left-wing violence has risen in the last 10 years, particularly since President Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence in 2016.… More contentious politics in the United States and the expansion of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement appear to have reenergized violent left-wing extremists.

Mind you, the increase in left-wing violence is from “very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.” (The latter represent a third category.) Left-wing killers have a long way to go before they reach the level of sustained political violence achieved by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Jew-haters, Islamaphobes, homophobes, and many more.

Just to be clear: I abhor all violence, political or otherwise, left and right. Vandalism, too. (Before you ask: Yes, I said this when the George Floyd protests turned into riots.) That’s a moral judgment. In addition, I make the political judgment that political violence (and vandalism) is self-destructive, especially when committed by the left. (The right doesn’t tend to pay as high a price for breaking things and hurting people.)

I therefore take no joy in reporting that Trump’s extremist rhetoric and increasingly authoritarian policies have, according to CSIS, made 2025 “the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right.” Granted, left-wing political violence remains less lethal. Right-wing nuts killed 112 people between 2016 and the middle of 2025; the body count for left-wing nuts is a paltry 13. I don’t see that gap closing, given the left-of-center’s dislike of assault weapons. And I wouldn’t count on the left remaining more violent than the right into 2026, given the right’s historic advantage going back at least to the 1940s. It isn’t really, as the cliché goes, who the left is.

But this year’s surge has given Trump a pretext, and he’s taking maximum advantage. In the 1960s, Hoover infiltrated radical and so-called radical groups. Trump’s instinct is to follow the money. A National Joint Terrorism Task Force will target “individual and institutional funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors” in domestic terrorism. That’s a very broad brush. So is the memo’s definition of “domestic terrorism,” which includes “trespass,” “doxing,” and “civil disorder,” whatever that means. On the same day the memo was issued, Aakash Singh, who works in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, sent a separate memo to U.S. attorneys directing them to prosecute George Soros’s Open Society Foundations for material support for terrorism and other crimes. 

The Washington law firm Wilmer Hale, which is nobody’s idea of a left-wing alarmist, immediately warned its nonprofit clients that the result will be IRS investigations, “potential terrorism designations for organizations viewed as promoting progressive causes,” and “attempts to block assets of nonprofit organizations.” In a similar vein, Arnold & Porter said, “By targeting tax-exempt organizations and funders targeted based on ideological considerations, the Presidential Memorandum and investigative actions implementing it could raise significant issues under the First Amendment.”

It may be hard for Trump to get convictions, but winning in court probably isn’t his aim; it never has been in the past. As one former counterterrorism lawyer for the Justice Department told Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo, “It’s a legal nullity in many respects, but financial institutions don’t care about that.” Translation: This will scare banks away from doing business with liberal nongovernment organizations and other nonprofits. Who needs the hassle?

The money angle mimics the harassment strategy Trump is pursuing in his fight against universities, which he similarly considers domestic enemies. Not only is Trump imposing fines in the hundreds of millions on Ivy League universities, for imaginary violations that wouldn’t stand up in court; he also increased, in the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill, taxes on the largest university endowments—from 1.4 percent to 8 percent. This change will cost Yale, for instance, $280 million, and no fewer than 17 universities more than $10 million.

To use left-wing violence to justify harassing political opponents, Trump needs to keep the pot bubbling, even at the expense of personal safety. (Recall that there were two attempts last year on Trump’s life.) Sending troops into blue-state cities is mainly, I think, Trump’s strategy to create violent confrontation that he can exploit for political gain. God bless the National Guard, which in my opinion hasn’t received sufficient praise for keeping such confrontations to a bare minimum by hanging out in places (like Los Angeles’s federal building in Westwood and Washington’s National Mall) where confrontation is easily avoided, and by occupying itself with boring tasks like mulching, raking leaves, and picking up trash. 

The National Guard doesn’t want another Kent State. But Trump would relish one, no matter who the aggressor was. Recall that although a plurality today may blame the National Guard for killing four students and wounding nine that awful day in May 1970, at the time 58 percent told Gallup they blamed the students and only 11 percent blamed the guard. “When dissent turns to violence,” the Nixon White House said, in a statement on the massacre, “it invites tragedy.” Never mind that only one side had guns.

In his speech to the generals last week, Trump said, “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” He didn’t mean left-wing killers; those are his de facto allies. He meant peace-loving opponents—some of them on the right!—who shine a light on the many, many ways he’s damaging this country. Trump’s complaint that “they don’t wear uniforms” emboldened me last week to have a T-shirt made up, white letters on a navy-blue background, that says:
                                                       
                                                        the enemy

                                                           within

Many friends complimented me on it. But after reading Trump’s September 25 memorandum, I’m not sure that I’ll wear it anymore outside the house.

Inside Stephen Miller’s Secret Plan to Normalize Trump’s Dictator Rule - 2025-10-08T10:00:00Z

Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment. As President Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule, the powerful MAGA disinformation apparatus—at Miller’s direction—is supercharging public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way that’s designed to deeply polarize it. That will force Americans to take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes, driving them to embrace authoritarian rule, though perhaps without understanding it in exactly those terms.

Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment? It’s unclear. But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one. They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship—if they are presented with this as a clear choice.

This week, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act after a federal judge blocked him from sending the National Guard into Portland, in a ruling that sharply noted Trump is making up facts about crime there as his pretext.

“It’s a burning hellhole,” Trump said. “You have a judge that tries to pretend there’s no problem.” Trump declared that he’d enact the Insurrection Act “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

The specter of Portland “burning” is dim-witted MAGA propaganda. But Trump is now nakedly threatening to invoke the notorious nineteenth-century act if Democratic governors or the courts lawfully exercise their roles in our constitutional schema, in a way that displeases him. This would unshackle vast and dangerously vague authorities to domestically deploy the military, powers nominally reserved for extraordinary domestic unrest or civil breakdown. Trump would invoke it based on sheer fabrications, or possibly on old footage of Portland he saw on Fox News.

Yet it’s no accident that this comes right after Miller loudly denounced the Portland ruling by that judge—a Trump appointee, no less—as “legal insurrection.” Miller declared that it’s “insurrection” when judges assume for themselves “powers that have been delegated by the Constitution to the president.” Miller is also insisting that judges “have no conceivable authority” to restrict the commander in chief from “dispatching members of the U.S. military to defend federal lives and property,” meaning in Portland.

Of course, here in non-MAGA reality, the judge was merely interpreting whether Trump breached the limits Congress has already placed on that presidential authority. She concluded that Trump doesn’t have unlimited power to simply declare that the conditions permitting him to federalize a state’s National Guard have been met. In other words, as Harry Litman argued at TNR, facts matter. But that’s precisely what Miller denies. His argument, in essence, is that Trump’s power to declare by fiat that those conditions have been met really is quasi-absolute.

To that end, Miller appears to want Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Recently, Miller was asked directly if he’s discussed the idea with Trump, and he evaded the question. It’s likely that Miller, a master manipulator lurking furtively behind the despot’s throne, frequently uses the word “insurrection” about Trump’s opponents to lodge it deep in Trump’s brain stem and make invocation of the act more likely. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger notes, Miller’s goal is to supplant the rule of law with the “rule of Trump,” a personalist form of rule that answers to Trump the man and no one else.

Yet there’s another dark aim here that’s worth appreciating. Miller is working overtime to polarize the public debate about Trump’s increasingly dictatorial abuses of power. And he’s doing so quite consciously. He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively on Trump.

Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles, media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.

Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video depicted the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on Fox News to hail the operation as an enormous triumph.

Amid all this, Miller’s public battle with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has been particularly noteworthy. Pritzker went on CNN and tore into the ICE raid, vividly depicting it as a lawless action targeting U.S. citizens in order to provoke a response and justify more thuggery later. Pritzker called it “Trump’s invasion,” deliberately using a term Miller uses for immigrants. Miller eagerly took the bait:

The rub here is that both these men want this fight. To be clear, the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey finds that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll finds opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37 percent.

But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions, at best. In this understanding of politics—and you should read Brian Beutler and Lee Drutman on this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to really take sides.

Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language, he has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.”

In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly.

Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.

What’s notable, in one sense, is how badly this project has failed. Despite months of effort, Trump and Miller have not come close to manufacturing the sense of fear or trauma out in the country they’d hoped for. But in the nascent Pritzker-Newsom understanding, assuming this will all take care of itself—that voters will resist Trump-Miller agitprop without prompting—is insufficient. We’ve learned, hearteningly, that majorities seem to harbor a deep attachment to liberal rights and liberties, one that instinctively recoils at masked kidnappings, at hypermilitarized vehicles on urban boulevards, at the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship. But this must be activated. That takes conflict and controversy—powerful imagery and language that rivets attention.

It’s not clear many Democrats understand this. Some Democrats have confided to reporters that they see this topic as a “trap” enticing them into a losing debate about crime. But why assume voters will automatically believe Trump’s occupations are actually about combating crime? This throws in the towel, right up front, on communicating to voters what this debate is really about: that Trump’s abuses should be utterly abhorrent to anyone who values living in a free society.

Do Democrats, broadly speaking, have a theory of this moment that’s consciously matched to MAGA’s authoritarian politics? They need one. Because guess who does have a theory of the moment? Miller does. And he’s amassing unprecedented power to put it into practice as we speak.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Just Wrecked Trump’s Entire Shutdown Strategy - 2025-10-08T09:00:00Z

With the government shutdown fight dragging into its second week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene rolled a grenade into the GOP camp. She erupted on Twitter, demanding to know why Republican leaders have no plan to help millions of people who will be hurt when expanded Obamacare subsidies expire. This wrecks President Trump’s whole strategy in this fight, because it rests on the idea that only Democrats are to blame for the standoff, all due to their undying love of “illegals.” Greene’s broadside also sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling. But we think this fiasco goes even deeper. We talked to veteran congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, author of a new piece on the standoff. We discuss how Greene has exposed serious cracks in the MAGA coalition, why this exposes weaknesses in Trump’s stance, and what Democrats can do to maximize their leverage. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Transcript: Newsom and Pritzker Show How To Attack An Authoritarian - 2025-10-08T09:00:00Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the Oct. 7 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this video here.

Perry Bacon: Welcome to The New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m joined by Arkadi Gerney today. Great great to see you, Arkadi. 

Arkadi Gerney: Great to see you, Perry. Thanks for having me on.

Perry Bacon: I’m going to introduce him a bit, he’s—I’m going to use the term Democratic strategist, and he actually does real strategy. He’s worked for a lot of organizations: He worked for [The Center for American Progress] (CAP), he worked for Michael Bloomberg’s gun organization for some period. But in the last few years he’s worked on thinking about how to take on Trump and how to use the powers of, let’s call it, blue America, from cities to states to liberal institutions.

He’s done a lot of thinking and writing, and even before Trump became president the second time, he wrote a very detailed report about how we should prepare for Trump. The report actually argued that Trump 2.0 would be different, and therefore, the protest model and the [approach of] getting the Mitt Romneys and John McCains to vote against Trump would no longer exist, because the moderate Republicans on the Hill are essentially gone.

And the protests probably worked the first time better because people were stunned by Trump, but now that he won a second time, we’re in a different period. So, welcome—thanks for joining us.

Gerney: Thanks for having me on, Perry.

Bacon: So let me ask in a broad sense first: the resistance to Trump. How would you define how that’s going? 

Gerney: Well, I think, as you were describing the setup, the second version of Trump is harder than the first version. And I think there are three principal reasons why it’s harder: They’re different, we’re different, and the environment and some key institutions are different.

Let’s start with them. They’re much more organized. They had a plan—they had Project 2025. They’ve defeated the internal opposition in the Republican Party, so the kinds of people like John McCain who were around in 2017 are not anymore.

We’re different—with “we” being small-d democrats and big-D Democrats. I think there’s a lot of exhaustion. Some of that comes out of COVID, some of it comes out of having done this once before. And there’s a lot of division among Democrats about where to go, and I think that’s an understandable, and in some ways healthy debate, which is: What’s the right story for our party going forward? What’s the right coalition? There’s a lot of anxiety, understandably, about how the Democratic Party coalition seems to be falling apart.

And then the third thing that makes this very challenging is that the environment is different. Some of the key institutions that were pillars and guardrails in 2017–2020 are not there in the same way. One of those is the courts—in large part because of Trump’s first presidency. There’s been a much more profound takeover of the federal courts, especially at the Supreme Court level. The other one is journalism—your industry, Perry—where the years and years of stress on local journalism, national journalism, you see the consolidation happening, you see people who have more of an 
“Opinion” background like Bari Weiss taking over CBS News.

It’s very different from what we were in. So we shouldn’t be surprised that resisting Trump and finding a path forward is much harder this time around than before. But obviously that makes the project all the more important.

Bacon: So you were talking about what states could do even before Trump took office. What did you imagine—let’s go back to the initial writing you were doing. What did you hope [for] states specifically? Why states, why governors—obviously I mean blue state governors. So talk about what you saw the in the potential for states.  Why were they an important mechanism for resistance? 

Gerney: Well, I think states are obviously fundamental in our structure and the structure of democracy, and I think we don’t think about it every day, but the United States is a creation of a bunch of states. It’s sort of the outcome of a contract between states, and we think of divided power as between Congress and the Supreme Court and the presidency, but another critical part of the constitutional structure is the divide between federal power and state power.

And if you look at American history, for better or worse—and for probably most of American history, it’s been for the worse—states have been an enormous source of power and resistance to the federal government. You saw after the Civil War, there was a hundred years where a group of states were able to resist civil rights, and it signals the sort of structural centrality that states have.

And if you think about—California’s economy is the fourth-largest economy in the world, and in an enormous number of policy areas—schools, sanitation, things that are our daily life things—most of that is done at the state level. And so there’s an enormous source of power.

I think the other reason I think about states is if you look at the Biden years and try to think, “What was the MAGA opposition that put Trump back in power?” We can think that the center of gravity was at Mar-a-Lago and on Trump’s Twitter or Truth Social account, but I think the true centers of gravity were in state capitals, where Republican governors and attorneys general and treasurers were using their power in a coordinated way—in an unprecedented way—to undermine the Biden administration and to sort of push their policy prerogatives forward, interfere with blue states.

You saw migrant bussing where Texas moved 125,000 migrants, undocumented migrants, into New York and Illinois and other states, that precipitated a sort of logistical crisis, a political crisis. So I think you have a little bit of a model of what states can do to push forward their own prerogatives, to work together, and to undermine a federal government that they disagree with.

Bacon: So that model, while I don’t agree with its policy vision, was a model that was coordinated. You’re talking about Greg Abbot, you’re talking about attorney generals and various other states. So you had written before Trump took over, “Here’s a model we should use.” So how is that going? Are the are the Democratic governors in democratic states doing something—let’s tell the good story first. What are the parts of that model or [according to] that model they have used?

Gerney: Well, I think a lot of it is happening. First of all, let’s not pretend this is an easy pathway or some sort of silver bullet. This is a very hard, challenging position that these governors and attorneys general are in.

But if you look at, for example, the attorneys general, they’ve filed hundreds of cases to block Trump administration initiatives, to block the Trump administration from stealing money from states that they’re obligated by statute to provide. Many of those lawsuits have been successful, at least at the preliminary stages.

I think you see among governors, many of them finding their own way to push back and push against the Trump administration. Obviously, a big one is, you know, Trump basically ordered Republican governors, particularly Greg Abbott in Texas, to redistrict their states to try to get an advantage in the 2026 congressional elections, which Texas has proceeded to do. Other Republican states are looking at doing it. The Texas legislators—the Democrats—left the state to try to temporarily block it.

But the real response that’s available to blue states is to counter, and that’s what California has done. Gavin Newsom has led an effort to get an initiative on the ballot to allow California to override its independent redistricting for several cycles of elections to counter Texas. And that’s not because Democrats are against independent redistricting, but I think they have to understand that if you have one side that is trying to steal an election because they can’t win—talking about the OBB mega bill that takes away healthcare for millions of people, and cuts taxes for billionaires—that you need a way to respond when they are stacking the deck in their favor.

And so I think you see more of that happening, and I think the redistricting thing was something of a mind shift, where you saw some of the governors becoming more active. Obviously, an area of big challenge, I’m in Chicago today, is the issue of ICE and federal agents and National Guard troops who are in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. (which of course is not a state, which ties their hands a little bit in how they can push back). And clearly, this is over the will of the people in those states, over the will of the governors of those states, and trying to provoke a crisis.

And so I think that the governors are working on how to respond to this challenge. It’s not easy, but I think there are a lot of tools and levers that they’re beginning to use, and more that they can use, to take the initiative narratively, but also using legal power, economic power, political power.

Bacon: One thing I didn’t anticipate, maybe you did, was how aggressively Trump has gone after blue states, blue cities, particularly. I don’t think I expected—maybe the ICE raids I expected, but the combination of the ICE and the National Guard. In some ways, the Trump administration is really taking on cities in a way they didn’t the first time around. Is that fair to say? 

Gerney: I think that’s fair to say. I think that it’s not just that—One way to interpret it would be that blue states have a bunch of policies that Trump and his allies don’t seem to like, things like Medicaid expansion that gives more healthcare to low- and middle-income working people, and that the reason that blue states are getting targeted more is because they’re going after policies they don’t like.

But even if that’s part of it, if you look at what they’re actually doing, they’re clearly picking fights and trying to really target blue states, even on things that would seem to be more neutral. So, for example, the Department of Transportation is rewriting its grant funding formulas to take into account a bunch of factors that will lead to blue states getting less funding and red states getting more funding.

And it’s really interesting, because in the Biden administration you saw Democrats kind of do the opposite of this, which is, in the construction of the IRA—the big Biden bill that put a lot of investment in clean energy infrastructure—the structure of the bill actually sent more money to red states and red districts. And part of the political strategy behind that was like, “Hey, let’s get representatives from people who don’t agree with us as much on this to see the benefit of this policy.”

What you see with Trump is the opposite, which is reward your friends, punish your enemies, and beat them into submission. But I think there’s a strategy to counter that.

Bacon: Talk about the—I’m leery of of these terms, but there’s a piece in Mother Jones that I haven’t got to read yet, but it talks about the idea of California is doing a soft secession. Some of my other guests have used the term “civil war,” not that we have an issue like slavery, but more that the Civil War had a big element of states being in conflict with the federal government. Is there a real level of conflict between the blue states and the federal government right now, and resistance from the states to the federal government? I don’t love the term “civil war,” but we’re in something like that kind of conflict, right?

Gerney: I think we want to be careful with these kinds of terms. Probably the metaphor that I’ve thought about the most is sort of a cold civil war, and really, a cold war, which is something like the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. There are flashpoints, there are moments of actual, I guess, violent conflict or violent outbursts, but it’s really about two opposing ideologies and sort of a battle for relative power.

And I think when you view it in that lens, one of the best pathways—I think that [for] most big-D Democrats and small-d democrats who want to save American democracy, the objective is to get through this era and to get to some sort of new normal, some sort of more stable agreement between the various factions and states in our country, and something that is durable and, frankly, more united. But how do we get from where we are to that?

In my mind, a critical set of approaches are deterrence and hardball. I think you see this in the redistricting context: If you don’t like partisan redistricting, if you let one side unilaterally do it, they’re going to keep doing it. The way to get to some sort of compromise is to credibly convince Republicans, hey, you can do a mid-cycle redistricting—which, by the way, costs money, it’s sort of a mess, it’s not good for voters because one election you have one representative, another election you have another representative, it messes up accountability. It’s not a good way to run a country. But if they think they can get a political advantage or partisan advantage, they’re going to do it.

But if you can credibly show that you’re not going to let that happen, you’re creating the conditions where some sort of détente or compromise is more possible. And I think we need to think in that mindset in a lot of different areas. Because, number one, I think it’ll be critical to get through the next three years—but this is not a three-year problem. Even if a Democrat is elected in 2029, even if Democrats win the House and Senate, I don’t think this is going to reset to normal on its own, in part because MAGA has taken over the federal courts.

There [are] decades of federalism jurisprudence which essentially pushes power down to the states. And I think we should be interested in state and local power, because that’s where we’re going to solve a lot of the problems that our country faces, too. For example, inside the Democratic coalition, a big debate in the last year has been the so-called “abundance” theory of where Democrats should go—Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book by that title, but others have been talking about it. It’s sort of a critique of blue states and how they’ve governed, and tied their hands on building up clean energy and housing and things like that.

I think that is, whether you like it or not, something to think about: We need to be more focused on how we can leverage our power, make progress, attract people to blue states. Because I think there are essentially two competing worldviews in this country, and if people who want to save democracy want to do that, we have to both counter the interference in our own states where it’s happening, but we also have to grow and build places that people want to be part of.

A big challenge for blue states in the last five years, for example, is that there’s been a net population loss from blue states to red states of five million people. That’s driven especially by affordability—and that’s something that’s got to change. There is no political future for blue states or Democrats in this country if it becomes a collection of very nice, upper-middle-class, suburban, super-liberal places where only a handful of people can afford to live. That’s not going to work.

So I think there’s a lot of work to do—both to counter red states and the hostile federal government, but also to reimagine how we govern in blue states and cities to make them really great places to live across the board.

Bacon: Let me drill in a couple of things you said. Cold civil war. Did that start in 2015, or 2025, or—what’s the time period? Because it’s not just about Trump. In some ways, these competing ideologies existed a little bit longer. Define that term a little bit, or define what we’re talking about. 

Gerney: If you look at a few different indicators in data and research, it’s probably been going on—or growing—for about 30 years. I think it kind of started in the 1990s.

For example, one measure of differences between blue states and red states are the laws they end up adopting on different issues. A few researchers have looked at what I would term “policy divergence”—which the trend of blue states and red states adopting more divergent, different, policies across different issues: guns, abortion, taxes, you name it.

And if you look from the New Deal to basically the year 2000, across all these issues, there isn’t growing differences between blue states and red states in the policies they were adopting. If anything, there is some convergence—the policies are becoming less differentiated across these blocs of states. But in the last 25 years, that difference just keeps growing and growing and growing. So the difference between living in a blue state and a red state has become much more consequential.

For example, if you go to some other country and somebody asks you, “Hey, Perry, tell me—what are the laws on guns in America?” It totally depends where you are. It’s pretty different in Massachusetts and Kentucky. “What are the laws on abortion in America?” We used to have a somewhat consistent set of rules on abortion. Now we have wildly varied rules.

And I think that’s made this contest more consequential, which is part of what these blocs of states and parties are looking for when they take power in the federal government, is, “Hey, can we take our way and impose it on the rest of the country?”

Ideologically, conservatives used to talk 30 years ago about small government and devolving power to the states. But you see in Trump—probably the most maximalist president in terms of executive power—it’s not just about putting power in the executive branch. It’s about trying to intimidate the Federal Reserve, get rid of the independent agencies, and put all the power in the president himself.

That’s a real danger in terms of the risk of autocracy. And I think there’s a playbook about how to respond to that, and I think state power—and a state response—is at the center of that playbook.

Bacon: You mentioned some highlights of the coordinated lawsuits. OK, those are the highlights of the “Blue America” response. What are some things you wish there was more [of]? Some lowlights, or things that have not happened the way you wish they were in terms of the blue state response?

Gerney: Well, I think that there’s one thing from the red-state response in the Biden years, is you saw a lot of activity trying to push corporate decision-making. Red states didn’t like ESG—that’s environmental, social, and governance investing strategies. They didn’t like DEI. And they started using their pension fund investments and state procurement power to push companies out of those kinds of practices.

For example, Texas took $8 billion from the teachers’ pension fund and pulled it out of BlackRock, a big Wall Street financial firm that was the biggest promoter of this  environmental investment strategy. BlackRock pulled out of ESG investing. They eventually have gotten off Texas’s blacklist. And they’ve really used that power—as investors, as procurers—to change corporate America.

That’s a battle blue states should be more effective in fighting, in part because blue states have larger economies, higher GDP, higher GDP per capita. They have larger state governments, and they have larger state workforces with more generous pension benefits. If you look at pensions, blue states have 75 percent more money invested than red states. So it’s like a middleweight fighter taking on a heavyweight fighter—but the heavyweight fighter hasn’t responded.

Republicans talk a lot about “woke capitalism” and how the government is interfering in the marketplace, but in the last few years, they’re the ones who’ve been doing it. You see this now at the federal level, where Trump is going company by company, and investing money in Intel. And if we wonder why there’s been this widespread corporate capitulation to Trump, I don’t think it started right after the election—it started a few years ago when the states started using their power.

And again, this may not be something we want to do. What we probably should be doing with pension fund investments is trying to get the best return possible so that firefighters and teachers can retire securely and safely. But if red states are going to use that power to try to push around companies, and control their practices, and turn them into people who will fund their campaigns, I think blue states need to use powers like that—places where they actually have more power—to respond accordingly.

Bacon: You used the words hardball and deterrence a few minutes ago. So I think part of this is—and even when we’ve talked a few times—every time you talk, I’m sort of like, “Do I really want California to be using their pension to, like, force…” But the answer to these questions has got to be yes—part of what you’re saying is, things that make me queasy in sort of a liberal way, are gonna [happen]. We’re in a fight over power, and that requires hardball. Is that the subtext here, or the actual text?

Gerney: I think that’s right. For example, in the last 24 hours, Governor Pritzker and Governor Newsom sent letters to the National Governors Association, which is the bipartisan coalition of all 50 governors—and they said, “Hey, if you’re not going to say something about National Guard troops coming into our states without our request, we’re going to drop out of this organization.” And I think that’s a healthy response to something that’s not working anymore.

I think we have to be able to look squarely at what we have. At the end of the day, yes, we want to have a national bipartisan governors association where they talk about ideas across party lines. But if the red-state governors are not going to say something about something that is an across-the-board violation of the Constitution and of the role of states, what’s the point of being in something like this?

And look, I’ve talked about some of the challenges that blue states have around affordability and this sort of net migration toward red states. But blue states have a lot to be proud of too. If you look at educational outcomes, if you look at life expectancy—there’s a big difference. If you look at crime in cities—Republicans talk a lot about crime in Chicago and cities like that, but if you look at crime across states and control for urbanization, there’s more crime in red states. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think there’s a lot that’s going reasonably well in blue states, and part of what you want to do is tell that story.

There are some places where you can leverage those differences: there’s insurance regulation at the state level. Should people be subsidizing Florida property insurance when there’s all this home-insurance risk in Florida because the policies are not doing anything about climate change? I think there are a lot of tools that are potentially available to create economic pressure to get the kinds of policy incentives that more of us would like to see.

Bacon: I think we’ve talked about Pritzker and Newsom a few times. We’ve talked about Democratic AGs. Are the other Democratic governors involved in resisting? I don’t know, but part of it is Newsom and Pritzker are presumably running for president, so I think that’s part of what’s going on. That’s why the media covers them. But are the other Democratic governors involved in resisting?

Gerney: I think different governors are taking different approaches—and of course they represent very different states. I think, Perry, you’re from Kentucky, so you’ve got a Democratic governor, Beshear, who’s in a very red state. And, you know, I think the right answer for governors is that you can’t—you can’t do it [where] everyone does the same thing.

I do think you see a number of governors who are creatively pushing back in different ways. For example, President Trump was talking about sending the National Guard to Baltimore, saying Baltimore’s out of control with crime, when in fact crime has been going down there for many years. Wes Moore, the governor there, said, “Hey, why don’t you come to Baltimore and walk around with me, and come see for yourself.” I thought it was a creative, kind of playful response that shut the president up.

Another governor who I think has handled this era pretty well is Kathy Hochul, the New York state governor. After the November election, she had the second-lowest favorability rating of any governor in the country. Now she has a positive favorability rating. I think part of that is that she’s counter-punched, in different ways, at different times, with the Trump administration.

She’s done that even though there are things the state has to negotiate with the Trump administration around. For example, there’s a congestion pricing plan for New York City that has to do with how cars are tolled to reduce congestion and raise revenue. The Trump administration tries to block it. But I think she’s both been punching at times, negotiating at other times, and I think that’s the best strategy with Trump—which is, if you put your hands up right away, he’s just going to bowl you over and keep taking. 

Bacon: Let’s move to other institutions and then before we close here. I want to talk about cities ... Let’s talk about cities first.  Are there any are there good—are there useful things cities are doing, useful resistant cities, and are there things that cities could be doing better. 

Gerney: Obviously, cities vary enormously in their size, their budgets, etc. A huge—

Bacon: Let’s take the 50 largest cities—Boston, Chicago—let’s take the 50 largest cities, for now. 

Gerney: I think that cities—they’re on the front lines of these questions, whether it’s crime or education—and so they have real choices to make about how much are they going to facilitate things like the ICE raids, or not participate, or try to protect people. So I think there is a lot for cities to do.

I think their hands, constitutionally, are a bit more tied up than states’. Cities don’t exist in the Constitution, states do. And cities are basically creations of states. So in some states, cities are very powerful. So New York City, for example, has a massive budget—New York City’s budget is the size of the state of Florida’s.

And right now, there’s this mayoral campaign, and Zohran Mamdani seems like he’s the favorite to win the general election. I think that will be a real bellwether for other mayors, and I also think it’ll be a real point of contestation with Trump. Trump’s from New York, it’s the biggest city, and he’s definitely wanted to use Mamdani as something of a foil. I think you may see a lot of confrontation shifting to New York in the new year, with a new mayor.

Bacon: We mentioned corporations a little bit earlier, but I mean, it’s corporations. I wish they were doing more, but is that probably the most logical place where, of course, they’re falling in line? Maybe there’s nothing to expect beyond that, or ... ?

Gerney: I think there’s been a massive capitulation by businesses, and they’re going to look at their bottom lines and take the path of least resistance. That’s what businesses are mostly going to do. But I also think there’s been some mistakes and overreactions.

For example, in the capitulating law firms, there were a lot of big law firms that were under pressure from Trump to settle with the Trump administration and offer free legal services to president Trump’s preferred causes. The firms that settled—a lot of them have lost lawyers who’ve left, they’ve lost some clients. And then the firms that fought back, based on what accounts there are, seem to be doing quite well.

And part of that is, if you’re in a dispute with someone, do you want to hire the lawyer who might be cowed and give up because there’s a little pressure, or do you want the lawyer who’s never going to back down? I think it’s a real problem for them—big businesses, global businesses. They have to recognize, yes, who’s the president of the United States matters, and what the policies of the United States are matter. But they also have to sell across these 50 states—and who the governors are, what the policies are in those states matter, what the policies are around the world matter. 

And they have to think about what’s rational for their businesses. So as it relates, for example, to climate change: Donald Trump may decide that climate change is a hoax, that he hates windmills, and that he wants to push businesses out of that. And he’s had some success in bullying businesses so far. But they have to think, what is the real challenge here? What are the other markets and actors that are ultimately going to set the rules around this? What is strategy that ultimately makes sense?

There’s a lot of power in influencing those decisions, especially among blue states. If you can coordinate your regulatory incentives, you may see businesses begin to behave differently. And I think you may see them begin to behave differently as we get closer to the end of the Trump administration. Despite his threats to run for a third term—which he’s not constitutionally allowed to do—someday this is going to end. It doesn’t mean the challenges are going to end, but every actor is going to be assessing, “What makes sense for me this month?” But also they’ll be remembering that what they do this month may have consequences 12 months, 24 months from now.

Bacon: Let me close—I want to hit four other institutions, and I’ll give you my four other parts of our [side], and I’ll let you—I’ll give my views on them and then see what you think.

So my sense is: Congressional Democrats started off pretty poorly in terms of this, but they’ve gotten more aggressive now. I think you’ve been urging me, when you and I have talked, that states might be a better venue for this in any way because they have more actual power. But I think congressional Democrats are getting better, but are not great.

I think the public has been there from the beginning. If you look at the No Kings protests and things [like that], the public—and Trump’s approval rating has gone down a lot—the public seems to be resisting and opposing pretty strongly, I’d say.

Higher education I’ve been very disappointed by, and surprisingly so — another place where I think capitulation has been too fast and really bad. And then the news media is another place I’d say has been generally disappointing—though you’ve got great work at ProPublica, The New Republic, some of the more left-wing publications have done pretty well, I’d say—but the sort of mainstream.

So—news media, higher ed, congressional Democrats, the public. Any of those you want to take, disagree with me about, or want to amplify?

Gerney: I’ll try to do a little bit of each. Congressional Democrats—I appreciate what they’re doing right now with the standoff on the shutdown. I think they’ve settled on a clear ask around health care that makes a lot of sense.

I also think their actual leverage and power are quite limited, so they have a hard hand to play. Part of the reason we’ve been more focused on states and governors and attorneys general, is that they just have a lot more they can do to successfully obstruct and offer a different path forward.

On media, it’s a huge challenge, as you know, and it started long before the Trump administration. Because of changes in social media platforms and how advertising works, there’s been incredible stress in this industry that’s driving some consolidation. But what’s really of concern, is that the Trump administration using its leverage as a regulator to influence—to make news organizations to capitulate.

There was the bogus Disney–George Stephanopoulos settlement. Then there was the 60 Minutes bogus settlement and lawsuit. And I think what you’re seeing—Republicans have complained for a long time about mainstream media. I think what’s going to be left of mainstream media in a couple of years is very consolidated and largely aligned with Trump.

So I think it’ll be really important in this environment for there to be more alternative media—and for people to become part of the media more. I think it’ll be a lot of Substack video chats, and newsletters, and different places that will be essential. It doesn’t mean that all the pillars of media are falling apart. A lot of people complain about The New York Times, but I think they’ve probably handled this last ten months reasonably well. But it’s a real challenge.

Bacon: And on that note, I think it’s been a great conversation. You’ve given us some positive things to think about, which I think is important, in that the states are resisting. I think it’s an important story that you’re explaining. Anything else you want to finish on, anything else you wanna add?

Gerney: My advice for regular people who are trying to figure out how to get involved and make a difference: People have often said, “Think globally, act locally.” I’d really look around you, and your city councils, your state legislators, your state comptrollers, offices you may not be paying much attention to, and start thinking about what you want from them.

How could it make where you are work better and be a better place to live? But also, how can they do something—use your power, to help them use their power, to push back?

Bacon: That’s great. Arkadi, where can people find your work? I don’t think you do a ton of social media, but are there things you’ve written that you want to highlight?

Gerney: I had an op-ed in The Washington Post, something in Democracy Journal, the American Prospect—if you Google my name, you’ll find it—but hopefully more coming soon. 

Bacon: Good. Arkadi, thanks for joining us. Good to see you.

Gerney: Thanks, Perry. Bye.  

Newsom and Pritzker Are Showing How to Attack an Authoritarian Crook - 2025-10-08T08:59:00Z

In the latest episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon, Democratic strategist Arkadi Gerney argues that the United States is in the midst of a “cold civil war.” For liberals to win it, they must use “hardball” tactics, including borrowing from the Republicans’ playbook. Gerney says that Republican governors and attorneys general smartly coordinated during Joe Biden’s presidency to thwart him. He praised Democratic attorneys general for taking a similar tack, constantly filing and at times winning lawsuits against the Trump administration. He also lauded California Governor Gavin Newsom for immediately responding to Texas’s redistricting scheme with a proposal for California to redraw its district lines in ways favorable to Democrats. Newsom and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s threat to leave the bipartisan National Governors Association unless it condemns Trump’s National Guard deployments was also a savvy move, he says. A big and unresolved challenge for Democrats, according to Gerney, is dealing with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the guard deployments from Trump that target Democratic-leaning cities in blue states. You can read the transcript here.

MAGA Loses Its Collective Mind Over New Country Song Bashing ICE - 2025-10-07T21:57:55Z

Trump Republicans aren’t too happy about the new Zach Bryan song coming for the airwaves.

The Grammy award–winning country music singer released a snippet of an unreleased track, “Bad News,” on his Instagram over the weekend. From the minute-long preview, “Bad News” appears to be an old-fashioned protest song that captures scenes of a disintegrating America, taking swipes at ICE while lamenting the “fading of the red, white, and blue.”

“I heard the cops came / Cocky motherfuckers, ain’t they?” sings Bryan. “And ICE is gonna come bust down your door / Try to build a house no one builds no more / But I got a telephone / Kids are all scared and all alone.

“The bars stopped bumping, the rock stopped rolling / The middlе fingers rising, and it won’t stop showing / Got some bad news / Thе fading of the red, white and blue,” the song continues.

Bryan, a self-described “total libertarian,” has rarely dipped his toe into national politics. In 2023, he publicly feuded with fellow country music star Travis Tritt after Bud Light opted to feature a transgender activist in one of its commercials. At the time, Bryan warned his fans against “insulting transgender people.”

But this weekend’s teaser absolutely jolted supporters of the president’s agenda, particularly those in the country music enclave, who have since expressed their disinterest in Bryan’s foray into political commentary.

Nashville singer Jake Owen called Bryan a tool. Big & Rich’s John Rich sarcastically posited there might be a “large ‘anti law enforcement’ wing of the country music fanbase” that Bryan could tap into.

Incredibly, the Trump administration also commented on the pop culture development. In an email to Rolling Stone, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Bryan should “stick to Pink Skies,” referring to the musician’s song about a funeral. McLaughlin reiterated the comment on X Tuesday.

The White House shared its two cents, rejecting Bryan’s vision while reiterating Donald Trump’s “mandate from the people” governing philosophy.

“While Zach Bryan wants to Open The Gates to criminal illegal aliens and has Condemned heroic ICE officers, Something in the Orange tells me a majority of Americans disagree with him and support President Trump’s great American Revival. Godspeed, Zach!” said spokeswoman Abigail Jackson in a statement to Axios.

Mike Johnson Struggles to Explain Delay in Swearing In Democratic Rep - 2025-10-07T20:40:34Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday said he will schedule the long-awaited swearing-in of Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva “as soon as she wants.” That’s not true, as that day has already come and gone.

After handily winning a special election in Arizona two weeks ago, Grijalva is poised to give Democrats some more power in the House—and also, notably, supply the deciding signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein files.

But Johnson has stalled Grijalva’s swearing-in thus far, even calling the House in recess (seemingly in order to pressure Senate Democrats to cave on the shutdown). Many Democrats—Grijalva included—have chalked the delay up to an attempt to prevent the release of the Epstein files.

Johnson on Tuesday pushed back against that idea, telling CNN reporter Manu Raju, “It has nothing to do with that at all,” and that he would “swear her in when everybody gets back.” But, as Raju noted, there’s no need to wait for a full regular session; Grijalva could be sworn in during one of the brief, minutes-long pro forma House sessions regularly taking place during the recess.

After all, Johnson swore in Republican Representatives Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine during a pro forma session in April. At a pro forma session last week, Democratic lawmakers shouted at the presiding member (Johnson was not in attendance) to swear in the newly elected Democrat, but their pleas fell on deaf ears, and the session was quickly gaveled out.

So why not swear Grijalva in during a pro forma? Throwing up his hands, Johnson replied Tuesday: “Uh, look. We’ll schedule it, I guess, as soon as she wants.”

This was clearly a cop-out, considering Grijalva has, in fact, publicly called for her swearing-in repeatedly over the past two weeks. A few examples: In an interview published three days after her election, Grijalva spoke out against Johnson for dragging his feet. Three days after that, she wrote on social media that “there’s no reason why Speaker Johnson cannot swear me in tomorrow during the pro forma session,” citing the cases of Patronis and Fine.

On Monday, she put it even more directly: “Swear me in NOW,” she posted on X, tagging Johnson’s profile.

Professor Flees to Europe After Turning Point USA Calls Him Antifa - 2025-10-07T20:27:43Z

Author and Rutgers University history professor Mark Bray is taking his wife and children to Europe after facing mounting death threats, some of which were sent to his home address.

Bray made the announcement on Monday, shortly after the school’s Turning Point USA chapter called for his termination and claimed his research—which focuses on the history of leftist movements—“puts conservative students at risk for antifa to come in.”

“You have a teacher that so often promotes political violence, especially in his book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, which talks about militant fascism, which is on term with political violence,” Rutgers Turning Point chapter treasurer Megyn Doyle told Fox News last week.

A petition from the university’s Turning Point chapter also accused Bray of being “a prominent leader of the antifa movement on campus.” Bray states that he is against facism, not conservative students on campus.

Even still, the so-called free speech club got their wish. In an email to his students later posted on the Rutgers University subreddit, Bray said his class would be online for the rest of the semester as he and his family go to Europe out of fear for their safety.

Hi everyone in Terrorism,

Unfortunately my situation has gotten worse recently. This weekend, shortly after some negative media and social media attention (some of which, ironically enough, accused me of being a “terrorist”), I received another death threat and a separate threat that included my home address. The University and the authorities have been notified. Since my family and I do not feel safe in our home at the moment, we are moving for the year to Europe. Truly I am so bummed about not being able to spend time with you all in the classroom. I really enjoyed our conversations.

Bray went on to notify the students that he’d be moving the class online asynchronously until the midterm, given the time difference.

This chilling news comes as President Trump designates antifa as a terrorist organization, even as he’s unable to name a single leader of the group—because it doesn’t exist. Trump also declared any vaguely leftist rhetoric to be domestic terrorism in his NPSM-7 memo.

“Wait, so they terrorize, dox him, and he’s the terrorist?” one comment on r/Rutgers read.

“I loved him as a professor,” said another. “He was great at challenging us to argue more nuanced points. He made me such a better writer. I’m honestly in so much shock. I was only in class with him like three years ago.”

Cognitive Decline? Trump Goes on Bizarre Rant About “Water Drugs” - 2025-10-07T19:33:33Z

Donald Trump has a strange new excuse for attacking Venezuelans.

Seated beside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during a White House press conference Tuesday, the president blamed his administration’s dubious airstrikes on several Venezuelan boats allegedly carrying what he described as “water drugs.”

“We call them the water drugs,” Trump said. “The drugs that come in through water. They’re not coming.”

“There are no boats anymore. Frankly, there are no fishing boats. There are no boats out there, period, if you want to know the truth. We’re saying, ‘Does anybody go fishing anymore?’ The fact is we knocked out, probably saved at least 100,000 American lives—Canadian lives, by taking out all those boats coming in,” Trump said.

He did not elaborate on how his administration had reached the conclusion that killing more than a dozen Venezuelans outside of U.S. waters could save so many people in the northern hemisphere.

Over the last several weeks, the U.S. has destroyed at least four small Venezuelan boats traversing international waters that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 21 have been killed in the attacks.

In a memo to Congress on Thursday, Trump declared that the U.S. government is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels.

“The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations,” the leaked memo, obtained by the Associated Press, read.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro has accused the Trump administration of violating U.S. and international laws by striking the boats. He condemned the attacks as a “heinous crime,” and also suggested that the strikes were an attempt to goad Venezuela into a “major war.”

“Do Something B*tch”: Damning Video Shows CBP Agent Shooting Protester - 2025-10-07T19:32:46Z

Is the Department of Homeland Security lying about the victim of yet another shooting by an immigration enforcement officer?

Marimar Martinez, 30, was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago Saturday, after she and several other drivers trailed the officers’ car through the Chicago streets. In a press release, DHS claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.”

Martinez and 21-year old Anthony Ruiz were both charged with felony assault of a federal officer. But Christopher Parente, Martinez’s attorney, claimed during a federal court hearing Tuesday that body-camera footage disproved the government’s claim, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Parente said that he had repeatedly viewed the footage, and it appeared that the agent suddenly turned his wheel, indicating that Border Patrol had rammed into Martinez’s car and not the other way around. That officer was reportedly caught saying, “Do something, bitch,” before leaping out of the car and shooting her multiple times within a matter of seconds.

Parente also claimed the body camera footage captured another officer asking, “Hey, what happened?” The first officer pointed to his body camera and said, “Hey, don’t speak. You’re good.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Hennessy, arguing that the duo should not be released pending trial, told the judge that Martinez had been following the agents for 30 minutes before the shooting happened. He claimed that body camera footage showed the agents fretting that their cars were going to collide. “We’re getting boxed in! We gotta get out of here! She’s going to make contact!” one of the agents reportedly said, before the car was allegedly hit on both sides.

Hennessey claimed that Martinez and Ruiz were “extremely dangerous and extremely reckless,” but Parente argued that the Border Patrol agents careening through the streets of Chicago while carrying assault rifles were the bigger threat.

U.S. District Judge Heather McShain denied the government’s bid to keep Martinez and Ruiz locked up, saying it was “a miracle” that no one was more seriously injured.

Last month, DHS claimed that ICE had shot and killed “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving,” while trying to detain him—but a closer look found that the man had no criminal history, and his last traffic violation was in 2013. DHS also claimed that the ICE agent responsible for the shooting had been “seriously injured” in the line of duty, but bodycam videos from shortly after the incident showed the agent describing his injuries as “nothing major.” One witness speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that ICE’s account of the fatal shooting had been inaccurate, and questioned whether the incident would be properly investigated.

Pam Bondi Refuses Simple Yes-or-No Question on Damning Tom Homan Tape - 2025-10-07T18:46:10Z

Attorney General Pam Bondi sidestepped a series of simple yes-or-no questions at a Senate judiciary hearing on Tuesday about border czar Tom Homan and the $50,000 in cash he allegedly accepted from undercover FBI agents in a paper Cava bag.  

“There’s a tape, right, with Mr. Homan. First of all, is there a tape that has audio and video of the transfer of the $50,000?” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked Bondi, referencing reports that such a recording indeed exists. 

“You would have to talk to Director Patel about that,” Bondi replied.

“No, I’m talking to you.” 

“I don’t know the answer, Senator.” 

“You do know the answer to that,” Whitehouse pressed. 

“Don’t call me a liar!” Bondi shouted. 

“I didn’t call you a liar.”

“You just said I know the answer, I said I don’t know the answer, you have to talk to Director Patel.”

“Let me put it another way. If you don’t know, why don’t you know whether there was a tape and video?” 

“Senator, I believe that was resolved prior to my confirmation as attorney general.” 

Bondi continued to insist that she had no clue about the investigation, and that Director Patel “resolving” the case was enough for her. 

“But it’s not resolved. There’s $50,000. Homan has it, or somebody has it,” Whitehouse responded. “Do you have no interest in knowing where it is?” 

“You’re not gonna sit here and slander Tom Homan.” 

​​

Shortly thereafter, Bondi had a similar spat with Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. 

“You were asked by my colleague from Vermont, whether or not you will support providing a video or audio tape if it exists, of Mr. Homan taking $50,000 in bribe money from the FBI,” Schiff said, referring to Whitehouse. “Will you support a request by this committee to provide that tape or tapes to the committee, yes or no.” 

“Senator Schiff, you can talk to Director Patel about that,” Bondi replied.

“Well I’m talking to you about it. You’re the attorney general. This will be your decision. Will you support—”

“You don’t have to tell me what is my decision and what is not my decision, you think you got a gotcha with Tom Homan our border czar, who’s been out there fighting for our country—”

“You don’t have to refer to the FBI director to pass the buck. So I’m asking you, will you support a request, so that the committee, or indeed I believe the American people should be able to see that video or audio tape. Will you support that request?” 

“Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him?” Bondi shot back, avoiding the question entirely and pivoting to Hunter Biden theories. 

Our very own FBI bribed Tom Homan with $50,000 and he accepted it. Now the attorney general is pretending that she doesn’t know anything about it at all, and is instead demanding that Schiff say he’s sorry rather than acknowledging a very warranted further investigation into Homan’s bribe. 

Schiff Lists Every Question Pam Bondi Ignored as She Melts Down - 2025-10-07T18:42:13Z

Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California took Attorney General Pam Bondi to task Tuesday for her incessant deflections and evasions throughout a Senate judiciary hearing.

Bondi had verbally attacked Democratic senators throughout the hearing rather than answer their questions. Schiff was, evidently, keeping track of questions Bondi left unanswered, and he ran through the lengthy (yet inexhaustive) list after the attorney general derailed his own inquiry about releasing a video of Tom Homan, now Trump’s border czar, accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents in 2024.

“I think it’s valuable that the American people get a sense of what you’ve refused to answer today,” Schiff told Bondi. The following questions are those that Schiff noted went unanswered, or were met with personal attacks, by the attorney general:

1. Did Bondi consult with career ethics lawyers when she approved Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million jet gifted by Qatar’s royal family?

2. Who ordered that Donald Trump’s name be flagged in the FBI’s review of the Epstein files?

3. Did Homan keep his $50,000 from the undercover agents?

4. Did Homan pay taxes on the $50,000?

5. Did DOJ prosecutors determine there was “insufficient evidence” to charge former FBI Director James Comey before he was indicted?

6. How did the administration determine whether U.S. military strikes on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean were legal?

(Here, Bondi interrupted, asking the senator, who worked for the justice department before his career in politics, “Do you have a law degree, Senator Schiff?”)

7. Did Bondi discuss indicting Comey with Trump?

8. Did Bondi approve the dismissal of antitrust lawyers who opposed the Hewlett Packard–Juniper merger?

9. Does Bondi support a “compensation fund” for people prosecuted in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots?

10. Is Bondi firing career prosecutors for working on January 6 investigations?

11. Does Bondi think government officials must follow court orders?

After concluding the list, Schiff made the following statement, though he was peppered with interruptions from Bondi—who brought up red herrings, such as wildfires and riots in his home state, and threw personal barbs, calling the senator a “failed lawyer.”

This is supposed to be an oversight hearing of the Justice Department, and it comes in the wake of an indictment called for by the president of one of his enemies. This is supposed to be an oversight hearing, and it comes in the wake of revelations that a top administration official took $50,000 in a bag, and this department made that investigation go away. This is supposed to be an oversight hearing, when dozens of prosecutors have been fired simply because they worked on cases investigating the former president.… This is supposed to be an oversight hearing in which members of Congress can get serious answers to serious questions about … the cover-up of corruption, about the prosecution of the president’s enemies.

Schiff implored members of the committee to “demand answers to those questions” and to refuse “personal slander as an answer to those questions.” Bondi in turn said Schiff should apologize for “slandering” Trump.

Trump Ignores Crucial Question on Insurrection Act in Chicago - 2025-10-07T18:22:25Z

Invoking the Insurrection Act is still very much on the table, according to the president.

Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to enforce a nineteenth-century law that would let him utilize the military for domestic purposes, allowing the troops to police and arrest citizens. If invoked, Trump would be able to deploy active duty forces in order to enact his agenda, which involves federalizing the law enforcement agencies of Democratic cities.

“I’d do it if it was necessary. So far it hasn’t been necessary. But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Trump has claimed that the troops are a necessary precaution to safeguard federal buildings and agents enacting his administration’s immigration agenda.

“If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that. I mean, I want to make sure that people aren’t killed. We have to make sure that our cities are safe,” Trump continued.

The law has not been invoked since 1992, when President George H. W. Bush used it to subdue riots in Los Angeles after the local police force brutalized Rodney King.

Trump has floated the idea of leveraging the Insurrection Act for years, though the idea has picked up steam since his inauguration.

But the president has so far not aligned his desire for militaristic order with quelling real violence in the country. After mass shootings devastated communities in Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Illinois late last month, the president decided to order the National Guard to the hipster paradise of Portland. His rationale for sending them, according to the president himself, was not informed by statistics or data, but because of something he saw on TV.

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said at the time, referring to a phone call he had with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place.… It looks like terrible.”

So far, federal judges have temporarily staved off Trump’s efforts to force the National Guard into Oregon. In the meantime, though, the president has directed the Guard to deploy to Chicago and Memphis. He has already federalized the law enforcement of Washington, D.C., as well as areas of Los Angeles.

“What President Trump is trying to do is an abuse of power,” Kotek told PBS News Hour Monday. “And it is a threat to our democracy. Governors should be in command of their National Guards, our citizen soldiers who sign up to stand up in an emergency to deal with real problems.

Trump Insults Democrats by Comparing Them to an African Country - 2025-10-07T17:12:38Z

President Donald Trump came off unintelligibly Tuesday while comparing the Democratic Party to Somalia.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Trump appeared to brag that he didn’t even know the names of the Democratic lawmakers hoping to speak with him about ending the government shutdown.

“I’m getting calls from Democrats wanting to meet. I never even heard their names before. And they’re claiming to be lead—the Democrats have no leader. They remind me of Somalia,” Trump said.

Appearing pleased with his weirdly racist analogy, Trump continued babbling.

“And I met the president of Somalia, told him about the problem it’s got. I said, ‘You got somebody from Somalia that’s telling us how to run our country, from Somalia.’ I said, ‘Would you like to take her back?’ He said, ‘No, I don’t want her!’” Trump ranted incoherently.

Trump was referring to Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, who has previously been targeted with threats of deportation by racist Republicans. The president, who has a tendency to repeat himself, was rehashing a joke he made earlier this month at Omar’s expense when he claimed he’d asked Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud if the Minnesota lawmaker could be “taken back” to her home country.

Trump’s insistence that he doesn’t know who the Democrats are, and that they have no leaders, tells you everything you need to know about how seriously Trump is taking efforts to end the government shutdown. His own spokesperson revealed Monday that she wasn’t aware of any efforts the president had taken to speak with Democrats directly, but he is instead working through his own proxies in the House and Senate.

Trump previously met with very real Democratic leaders House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (whom Trump has repeatedly called a “Palestinian,” as another form of racist insult) ahead of the shutdown last week. But the president used the meeting as a meme photo op before proceeding to blame Democrats for the shutdown, as well as his administration’s efforts to enact massive layoffs and illegally withhold back pay from furloughed workers.

Trump Says Which Furloughed Workers Get Shutdown Backpay “Depends” - 2025-10-07T16:40:42Z

President Donald Trump gave the least reassuring answer Tuesday about ensuring federal workers receive backpay after the government shutdown.

During a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Trump was asked about the White House’s position on paying back furloughed federal workers for the shutdown. While federal law requires the government to provide backpay for federal workers sent home during the shutdown, the Trump administration is reportedly making preparations to renege on its obligation to pay up once the government reopens.

“I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” Trump replied.

“I can tell you this, the Democrats have put a lot of people in great risk and jeopardy, but it really depends on who you’re talking about,” Trump continued. “But for the most part, we’re gonna take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’re gonna take care of them in a different way.”

Trump limply attempted to blame the Democrats for his potentially lawless acts—but it’s Russell Vought’s White House Office of Management and Budget that is behind the newest threat.

A drafted memo from OMB reportedly offered a wild new interpretation of the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act Trump signed during a previous shutdown in 2019, undermining assurances that federal employees will eventually get paid. OMB also quietly deleted a line from a document about Frequently Asked Questions During a Lapse in Appropriations that referred to the GEFTA rule that “employees will be paid retroactively as soon as possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Tuesday morning that paying federal workers was something he hoped for—but not something he could promise. Meanwhile, the Louisiana Republican’s own website states: “Under federal law, employees are entitled to back pay upon the government reopening.”

When asked why only some people would receive backpay, Trump simply replied, “You’re gonna have to figure it out.”

But it’s not clear who exactly the president believes will receive pay, or why. During a shutdown, government employees are either furloughed or “excepted” from furlough, meaning they continue to work and earn pay, but their pay is postponed until appropriations are authorized. And Trump has already picked some convenient projects to keep federal employees working on, ensuring that immigration enforcement and tariff offices are fully staffed, while threatening to gut Democrats’ “favorite” programs. Trump could potentially plan to pay those working on his own pet projects, and illegally withhold funding from everyone else.

It’s also not clear how the president intends to deal with those he believes do not deserve pay. The president could potentially be referring to the scores of federal employees OMB has instructed agencies to lay off amid the shutdown, in an unprecedented move he certainly appears to be enjoying.

Mike Johnson Seems Uncomfy With Trump’s New Shutdown Plan for Backpay - 2025-10-07T15:49:27Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that he hopes federal workers receive their back pay, making it seem possible that they won’t—even though he knows federal law requires that they be compensated.

Speaking on the House floor, the Louisiana Republican suggested that there was new analysis that showed that federal workers furloughed during the government shutdown might not be entitled to back pay.

“I hope that the furloughed workers receive back pay, of course,” Johnson said immediately after, claiming that was why he and President Donald Trump had begged Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to spare federal workers from a government shutdown.

“We don’t want this to happen,” Johnson said.

But as Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer, noted on X, this was a blatantly dishonest gambit—and Johnson knew it. As Johnson’s own website states: “Under federal law, employees are entitled to back pay upon the government reopening.”

Screenshot of House Speaker Mike Johnson's website

It seems that Trump’s administration may be preparing to withhold back pay from federal workers in the president’s latest ploy to force Democrats to abandon their fight for health care subsidies.

Axios reported Tuesday that a draft of a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget claimed that federal workers may not be entitled to just compensation after the government reopens, under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act Trump signed during a previous shutdown in 2019.

“Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically? The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn’t,” one senior White House official told Axios. OPM’s draft memo claimed that the law had been previously misconstrued to ensure back pay to furloughed workers.

The White House claimed that an amendment to the law assuring workers will be paid “subject to the enactment of appropriations Acts ending the lapse” refers to when federal employees will be specifically appropriated funds by Congress, and not how it has always been understood as the completion of the shutdown. A joint resolution that accompanied the 2019 amendment said that the government would pay “obligations incurred.”

It seems OMB is preparing to move forward with holding federal employees’ pay hostage. Government Executive reported that OMB had quietly deleted a line from a document about Frequently Asked Questions During a Lapse in Appropriations that referred to the GEFTA rule that “employees will be paid retroactively as soon as possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.”

But OPM’s special instructions for agencies affected by a lapse in appropriations starting October 1, 2025, stated just the opposite. “The appropriate retroactive pay for periods of furlough and excepted work will be provided after the lapse ends, as required by law,” the instructions say.

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen, who helped write the 2019 back-pay measure, told Government Executive the meaning of the statute was clear.

“The law is the law,” he said. “After the uncertainty federal employees faced in the 2019 Trump Shameful Shutdown, Senator Cardin and I worked to ensure federal employees would receive guaranteed back pay for any future shutdowns. That legislation was signed into law—and there is nothing this administration can do to change that.”

This isn’t the only dirty trick the administration has pulled to intimidate Democrats into submission. Trump has also threatened to execute mass layoffs amid the government shutdown. Administration officials have insisted that the Democrats forced the president’s hand, but the move is entirely in line with Trump’s agenda as outlined in Project 2025, and the president has touted the “unprecedented opportunity” to make sweeping permanent cuts to programs and departments that he doesn’t like.

Bondi Loses It After Being Asked About Epstein Files With Trump’s Name - 2025-10-07T15:48:23Z

Attorney General Pam Bondi somehow managed to be smug and combative while offering an incredibly weak answer to a basic question about her department’s handling of the Epstein files. 

“So who gave the order to flag records related to President Trump?” Senator Dick Durbin asked Bondi during a Senate hearing on Tuesday. 

Bondi paused for a beat. 

“To flag records for President Trump?” she said, as if she was confused or unfamiliar with what Durbin asked. 

“To flag any records which included his name.” 

Bondi shook her head, smiling slightly. 

“I’m not going to discuss anything about that with you, senator.” 

“Eventually you’re going to have to answer for your conduct in this,” Durbin replied. “You won’t do it today, but eventually you will.” 

This all goes back to July, when Durbin’s office found that Bondi told personnel to flag any mention of Trump in the Epstein files. It was later revealed that once flagged, Trump’s name was redacted from the files.  

This is such a clear example of the attorney general—historically a politically neutral position (or at least meant to be such)—openly caping for her president. If she can’t be transparent and honest in a Senate hearing, how are we expected to take anything she says seriously? 

Pam Bondi Flails as Democrat Grills Her on Tom Homan’s $50K Cash Bribe - 2025-10-07T15:40:24Z

At least eight times during a Tuesday hearing, Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked Attorney General Pam Bondi about what border czar Tom Homan did with the $50,000 cash bribe he received from undercover FBI agents in 2024.

Again and again, Bondi refused to answer.

“What became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI paid to Mr. Homan, in a paper bag evidently?” the senator asked the attorney general, who slowly flipped to a page in a binder so she could quote a statement from her deputy attorney general.

“Senator,” she said, “as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently stated, the investigation of Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.”

Nowhere in that response was an actual answer, Whitehouse observed, so he again asked what became of the $50,000. Bondi vaguely urged the senator to “look at your facts.”

“Are you saying that they did not deliver $50,000 in cash to Mr. Homan?” Whitehouse pressed. Bondi began reciting the statement she previously attributed to Blanche, which Whitehouse noted addresses a “different question.”

He repeated his question, asking if the FBI ever got the $50,000 back. Bondi told the senator to consult the FBI.

“They report to you,” Whitehouse pointed out. “Can’t you answer this question?” Bondi said he could talk to FBI Director Kash Patel, leading Whitehouse to ask if Homan kept the money. The attorney general, chuckling, began to repeat her previous spiel verbatim.

“I can see I’m not going to get a straight answer from you to a very simple question,” Whitehouse said. Out of the blue, Bondi leveled a personal attack, accusing Whitehouse of working with “dark money groups.”

Staying on track, Whitehouse asked whether the reported investigation looked into whether Homan declared the $50,000 on his tax returns, leading Bondi to make another unrelated accusation, this time that Whitehouse “pushed for legislation that would subsidize [his] wife’s company”—an imperfect telling of allegations first made by a conservative watchdog group and amplified by people like Elon Musk.

Whitehouse pointed out the irrelevance of that claim, promising to submit the questions Bondi failed to answer as “questions for the record,” or written, formal questions Congress provides witnesses after a hearing for inclusion in the record.

The questions about Homan were far from the only ones that Bondi avoided answering during Tuesday’s hearing, in which she frequently seemed more interested in verbally attacking Democratic senators attempting to conduct oversight.

You Won’t Believe What Trump Switched to After Bad Bunny Complaint - 2025-10-07T15:32:16Z

The president has deployed the National Guard to multiple cities, rattled the economy with inconsistent tariffs, and frazzled the country’s longest international alliances. But late Monday, he also weighed in on the Super Bowl’s halftime pick.

In an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, Donald Trump spoke out against the NFL’s decision to hire Latin superstar Bad Bunny to perform during the coveted slot.

“The NFL just chose the Bad Bunny Rabbit or whatever his name, this guy who hates ICE, he doesn’t like you, he accuses everything he doesn’t like of racism,” said Kelly. “Do you think maybe we should just kind of entertain blowing off the NFL, like a boycott or something along those lines?”

“This guy does not seem like a unifying entertainer, and a lot of folks don’t even know who he is,” he added.

“I never heard of him, I don’t know who he is, I don’t know why they’re doing it, it’s like crazy,” Trump said. “And then they blame it on some promoter that they hired to pick up entertainment.”

“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.”

But Bad Bunny wasn’t the only new development in the football league that upset Trump. After barely finishing his thought about the halftime show, the president also took aim at the NFL’s new “dynamic kickoff” rule, calling it “ridiculous” and “terrible.” The kickoff rule was made official this year after it drastically improved player safety in the 2024 season.

“The ball is kicked, and the ball is floating in the air and everyone’s standing there watching it,” Trump groused. “It’s ridiculous. It’s not any safer than the regular kickoff. I think it—it just looks so terrible. I think it really demeans football, to be honest with you.”

It’s almost impossible to escape Bad Bunny in 2025. His music plays everywhere from clubs to grocery stores across the country, and is near nonstop on the radio.

The 31-year-old is, as of now, one of the most dominant music artists in the world, topping the charts on multiple continents. Billboard crowned him the artist of the year in 2022, and he was the most streamed artist on Spotify between 2020 and 2022. He’s also elevated Puerto Rican music and culture to the global stage, highlighting the economic disparities present on the island.

But it’s not just his music that has made him an international phenomenon. His bombastic personality has helped establish him in American culture: Besides partaking in the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny found himself in the country’s pop culture spotlight during a three-year on-again-off-again relationship with the Kardashians’ Kendall Jenner. He has also hosted Saturday Night Live, a mainstay of American comedy for the last 50 years, twice.

Shortly after the NFL unveiled Bad Bunny as its halftime pick, the Trump administration fired back: Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that federal immigration officers would be in attendance at America’s most-watched annual television event. Days later, the White House appeared to backtrack on that, claiming that there was “no tangible” plan for agents to monitor the venue.

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