Political News

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed her conservative colleagues on Monday for making President Donald Trump more powerful than a king.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority scrapped Humphrey’s Executor, a high court precedent that established Congress could limit the president’s ability to fire executive officials of independent federal agencies, and allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

In a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Sotomayor warned that Trump had just become more powerful than the English monarch whose Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”

“The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President,” Sotomayor wrote. “In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision was Constitutional, because the country’s founding framers had “‘never intended’ to give the President ‘the complete set of powers’ that the English Crown held, let alone more.”

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

The news about the news has been terrible over the last year: CBS News taken over by Bari Weiss; Jeff Bezos pushing The Washington Post opinion section to the right; CNN, The New York Times, and other outlets often choosing to downplay the radicalism of President Trump so they can portray themselves as neutral and objective; numerous local and national outlets laying off reporters. But The Guardian US is the rare positive news media story. The London-based paper is vastly expanding its audience and staff size in the United States. It’s covering Trump honestly and directly. Steve Sachs, managing director of The Guardian US, explains the paper’s strategy in the latest edition of Right Now. The paper’s core journalism is global, independent, and free, and he argues all three are essential.

America will reach a historic milestone at the end of this week as it celebrates its semiquincentennial, but the people that comprise this storied nation have reportedly never felt so detached from its identity.

An AP-NORC poll published Monday (but conducted in April) found that American pride has dropped significantly over the last decade. Negativity surrounding the government has seeped into public perception of the core components of America’s story, such as its history, its foreign influence and impact, and the way the country’s democracy works.

Pride in American democracy has dropped 14 percentage points since 2017, when it was measured at 42 percent. It is now at 28 percent.

The survey also found that a majority of Americans are disillusioned with the American dream: They are not confident in their current financial situations, do not believe they can find a “good job” in the current market, do not believe they have the ability to purchase new homes if they want, and do not believe they’ll have enough money to retire when the day comes.

A Gallup poll, also published Monday, found that just 33 percent of U.S. adults were “extremely proud” to be an American. That’s the lowest rating since the polling group began asking the question in 2001, when 55 percent of the nation’s adult population answered similarly.

Another 20 percent of U.S. adults said they were “very proud” to be an American, indicating that just over half of the country feels a deep sense of pride in their national identity.

The falloff is represented most extremely amongst self-identified Democrats, of which just 14 percent said they were “extremely proud” to be an American in 2026. Right behind them were registered independents, 28 percent of whom offered the same response. Independents, according to Gallup’s data, have experienced a steady decline in national pride since 2004.

Meanwhile, 70 percent of Republicans said they were “extremely proud” to be an American when polled this year—a sharp uptick from when they were asked the question between 2020 and 2024.

Ahead of their summer break, the conservative-stacked Supreme Court has been issuing back-to-back decisions related to immigration. From the state of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians to denying entry of green card holders, what the justices decided has a large impact on the state of the nation. While these cases have a chance at being contested by legislation to come out…

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President Donald Trump seems to be catching on that people aren’t impressed by his disastrous Great American State Fair.

“Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people, and everybody loving it?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday morning.

“Ask yourself this simple question, ‘DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?’ THE ANSWER IS NO!”

Since Trump’s pet project opened on the National Mall last week, it has been beset by a slate of issues, including technical difficulties and disappointing weather delays. Over the weekend, The New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson visited the festival in-person and confirmed it was a ghost town, marred by low energy and few attendees.

If you don’t believe us, check out posts from Trump’s allies:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted pictures from the president’s festival on Sunday. Barely anyone else seemed to be around.

Actor Dean Cain, a vocal supporter of Trump, also posted a picture from the top of Trump’s towering Ferris wheel, revealing thin crowds below.

Oh, and the food really is that overpriced.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday to scrap a key protection and allow President Donald Trump to fire whoever he wants, whenever he wants.

In a 6–3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court found that the “for cause” removal provision for the Federal Trade Commission violated the separation of powers, allowing Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the FTC.

In the process, the high court voted to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 Supreme Court case that established Congress’s ability to limit the president’s ability to fire executive officials of independent federal agencies.

“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority ruling.

The decision grants the president broad firing powers across independent federal agencies. However, in a separate 5–4 decision on Monday, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Reserve was a different kind of entity, and blocked the removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

In a scathing dissent in the FTC case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor insisted that Congress could limit the reasons for removing the head of a federal agency.

“In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

The court previously issued a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines approving Trump’s emergency request to remove Slaughter from the FTC. Trump attempted to fire Slaughter in March, leading the commissioner to challenge the move, as presidents may only legally remove FTC commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In July, a federal court blocked Trump’s “unlawful” attempt to remove Slaughter, citing the Humphrey decision, which was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

In a surprise victory for voting rights, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after Election Day, as long as they had been postmarked by the day of the election.

The 5-4 decision by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices, averts a major election disaster that would have injected chaos into the midterms. Fourteen states have mail-in ballot grace periods on the books, and 30 states accept ballots from overseas and military voters sent before or on Election Day but only received after. The New York Times found that during the 2024 election “at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within the legally accepted post-election window.” Changing mail-in ballot deadlines months before the general election could have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters who could have been unaware of the stricter rules, or have their ballots thrown out because of postal delays, or because they live in remote, rural locations in states like Alaska.

Overruling the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett affirmed that such laws are constitutional. “In sum, the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day,” she wrote. “That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

“But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. “The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement,” Alito claimed, even though late-arriving ballots do nothing to change a voter’s choice on Election Day, since ballots are still required to be submitted by then.

President Trump has long spread conspiracies about mail voting and most recently attacked California’s protracted vote count as a “rigged election.” The administration’s latest plan to undercut mail voting would require states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security for the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots—a form of extortion that has generated furious pushback from election officials. The head of the Postal Service told the Senate they were following Trump’s directive, claiming that he wanted to ensure “the right ballots are going to the right people.” (A federal judge last week blocked key parts of a Trump executive order that authorized such a scheme.)

Alito’s dissent amplifies Trump’s conspiracies. “Today’s decision leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections,” he wrote. “Diverse sources have recognized that mail-in ballots increase the potential for fraud.”

In fact, every major study has shown that mail-in voting is safe and secure, but the fact that four justices signed on to Trump’s crusade to get rid of mail-in ballots is highly disturbing and could embolden the president to attempt to take even more drastic steps to make it harder to vote.

Today’s ruling should also not distract from the damage the Roberts Court has already done to voting rights. Its decision in late April, effectively destroying the Voting Rights Act, gave Republicans just enough time to dismantle majority-Black seats held by Democrats in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama. That was followed by a series of orders by the Republican-appointed justices on the shadow docket that expedited the GOP’s efforts to erase Black representation and give their party additional seats before the midterms.

The Supreme Court has blocked President Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, preserving the central bank’s independence for now.

In a 5-4 decision Thursday split across ideological lines, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to become the first president to remove a Federal Reserve official since it was created in 1913.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices to rein in Trump.

Last August, Trump declared that he was booting Cook—the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board—over claims she committed mortgage fraud with two primary residencies. Cook refused to step down, and sued, stating that “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.”

A lower court ruled that Cook could not be dismissed while her case proceeded. The Department of Justice then requested that the Supreme Court stay that ruling, so that Cook could be removed from her position. The Supreme Court refused.

“No matter the precise definition of cause, or the scope of our review of any such determination, the President failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute,” wrote Roberts, who wrote the majority’s ruling.

The case will now return to a lower court, where Cook will fight to save her job. Cook was appointed by former President Joe Biden, and her term was set to expire in 2038.

In a separate decision Monday, the Supreme Court gave the president more power over independent agencies, ruling that Trump had the authority to fire Rebecca Slaughter. The ruling shifted quite a lot of power from Congress to the president, and has ushered in one of the largest changes to the federal government in decades.

This story has been updated.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll verdict, in which he was found guilty of sexually abusing and then defaming Carroll.

This means Trump will still be required to pay Carroll $5 million.

Carroll, a former writer, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996. When she spoke out publicly against him, he posted on social media that the case was “a complete con job” and a “Hoax and a lie.” In 2022, she sued him for both sexual abuse and defamation, seeking damages, and the jury agreed with Carroll that Trump was liable.

Trump’s lawyers appealed the case, arguing that the jury heard “highly inflammatory” evidence—including testimony from two other women who claimed Trump assaulted them, and the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

The Supreme Court justices did not provide any explanation for why they rejected Trump’s appeal. But, they may consider another similar case. A separate jury found Trump liable for defaming Carroll in 2024, and he was ordered to pay the writer $83.3 million—Carroll’s lawyers argued that a significant settlement was the only way to get Trump to stop attacking her. Trump’s lawyers have said they plan on appealing that verdict to the Supreme Court as well.

However, that case is solely focused on defamation. Carroll’s claims that Trump sexually abused her in the ’90s have been affirmed by a jury, and Trump has now run out of ways to contest them.

This story has been updated.

The Supreme Court has demolished Republicans’ efforts to delegitimize mail-in ballots, upholding a Mississippi law that allows a grace period to count ballots received after Election Day.

In a 5-4 decision Monday split across ideological lines, the court ruled that ballots are valid up to five days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked before it. Justice Amy Comey Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts were the two conservatives who sided with the liberal justices, and Barrett authored the majority opinion.

Eighteen states and territories, including Mississippi, currently allow for mail-in ballots to be received after Election Day. That includes big Democratic states like California, Illinois, and New York. The ruling also protects states and territories that allow a grace period for ballots returning from overseas, such as for military service members.

“The Constitution’s Elections Clause empowers state legislatures to ‘prescrib[e]’ the ‘Times, Places and Manner of holding’ congressional elections. Congress may ‘override’ most of these choices,” Barrett wrote for the majority. “By ‘default,’ however, ‘responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections’ belongs to States. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the Constitution lodges power over congressional elections in state legislatures ‘primarily’ and in Congress ‘ultimately.’”

Mail-in voting is a very basic, safe tactic that Trump himself has even used, despite crusading against it as fraudulent. By upholding it, the court has protected voting rights for thousands of Americans voting at home and abroad.

This story has been updated.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche seems to be getting a bit high on his own supply, deciding that those pesky lower courts can’t tell him what to do. Bold strategy, Todd. Let’s see if it pays off. Well, it’s not paying off for him when it comes to the Epstein files, that is for sure. Earlier this year, independent journalist Katie Phang sued Blanche over his complete refusal to follow the…

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The opening weekend of the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C., was, to put it simply, miserable. It was extremely muggy, with rain pouring down seemingly every hour. A child rolled around in the grass, crying and screaming, “I. WANT. TO. GO. HOME!!!” Creed’s “Higher” blared over the loudspeakers, and a sparse crowd milled about the various exhibitions. The bare-bones setup—flimsy, fake two-dimensional columns that looked like something Wile E. Coyote would run into while chasing the Road Runner—left much to be desired, as America’s 250th anniversary was celebrated with kitsch and ennui rather than grandeur and appreciation. 

More than anything, the event lacked energy—and people. There wasn’t any line or wait to get in. The vibe was more conference-like than celebratory, and the state exhibits varied wildly in effort and presentation. Utah and Guam had particularly involved setups, while others like South Carolina felt totally sterile. Connecticut and Maine shared a space that looked like the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office, while Hawaii and Alaska didn’t have anyone attending to visitors. There were $25 pretzels, an AI George Washington, an interactive “Loyalist or Patriot?” test, and a whiteboard wall full of messages from attendees, one of which read “a felon and predator resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave!!”

“It feels more like a campaign event than a fair,” said M., a D.C resident who didn’t want to be named and was visiting with his wife and son. “There was potential here. I think that the state exhibits they had, some of them were very well done, others didn’t really have much effort put into them.… My four-year-old enjoyed the carousel, but I think that if this was done a little bit more thoughtfully it could’ve been really fun. I’ve been going to state fairs for most of my life, I’m from Minnesota. And so seeing what a really thought-out, well-done state fair looks like—it’s an incredible experience.”   

Bit of a flimsy set up at the Great American State Fair pic.twitter.com/4H1YauQgp4

— Malcolm Ferguson (@malc_ferg) June 29, 2026

“Kind of disappointing they don’t have anywhere to sit, especially if you get food—you’re just standing,” said Virginia resident Anita, as we were being ushered out of the “rain-or-shine” event Sunday afternoon due to the weather. “Right now, we’re being postponed because of lightning. Where are we all supposed to go? We drove two hours, we’re not just gonna go jump in the car. It’s kinda sad there’s not a backup plan.”  

“I think if [Trump] wanted to make a bigger splash, he should’ve gotten Disney, or somebody who knows how to do this,” said Haven, another D.C. resident attending the fair. 

While many states and artists opted out of the event, corporations did not. The presence of companies like Northrop Grumman, United Health Group, Chime, and others was very apparent.

“I understand that people are advertising here, that there’s sponsors,” said a visitor named Ryan. “Coming in and seeing SpaceX, or like Micron was kind of like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting that.’ But it’s America, so maybe I should’ve.” 

When asked about defining American moments of their lifetimes, attendees’ answers were about as bleak as the scene, as almost all the answers included 9/11, Covid-19, and pretty much every war the U.S has been in. “The Revolutionary War, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War,” said Haven. “It’s a shame you think of war first.” 

Of course, not everyone was underwhelmed by the fair.

“I know how much [President Trump] loves the country, so I’m not the least bit surprised that they’re going all out,” said Nicki Hannigan, in her seventies, who came all the way from Grand Rapids, Michigan, with her husband, Jack.

“There’s not a weed in this grass!” Jack said. “I don’t know if anybody’s noticed that, but that takes some doing. If the administration can do that well, they can do a lotta stuff well.” 

“Well” is relative, as the event has been shrouded in tumult as Trump took over. What was originally supposed to be a weeks-long blockbuster festival to celebrate the nation turned into a politically charged event, where even B- and C-list artists like Flo Rida, Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, and the Commodores dropped out. Soon, nearly a dozen states did too, as it became more and more obvious that Trump was using this event for partisan purposes. As everyone bailed, Trump petulantly declared the fair would instead be kicked off with a rally that he would headline—but even that didn’t get much of a turnout. That timeline of chaos still felt prescient, as the haphazard, thrown-together nature of the event stood out more than anything. And that distracted from what people were actually there for: to celebrate the anniversary of their country.

Some attendees were able to acknowledge Trump’s heavy-handed involvement in the 250th while trying to remain appreciative of what the event represented. 

“I don’t really take [Trump] into consideration. He’s gonna be gone in three years, dead in ten,” said Scott. “He’s not gonna take away my joy of this event. He’s the president, but he’s not God—even though he thinks he is. I wasn’t gonna come to this, but then I thought, ‘Ya know, I’m not gonna let him take it away.’” 

I wish I shared that optimism. 

President Donald Trump and his family continue to dominate the field when it comes to corruption, with two new scandals exposed just within the last 24 hours.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Trump family stands to reap the financial benefits of a deal that gives the U.S. access to one of the earth’s largest reserves of tungsten, a metal needed to make fighter jets, computer chips, and missile warheads.

American company Kaz Resources was awarded $1.6 billion in federal financing to mine tungsten in Kazakhstan. Just weeks after the deal was made, a firm partly owned by Trump’s sons joined up with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a “corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported.

And it’s not just the Trumps—the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was also involved in the deal, raised capital for one of the project’s investors, a move that is expected to net them millions of dollars.

Between the Trumps and the Lutnicks, one or both families have ties to at least 14 companies that are working with the federal government on mining deals, the Times reported.

And on Monday, CNBC reported that the president bought up to $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise, a company that makes tasers, body cameras, and other policing software, just two weeks before ICE sought a $220 million contract that only a company like Axon could fill.

Though the ICE notice doesn’t name Axon specifically, the company makes 90 percent of all U.S. tasers, and experts told CNBC that the weapons called for in the notice would only match Axon products. If ICE buys the roughly 17,800 tasers it seeks, it would quadruple its total tasers.

According to a White House spokesperson, there are “no conflicts of interest.” The White House has said that Trump’s investments are managed by independent, third-party firms, and that his children control his assets—as if his children aren’t routinely profiting off of government deals.

The amount which the Trump family has personally profited off of the presidency is unprecedented.

Locked up after living in L.A., an immigrant has suffered rectal bleeding for months. “Sometimes I think they want to kill me here.” By Kate Morrissey for Capital & Main A year and a half after going into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, José is still experiencing rectal bleeding. An immigrant from Guatemala who lived in Los Angeles for more than two decades…

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Pick any Trump-imposed crisis over the last year, and you’ll find prominent Democrats decrying the president’s actions with an all-too-familiar word. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump’s “hypocrisy knows no bounds” after he pardoned fraudsters while throwing “baseless allegations” of “massive fraud” at the Golden State. It was “beyond hypocritical,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said, for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in Los ­Angeles after provoking an actual insurrection in DC. The Daily Show’s Jon ­Stewart responded to the president’s ­attack on a judge who blocked the deportation of Venezuelans—after previously saying it should be illegal to criticize judges he appointed—by straining his voice like a demon doused with holy water: “The hypocrisy! It burns!”

“Hypocrisy,” like democracy, was passed down to us from the ancient Greeks. Hypokrites was a word for stage actors—different people entirely, ­beneath their masks. But allegations of two-faced dealing are endemic to American politics. Benjamin Franklin took over his brother’s newspaper after he was sanctioned for printing an “Essay against Hypocrites” about the Puritan minister Cotton Mather. (“It is far worſe dealing with ſuch religious Hypocrites, than with the moſt arrant Knave in the World.”) Thomas Jefferson later lamented, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that the spread of Christianity and other religions imposed upon people through violence had made “one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Abraham Lincoln, in 1854, asserted that the existence of slavery “enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”

Then, as now, allegations of “hypocrisy” are often infused with a note of spiritual censure. Jesus, after all, condemns the Pharisees as “hypocrites” in the Gospel of Matthew. In recent decades, the term has become a favored pejorative for the grifting preachers and fallen “family values” politicians of the religious right. There’s something both powerful and irresistible about that critique. It highlights the danger and the fallacy of puritanism: How can you demand that a society conform to a standard that its advocates do not even maintain?

“Hypocrisy” has been a useful framework for deconstructing an insidious strain of American life. But it can also be a bit of a trap. “Hypocrisy” assumes that the imposition of values is really about the values. Sometimes it’s as much about the imposition.

Trump’s conduct has helped dispel these illusions—or at least it should have. His “hypocrisies,” sketched out in late-night Truth Social rants and meandering answers to misunderstood questions, reflect a worldview that is as disturbing as it is coherent. He and his acolytes are telling you who can wield power, and against whom power can be wielded. You have not caught the president and his supporters off their line by noting that they attack others for conduct they themselves engage in; you have captured their essence—a desire for dominance and impunity, and an avowed illiberalism that has been incubating in the conservative movement for generations. Hierarchies of citizenship are the rule. Exulting in “justice for me and pain for thee” does not necessarily make someone a hypocrite; it might just make them a fascist.

Show me a case of Trumpian hypocrisy and I will show you a president living his values, with the unpleasant but predictable belligerence of a mob boss protecting his turf. Take the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy against broadcasters and the targeting of ordinary citizens for protected speech. His administration has threatened to suspend the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage of the Iran war is insufficiently flattering, leaned on Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel for comments about the Charlie Kirk assassination, and attempted to deport a Turkish grad student for expressing support for Palestine in a student newspaper—after previously condemning “federal censorship,” and declaring that liberals were “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” It is a reminder that the earlier backlash to purported liberal censoriousness—like the corresponding demand to replace “DEI” with “meritocracy”—was always about which voices were sacrosanct and which were an affront. It is the uncensored frustration of having to share space with the kinds of views (and the kinds of people) they considered illegitimate. Free speech, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has written, means “they can say what they want and you can say what they want.”

Republicans are not roiled by contradictions when they spread conspiracies about mail-in voting by Democrats while casting mail-in ballots themselves. They are manifesting a deep-seated belief about who America is for and who it is not. It’s all right there in the racist Department of Homeland Security memes and the appeals from Vice President JD Vance for a “homeland” free of neighbors who aren’t like you. Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism—it’s an ethos.

It is not even hypocrisy to complain about election fraud and then attempt to commit election fraud by, say, telling an official in ­Georgia to “find 11,780 votes,” as Trump did in 2021. They are both attacks on democratic systems by someone who never truly subscribed to them—that’s the important part. Hypocrisy is a distraction that reduces core questions of power and ideology to a meta-commentary.

There is something overly familiar about seeing a Republican politician accused of hypocrisy. “It’s so blatant, the hypocrisy,” The Daily Show’s Stewart said during an episode covering Trump’s censorship of free speech. “It’s so old-school Daily Show gotcha.” For a late-night host, it’s an easy punch line. But as a broader criticism, it flattens the exceptional and discourages you from thinking deeper about the structures of power. It’s precisely because “hypocrisy” is a tag that you could lob at so many political figures over the last quarter century that it feels so insufficient to describe our current leaders. In a weird way, it’s almost not cynical enough.

I confess: I’m a hypocrite, when it comes to hypocrisy. I’ve written plenty of these stories in the past. I’ll write them again. There is still value in laying out the ways in which public figures deviate from their professed identity—to establish, for the record, that someone is full of it. Sometimes it just feels cathartic to fire up an old C-SPAN clip and say: Can you believe this guy?

But I often find “hypocrisy” stories limiting because they substitute the deep for the superficial. It feels less like a critique of a particular set of values than a way to talk about politics without having to talk about what politics is about—a language for discussing matters of consequence in inconsequential ways. “Hypocrisy” functions as a kind of political scrip, a facsimile of conflict that can be traded back and forth in perpetuity without ever being ­exchanged for the real thing. Shouting about it is an impulse in place of an analysis. It blurs the anodyne and the profound. Everyone is a hypocrite, but not everyone is cruel.

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Don’t forget to visit the Tom Tomorrow Merchandise Mall, and, if you’re so inclined, follow me on Bluesky! Related | Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool…

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Abdul El-Sayed, a primary candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, released an ambitious AI policy platform Monday, joining other progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders in a push for regulation and public ownership. But El-Sayed’s proposal also goes a step further: not just public ownership, but also public governance.

Earlier this month, an AI super PAC spent millions to ensure that Alex Bores, the author of a comparatively weak New York state AI accountability law, wouldn’t make it to Congress. El-Sayed’s proposed changes to the AI industry go far further than Bores’s legislation. When asked whether he was worried about industry political action committees targeting his campaign over his new proposals, El-Sayed shrugged it off. “I’m just not afraid of them or AIPAC or any of the others. What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”

El-Sayed’s policy proposal, which he shared exclusively with The New Republic ahead of its release, has three key components: democratic governance of AI, public ownership of AI companies, and safety requirements. His proposal takes inspiration from Sanders’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund bill, proposed earlier this month—and like Sanders’s bill, calls for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to distribute AI companies’ cash into Americans’ pockets. Sanders envisions establishing that via a one-time 50 percent tax on the country’s biggest AI companies, generating an estimated $7 trillion for social safety net programs, plus a yearly dividend for Americans. El-Sayed proposes using that money to fund education and job training, increase unemployment benefits, and boost small business loans.

“I love the senator’s point that we need to own the outcomes of this, in part because it is our data and our knowledge that went into creating it,” El-Sayed said about Bernie’s proposal. They both reason that, since AI has been trained on human writing, research, and collective knowledge, it is a good that belongs to all Americans. “But I think the ownership part needs to go a step further, because we also need some control,” El-Sayed added.

To get that control, he proposes democratic governance of AI companies. He proposes that frontier AI labs be chartered as public benefit corporations, legally mandating them to balance public interest with profit margins. Additionally, he suggests that a majority of board seats at these companies should be democratically elected or publicly appointed, rather than selected by shareholders. And, importantly, he calls for major tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to divest from frontier AI companies. El-Sayed also recommends the establishment of a Food and Drug Administration–style agency to evaluate models before they’re deployed, a ban on AI-generated political media, and requiring companies to work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Federal Emergency Management Agency to protect against biosecurity breaches.

El-Sayed’s breezy response to TNR’s question about possible industry retaliation—“What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”—references the unrelated money that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has already spent on the race. Through United Democracy Project PAC, AIPAC has spent over $2 million to support one of El-Sayed’s opponents, Representative Haley Stevens, who is the Democratic establishment’s favored candidate. El-Sayed has repeatedly criticized both the Israeli government and AIPAC’s influence in politics. El-Sayed is also facing State Senator Mallory McMorrow, though polls suggest the race is largely between El-Sayed and Stevens.

McMorrow released an AI policy proposal last month that focuses on creating a professional apprenticeship program funded by a token tax, which would charge by the number of tokens used (tokens are the basic units of data that AI models use). Stevens has not released an AI policy plan.

Despite a broad consensus among voters that politicians should regulate the AI industry, few bills have actually been passed. Following AI industry super PACs’ massive spending to defeat Alex Bores in retaliation for the RAISE Act, some feared politicians might become even more reluctant to try.

El-Sayed is hopeful that American voters are ready to push back against money in politics. “We live in an era right now where people are really smart to the old system of money coming in to buy elections. They see the wool being pulled over their eyes and they don’t like it,” he said.

He also doesn’t think politicians have the luxury of time when it comes to regulating AI. “We need to act yesterday,” he said, “and at best, we can act tomorrow.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 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.

The saga involving Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool renovation is getting stranger and darker. Federal prosecutors are now saying they’re aware of citations that have been issued to the supposed vandals that, according to Trump, have sabotaged the renovation, but no details and no records of any kind are being released.

Meanwhile, Trump is rambling in a truly crazed way about this, describing the people who have received citations or have even been arrested as enemies of our country. This is really taking on the cast of an unhinged tyrant, and while it’s tempting to laugh at the story, there’s something about it that signals a profound degradation that’s underway.

Former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori has been writing well about how Trump has been degrading the rule of law and arguing that we need to be thinking now about how to address that down the line. So we’re working through all this with him. Ankush, thanks for coming on.

Ankush Khardori: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So we know very little about this right now. Trump is very angry that the Reflecting Pool has gone off the rails. There’s been the algae and the peeling paint. Trump has posted on Truth Social that six people have been arrested and seven others have gotten citations, some he says for cutting a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant with a knife or with razors.

But there doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence of these arrests. Ankush, this has gotten truly weird, hasn’t it?

Khardori: Yes, this is quite strange. Ordinarily you would expect a little bit more clarity from the federal government in a situation like this.

Sargent: You sure would. And there’s one guy we know of who says he’s gotten a citation—the former Olympic canoeist David Carter Hearn. He’s 67. I believe there’s another woman who’s been quoted saying something similar, that she got a citation or was temporarily detained.

I mean, a 67-year-old former Olympian who was biking in on the National Mall doesn’t seem like an Antifa vandal, does he?

Khardori: No. This thing seems like it’s gotten quite out of hand and that federal law enforcement, the Park Police in particular, seem to have been dispatched to preserve the president’s ego, I guess.

Sargent: Can you talk about that a little? In other words, you think that maybe the park police were in some sense directed to find something wrong out there?

Khardori: It kind of seems like they were directed to watch things very, very closely and to behave in a way that they ordinarily wouldn’t.

Sargent: Right. And we should just clarify for people that the Reflecting Pool is on the National Mall. It’s in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And that’s why the Park Police, I guess, have jurisdiction or something. But here’s where it gets murky. It gets really murky here.

The New York Times just got a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, which handles prosecutions in D.C. And all they said was, we are aware of citations being issued, meaning by the park police. But the U.S. Attorney’s office provided no specifics, no number of people given citations. Here’s how the Times put it: “No records of arrests or citations have been produced by the administration or law enforcement officials to support the president’s claims.”

Ankush, he said six people were arrested and seven people were given citations for serious vandalism. And they’re not putting out anything about this, the Washington office of the U.S. Attorney’s office. What on earth could this possibly mean?

Khardori: Look, my first suspicion is that they don’t want to put out information that would contradict the president’s claims about what’s happening there. Because bear in mind that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., under Jeanine Pirro, has been more than happy to speak publicly on pending matters when it serves the administration’s preferred narrative.

I think the most prominent example that comes to my mind is when they arrested the sandwich guy. Jeanine Pirro put out a video taunting him. Now, that video is deeply hilarious for the wrong reasons for her in hindsight, since they totally flopped on that case—they couldn’t even get a misdemeanor conviction on the guy.

But of course, that’s just to say that when there’s a thing of public interest to them where they want to produce information and make a show to the public, they will absolutely do it. So we should infer that the facts would not reflect well upon them if they were being forthright about them.

Sargent: It’s such a good point. The U.S. attorneys have been willing to bend over backwards to support even the most tenuous and ridiculous things that Trump wants to make true. And here he is out there saying there have been six arrests, seven citations or whatever, and now they’ve just gone completely quiet.

I guess, if I understand you correctly, you think that if they were to say in some form on the record, here’s what’s actually happening, all of a sudden the Trump claims about these arrests would fall apart, right? In other words, Trump got it into his head somehow that there were six arrests and now nobody wants to contradict the despot. Is that the basic likelihood here?

Khardori: Well, I think more than about the numbers, it’s about what the arrests would have been for, right? Because Trump has been claiming that there’s been this serious vandalism, the gashes through this covering or whatever, and that should be readily provable—whether there were arrests or citations for that.

So just to give you and your listeners a sense of what should be at hand for the government to produce if they want to: the citations are just tickets usually, right? So they’re in the possession of the park police, who maintain their half of the ticket. They have to be provided to the federal government eventually, when the people show up in federal court, and they can be provided or summarized at any point in time after the citations have been issued.

So the park police can give this information to the U.S. Attorney’s office. The U.S. Attorney’s office can ask for it at any moment and provide it to the public—when the citations are for, what the citations were issued for. All readily available information if they wanted to make it public.

An arrest connotes something different, right? Now, I don’t know if they’re actually properly dividing these things up, whether they have the numbers right, the buckets right. An arrest, however, connotes an actual physical detention of some sort—whether it’s an arrest on a complaint, an arrest just in plain view, and that they have to show up at a later date on something like a criminal complaint. An arrest could happen if there’s an indictment, but it doesn’t seem like anything like that has happened in this context.

Now, in either of those contexts that I’ve just described—whether it’s complaint or indictment—there’s paper that is produced for the public and for the defendant about what the arrest was for and about, right? We don’t have secret court proceedings. We’re supposed to have court proceedings that make these things available to the public.

So none of this needs to be a secret. The government could produce this information easily if they wanted to.

Sargent: And I think reporters have been beating down the doors of both the Washington office, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and of the park police saying, provide us with evidence, tell us what is happening here. And they’re getting little to nothing back.

I’m really taken with your point about these secret arrests. We don’t know that anything like that happened here. In fact, there may not have been any arrests at all. But it’s really got that vibe, the situation, where all of a sudden stuff is really proceeding under cover of darkness in some sense. I mean, it’s literally proceeding under cover of darkness, right?

Khardori: Yeah. Well, look, we know very little. And I think broadly speaking, there are two possibilities. One is the worst-case scenario, which would be, to your point, the secret arrests—arrests where the details are not being processed in the courts correctly or made public correctly, in the ordinary fashion.

The other, which is my suspicion candidly, is that they’re withholding this information because if they were to make it public, it would contradict the president’s claims about what’s actually been happening at the pool. He’s got this theory that there was this vandalism, and now he’s trying to sort of hang all of the messiness around the pool around this vandalism.

There’s just not—I haven’t seen any evidence that this actually happened. And the most readily available evidence would be to produce arrest records for it—a criminal complaint, a citation, whatever. And my operating hypothesis is that this information is not being produced to the public because it would not support the president’s claims about what’s been happening.

Sargent: And Trump is very visibly invested in these claims. Let’s listen to something Trump said about the situation. Here he’s talking about this 350-foot gash that he says the vandals cut in the sealant of the pool. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): They tried to destroy it. They cut it up with a box knife and tried to destroy it. And it’s in great shape now. They’re terrible. They’re vandals. They’ve caught six, I guess, maybe more. They’ve got others in line to be caught. But we just inspected it. We’ll fix it right after the Fourth of July. Got to let the water out, just fix it. But we caught—they would cut it and they would grab this very expensive and very good material, totally waterproof, and they rip it. These people are sick. They ripped a scar 350 feet long through the side of the reflecting pool. These are the people we’re dealing with. These are the people that want to destroy our country.

Sargent: Now, someone with the National Park Service has said in a court filing that there was some kind of cut to the sealant, but it’s not clear what evidence the Park Service has, according to CBS. And critically, I think Trump is saying here that the vandals who have been arrested are basically enemies of the state.

What do you make of what you heard there, and this business of there being a filing that the National Park Service put in saying there was some kind of cut?

Khardori: Look, maybe there was some kind of cut. But—by the way, I think the number of feet he’s been using has also grown as he’s been telling this story more and more. I think it was like 200, then 250, now I guess we’re up to 350.

Look, I don’t believe him. I’ll just be honest, I don’t believe him. And at a minimum I’m unwilling to take his word for it. And I will not take his word for it unless and until the government produces records from the criminal system that would back it up. And thus far they’re not doing that.

And what I infer from that, as I just said, is that if they were to produce it, it wouldn’t corroborate the president’s claims. It would be extraordinarily embarrassing. And it would reflect very, very poorly on him, because either he has fabricated this claim or he’s incapable of sorting truth from fiction. Maybe he was told this and doesn’t know it’s false. All of the possibilities are just different forms of bad.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s an essential point about this, because if you listen to Trump talk about this topic, it’s now clear that he’s grown quite obsessed with it. And he has turned it into a matter of intense public interest by talking about it all the time.

This is the president of the United States who’s kind of toggling back and forth between talking about war in the Middle East and talking about deep 350-foot gashes that he thinks were cut in his reflecting pool. And so this is what I find troubling here, given that we really need to know what the hell he’s talking about—whether there’s any kind of reality to this at all. You’d think the government would be forthcoming, but they’re not. That’s what I don’t get about the situation.

Khardori: I agree with you. Right. And that’s why I draw the inference that I do about it.

Sargent: Well, let’s step back and talk about the big picture. You did this very good piece for Politico laying out the extent of the degradation we’re seeing to the Justice Department and to the rule of law. Can you just recap that big picture case for us?

Khardori: Gosh. Yeah, I think in some ways the degradation of the Justice Department has been underappreciated. We have seen this administration really aggressively shift law enforcement priorities away from what we typically associate with high-operating federal law enforcement to what they basically call street crimes in many respects. That’s been a massive shift.

So that means there’s less prosecuting of public corruption, less prosecuting of financial fraud, white-collar crime, all that sort of thing. All that is being borne out from data and reporting.

But what has happened also within that framework is that the professionalism and the comportment of the prosecutors in the department has just dramatically declined. A lot more people have left than I anticipated would leave voluntarily, right? There were a lot of firings, but most of these people left voluntarily, the prosecutors.

And the staffing at these offices—the U.S. attorneys are unqualified often, and they’re making major mistakes. And you’re seeing prosecutors in these cases, some of the more high-profile ones, like the Broadview Six case out of Chicago, making extraordinary missteps in their cases, engaging in what we would ordinarily describe as intentional or unintentional prosecutorial misconduct.

And I’ve spent—at least I’ve been thinking about this the last year—a fair amount of time thinking about, well, what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But I think we have underappreciated what’s going on in the U.S. attorneys’ offices, which is, these major metropolitan jurisdictions where the U.S. attorneys’ offices are vitally important. Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Chicago, LA, Miami, all of them.

In these you’re seeing really, really bad conduct on the part of prosecutors, shoddy cases, grand jurors refusing to indict cases at a level we have not seen before. And critically, we’ve seen a fair number of judges in these jurisdictions saying to line prosecutors, what you’ve done here is inappropriate, and you’ve totally cratered the credibility that your office has earned over the decades.

Sargent: Well, a big part of the story, of course, is Donald Trump essentially turning DOJ into an instrument to go after his critics.

Khardori: This is very much a department that is operating under Trump’s thumb. And what we have seen, as you alluded to, is a series of politicized investigations and prosecutions, including the indictments against Letitia James and James Comey that got thrown out because the prosecutor, Lindsay Halligan, another Trump sort of private lawyer, was improperly appointed to the position. And she was improperly appointed to the position because the actual prosecutor who held the position was unwilling to indict the cases, and the career prosecutors were unwilling to indict the case.

So they indict cases, the cases are silly, then they get thrown out. They have since come back with a new indictment against James Comey for his seashells, in the “86 47” business. So, you know, James Comey the seashell scoundrel or whatever. I mean, that seems like a ridiculous case.

There was an effort to prosecute six members of Congress who put out a video telling members of the military—reminding them, in their words—that they should be disobeying illegal orders. Now, setting aside the wisdom of that video, there is nothing illegal about it.

And prosecutors, again under Pirro—the same office that is now not giving us the information on these arrests at the mall—took a case to the grand jury and got zero votes to return that indictment against those six members. I cannot even begin to tell you how remarkable that is.

A high-profile case involving high-profile defendants, which presumably is attracting the highest level of attention within the U.S. Attorney’s office—getting zero votes from a grand jury. I’ve actually never heard of an indictment of any kind getting zero votes in a grand jury. Any kind. And so for it to have—I mean, it’s just remarkable. And it tells you that this was an absolute piece of junk. I use a different word in another setting, but an absolute piece of junk.

And so there’s that case, but just to a slightly broader picture as we’re talking here today, John Bolton has pled guilty to mishandling classified information. A lot of people put that under the rubric of a revenge prosecution, because the motive of resurrecting that case does appear to have been because Trump hates John Bolton. But it also appears to have been the case that John Bolton did the thing he’s accused of. So we do have to keep that possibility in our mind.

But I kind of suspected Bolton did it, actually, when the first reporting came out, you know what I mean? I was like, I kind of think that of the cases, this is the one that maybe they’re going to get a conviction on.

But no, for the most part, it’s been a series of very, very aggressive politicized prosecutions. I was just talking about the big names, but I would place the Broadview Six case, the Chicago case involving protesters, as also a politicized prosecution, right? Political motives, political interests, and a deeply politicized process that produced a wildly embarrassing outcome. The government had to dismiss the case itself.

Sargent: Is it fair of me to say that in some basic sense, what we’re seeing from these prosecutors right now—their refusal to level with the public about this, their willingness to, I guess, keep a sham going in order to protect the despot from embarrassment—is that in some sense another form of corruption and degradation?

Khardori: Yeah. Yes. Yes. I think when you have the president going out saying that criminal conduct has occurred, and you’re not producing readily available information either to back it up or information that you believe would contradict it—yes, this is not appropriate and it’s not leveling with the public. That’s not how cases ordinarily proceed. You don’t normally have the president talking about that.

Once that has happened, you’ve hit a very, very tiny subset of criminal cases where, yes, the public expects and deserves an accounting of what has happened. And there’s this too-oft-repeated notion that the government only speaks through its filings—it’s not really true.

When there are public cases, cases that are of significance to the sitting administration, the Justice Department is more forthright. They produce more material. They make themselves available to answer questions, they provide documents. That is what the government does when there is a criminal prosecutorial effort that they want the public to know about and pay attention to. And this seems like, if Trump had the facts to back him up, this would be one of those.

Sargent: Well, there you have it. Where do you think this is going to end up? I gather that in your interpretation of events, at some point, because people will have to have their moment in court—because we still have that as part of our legal system—when that happens, maybe we’ll see that there were no actual arrests, or we’ll see that these 350-foot cuts maybe didn’t exist or were something made by construction workers. I don’t know. How do you anticipate it unfolding in a practical sense at this point?

Khardori: I think it’ll kind of fizzle out, actually, is what I suspect. I mean, of course people like you and me will want to see how this actually unfolds, just to complete the record, so to speak. But I think the government’s move here is kind of just to hope that people stop paying attention. Trump will be the biggest obstacle to that. You just kind of go away quiet, hope it just kind of fizzles out. Because eventually, if they’ve issued citations, people will have to show up.

But usually this is just money. We’re talking about tickets, right? Like a hundred bucks, whatever, it was 75 bucks, I don’t know. And assuming that there were actual arrests of any consequence, that will become public at some point too. Thus far, that has not happened.

So I expect that one way or another, we will get clarity, even if it’s by omission. And I remain very skeptical. I just—I don’t believe the president. I’ll just say it forthrightly. I don’t believe the president about this gigantic gash. Maybe there was some small little thing. He’s blown it out of proportion, or someone else has lied to him and he’s just running with it. I don’t know.

I don’t have to tell you—after the 2020 election, we all learned the man is capable of zeroing in on a lie, hewing to it tightly, and then persuading a large number of his supporters that it’s actually true. And it seems like he’s kind of trying to run the same play here, except it’s lower stakes, so to speak, but the same modus operandi.

Sargent: And by the way, he persuades himself that something’s true and then all bets are off and it just stays true no matter what. And the entire world needs to sort of bend itself around that.

Khardori: I think there’s a point at which—and I think we’re maybe there on the 2020 election—he loses the ability to tell the difference himself, which is very disturbing.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. And I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that no matter how hard the Justice Department tries, it’s not going to be able to protect Donald Trump from embarrassment at the end of the day here. Ankush Khardori, great stuff. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

Khardori: Thanks for having me.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn’t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on O‘ahu, but like a lot of Native Hawaiians, he had never had the opportunity to visit the uninhabited islands and atolls scattered to the west of the main islands. 

What he saw changed his life. “There’s no places left in Hawai‘i, or very few places, where the environment is so wild and intact that you have your ancestors who are embodied in the environment communicating with you every second: birds hovering over you, monk seals swimming up to you, fish trying to bite you,” he told Grist. “It’s so raw, the experience up there.”

“If anyone gains to benefit from this, it’s not going to be the traditional Indigenous communities.”

The trip, a monthlong research expedition with scientists and Native Hawaiians, sparked decades of advocacy within the Hawaiian community for the protection of the Papahānaumokuākea. “It ended up being this amazing journey of rediscovery for a lot of us. When we came back to the main Hawaiian islands, we started telling the community about how thereʻs a whole other side of our house that we didnʻt know about. We have to know about this place,” Kikiloi said. That support helped establish Papahānaumokuākea as both a marine sanctuary and a marine national monument. 

Now Kikiloi is worried those protections are under threat. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive proclamation to allow commercial fishing in parts of three national marine monuments in Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI): the Mau and Ho‘omalu Zones of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, and the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. Collectively, the areas under the proclamation span roughly half a million square miles in the Pacific Ocean and are home to thousands of plant and animal species in some of the planet’s most ecologically sensitive habitats.  

The proclamation is Trump’s latest attempt to dismantle conservation guardrails for industrial fishing. Last April, the president signed a proclamation to open over 400,000 square miles of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. He also issued an executive order intended to boost domestic seafood production, and his administration has continued to increase several fishery quotas. Then, this February, Trump signed another proclamation removing commercial fishing from the prohibited activities in two national monuments in the Atlantic. 

“AMERICA FIRST FISHING POLICY,” the White House posted on Facebook after this month’s proclamation. “MASSIVE WIN FOR AMERICA’S FISHERMEN!” During the signing in the Oval Office, Trump himself promised the move would generate “millions and millions of dollars in new business for our great, really great fishermen” and lower seafood costs. 

Rep. Kimberlyn King-Hinds, the sole congressional representative from the CNMI, attended the signing and said in a press release that she hopes the federal government will work with local officials and communities to implement the directive and that it creates jobs. “For the CNMI, ocean policy is local policy,” she said. “If American fishing activity grows in these waters, our goal should be to connect that activity to local jobs, local businesses, port activity, seafood infrastructure, and long-term food security for the Commonwealth.”

“We are destroying the capacity of the oceans to make the food we need.”

Numerous commercial fishers and groups have also hailed the president’s move to roll back the restrictions in areas such as Papahānaumokuākea. “We need to eat fish caught by our fishermen who follow US laws,” Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, told Grist. Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawai‘i Longliners Association, told Honolulu Civil Beat that he welcomed a review from the federal government “guided by sound science” on the scientific, economic, and cultural significance of the area, as well as management decisions that support “the long-term viability of Hawai‘i’s longline fleet.” After Trump signed the first commercial fishing proclamation last April, Kingma argued that ocean conservation and commercial fisheries can be compatible. “What we like about opening these up is the opportunity to fish there when the fish are there,” Kingma said at the time. 

But the administration’s strategy for boosting America’s $319 billion-dollar fishing sector has been riddled with unresolved legal questions.

In spring of last year, just days after the president’s April 2025 proclamation, the National Marine Fisheries Service, known as NOAA Fisheries, announced in a letter to permit holders it had reopened commercial fishing in the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. That ban was lifted for nearly four months, until last August, when a federal district judge ruled, in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, that the move violated the federal rulemaking process. 

Earthjustice attorney David Henkin believes that the lawsuit, which he led, may have prompted the administration to change its strategy for revising industrial fishing regulations. This shift became evident when, after the president’s Atlantic Ocean proclamation earlier this year, NOAA Fisheries went through the formal rulemaking process to change the regulation that previously banned commercial fishing in those monuments.

Still, there is another, more fundamental legal question that Henkin says remains open. Though Congress has absolute authority over the use and management of federal lands and waters, the Antiquities Act of 1906 also gave the president the authority to designate certain federal water and lands containing scientific, historic, or cultural resources as protected monuments. No federal court has yet ruled whether the Antiquities Act allows a president to undo a national monument or their protections, though several cases are pending. Earthjustice is again preparing to challenge the administration in court. “It’s anyone’s guess what these folks are going to do, other than play fast and loose with the law,” said Henkin. 

Opening these areas to commercial fishing has the additional effect of edging out traditional Indigenous fishers, who not only tend to practice smaller-scale, more sustainable fishing, but are also largely exempt from the commercial fishing bans in protected waters. Indigenous fishers, for instance, still retained the right to subsistence fish under the protections Trump just stripped back within the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument.

“If anyone gains to benefit from this, it’s not going to be the traditional Indigenous communities,” said Steven Mana‘oakamai Johnson, Kanaka Maoli from the island of Saipan and an assistant professor at Cornell University. “It’s going to be businesses, corporations, and those who have these larger vessels.” 

Even in American Samoa—where tuna is the biggest export and support for commercial fishing is widespread—some are questioning the expansiveness of Trump’s latest proclamation and its effect on Indigenous peoples. A year ago, congresswoman Uifa’atali Amata from American Samoa said of the Pacific marine monuments, “Neither presidents Bush, Obama, or Biden ever asked American Samoa what they wanted before they took away our Indigenous fishing rights without any science.” But now Amata is concerned about how fishing around Rose Atoll could also infringe on Indigenous rights. “Amata remains convinced that Rose Atoll should be off limits, her longstanding position, especially as she respects the cultural rights of the people of Manu‘a,” her office said in a press release. 

“It’s hard to exist as Hawaiians nowadays if every aspect of your environment is degraded.”

Camilo Mora, a scientist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, challenges the administration’s argument that deregulation will create jobs and strengthen the fishing sector. Mora has long studied the relationship between biodiversity, fisheries, and the global food system, and argues any short-term economic benefits of the move will be offset by the long-term ecosystem losses. Most US waters, in any case, are already open to commercial fishing—highly protected areas where all extractive activity is banned make up about 3 percent. 

Papahānaumokuākea, for one example, is one of the largest marine protected areas in the world and is a refuge for rare and ecologically significant species. The Hawaiian monk seal, humpback whales, and green sea turtles are among the more than 7,000 species found there, many of which are critically endangered. Opening up the Mau and Ho‘omalu zones of the area to commercial fishing, Mora warns, could trigger a trophic cascade—when a change in the top predator’s population or behavior ripples throughout the food chain—that will then drive “all of these populations to collapse.” 

“We are destroying the capacity of the oceans to make the food we need,” said Mora.

For Kikiloi in Hawai‘i, what’s at stake is not just food—it’s the ability for Indigenous people in Hawai‘i to stay connected to their ancestors. He’s not surprised that scientists like Mora have found some of the oldest living corals on Earth in Papahānaumokuākea, because Hawaiian oral histories describe it as the place where life began. “It’s the place where our souls return to after death,” he said. “It’s hard to exist as Hawaiians nowadays if every aspect of your environment is degraded.” 

Two versions of history began when, one fall night in 1957, a two-stage rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and deposited a Soviet satellite called Sputnik into orbit around Earth. The first version is the one that is well-known: the grand romance of a terrestrial species bounding out of its cradle, the sharpening of America’s own hunger for this scientific adventure, the astonishing realms of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Space Age. The alternate history casts the space race, first and foremost, as a surly, selfish contest for military and ideological supremacy.

The prospect of being snooped upon from space by the Soviets got the Americans worked up enough to accelerate the development not only of Explorer 1—the first U.S. scientific satellite, launched in January 1958—but also of the Corona program of spy satellites. Just as worrying for the Eisenhower administration was the rocket on which Sputnik rode: an R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. (Edward Teller, who helped build the hydrogen bomb for the United States, described the news of Sputnik as “a technological Pearl Harbor.”) If you could put a satellite on the R-7 and send it into orbit, you could also put a nuke on it and send it to Chicago. The Russians had set a precedent, Eisenhower’s advisers insisted in a closed-door conference; the United States, too, could and should lob missiles into outer space. Moscow was surreptitious and scheming in its own way. To dupe the Americans, the spaceport referred to as the Baikonur Cosmodrome was, in fact, nearly 200 miles southwest of the mining town of Baikonur. These cold warriors had not so much thoughts as afterthoughts of science.

All narrators of the Space Age as a sordid geopolitical competition will invite several accusations. That they’re narrow- and mean-minded, so intent on sweating the politics that they’re unable to cherish the scientific advances—not to mention the glorious vistas of our universe—that our spacefaring has brought to us. That they’re Luddites. That they’re too idealistic, too eager to believe that we would have reached the moon when we did even without the pants-on-fire urgency of Cold War militarism. Or that they’re not idealistic enough, because they aren’t able to imagine the egalitarian space bound future that will rescue us from our ramshackle present.

These charges hold varying levels of merit. You’d certainly have to be staggeringly cussed, for instance, to dismiss the images of Saturn’s rings captured by the Voyager and Cassini probes, or the truths that space telescopes, picking up cosmic microwave background radiation, revealed about the age and shape of our universe, or just the daily conveniences of GPS, memory foam mattresses, and runners’ Mylar blankets that have spun out of space missions. The clear-eyed will see, on the other hand, the utter hokum that is the space utopia now hawked to us by a handful of libertarian billionaires. They will also spot the bright, continuous line that connects the space race of the twentieth century to that of the twenty-first. Just as scientific universalism was once used, at least in part, as a cover for the power struggles of the Cold War, today’s techno-libertarian drive outward into space cloaks a steroidal American urge to impose its will upon the world. The signs can be read through the history of space exploration, right up into Artemis—the recent lunar mission hastened along by Donald Trump’s vanity, his desire to “never be second,” and the plot to “establish U.S. dominance on the moon.” It’s futile to deny that we got the Space Age we got because one country grew drunk on capitalism and is still zealous about defending its mythic exceptionalism beyond the literal ends of the earth.

For David Ariosto, the author of Open Space, that defense must be led by U.S. companies, with an aim to grab their share of space before China does. Ariosto describes himself as the founder of a “strategic communications and intelligence firm redefining how organizations navigate the space frontier,” and while his book is scattered and incoherent, it is revealing in one way. In being thoroughly and constantly obsessed with what China is up to, Ariosto reveals the id of America: its paranoid lust for military and industrial preeminence, its self-regard, its delusion that the future belongs to no other nation. During his first spasm of panic about China, which comes as early as the second page of the prologue, Ariosto writes that “we” ought to “acknowledge that it is wiser to have trusted stewards at the table than to surrender control to those who may do us harm.” It’s uncertain whom he means by “we,” but he leaves no doubts that the stewards should be Americans—or American corporations.

This clumsily posed binary choice has a rich heritage. In the “battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny,” John F. Kennedy told a joint session of Congress in 1961, the time had come “for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.” It was almost existentially important for humanity to see that the American system—or the Soviet system, as the case may have been—was the best to grasp the universe, and also to weaponize it en route. Again and again, the space programs of the two Cold War antagonists were waylaid or warped by the priorities of their militaries. When, in the late 1940s, the Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev wanted to propose building a satellite, his superiors, wary of subversive talk, warned him to back off. Practically as soon as satellites confirmed the existence of the Van Allen belt, a zone of charged particles high above the atmosphere, the United States began detonating nuclear bombs within it, trying to generate enough radiation to disrupt the mechanisms of Soviet warheads. Both Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn rode to space on ICBMs; so useful was NASA to the Pentagon, the political scientist Daniel Deudney writes in Dark Skies, that “Lyndon Johnson claimed the space program had saved ten times as much as it cost by reducing arms expenditures.”

The Pentagon wanted the space shuttle to be designed so that it could fly over Soviet latitudes, release a spy satellite or capture one, and then return to its launchpad after a single orbit. As a result, the wings had to be shaped differently, the cargo bay had to be enlarged to hold the bigger reconnaissance satellites that were in the offing, and the spacecraft itself grew heavier. When the shuttle lagged behind schedule and ran over budget, Jimmy Carter kept funding it in the hope that it could be used to check up on the Soviets, to see if they were sticking to the terms of arms-limitation treaties.

In the Reagan era, NASA’s scientific funding shrank, even as the Strategic Defense Initiative, which relied so heavily on space-based missiles that it was nicknamed “Star Wars,” received more and more money. In 1986, when NASA’s entire budget clocked in at $7.4 billion, Reagan asked Congress for $5.4 billion for Star Wars alone. And then, when the Cold War petered out—when the United States felt it had won, when history ended—America’s space adventurism deflated. To be sure, there was serious and excellent research conducted aboard the International Space Station and by observatories on the ground and in the sky. But the once-frantic ambition to push ever upward seemed to fall in America’s priorities when there was no burning strategic or military objective to tether the space program. Net-net, Deudney writes with provocative boldness, “the consequences of what has actually happened in space are much less positive than space enthusiasts and many others believe.”

It can’t be total coincidence that the U.S. space sector revived around the dawn of another rivalry of great powers and their clashing ideologies. Beijing didn’t offer tactful euphemisms for its aspirations. Ye Peijian, the head of the Chinese lunar exploration program, said of the moon in 2019: “If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.” This kind of directness has been the rhetorical equivalent of the R-7 rocket: a license to freely frame the new space race as a tussle for control and wealth.

If Ariosto is any measure of the U.S. space industry today, everyone has an anxious eye turned eastward. When he suggests that space has become a “gatekeeper to humanity’s AI-driven future, offering solar energy, abundant resources, and natural cooling”—a thorough deromanticization of the universe if there ever was one—he frets in the very next sentence that China has surged ahead in batteries, solar cells, rare earths, robotics, and quantum technologies. An Iranian-born space entrepreneur working in the United States tells Ariosto that he wants to “ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.” If the high seas might be read as an analogue to deep space, Ariosto writes elsewhere in the book, China signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea but then showed its willingness to ignore the treaty whenever

it saw fit. (He neglects the fact that the United States has refused to sign up to UNCLOS, just as it has rejected treaties that ban nuclear testing, act against climate change, and recognize the International Criminal Court.) In detailing how satellites might help build “digital twins”—real-time models—of practically anything on Earth’s surface, he points out that the notion raises “major questions of privacy.” He means, of course, not the capacity of governments to intrude into the lives of their citizens, but the possibility that China could obtain critical insights into Western infrastructure.

Ariosto devotes two whole chapters to China’s construction in Argentina of a ground station to support its space missions; he is allowed to visit the facility, he watches scientists and engineers at work in their labs—and then he seems to hint that the station is likely to have been set up to intercept U.S. electromagnetic signals. (Las Lajas, the town in the Andean foothills where the Chinese built this complex of buildings, is thousands of miles from the continental United States—much too far to eavesdrop on the president’s cell phone calls.) It’s never wise to be too credulous of the subterranean motivations of great powers, as the United States itself has taught us again and again. But Ariosto’s manner implies that, for Americans, space wouldn’t be worth a second look if they weren’t mightily alarmed about China’s interest in it. When he describes Apophis, an asteroid that will pass uncomfortably close to Earth in 2029, I half-expected him to urge America to load it with explosives before the Chinese can make a move.

For that is really what Ariosto thinks it will mean for the United States to excel in space: weaponize better, extract more, and colonize faster than anyone else. In this, he resembles most of the Americans he speaks to and writes about—even Barack Obama, who in 2015 made it legal for U.S. companies to own minerals and other resources found in space. The act may well violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which banned governments from claiming sovereignty over any celestial body. But the flag bearers of the modern space race must view the 1967 treaty as part of a brief and regrettable infection of idealism in the American establishment. They certainly regard that establishment as not being aggressive and cutthroat enough in its extraterrestrial pursuits. (One of Ariosto’s sources, deciding that words really hold no intrinsic meaning, ascribes the laggardness of the United States in the 1960s to the “socialist paradigm” of the time.)

Today’s space titans—including those in China—plan to avoid those old-timey, rookie mistakes. The only reason, really, to send probes to asteroids is to figure out how best to strip-mine them. (“Will we actually land on an asteroid and get these beautiful samples? Probably fucking not,” says the CEO of AstroForge, an American space mining startup, sounding as if he were assessing his chances of rushing a frat. “But do we hope to … show people the price point we’re doing this at is doable? I hope.”) A senior Chinese official envisaged a “special economic zone” between the moon and Earth that might, by 2050, yield $10 trillion in yearly revenue. The Adam Smith Institute published a report arguing that we should privatize the moon altogether, sweetly pretending that the objective is to “turbocharge scientific discovery.” The abject lack of any enforceable space law is a feature, not a bug; SpaceX’s general counsel has said that his company would “move to impose our own legal regime” on Mars. The laissez-faire code of outer space will, it is implicitly believed, engender better civilian technology—which will, in turn, prove useful in preparations for war. For the Americans in Ariosto’s book, this future cannot arrive fast enough. What better way, after all, to champion the free market, the military-industrial complex, the internalized hallucinations of Manifest Destiny, and all the other pillars of the American way of life than to put them to use, nakedly and in concert, in the conquest of space?

Open Space likes to valorize the entrepreneurs it portrays. These aren’t the very grandest names in the business; Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who coined their wealth in other fields and then spent it on SpaceX and Blue Origin, only transit briefly through the book. They aren’t even the founders of companies in the next tier: the New Zealand-born Peter Beck, for instance, whose Rocket Lab has ferried more than 200 satellites into space, or the trio behind Planet Labs, whose Dove satellites, like manic shutterbugs, photograph Earth from orbit thousands of times a day. Rather, Ariosto takes us to startups striving to cash in on the space race. One company, Lonestar Data Holdings, wants to repurpose the moon “as a kind of off-world backup for Earth’s data.” Ariosto suggests that the eventual result of a lunar mission launched by another company, Intuitive Machines, will be the mining of the moon for iron and titanium. A third, D-Orbit, wishes to take apart old satellites and recycle their parts for profit.

The men—usually men—who lead these companies wear the heroic sheen not of philosophers at the frontiers of knowledge but of accountants toiling over their P&L statements. As a habit, in describing these endeavors, Ariosto will say: “Yet, admittedly, the path forward will not be easy” or “Turns out, it wouldn’t be easy” or “Of course, it wouldn’t be easy.” (Once, to change things up, he writes: “Failure was a very real possibility.”) Perhaps he intends to signal that he is a realist, a cool and clinical analyst of the state of play. But he offers no satisfying insights into what it means for the space sector to have intersected so neatly with Silicon Valley, and why that even came to be.

One factor behind this unholy marriage is the confluence of economic trends, as Ashlee Vance explains in When the Heavens Went on Sale, a closely observed account of the people and companies propelling the modern space business. Some things got cheaper—consumer electronics that could survive in space, materials for rockets, software—and some people got epic rich. It became possible to build a satellite for $100,000, rather than $1 billion, just when tech magnates like Musk and Bezos grew wealthy to the point that $100,000 was a meaningless sum of money—and also when they believed that they ruled their industry and wished for more worlds to master. They could have improved health care or paid off student debt, but these wouldn’t have been very American things to do. Just like the tech sector circa 2000, space exploration today holds the same promise of titanic and impersonal engineering challenges (“Of course, it wouldn’t be easy”), untold riches for first movers, and an unregulated playground. Aspiring to exploit the cosmos for personal gain is one exponential leap from aspiring to build an online store that crushes every other online store or to build a thinking machine that replaces humans. The hubris of it all, which Vance captures so well, and also the harm-be-damned approach of it all—that is very American. It may be corporations that are running this race, but they’re still direct and rather obvious proxies for national power.

It helps, too, that the tech moguls had, like their predecessors in the space sector, learned to garb their real motivations in do-gooding platitudes. Just as Neil Armstrong claimed to be arriving on the moon for all mankind but was really there for the United States alone, so, too, the pitch decks of Silicon Valley routinely talk about making the world a better place while pledging their loyalty in blood to shareholders. These new pioneers of space expansionism guarantee nothing less than utopia at the other end of the journey. In Open Space, Ariosto points to previous such projects that he deems to have succeeded: The expansion of Western empires, he writes, was driven by fine things like “new financial incentives and stock options [that] spurred entrepreneurial growth.” And the settlement of Mars, he says, might resemble the settlement of Jamestown: with some “tensions” between the early colonists, distant investors, and the English crown. He has left out the racist subjugation and extractive greed of imperialism, and the “tensions” with Native Americans that resulted in their large-scale slaughter. To forestall the possibility of industries ravaging outer space, Ariosto ponders some vague “earthly legal overseer,” but he isn’t very interested in details. It’s too important to dupe the world into thinking that this space mania—into which billions of dollars have been invested—will truly bring about colonies wonderfully low on violence, servitude, and greed, pies in the literal sky.

The tragedy of this space race is that it has left us unable to imagine or craft an alternative one. Because of course it’s essential for humans to know this universe that holds us, not only for what we will learn about the nature of matter, space, and time, but also for the genuine potential of this enterprise to unite us. Nothing about our recent record suggests that we’re even able to come together to combat threats that imperil us right this minute, let alone capable of forming world governments and moon cities that are just and free. If the future of humankind in space is to look any different from the state of humankind on Earth, it can’t be left, by default or out of despair, to the tech firms of Silicon Valley. We need other space programs, other agencies, other men and women to obsess over our role out among the stars. This won’t be easy, as Ariosto would no doubt say—but the moon shot will be worth it.