Why the right’s attack on ‘socialism’ is a failure
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. This past week, after Democratic socialists swept a slate of primaries in New York City, Republicans launched a rerun of one of their most well-worn lines of attack: communism. President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to…
Small differences
A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | A sneak peek at Obama’s legacy-defining presidential museum…
It’s too hot in Europe—again
Europeans are experiencing their second heat wave this summer. One climate scientist called the weather event a “sad inevitability.” By Lauren Dalban for Inside Climate News Europe is in the midst of its second big heat wave of the year, and it’s breaking more records. France just recorded its hottest day ever, with temperatures exceeding 44 degrees Celsius in some places.
Trump hates cops—and reminds the DOJ they are at his command
Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back. It’s the kind of week where you can see just how much Trump has captured and warped the Department of Justice, and it does not feel good at all. Sure, President Donald Trump likes the idea of cops, viewing them as hyper…
Green with envy
A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump deflects from Reflecting Pool failure by arresting ‘vandals’…
A voice for change: How Woody Guthrie keeps resonating with new generations
A new documentary connects the life and music of the Depression-era singer-songwriter to today’s struggles for social justice, equality and immigrant rights. By Steve Appleford for Capital & Main During his lifetime, Woody Guthrie saw America at ground level, riding boxcars, singing in taverns and on street corners, and even living for a time in a California migrant camp.
Even in blue states, hospitals have continued to drop gender-affirming care for youths
By Karen Brown, New England Public Media, for KFF One afternoon in late 2024, a sixth-grader nicknamed Bug came home from school with an announcement to make. Bug, who was assigned female at birth, told his parents he was a boy — and would be using he/him pronouns. “OK, cool,” his mother, J, remembered saying. (J asked to be identified by only her first initial, and Bug by his…
Mark Zuckerberg Sure Sounds Eager to Get Young People Hooked on Online Gambling
Meta believes the future is gambling.
As prediction markets surge in popularity, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly calling for his company to consider partnering with Polymarket and Kalshi, two of the biggest platforms, while he develops a similar in-house app, Arena. According to a Friday report by the New York Times, Zuckerberg wants to design Arena to specifically target 18 to 34-year-olds.
Meta also hopes to implement parts of Arena into Facebook and its messaging app, Messenger, attaching betting options to group chats, news feeds, and videos.
“We believe that prediction markets are one of the more interesting new content types,” Ime Archibong, a senior Meta official leading Arena’s development, reportedly said in an internal company post last month. “The social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.”
The strategy appears to be: betting as content, gamifying gambling to become social. It’s a framing that could open the door to harmful situations, especially for the young people he’s going after. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 2.5 million US adults, or about 1 percent of Americans, meet the diagnostic mental health criteria of severe gambling addiction. An Epic Research study published on Friday analyzing electronic health records found that gambling disorder diagnoses have risen more than 60 percent since 2018 in states that have legalized sports betting. The largest increase came from young people, aged 18 to 29, whose rate more than doubled.
“When markets are built into a personalized feed, they stop feeling like something for traders,” Archibong wrote in his same internal post. “They start to feel like part of the conversation that is tied to memes, moments, and whatever people are paying attention to.”
Yes. Right. Exactly. Meta appears to openly desire a world in which the company profits off addiction by blurring the lines between gambling and daily online conversation.
A fiercely divided debate over Democrats’ future
This week, I blew up Daily Kos with two stories that generated fiercely divided responses. The first was the perhaps too-provocatively titled “Why Democrats need their own Trump,” followed by a bit of a cleanup piece, “Yes, there is plenty that Democrats can smash.” Too many people never got past the headline to engage with the substance, which I understand. We don’t need our own Donald Trump.
Does Trump Know How Passports Work?
President Trump on Friday unveiled the latest rendering of a special edition US passport to commemorate America’s 250th birthday that features a large image of himself hovering over the Resolute Desk, the latest in a series of plans to place Trump front and center of the anniversary.
But it’s the warning that will accompany the new passports that’s prompting a new kind of stress: “Welcome, but be good!”
The message instantly called into question Trump’s understanding of a passport, which is primarily obtained so that American citizens can leave the United States and travel abroad—no welcome needed. It seems likely that Trump was conflating a US passport with a visa. Either that or he feels a knee-jerk inclination to inject anti-immigrant, xenophobic themes into everything he does. Both feel too possible.
Truth Social
Meanwhile, the State Department hasn’t confirmed the new design. But American citizens with plans to obtain or renew their passports this summer may want to steer clear of the Washington Passport Agency. As CNN reported when an earlier rendering was released in April, the limited edition passport will be the “default option” at the DC processing center. “Online options or other locations will maintain existing passport design,” an official told CNN.
Recognizing Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee’s Caribbean American allyship
Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean. Welcome! This is the first time I am celebrating a Caribbean American ally in this series, applauding the work of Barbara Lee, mayor of Oakland, California, and former U.S.
Grab ’em by the cookies
A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trumps find tacky new way to profit from White House cage fight…
How to Survive a Brutal Heat Wave in Italy
This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
With Western Europe in the grip of a punishing early-summer heat wave, maximum health alerts have been issued in Rome, Paris, and even London. Thursday was the UK’s and Switzerland’s hottest June day on record, with each just below 100 degrees F, while France endured its warmest day ever on Wednesday, with temperatures in some areas rising to approximately 111 degrees F.
The toll of the sweltering temperatures driven by a heat dome has been stark: French authorities have recorded at least 48 drownings as people try to escape the heat, while hot cars have tragically claimed the lives of three young children. Spain is seeing a similarly tragic reality. Between Sunday and Thursday alone, an estimated 327 people lost their lives to the extreme conditions, according to data from the Spanish health ministry’s monitoring system.
Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers.
Italy, where I live, is under severe strain too. Even though this is the country that holds the title for Europe’s hottest-ever temperature (119.8 degrees F in Sicily in 2021), the current climate is testing those limits once again. On Friday, the Italian Ministry of Health placed 18 major cities on strict Level 3 red alert (bollino rosso), indicating immediate risk to even healthy adults. These cities include Rome, Milan, Florence, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Genoa, and Bari.
That warning seems prescient—of the five people who have died so far, one was a 61-year-old male in the Piacenza area who collapsed while working in his vineyard. Though this initial toll seems small compared to those in Spain and France, Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers, capturing a grim toll of roughly 18,800 deaths in 2022, 13,800 in 2023, and over 19,000 in 2024. (Numbers for 2025 aren’t in yet.)
Moreover, even as other places in Europe are looking toward relief this weekend, meteorologists warn that Italy’s anomalous heat wave will not ease significantly until early July. Yet, tourism figures for this summer indicate a record-breaking 172 million people are slated to come to the Bel Paese in July and August. Oh, and remember—we do not really do air conditioning in this country (more on that in a moment). If you are heading our way, how will you cope?
The Italian health ministry offered sage advice in their recent circular titled “Protect Me From the Heat”: Avoid going out between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when the weather is at its hottest), limit alcohol and coffee (sorry), dress in natural fibers such as linen (do this anyway), eat lightly (again, sorry), and drink at least a liter and a half of water.
Always carry a bottle with you, too; in both the countryside and cities in Italy, you are bound to come across a water fountain. If filling water from somewhere public grosses you out, fear not; there is a knack to it. There should be signs saying Acqua Potabile (drinking water) above the fountain. If it says Acqua Non Potabile, it’s a no-go. If you’re headed to Rome, there are specific drinking-water fountains called nasoni, named because they resemble long noses. There are about 2,500 dotted around the Eternal City.
On a much broader spectrum, there is an app called Acquea that pinpoints over 150,000 points with drinkable water throughout Italy. Run by Rome’s water company, Acea, the app also gives out the sodium and calcium levels of the liquid from the fountains and has a built-in tracker to monitor hydration (small amounts of sodium are essential to rehydrating effectively).
Lunch during hotter times tends to be a no-cook affair. Instead of devouring a plate of hot pasta or a whole pizza come midday, opt for timeless Italian summertime classics such as prosciutto-wrapped melon, a refreshing caprese salad, or an insalata di riso (rice salad) tossed with light ingredients such as vegetables and eggs. Back in 2023, the Italian Ministry of Health even advised swapping out pranzi freddi (cold lunches) for gelato instead. “Consuming an ice cream or a milkshake can be an alternative to a midday meal,” the guide suggested.
Speaking of sweet treats to cool down, Sicilian granita is a semi-frozen dessert similar to a slush, but with fresh ingredients and a more crystalline texture. Originating on the Italian island, but now found everywhere in Italy, popular flavors of granita include lemon and strawberry. In Rome, grattachecca (shaved ice) is king come the summer months. Vendors manually shave ice off of a block and into a cup. The ice is then drenched with flavored syrups, making for a perfect Roman summer street food.
Coffee doesn’t have to be a complete no-go either. There are plenty of cold coffee options, such as caffè shakerato, a drink made by vigorously shaking coffee with ice and a sweetener in a cocktail shaker, or caffè leccese, a sweet, almond-based coffee from Puglia made by placing almond syrup and ice cubes in a glass and topping them off with espresso.
There are plenty of crisp indoor sights, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.
While mastering the local food and drink menus is a delicious way to stay cool, surviving an Italian summer also requires a bit of structural strategy. Wherever you are staying or plan to eat, make sure you call before you book to inquire about whether they have air conditioning. The reason it is not a given in Italy is a somewhat unique belief called colpo d’aria (hit of air). According to Italian lore, a sudden exposure to a cold draft while you’re hot is believed to cause neck aches, stomach cramps, earaches, and headaches. Fortunately, recent market data shows unit sales have increased by 16 percent since last year, providing a glimmer of hope that this attitude is changing given the heat waves.
If you find yourself AC-less, the shutters found on the facades of all Italian residential properties can provide much-needed respite. Do as Italians do and keep them closed during the morning to stop the sunlight from getting in and warming up your hotel room.
The boiling weather doesn’t necessarily mean you have to skimp on major landmarks, either—it just means you may have to switch it up. If you fully intend to brave the heat between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., make sure you get tickets in advance to avoid queuing for hours in the blistering sun.
More importantly, make sure your midday landmarks are indoors; standing in the center of the Colosseum at noon during a heat wave is a surefire way to ruin your day. But Italy has plenty of crisp indoor sights to see, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.
Taking a stroll (passeggiata) and sightseeing at night is also just as nice as doing it in the day. You’ll probably meet more locals along the way too, as they seldom step out when it is boiling. During summer, main attractions stay open until 7 p.m., and even offer exclusive night openings; after-hours entry at the Vatican or visiting the Colosseum by moonlight allow you to see world-class history under the stars.
And remember, Italy is more than its cities. With tourists never being too far from a beach or hills, and train travel being cheap (and air-conditioned!), holidaymakers can always substitute a day wandering around cobblestoned streets for white sands or grassy paths to keep out of the humidity. By learning to adjust your clock, leaning into the art of the pranzi freddi, and treating the midday heat as an excuse for an extra gelato, you won’t just survive the intense Mediterranean summer, you will get to experience Italy in a safer way, exactly the way the locals have become accustomed to.
America’s 250th Celebration Is Donald Trump’s Lost Cause
We’re closing in on July Fourth and the nation’s 250th birthday, and right on time, the all-knowing digital algorithm deposited a memory from 2015 on my screen: That year, burning the Confederate flag on Independence Day was in vogue, sparked by the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My fondness for desecrating rebel iconography is not restricted to either a national holiday or a national tragedy—we should have fully conquered the Confederacy when we had the chance, instead of allowing them to commemorate their traitorousness. Maybe those nine parishioners would be alive today if we’d done a better job discrediting that toxic ideology.
That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth. When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration. At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his “Great American State Fair,” Trump announced that “America is back.” Where had it gone? The president proclaimed that “a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”
As a thin crowd made for the exits, he also touched on the matter of state that’s consumed most of his time lately: “The Reflecting Pool that you’ve heard so much about, which is so incredible, it’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people, but soon will be looking as beautiful as it looked just two weeks ago,” Trump said. “In fact, I looked at it just a little while ago. It looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” As it happens, the Reflecting Pool is still green, still peeling, and half-assedly stashed behind some chain-link fence. It may be a federal crime for me to report this, it’s not really clear.
All of this is definitely a product of ego, but it’s also highly reminiscent of Confederate kitsch. Trump’s drive to commemorate himself, which has even run afoul of some of his fellow Republicans, is animated by the same idea as the Lost Cause: to lend legitimacy to a period of betrayal and to ensure this malevolent force lives on. Allowing the Confederacy to commemorate itself was a profound failure on our part, and it seeded the earth for the weakening of our democracy. As Trump plans to sully the District of Columbia’s skyline with his triumphal arch (now with more fist!), I can see history repeating: Trumpism as the new Lost Cause.
I am hardly the first to evoke this comparison. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote back in 2020, Trump spent his Independence Day marinating in a variety of Lost Cause grievances: the decision to remove the Confederate iconography from the Mississippi state flag and NASCAR events, the renaming of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, along with the usual suspects (“the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing”).
As Graham noted at the time, Trump’s Lost Cause fetish was his campaign schtick, the red meat he used to rally his base. In 2020, that playbook failed, in no small part because the Covid-19 pandemic was foremost on the minds of voters. But Trump played the same game in 2024 and won back the White House. And as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Rivka Maizlish wrote last year, the “unrelenting propaganda of the Lost Cause” returned with a vengeance. The names of Confederacy luminaries stricken from U.S. military bases were restored, there was a renewed push to whitewash the sins of slavery, and the Civil War era’s insurrectionists were conflated with the nations’ Founders. It’s no accident that Trump believes our latter-day insurrectionists should be the ones to get government reparations.
As Maizlish noted, ’twas ever thus:
Lost Cause mythology is central to Trump’s movement. He romanticizes the gender and racial hierarchies of the Old South, valorizes Confederate leaders and symbols, and demonizes those who would remove Confederate memorials as “angry mobs” trying to “wipe out our history.” The Confederate anthem “Dixie” played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27, 2024, an event filled with racist harangues and ridicule.
Trump is now deep into his dotage (and perhaps his inexorable decline). He has no campaigns left to run and no further need to worry about uniting the American people to build some kind of sustainable electoral coalition. These days, the president is motivated entirely by thoughts of his legacy. But the Lost Cause schtick remains the same—only now it’s manifesting itself in his relentless pursuit of various vanity projects and alterations to Washington, D.C.
The possibility that he might not be remembered seems to vex Trump, whose administration moved with the same sort of alacrity to forestall the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center as it did in fighting its inane war with Iran. As Brian Beutler reported in his Off Message newsletter, Trump’s name only came off the building because Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty, as an ex-officio member of the center’s board, had the standing to sue over the matter and she took the opportunity. Some other Democrats who had standing for the same reason decided to pass, including House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and outgoing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Beutler hails Beatty as a model for other Democrats to follow, given what can happen to a country when a traitor to the Constitution is allowed to remain commemorated. Every lasting monument to Trump is really a monument to accommodating his misrule, celebrating his corruption, and a signal to the public that it’s OK to forget his criminal legacy and accept the Trump era as legitimate. “It will be much easier to arrest the normal process of forgetting,” writes Beutler, “if Democrats embrace the goal of Trump humiliation now. If peeling Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center is just a taste of what’s to come.”
Tearing Trump’s various architectural vanities down isn’t what I’d call a top priority. Like TNR’s editor, Michael Tomasky, I think Democrats need to commit themselves to freeing us from the iron grip of oligarchy and radically reshaping the Supreme Court. Still, as Tomasky wrote earlier this week, we should look to future Democratic presidential candidates to follow in the footsteps of Beatty and commit to a cosmetic de-Trumpification. It would send a strong signal that the party will brook no attempts to commemorate a discredited president—and that it has the stomach for the civic deworming this nation needs to kick off its next century.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Has America Lived Up to Its Founding Promise?
Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved person living in Massachusetts when the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago. The document’s famous words “all men are created equal” did not apply to her, but she thought they should.
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“She is somebody who heard the words of the declaration, knew that they were real in her life, and argued for that to be true,” says Errin Haines, editor-at-large at The 19th. Eventually, Freeman fought to abolish slavery in Massachusetts.
This week on Reveal, as America marks 250 years since its founding, we share stories of people who were denied equality and the battles they fought to attain it. In addition to Freeman’s story, we hear about one of the first Native American communities to encounter white settlers more than 400 years ago and learn why the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment for women continues to this day.
Will ‘shy voters’ boost Democrats in the midterms?
In recent days, Democrats’ lead has shrunk in the congressional generic ballot, which asks respondents if they would vote for the “Democratic candidate” or the “Republican candidate” if the election were held today. On June 1, Democrats led by 7.1 percentage points on the generic ballot, but that has since fallen to 6.1 points, according to election analyst Nate Silver’s polling average.
Tucker Carlson curses out Trump, plus Trump’s Great American State Fail
A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump’s ‘Great American State Fair’ is a flop All Maine’s booth had was two empty chairs—and it got worse from there. Trump’s ‘teleporting’ FEMA official vanishes from agency The title for Most Absurd Guy in the Trump administration has a front-runner.
Reflecting pool party!
A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool scandal…
‘Get out!’: Megyn Kelly adds Haitians to her racist enemy list
Conservative pundit and podcaster Megyn Kelly responded to the Supreme Court’s recent anti-immigrant ruling in the Mullin v. Al Otro Lado case with her latest bigoted rant. The decision in the 6-3 case, decided by the conservative majority, allows the Trump administration to deport people who have legally lived in the U.S. after seeking asylum to be deported, even after living here in peace…
Disagreements between Supreme Court justices bubble into public view as major rulings loom
The Supreme Court is handing down major opinions at a rapid clip, but even with some of the biggest decisions yet to come there are signs of tension between the justices. One highly unusual exchange for the restrained and traditional atmosphere came Thursday, as the members of the nation’s highest court took the bench as usual to read a short summary of their decisions.