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Right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson has pivoted from his cringeworthy praise of President Donald Trump as a “daddy” who would administer spankings to his political rivals to now referring to the president as “weak” following his Iran war disaster. In an interview with podcaster Jack Neel, Carlson described Trump as “buffoonish” and said he decided to retreat from hostilities in Iran…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Mamdani minces no words over ICE’s threat at the World Cup…

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A South Dakota Republican state senator has been hit with two felony charges for falsifying party nomination forms, reports the South Dakota Searchlight.

Tom Pischke, 44, allegedly submitted 16 forged forms to try to put candidates on the ballot for county party leadership, unbeknownst to the candidates themselves.

The fake forms were caught by Minnehaha County auditor Leah Anderson, who noticed that the address for one of the nominees didn’t match the one on their voter registration. She then noticed that all 16 forms had similar handwriting, and the signatures didn’t match other documents the candidates had signed.

Pischke initially denied forging the forms, but turned himself in after footage showed his car dropping off papers at the post office, and his DNA was found on the envelopes, reports the South Dakota Searchlight.

Pischke represents a deep-red district near Sioux Falls, and ran unopposed in his Republican primary, according to the AP.

Korry Petterson, the chair of the Minnehaha County Republican Party, said that he believes Pischke’s meddling was likely an attempt to interfere with his more centrist agenda and push the party to the right.

He told the South Dakota Searchlight that he wants prosecutors to push for a severe punishment for Pischke if the allegations are proven, and that he hopes the Republican Party as a whole will take this as a warning.

“If anything, I think it will help people realize that the extremism has got to stop,” Petterson said.

Was Thursday among the darkest days in the history of the Supreme Court? You could make a case. First, a majority cleared the way for a pesticide manufacturer to get thousands of lawsuits off its books from farmers who’d used its product and gotten cancer. Next, it ruled that the administration could turn away asylum-seekers at the border. And then it held that gun owners could now freely carry their weapons into private establishments that serve the public.

Let’s pause over that one for a paragraph. Here’s a good description of the particulars of the gun case and the legal arguments on both sides. But the upshot is this: Everywhere in America, gun owners will presumably be able to take their guns to shops, stores, malls, movie theaters, restaurants, bars, amusement parks, Baby Gaps, you name it. Does any rational person think that the Founders, who simply wanted men to have muskets to protect themselves from invaders, would want someone to be able to take a military-style semiautomatic rifle and 600 rounds of ammo into a Chuck E. Cheese?

But the worst of Thursday’s big four decisions was Mullin v. Doe, which will allow the Trump administration to begin deporting Haitians and Syrians who were granted Temporary Protected Status by the Obama administration in 2010 and 2012, respectively. My colleague Matt Ford shredded the decision in his piece, writing that the court “effectively blessed Trump’s bigotry toward Haitians and dealt potentially catastrophic damage to federal civil rights laws.”

The cases combine to give the executive branch more power. They turn several lower court decisions on their head (as The New York Times notes today, immigration hard-liners had lost case after case on TPS until yesterday). And in the case of Mullin, in particular, the highest legal authority in the land—namely, Samuel Alito, writing for the majority—pretends that Donald Trump’s blatant racism toward Haitians doesn’t exist; that there was nothing “overtly racial” in Trump’s many disgusting and false comments about the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, and beyond.

This conservative court is out of control—blatantly partisan and ideological, the six-member majority scarcely even pretends otherwise anymore.

Some major decisions about executive power—Trump’s power—are yet to be handed down this term, involving the firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the removal of Democratic appointees from independent agencies, and of course the birthright citizenship case. If the court rules predictably on two of these three, or certainly on all three, it will have completed a term—with the aforementioned four decisions already on the books, as well as Callais v. Louisiana, which did away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—that might well be the most reactionary in its history. And all this is on top of the earlier reversal of a 49-year-old precedent in 1973’s Roe v. Wade and the handing to Trump of sweeping immunity for all “official” acts.

It’s now unavoidable: This has to be a front-and-center issue in 2028. Democratic presidential contenders will have to answer the question: What do you plan to do about the Supreme Court?

Many of them will be afraid to dip a foot into these waters. They shouldn’t be. Poll after poll shows us that majorities disapprove of the court and think of its decisions as being more political than jurisprudential. According to Gallup, disapproval of the court topped 50 percent five years ago and has stayed there ever since (in contrast, that number was just 29 percent as recently as 2010). So the public—not just the progressive base of the party—is ready to hear ideas.

Terms limits, the most common idea bruited, are fine. But imposing term limits won’t really change the makeup of the court for years; maybe decades. How many more rights will they strip away before then? How much more power will they give to the uber-rich to buy political campaigns and candidates? How much more immunity will they grant to corporations? How many new ways will they find to weaken protections for workers and litigants against corporate power? And perhaps most of all, how will they figure out how to allow the executive branch to undermine the laws passed by Congress and refuse to write regulations and enforce the laws Congress has passed?

No—terms limits are no longer enough. It’s time to talk seriously about court expansion. And I think there’s a smart and totally constitutionally defensible way to do it.

The United States has 13 federal circuit courts. That number, naturally, grew over the course of the country’s history, as the number of states grew and as the population expanded. This is relevant here because each Supreme Court justice is responsible for overseeing a certain number of circuits. Historically, Congress has expanded the number of justices as it simultaneously increased the number of circuits.

Admittedly, all this happened a very long time ago. But still, it’s precedent. The court was established in 1789 at six justices. In 1807, Congress expanded the number of federal circuits to seven, and added a justice to match. In 1837, Congress created nine circuits and nine justices. In 1863—even while the United States of America had lost the 11 states of the Confederacy—Congress created 10 circuits and 10 justices. The current nine-justice format was set in 1869.

Later expansions in the number of circuits did not simultaneously add justices. But why not revive that thought? The country has had today’s 13 circuits since 1982. The population of the country in 1982 was 230 million. Today, it’s around 345 million. That’s a lot more people. And the courts are horribly backlogged.

That could be solved by just adding judges. But it’s also a justification for increasing the number of circuits. From there, a case can clearly be made that increasing the number of circuits requires increasing the number of high court justices. Or at the very least, Democrats can pursue a hybrid solution that would keep the number of circuits at 13 and add a large number of judges within those circuits—while increasing the size of the Supreme Court to 13. Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia, a leader on these issues, introduced such a bill in 2023, and it had around 60 co-sponsors.

It would all be completely constitutional and completely legal. Which is more than can be said for a lot of the things Trump and the Republicans are getting up to, as they try to find new and blatantly illegal ways to stop mail-in voting and otherwise take the franchise away from citizens.

But the big door-opener here by Trump and the GOP is their rancidly unconstitutional mid-decade redistricting move. The Constitution clearly and plainly states that districts will be redrawn every 10 years, after the decennial census. What Trump and his party are doing with this redistricting is completely lawless.

Once they’ve done that, all bets are off. Democrats should do whatever they need to do to rebalance power. But—they should stay within the law. What I’m talking about here, what Johnson’s bill would accomplish, would be entirely within the law. Congress can set the size of the Supreme Court. And I believe that a smart Democrat, framing the argument the right way, can take that case to the American people and win it. He or she can convince the voters that far from destroying the court, such an action would constitute saving it from its own extremism—and saving the rights we cherish that these ideologues are stripping away.

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

President Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about high prices—even at his own Great American State Fair.

Attendees at the first day of the president’s festival were disappointed to discover that what few food options were actually open were far from cheap.

USA Today reported that the only food stall open on Thursday sold turkey legs for $23—almost twice the price of the same offering from a Disney theme park. The stall also offered smashburgers and giant western sausage sandwiches for $20, and lemonade for a whopping $9.

Online, people were particularly outraged by the price of a stuffed pretzel roll—which ranged from $12.48 to $24.96.

One attendee wasn’t impressed by the offerings at the Express Hibachi stand, which offered pizzas and salads for $13 to $14, boneless wings for $15, and rice bowls for $16.

“Do you see a single corndog? No! It’s a tragedy. It’s an affront to American culture,” joked political commentator Alex Cascio.

D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson also expressed her disappointment in the fair’s offerings. “Not a funnel cake, corn dog, bucket lemonade, or fried Snickers in sight. The only ride is the Ferris Wheel,” Henderson wrote on X. “It’s not that kind of state fair, y’all.”

President Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” is underway on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and it looks more like the ill-fated Fyre Festival than a celebration fit for the United States’ 250th birthday. Thursday was the first full day of the two-week-long fair, and rather than a crowded, lively scene, it was sparsely attended and wrought with problems related to the food and…

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Former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty on Friday to illegally retaining classified information, sealing a deal with federal prosecutors that could allow him to avoid a prison term. Bolton, who became an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump after serving in the Republican’s first administration, is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 28 by U.S.

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A Republican congressman went on a racist tirade Thursday at a conservative town hall on Capitol Hill.

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the U.S. House Majority Whip, went on an anti-immigrant rant, complaining that “Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re gonna call us a racist, you’re gonna call us an Islamophobe.”

“I am done being careful, even the least bit. And I don’t really care where you come from, but if you come to this great country, you have to understand you’re coming here to be an American,” Emmer said to applause from the audience at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s event.

“We celebrate everyone’s culture. We’re happy with that—as long as you are an American. Celebrate your culture, I don’t care, Italian, Polish—you know, Somali, OK? But they don’t assimilate. And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from,” Emmer continued, to more applause from the right-wing crowd.

Tom Emmer: "Minnesotans are so afraid that you're gonna call us a racist, you're gonna call us an Islamophobe. You know what? I'm done being even the least bit careful. Somalis don't assimilate. And if they don't assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came… pic.twitter.com/wsb9taca9K

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 25, 2026

Emmer’s jab at the Somali community carries weight, considering he’s third in the party’s House leadership. He’s definitely not telling Italian and Polish immigrants who don’t assimilate to “go the hell back to where they came from.” Somali-Americans in Minnesota number about 108,000, and almost half of them were born outside of the U.S. The majority of them have citizenship or legal residency.

President Trump has targeted the community in the past year, accusing them of committing fraud when receiving government assistance and amplifying false smears from a right-wing influencer. Emmer seems to be following his lead. The House whip’s comments came the same day as the Supreme Court ruled that the president could end temporary protected status for Syrian and Haitian refugees. Trump’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the U.S. have taken over the Republican Party.

Former White House national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he unlawfully kept and transmitted classified national security information. The case is a big win for President Donald Trump, who went after Bolton after he exposed embarrassing details about Trump’s first term.

Bolton admitted to sharing classified details with his wife and daughter, which amounts to one felony count. He was accused of 18 violations, but only pleaded guilty to one. Bolton has agreed to pay a fine of over $2 million, and could face up to five years in prison.

The case centered around notes Bolton took for his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, and the information he shared with his family as part of the editing process. During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department tried to prevent the book from coming out, claiming it contained classified information.

The memoir revealed damning details about the first Trump presidency, including Trump’s corrupt foreign policy dealings, his general incompetence, and confirmation that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine until they agreed to investigate Joe Biden, which Trump was impeached for in 2019.

Trump has called his former national security adviser a “lowlife” and a “sleazebag,” and claimed that if he had listened to Bolton’s advice while in office, the U.S. would be in “World War Six” by now.

Though Bolton is just one of many Trump enemies that have been prosecuted at the president’s fancy, CNN reports that the case against him was more sound than the others.

Every day, for more than three weeks running, tens of thousands of Albanians have taken to the streets, a peaceful mass movement seeking nothing less than a complete overthrow of the government.

The “Flamingo Revolution,” as local activists have dubbed it, was set off by the luxury resort projects that Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, plan to build on nature reserves in Albania. At the beginning of May, a barbed-wire fence was erected in the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape in Zvërnec, restricting access to one of the most treasured natural coastlines and one of the Mediterranean’s last untouched coastal ecosystems.

Activists, residents, and members of the Levizja Bashkë political party gathered to protest the fences, and after security guards violently dragged a demonstrator through the property, more protests erupted and the story went global.

A protester speaks his mind during the early days of the so-called Flamingo Revolution. Protesters gather nightly in the Boulevard of Martyrs, even in the rain.

The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape in Zvërnec, Albania, one of the Mediterranean’s last untouched coastal ecosystems and home to hundreds of protected species, is where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump aim to build a new luxury resort.

The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape is home to flamingos, pelicans, migratory birds, and hundreds of protected species. It includes lagoons, wetlands, and habitats of exceptional ecological value. And it is one of many protected nature zones now at dire risk of destruction.

In February 2024, led by Prime Minister Edi Rama of the center-left Socialist Party, Albania’s parliament passed Law 21/2024, which allows the National Territory Council to grant permits for luxury tourist resorts anywhere in the country, even inprotected landscapes. Three days later, Kushner went public with plans to create two luxury developments in the region, including a resort on Sazan, a protected nature zone and one of Albania’s only major islands.

Javanka’s vision includes up to 10,000 “units of villas,” priced far beyond what most Albanians can afford, to be built in an area where many locals lack access to 24-7 running water. Albania, which has set a goal of 2030 for admission to the European Union, is obligated to repeal Law 21/2024, which clashes with EU conservation standards, but so far has failed to do so.

The ongoing protest movement set off by the Kushner projects, has turned into something much larger, with youth chanting “Çohuni nga kafja! (Get up from the cafes!)” each night as they flood the streets of Tirana, Albania’s capital.

Protesters atop the Skanderbeg statue in Tirana’s main square. Skanderbeg was a national hero who fought for Albania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. A view from the crowd at the foot of the Skanderbeg statue.

Their immediate goal is Rama’s resignation and the dissolution of his government; in its place, the protesters are demanding a year-long, interim technocratic leadership to prepare Albania for new elections, along with a two-term limit for prime ministers, nullification of Law 21/2024, and legislative reforms related to foreign investment and elections.

You can tell a lot about a movement from protesters’ chants. One that has united Albanians left and right is “Rama Burg, Berisha Burg” (Rama jail, Berisha jail), a call for the imprisonment of the country’s two most predominant political bosses, Socialist Rama and Democrat Sali Berisha, whose parties have been mired in corruption scandals ever since Albania transitioned from state socialism to democracy in 1991.

Berisha has been charged with corruption directly, while Rama’s Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku, her predecessor, Arben Ahmetaj, and Tirana’s mayor, Erion Veliaj, have all been indicted by Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution agency. Among the other chants: “Revolution!” “The end has come for you!” “We are the opposition!” “Cancel the Project!” “Rama, resign!” And “A new Albania!” 

During a nightly march, protesters encourage bus riders to join in. An elderly resident shows support for the protesters.

Savvy Gen Zers, content creators, and influencers have flooded Instagram with protest videos, memes, informational content, and revolutionary posters and artwork that are helping to fuel the movement—and prompting Rama to blame the protests on social media algorithms he says are being hijacked and fueled by foreign agents.

In interviews, the PM has downplayed the opposition. Rama says the Kushner-Trump project will proceed even if 500,000 Albanians take to the streets—and that the Socialist Party’s sweep in 2025 is evidence of his popular support. He also has referenced the investment of roughly $4.6 billion in the Vlorë region, with an estimated $1.6 billion just for Sazan island—a no-brainer, he says, for a nation whose GDP is only about $33 billion.

But the unprecedented youth protest movement signals something else—widespread discontent. It has spawned the largest public demonstrations since the collapse of the communist regime in 1991. Since then, approximately 40 percent of the population has left Albania, and more than 50,000, mostly young adults, still migrate abroad annually—an exodus driven by official corruption, Albania’s high cost of living, and the lack of economic opportunity.

A sizable diaspora has spawned sister protests in several European and American cities; on June 20, hundreds of Albanian expats flew in and descended on Tirana in support of the protesters, leading to the movement’s largest rally yet, with more than 100,000 in attendance. Outside the city, in beach towns such as Kakome and Rrjoll, protesters followed the example set by their peers in Zvërnec, tearing down the fences and barriers blocking coastal access to protest the privatization of natural areas by powerful business interests.

The movement has attracted many young families with children, thanks to its nonviolent nature. Protesters impersonate Sali Berisha and Edi Rama, heads of the two main political parties, complete with chains and prison colors.

The movement is grassroots and decentralized, with no clear leaders, only protest “coordinators.” It is a revolt against the status quo and the political establishment that has ruled Albania for the past 36 years. It is a protest against corruption, and oligarchy.

It has united people across the political spectrum—youth, environmental activists, pensioners, young families, and influencers coming together to build momentum and pressure Rama to resign. Nightly rallies at the Boulevard of Martyrs are family-friendly, with a dedicated children’s drawing area run by local artists and volunteers, and a “people’s podium” where citizens can voice their discontent. Each night, after the rallies, protesters march through the streets of Tirana, with residents waving them on from balconies, taxi drivers honking their horns, and tourists looking on from cafes—and sometimes even joining in.

In a country as small as Albania, with just 2.3 million residents, 100,000  protesters is the equivalent of 12.7 million in the United States. And it doesn’t appear as though the movement will lose steam anytime soon.

Cafe patrons watch as thousands of protesters march through Tirana. Protesters on the march after a nightly rally. For three weeks now, thousands of people have come out on Tirana’s streets every night. Protesters call it the Flamingo Revolution. Hundreds of Albanian expats returned home to join the protests on June 20. Many plan to do the same over the July 4 weekend. A young woman displays a Monopoly box with “Albania” written on it during one nightly march.

The “people’s podium” is a key part of the nightly rallies, open to anyone who wants to speak.

A protester waves an Albanian flag atop the Pyramid of Tirana, which was originally built as a museum to Communist leader Enver Hoxha. Now it’s a cultural hub and tourist attraction. On Day Three of the protests, police unleash water cannons and teargas after protesters stormed through barricades set up to thwart them. There have been no such confrontations since. Environmental activists march with hand-painted flamingos in protest of the Kushner-Trump resort plan. The protests are widely seen as family friendly, which has added to the appeal.

As President Trump holds a popular bipartisan bill hostage, Democrats say that the issue is out of their hands, and that the onus is on Republicans to stand up to the president and get the legislation signed.

On Wednesday Trump was set to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which had passed the Senate and House easily. On the Hill, Speaker Mike Johnson was preparing to tout the legislation. But by lunchtime, Trump had thrown a wrench into the works, announcing on Truth Social that he wouldn’t sign the bill into law until Congress passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, America Act. That afternoon, Democrats held a press conference urging Trump to pass the bill. None of their Republican colleagues joined them.

“What a mess,” Senator Tina Smith said on Thursday.

The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID when voting. Trump has claimed that the bill will prevent noncitizens from voting in elections (an illegal and incredibly rare phenomenon), while opponents of the bill say it would functionally disenfranchise citizens who don’t have passports or other eligible documentation. The bill passed the House in February, but has stalled indefinitely in the Senate and is widely viewed as unpassable. Senator Jon Ossoff called it a “poison pill” that sinks any legislation it’s attached to.

On Thursday, Democratic lawmakers emphasized that dealing with Trump is Republicans’ job.

“We have to just keep on pounding on the idea that you need to sign the damn bill,” Smith said. “I don’t have a lot of clout with the President, but I believe that Senator Scott does, and others who worked so hard to get this bill passed.” Republican Senator Tim Scott sponsored the bill alongside Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Reporting suggests that Johnson might be working on a solution. On Thursday afternoon, he headed to the White House to speak with Trump about the SAVE Act. “We passed the SAVE Act three times in the House. We’ll do it again. We’re working on that, and I’m going to talk with the president about these issues and how to get the agenda moving again. It’s going to be very productive,” Johnson said.

At least one Democrat, Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, expressed hope that Johnson will find a work-around and get Trump to sign the housing bill: “Mr. Johnson has a bill, he has to get it to [Trump]. I think he’s going to get it to him, and that they’re going to work it out,” she said. “I’m very optimistic.”

There’s a clock ticking in the background. When a bill passes both houses, the president has 10 days to sign it before it automatically becomes law. The 10-day countdown only starts once Johnson officially presents the bill to Trump—which on Thursday evening he said he would do, but as of early Friday it was unclear whether he had actually done so yet.

Warren says that it’s up to Republicans to officially present the bill and start the clock. “There’s plenty that the Republicans in Congress could do if they have the backbone to,” she said.

But there’s also a second complicating factor. If both chambers aren’t in session when the 10 days expire, the bill is automatically pocket vetoed. It’s legally ambiguous whether the recess in early July counts as an adjournment and would trigger a pocket veto. If it does, the bill will be killed. Congress cannot override a pocket veto, and would have to reintroduce and revote on the legislation.

When asked if they thought a pocket veto was Trump’s ultimate goal, Warren and Smith had similar answers. “You’re asking me to get in Donald Trump’s head and figure this out. Sorry, that’s a crazy place,” Warren said.

“I am so not qualified to look into this man’s mind and understand what it is that he is trying to accomplish,” Smith said. “But what he did was sabotage a bill that was strongly supported by Democrats and Republicans in some sort of a fit, because he was mad about the War Powers Act and the Reflecting Pool, and the fact that Republicans don’t support his voter suppression bill.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Thursday decision to allow a wider cancellation of Temporary Protected Status, Venezuelans are grappling with a stark reality: There are only remnants of a country to return back to. On Wednesday, twin earthquakes—the first with a magnitude of 7.2, the second 7.5—centered on the nation’s state of Yaracuy, which is west of its capital, Caracas.

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Somehow President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair keeps getting worse.

As temperatures topped 80 degrees Thursday, the festival’s food hall lost power, causing all the ice cream to melt, according to Fox 5 DC reporter Homa Bash.

Food hall at Great American State Fair has lost power - they have food but tell me all their ice cream has melted 😭 pic.twitter.com/5sQXOEvUVl

— Homa Bash (@HomaBashNews) June 25, 2026

The food hall wasn’t the only attraction affected by power outages. The much-hyped Ferris Wheel temporarily stopped running Thursday due to generator issues.

In order to cool off, attendees crowded under one of the only sources of shade on the National Mall—Trump’s Temu Arc de Triomphe.

The Great American State Fair was already off to a rocky start Wednesday evening when dozens of attendees were seen flocking toward the exits in the middle of Trump’s address, which was meant to kick-start the two-week event.

The line for admission appeared to dwindle on the festival’s second day.

Also on Thursday, Pennsylvania joined nine other states to pull out of the Freedom 250 gala on the National Mall, including Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Vermont.

A stall celebrating Maine remained empty Thursday, as the state did not send a delegation to Trump’s festival. Connecticut, too, was just “chairs,” according to Bash.

All in all, it seems like Trump’s festival isn’t a resounding success, but who can be surprised when the president has shrunk the meaning of patriotism to be more about him than about the country he leads?

Watergate wasn’t even that bad, according to JD Vance.

The vice president spoke at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California Thursday, and expressed his admiration for Nixon.

“I joked … backstage if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” Vance said. “The idea that it would’ve taken down a presidency is crazy.”

JD Vance: "I think Nixon's historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12 hours news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy." pic.twitter.com/osy0V3QLyN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 25, 2026

The 1972 Watergate scandal began when operatives associated with Nixon’s reelection campaign were caught attempting to bug the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate Hotel. It was then uncovered that Nixon knew about the break-in, and had secretly diverted payments in order to cover it up. The two-year scandal ended with Nixon resigning during his impeachment proceedings.

The galling conduct by a president—lying to the American people, sending hush money to burglars to conceal their connection to his campaign, using executive privilege to try and withhold evidence—shocked the nation, and resulted in a series of government reforms to create more oversight for the president, including more independence for inspectors general.

The idea that Watergate would have taken down a presidency is not at all crazy. But Vance’s assertion shows that the Overton window for acceptable conduct has shifted. And not by accident: Americans have to wade through a constant barrage of offenses, from Trump being convicted on 34 felony counts for hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, to normalizing political prosecution of enemies, to creating a slush fund for all the January 6 insurrectionists he pardoned after encouraging them to attack the Capitol. That’s to say nothing of his White House ballroom, his gifts to his political donors, and his turning the presidency into a crypto crash grab for himself and his family.

Nixon knew that if the country heard the things he said in private in the Oval Office, his presidency would be over. Trump regularly says far worse out loud.

Vance went on to say that he sees himself in Nixon: “Young senator, vice president, writes some best selling books, is hated by the media — it kind of sounds like JD Vance,” he joked to the crowd on Thursday.

Hopefully America is smart enough to see Nixon in him too.

By Julie Appleby for KFF Sen. Ron Wyden and 14 Democratic co-sponsors introduced legislation Thursday to cap consumers’ potential out-of-pocket costs in traditional Medicare, resurfacing a long-running debate over why the program doesn’t limit beneficiary spending. Even the bill’s backers say securing passage this year is a long shot. But the effort is one more opportunity for…

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What We Fixed This Week What We Are Working On Next Week A Note On Logout Issues On Wednesday, WordPress VIP integrated the patch on their infrastructure that was definitely causing some of the logout issues. It is very important for us to know if you are still seeing problems. If so, please email me at allison@dailykos.com — ideally including the header information from…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool scandal…

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

It’s not just that President Trump has ramped up the decades-long conservative attacks on colleges. It’s also that some college presidents and board members themselves are repeating right-wing talking points about the shortcomings of American higher education. A recent report by officials at Yale University on declining trust in higher education criticized universities for not hiring enough professors who vote for GOP politicians but largely left out the aggressive Republican efforts to undermine academia. In the latest edition of Right Now, Charlie Eaton, an economic sociologist at University of California, Merced, and John Warner, a columnist at Inside Higher Ed, explain why universities are under siege from both the right and the center-left. Eaton emphasizes the role of oligarchs, who are wary of universities in part because professors put out research that questions wealth inequality in America and industries such as artificial intelligence where the super-rich are growing their fortunes. Warner argued that there is an ideological divide in academia somewhat similar to that in the Democratic Party, with students and professors, particularly those of color, challenging an old guard that doesn’t want to give up influence. Eaton and Warner both say that colleges should change to build more public trust. But not by hiring more Republican professors or cracking down on progressive protestors. Universities, they argue, should lower their prices, connect more with their communities, and more broadly adopt a more public, democratic posture, instead of trying to be elite and exclusive. Marshall Steinbaum, an economics professor at the University of Utah, offered similar ideas in a Right Now episode earlier this year.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Two great guests today. Charlie Eaton is a professor of economic sociology at the University of California, Merced. And Warner’s been here a couple times before. He’s a writer at Inside Higher Ed. He’s written a couple of books about higher education, one a great book recently about AI. John, Charlie, thanks for joining me.

John Warner: Pleasure.

Bacon: So what got me wanting to talk to you guys—you’ve both written a lot about higher ed. Both of you have taught at higher ed as well. So a college called Yale University that I may or may not have attended put out a report in April about the declining trust in higher ed. And while it took a while for me to get to it, I want to talk about this because it’s in the discourse right now—that you have Donald Trump attacking higher ed in the way Republicans have for a long time, in a more aggressive way.

But I think an interesting part of this is that higher ed is not defending itself and saying, How dare you? In fact, in a lot of ways, higher ed is saying, We agree with you. This report that Yale put out, that said there’s declining trust in higher education, cited a lot of factors about the declining trust.

One thing it did not cite is the decades of Republican attacks on higher education, particularly from Donald Trump. And this report from Yale University was praised by one Linda McMahon, who’s not exactly who you want to be praised by, in my view, when assessing higher education. She’s, of course, the education secretary under Donald Trump.

So I want to talk to you all about it, because it feels a little like the media right now, where we have Bari Weiss, who is in our field but attacking our field. And I wonder why Yale is putting out a report that reads like Republican talking points about higher ed.

So I’ll start with Charlie. Why is the president of Yale producing a report that repeats Donald Trump’s talking points? Why might that be? What are her incentives that are different from a professor or the students or even the public?

Charlie Eaton: Yeah. Part of it is that the university is governed by a board of trustees that in many ways is the very elite. It tends to be made up of folks, especially from high finance—very wealthy folks who donate a lot to the university. I wrote a book about this called Bankers in the Ivory Tower.

And diversity and expanded access and the things that really animate the right in attacking universities are not necessarily things that were core to the interests of those elite boards. Those elite boards themselves are not very diverse. And so I think that is part of the dynamic.

Another part of the dynamic is, I think declining trust in higher education is not just because of attacks by the right. The declining trust is really in our most elite institutions. And both the elite institutions themselves and the Democrats did plenty to leave themselves vulnerable to these attacks.

I like to remember a quote from Malcolm Gladwell about Yale University, where he’s also an alum, I believe. And he said, “Instead of making a donation to my university, I’m going to write a check to the hedge fund of my choice.” And that refers to Yale being the pioneer of the endowment investment model that grew these endowments to the tens of billions of dollars.

But as those endowments grew, they didn’t invest them in enrolling more students, especially more students from all walks of life. Instead, they spent a lot more per student, and they hoarded the endowments. And as a result, a lot of these wealthiest schools are among the schools that economist Raj Chetty found enroll more students from the top 1 percent of the income spectrum than from the bottom 60 percent.

And the thing I’ll note about these reports is they didn’t really say anything about doing anything about that problem. So they’re saying, We’re going to keep doing the thing that left us susceptible. And Democrats have not had an agenda.

So it’s kind of crazy that this space was left open for Republicans to make these endowment tax proposals, which are highly regressive. They use the endowment tax revenue to fund tax cuts for billionaires, and they’re not well-structured. They haven’t gotten the universities to act any better for serving more people. So I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but these reports are not charting a meaningfully different course for higher education.

And part of the reports—the elites on the board, they don’t want a meaningfully different course.

Perry Bacon: In choice of reports, in part—because there was also a report about the, quote-unquote, “declining of the humanities and social sciences” that was released also in April. And that was produced by the chancellor of Vanderbilt and the chancellor of Washington University. That report actually was more honest about the right wing and its role in hurting education, but it also had similar critiques—that higher education is too woke, functionally, and it’s too disengaged from regular people, and so on.

So John, I guess I wanted to put the question to you: why does higher education, or the higher education leadership, seem to be against higher education?

Warner: Charlie is well-versed and a literal expert in the structural realities of what governs and influences how these institutions operate. And it cannot be overstated that pleasing these boards—staying in the favor of the boards and the money—is really driving the operations of these universities. When you saw Columbia cave to Trump, it was basically the ultra-wealthy people on the board who are like, We have to get on the right side of this guy.

I have a more observational take based on spending a career inside and adjacent to these institutions without ever being deeply inside. I was a contingent adjunct faculty for the 20 years of my career.

Both of these reports are part of a larger intramural power struggle in these sorts of elite institutions over who gets to be listened to. And it is really a backlash to what they would label as wokeness. But it’s really a backlash to diversity. Yale—Perry, you might know better, having gone there—but Yale had a rather poor reputation for being welcoming to students of minority backgrounds.

Bacon: Yes.

Warner: There was this very famous Halloween incident at Yale, which the people who want to criticize progressive students and woke faculty cite endlessly, over and over again, which is really just a bunch of students saying, Hey, pay attention to what we’re talking about. And progressive faculty who desire a more diverse and more welcoming place found a moment. It was not unlike the Black Lives Matter uprisings—it’s like, Hey, this is our moment. And there are counter forces that are now like, That got out of hand.

That Vanderbilt report—I will admit straight up, I am not smart or learned enough to parse the academic fight. I don’t even know what the fuck they’re talking about. But what I do know is that the chancellors of WashU and Vanderbilt are angling for increased status in a kind of authoritarian-curious space.

They are below the tier of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, and maybe even places like Duke and University of Chicago. So it’s, Hey, if we can massage the arena in a direction that’s more favorable to us, where we look like the good guys, maybe this is going to be something for us. And in a world where Trump is more than happy to deliver the spoils to those who are in his favor, maybe this is a calculation.

I think they’re kidding themselves. I think the idea that any higher education institution is going to benefit from a Trump administration is a pure pipe dream.

Really, the dynamic—if people outside of higher education want to understand the dynamic, and they come from a sort of progressive or left politics—it’s identical to what’s happening in New York right now, based on the New York primaries, where the mainstream of the Democratic Party is going bonkers over the fact that three, just three, progressive candidates managed to win their primaries while campaigning on the issues. They don’t like this direction.

The people who wrote that Vanderbilt-WashU report—simply, their academic disagreement is serious. It’s real. It’s good faith. Except the people who are issuing these reports, or using these reports, it’s really an instrument to assert their own power over other groups that they wish had less power. It’s not particularly complicated. It’s not new. That they’re choosing to do this while the Trump administration is quite literally trying to tear higher education apart forever is super distressing.

Outside of the elite institutions, we’re already past some point of no return in states like Texas and Indiana and Iowa that have essentially abrogated just basic issues of academic freedom. Why Yale is doing it, I don’t know, other than whoever’s in charge—the leadership there feels there’s pressure to do these things. Maybe it’s why they hired David Brooks to solve their problems too. If we get this nice friendly face, we can get people on our side again.

Bacon: Let me follow up with that, John. One thing you’ve written about is that most people do not go to the five or six colleges we talk about all the time—Yale, Harvard. So is the attack—this sort of elite attack from, my guess is, the president of Yale as a Democrat—is the sort of elite attack from center-left on left in these elite colleges, and the broad attack on academia in Texas, Kentucky, Indiana—are those related or different stories?

Warner: They’re all part of the larger jockeying for money, funding, attention. The entire higher education space of any selective institution is essentially set up as a competition for prestige, for money, for enrollment, and this kind of stuff. And so it is important to Yale that Yale remain elite. If they don’t look elite, a lot of what the value of going to Yale confers is no longer there.

And it’s part of the reason why Columbia was in such a weakened state—they allowed their U.S. News & World Report ranking to drop precipitously between years. Precipitously was, like, from five to 19 or something like that, really because, as I recall, they were cooking the books and they were busted.

So this, coming from the point of view of somebody who’s taught at public institutions and this kind of stuff—it’s all nonsense to me. But it’s hugely important in how it shapes public perceptions of what higher education institutions do. If you ask somebody, Is DuPage Community College woke? the answer is no. That doesn’t even make sense.

But if you ask them about increasing funding to higher education in a particular state—the kind of money that would go to something like a community college—they are unsure, because of what they’re hearing about these stories in the media and elsewhere.

Eaton: Can I pick up on that a little bit?

Bacon: Yes. Sure.

Eaton: I think John’s absolutely right. There’s this war over status, both within the university but also in society. There’s a reason why the Trump administration—and it’s really important to recognize it’s not just the Trump administration. In some ways, the Trump attacks are driven as much by billionaire anger at higher education as by Trump anger. And I’ll give you an example.

So Marc Andreessen, who’s the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the largest venture capital firm in the world. He’s a multi-billionaire. He created Netscape, for those who remember that web browser.

Warner: He and I are both alumni of the University of Illinois, a year apart.

Eaton: There you go. Yeah.

Warner: I remember him and his big egghead back from my undergraduate days.

Eaton: But much of Stanford is named after his in-laws, the Arrillagas. And so he’s in this space. His partner in co-founding Andreessen Horowitz is Ben Horowitz, who was for a long time on the board of Columbia. And they gave a series of interviews in which they outlined the strategy that they developed. The story’s been told—they helped develop the strategy for going after elite universities with Christopher Rufo, one of the right-wing activists who’s really developed the strategy.

And he said, Look, we’re going after these universities because they are elite, and they produce elites. And I don’t like how the elites that they’re producing are woke, how me and my fellow billionaire friends and CEO friends—we don’t like how they’re challenging the status and deservingness of ourselves. And we don’t like the policy agendas that they’re supporting. And he specifically names policy criticisms of AI, crypto, and finance in general.

So these are the—and they’re saying it’s because they’re elites. That said, there are coattails to the attacks on the elite institutions, where they affect the less elite institutions that have a lot less room for maneuver, resource-wise. So when they go after student financial aid funding or even research funding, it affects down-the-line institutions.

We’ve had grants terminated at my university, University of California, Merced, where a majority of our students are working-class students, or who are the first in their families to go to college. And we’re a majority-Latino institution, because of where we are geographically, in part. And we’re affected by these attacks.

And so part of the issue is—the less elite institutions, they need the elite institutions to fight back, because they’ve got the microphone. But also, we need the elite institutions and people who aren’t in the anti-higher-ed right-wing coalition to fight back, including Democrats but ideally also more centrist, independent folks, to say, Look, we’ve got to make the elite institutions do more to serve more people in America and to seem less out of touch.

Because they put a target on the backs of everyone, including the community colleges and the public universities, the regional public universities that tend to be much more trusted. But we still get a target put on our backs by the criticisms of the elite institutions.

Bacon: Go ahead John.

Warner: Yeah. That’s really well observed. The reality is, this is a project to discredit the work of education—teaching, learning, democratic self-governance, people engaging in these institutions. And a lot of it is deliberate, and they don’t even see institutions like University of California, Merced as collateral damage. It’s just the price of doing business.

This is part of what we do to undermine the people who vote for Democrats—to destroy these institutions and make them weaker. And really part of it too is to just get faculty to preemptively shut up and not make waves and not speak on this.

And the solution to it really is like a literal democratic uprising of saying, Hey, we need these things. The University of California system, of which Charlie’s a part, is an amazing institution and part of the backbone of why California is California, that has been neglected to some degree for a long time. Now it’s starting to wear—we see it with the erosion of democratic governments and support for these things going.

Back when Trump was in his most aggressive phase, when he was trying to get everybody to sign these settlements like Columbia did—at the newsletter for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, On the Line, I kept writing, “Harvard can’t cave.”

I don’t give a shit about Harvard. I could not care less about Harvard. But if Harvard caved—if Harvard said, Yeah, we’re going to give Trump $500 million and let him look at our books, and all that stuff—that’s it for everybody. That really is the end.

And some of these institutions have been likely to cave, except for faculty pushing back. That was the case at Harvard. UCLA has reportedly come close to capitulating in one way or another. And it is that democratic spirit—the people who work there, the people who are served by the institutions—that has kept that from happening. And that’s important to build on. I hesitate to call them successes, but they are. They were successes in fending off the worst. It could have been much worse than it was.

Bacon: Let me ask this. Charlie, you’ve written a lot about how universities work. I invoked Bari Weiss as—this might feel—but in some ways, I’m sure the president of Yale, the president of Columbia would reject being compared to Bari Weiss. But in reality, a person installed by the wealthy, who’s a member of that profession but installed to beat up on the professional people for the billionaires’ benefit—that’s what Bari Weiss is doing. And on some level, the person chosen by the trustees of Yale or Columbia or Princeton to do the donors’ bidding is doing what Bari Weiss is doing?

Eaton: Yeah. The kind of interesting thing is that the board’s main job is to raise money for the university. It also hires the president of the university. And then the president sets the agenda and has to maintain relationships with the donors.

And so in some ways, it was an interesting test of where the boards are at when they started getting more involved in the last few years in the day-to-day of the universities. I think it’s right to say there’s these fights within the university, including among faculty, about who’s going to be influential and who’s going to have more faculty like them hired, what fields are going to be supported in the university—and they get caught up in this fight.

But the thing I would say is, the people who get attacked the most—folks who do critical race scholarship, people who do ethnic studies—they are not the power center in the universities. They’re attacked as though they are the power center in the university. They are not the power center in any university.

And the kind of other weird thing is this whole viewpoint diversity movement. So viewpoint diversity is a very strange thing. I think there is actually quite a lot of viewpoint diversity in the university. The fact that you don’t get many university faculty voting for Republicans has to do with where educated people have gone in general, not just people in the university.

But the whole viewpoint diversity, which is now the only kind of diversity that we can talk about, is used to justify hiring people who tend to have no real expertise or established training, particularly in the social sciences.

You have plenty of right-wing scholars, particularly in economics and in law schools—conservative scholars. Some of them might not be as far right as MAGA, but you have plenty of them. We have that viewpoint diversity. But the whole viewpoint diversity call is like, “We want to put more Trumpists in the universities.”

At the same time, the people who are calling for viewpoint diversity—they want to purge the university of people who are, for example, supportive of Palestinian rights, or people who do a particular type of critical race scholarship that’s made important discoveries for understanding race and inequality in society.

So it’s a bit odd. And there’s been this sort of activation of the board class to be more involved in trying to structure: who are we giving voice to and giving resources to in the university?

Bacon: John, talk about viewpoint diversity a little bit.

Warner: Yeah. I’m with Charlie. This viewpoint diversity canard is frustrating, because there is plenty of viewpoint diversity in these spaces. I invite anyone to go find the actual Marxists in a university—they’re not all that plentiful.

And when you get right down to the operations of these departments—again, I was a non-tenure-track lecturer. My leftist colleagues were more than happy to see me in a job that paid a fraction of their salaries, so I could teach courses that allowed them to do their research. These human dynamics override ideology.

The idea that ideology determines what is happening—or political ideology, or even worse, who people vote for—as a proxy for what’s going on in these universities is absurd.

This viewpoint diversity movement is coupled with what we’ve seen in the rise of these, in public institutions, of legislators installing these quote-unquote civic centers in multiple states. These things are well-funded but unpopular. Ohio State has to bribe students—quite literally bribe them with scholarships—to take classes in it.

Bacon: I think Iowa is now mandating students take the courses at one of these.

Warner: So this is the other part. It’s not just who’s going to teach, but what’s going to be taught. This is a kind of legislative fiat decision over what kinds of general education courses students receive. Iowa is going to try to somehow pivot so all 22,000 University of Iowa undergraduates will take two courses in this—I can’t remember what the title is, it might be the School for Civic Life or whatever it is.

There’s all these vague ways—their institution, the School for Freedom and Awesomeness in America, whatever it is. All 22,000 undergraduate students at the University of Iowa will be mandated to take two general education courses in this new school of civic study that currently has zero faculty and one interim director. So there’s literally one person who works there, and this must be done by fall semester 2028.

We are in summer of 2026. Now, Iowa already teaches all of those students courses necessary for the general education. The legislature realizes, We can’t actually go in there and tell sociology and history and these departments what their courses are going to be, because that probably would be a step too far. But if we can invent this new fake school and fund it and say, ‘Actually, we’re going to give you money that allows you to hire faculty to do this work,’ that will happen.

The scarcity of money, or the worries about money, lead to institutions—and even faculty in institutions who think these are horrible ideas—to say, It’s the only way we’re going to get money.

The reason why Columbia caved and Harvard didn’t is because Columbia, as crazy as this sounds, is relatively poor relative to Harvard. Its endowment is too small—with its medical school and its sprawling campus and its real estate empire in New York City, it really just had very little runway for losing this money in ways that Harvard and Yale and some of these other places could absorb. So they had to cave.

These public institutions—if a legislature says, Hey, we’re going to give you millions of dollars and you’re going to be able to hire people for it, faculty will shut up. Not all of them. There’s a story in Inside Higher Ed about what’s going on at Iowa today, where some of the faculty are like, This is just an end run around the faculty who already work here.

These entities could be integrated into the entire university. They could be governed in the way other departments are. They could invite faculty from existing departments in to collaborate, and this kind of stuff. But by and large, they don’t do that. Because they are set up as a little fiefdom that right-wing legislatures can say, We get to say what’s taught in these spaces. And we will have control over this part of the university, that would otherwise not be possible because of the way universities have been traditionally set up and operated.

Bacon: So the broad question here, Charlie—and coming to the media analogy again—is that what is covered in the news and what is taught at universities is oppositional to the ideology of the current Republican Party, because it’s grounded in facts and evidence, and the current Republican Party is not. Is that the core? The Republican Party is against academia and against journalism. Is that the core of the dispute here?

Eaton: Yeah. And it’s the oligarchs too. It’s not just—

Bacon: OK, the oligarchs. That’s why people are upset.

Eaton: Not just the Republican Party. And there is a marriage between the two. And whether it’s Larry Ellison and his progeny, who are buying up CBS and putting Bari Weiss in charge, or whether—

Bacon: Let me stop you for a second to ask the question, which is: it’s obvious that Republican politicians are against critical race theory. What do academics do that oligarchs are against?

Eaton: Yeah. Let’s go back to Marc Andreessen. So that policy agenda that he was so exercised about—he particularly singles out Elizabeth Warren and the sort of Warrenite wing of the Democratic Party as being a product of these elite universities. And look, there’s something to that.

Elizabeth Warren is like our law professor in chief and did create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which has tried to crack down on lots of consumer scams that the financial sector and corporate sector have done. He’s pointed to her, he’s pointed to AI regulation, which is something that everybody increasingly recognizes we need—even the Trump administration.

Bacon: Is that coming from universities, though—AI regulation coming from universities? Or what—

Eaton: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So Alondra Nelson, who’s an academic, was helping lead the development of AI regulatory strategy for the Biden administration.

So there is something to that. But it is expertise and a commitment to fact and a commitment to truth. It runs head-on into the ideological and power objectives of both the oligarchs and what’s become the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

I think it really is a mischaracterization that we should not accept—that universities are just a place of left-wing brainwashing because university faculty tend to vote heavily Democratic. They tend to vote heavily Democratic—not because—there’s plenty of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and Democratic establishment among university elites.

It’s just the MAGA right has gone so nuts and is pursuing an authoritarian transformation of society. That’s what people are opposed to within the university and among people with college degrees in general.

But I want to say one more thing about diversity. It’s a tell that universities should really not be abandoning their commitment to diversity, that the Republican le—

Bacon: You mean racial and ethnic diversity, right?

Eaton: Yeah.

Bacon: And class diversity.

Eaton: Diversity in its many dimensions should not be abandoned, because it’s popular. And that’s why the MAGA people call it viewpoint diversity. If you look at polling, diversity in universities, diversity in America as an important strength in America, is popular. The Republican attacks and the MAGA attacks on particular policies for strengthening diversity have weakened public support for particular policies.

But there’s been like an unnaming. We used to unname things named after racist Confederate traitors who tried to destroy the United States of America at universities. Now they’re renaming things to take the word “diversity” out of names. Why are we afraid of a word—”diversity” that’s actually quite popular? This shouldn’t be like the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc countries where you couldn’t say particular words because they were so threatening. And actually, “diversity” is a popular word.

And so we shouldn’t be unnaming things. We should be thinking about: what are policies that are both more effective for promoting and strengthening diversity but also policies that’ll be popular? But the word “diversity” should not be abandoned in the way that it has been.

And I think there will be a pushback in the opposite direction. I don’t think the word “diversity” and the concept is gone for good. It’s too popular and core to what America believes in.

Bacon: John, if you don’t teach at a university, or you never have, and you’re not at a university now—why does this conversation matter to you? Why do the attacks on academia and higher education matter to people who don’t teach at colleges, whose kids aren’t in college, who aren’t going to college themselves?

Warner: Part of this, as Charlie’s talking, is a broader attack on democratic self-governance, a broader attack on public goods that are meant to benefit not just the people who enroll in college. If you think about the way colleges and universities are situated in communities—as hubs of employment, of activity, of technology, of opportunity—if you got rid of some of these colleges and universities, if you drain them of the funds that allow them to operate, you would see something akin to the emptying out of the Rust Belt in the Midwest as manufacturing left.

Higher education is a huge industry in this country, and it’s a source of opportunity still, despite many problems. And I crack myself up—I’m now in the defending-higher-education business, where I’ve written this column for Inside Higher Ed for 14 years that was like, “Here’s all the stuff that higher education institutions are doing wrong and need to get their shit together on, so this doesn’t happen.” But here I am, still acknowledging all these problems we have.

But even with all the problems around tuition and loans and adjunctification of faculty and internal fights and this kind of stuff, education remains one of the greatest drivers of upward economic mobility that we have. The majority of students in this country—if you go to a post-secondary institution, it’s within 50 miles of where you live. It might even be 30 miles. I can’t even remember the exact fact. But more students go to a college or university within 30 or 50 miles of where they live than beyond that. So when we talk about who’s getting into Yale, the—

Bacon: No one, because no one goes to Yale.

Warner: Ohio State University, all by itself, is about the same size as the Ivy League in terms of the number of students.

Now, Ohio State is a mega university. The University of California system has millions of students. The New York system has like a million students or something like that. This is America. These are institutions that well served America when they were seen as a public good.

I’m 56. I went to college at the very tail end of that notion. Within four years of my graduating from college, the tuition for the University of Illinois had doubled from what I went. People don’t believe this, but my all-in tuition at the University of Illinois, 1988 to 1992, was $8,800. That was four years of college tuition.

I could have paid for college—I have this in a previous book, I did the math. I could have paid for college working a full-time minimum-wage job for the three months of summer—that would have covered my college tuition if I did that every year. That offer simply doesn’t exist anymore. Even with whatever help you can get from Pell Grants, even with internal scholarships, this kind of stuff.

The country benefited from that. As soon as we started admitting more Black and Hispanic students, and women came in, certain power structures got uncomfortable around this fact. This kind of masculinist movement around women are too educated, and we’ve got to get them back in the—this stuff is all wrapped up together.

And these institutions that bring what is truly a diverse cohort of people from different backgrounds and different beliefs together in community to learn stuff is a hugely powerful part of our democracy that we’ve allowed to atrophy. And I think Charlie said it earlier—the institutions left themselves vulnerable to these attacks.

That doesn’t mean the attacks are fair, but it is a reason why these attacks have been effective. This is one of the things we have to get back, along with voting rights and maybe some of the amendments that the Supreme Court has decided don’t apply so much anymore. It’s part of the broader ultimate reclaiming of democracy that we’ve allowed to backslide during these few Trump terms.

Eaton: Yeah, just to jump on that—I want to stress the last thing. One of the great values of universities, and especially public universities, is it’s one place where people come together and really engage with each other deeply. They socialize with each other, they learn together across lines of race, class, and geography.

With how segregated our neighborhoods are, how segregated our K-12 education system is, it’s really one of the only kinds of places where that coming together across those lines happens. And you learn skills that you’ll take into the workforce, but you also learn about other Americans, and you learn about community, and you learn about civic life that you take into life beyond the university.

And so that’s why critics like me as well are coming to the institution’s defense—especially our public institutions—and asking the elite institutions to do better. Because in the public imagination, even though about half of Americans now will attend a four-year school at some point and get those benefits that we just talked about, in the political discourse, college is Harvard.

In reality, college is UC Merced, or Michigan State, or University of Illinois, or a community college. And those are the institutions that are trusted and that really are an important part of the fabric of America.

Bacon: Both of you talked about colleges doing something of integrating people. And I think the evidence is people who went through a high school, this K through 12, that was integrated—the white people who went to those schools tend to have more tolerant views of minorities. My guess is the college graduates who are white tend to be more accepting of minorities too.

Is part of the education setting liberalizing—if “liberalizing” means tolerance and acceptance? Are the conservatives right on some level? They oppose integrated high schools, integrated colleges—and they probably should have been, in a vote-share way.

Eaton: Yeah. I think that’s actually understudied. I think there’s a strong theory to say, yeah, part of why college-educated people have abandoned the Republican Party is, A, because the Republican Party went nuts and has become authoritarian. And it’s become, in many ways—and I don’t mean this about people who vote Republican, but the Republican Party leadership, Trump, the oligarchs around them—have become un-American in what they’re attacking about the country and trying to really undermine our democracy.

But I think part of it also is people who go to college and get a college degree—they’ve learned about the value of solidarity and commonality across Americans, so that the narrative that’s pushed by MAGA leadership just doesn’t resonate.

Bacon: I guess I’ll finish here. How do we restore trust in higher education? We don’t think the way to do that is to write a report saying college professors are too woke and trashing them. So it sounds like part of the job is—people in my field need to stop talking about what happened at Harvard and talk about what’s happening at University of Kentucky or University of Louisville or Ohio State. What do we do?

I think you’re right that there is a trust problem with higher education, but it’s not going to be solved by hiring more Republican professors who say MAGA is good. It will be solved by X. What are the three or four X’s, John and then Charlie?

Warner: Part of it is institutions not engaging in the kind of half-assed mea culpa Yale did, which was primarily a political document. But a recognition of the disconnects—I keep mentioning this book, it’s called Sustainable, Resilient, Free: The Future of Public Higher Education.

Bacon: This is a book John wrote a few years ago, an excellent book if people want to read it.

Warner: And the book is essentially an argument for free public higher education, because this is the only way we can organize these institutions to actually be free from political influence and these sorts of things—if we can make these things a public good.

So I think part of what institutions, particularly public institutions, have to do is acknowledge the challenges that face students. Stop treating them like customers. In the book, I have examples of what I called institutions treating students like their ATM card. Oh, we need money, so we’re going to add a new fee. Charge you for this one. We’re going to charge you for this.

Or something Michigan State did years ago—they partnered with one of the online gambling companies. If you signed up with a Michigan State ID, there was a kickback. Even back in my day, you signed up for the credit card on the quad, and the school got a finder’s fee.

It has to stop treating students like customers in a transaction and more like a trusted group of stakeholders who are coming to you for this experience. So some of it is that. But for that to happen, it really is a big-picture, macro-level thing.

States have to embrace the idea that these institutions are for the public. The institutions themselves—like the flagship institutions in some states—may have to engage in some measure of relative sacrifice compared to the regional or satellite campuses.

The state of Illinois is in a bit of an argument about this right now. They were working on some changes in funding that were going to benefit the non-flagship campuses in the University of Illinois. My alma mater got their undies in a bunch about this thing, and they’re fighting about it. So some of it is that, some of it is the recognition of these things.

And what I would say to the people in the states where this is possible—maybe states like Illinois or Vermont or Massachusetts—

Bacon: California.

Warner: —or California—this is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to separate yourselves from the states that are really choosing to abandon the values and principles of higher education around student freedom, around faculty freedom, around shared governance, and these sorts of things.

If we’re going to get past this—if this Trump era, this authoritarian push, is an aberration that we can get past and move beyond—those states and schools that have embraced an authoritarian ethos will be left behind over time. They will be less attractive to students.

So students in Texas or Iowa or Indiana that want to go to school somewhere—if you are the attractive alternative next door, and you are reasonable, and you are affordable, and they are not sacrificing or putting themselves behind some kind of impossible debt to go there, you will benefit.

And we know if students enroll in your institution, in your state, it will grow. They’re more likely to stay—all of these things. So this is where I would rally certain states to their competitive edge. Take advantage of the opportunity to separate yourself from the pack of other institutions—

Bacon: Let me ask—

Warner: —you may be answering by being better at that.

Bacon: I have a question now. Why isn’t the head of Amherst, or the head of University of Maryland, saying, Come here, Texas students? Why are we not hearing that already?

Warner: Some of it—Charlie may have a better sense of this. Some of it is, you don’t kick a guy while they’re down. The people who are running these institutions often, they’re playing the hand as best they can, depending on who hired them and when, this kind of stuff. I wouldn’t say there’s a ton of solidarity among these institutions, but there’s a sort of understanding. But if you just market-position yourself—”We’re the affordable state institution, and you’re welcome here”—in the same way schools like Alabama and Clemson and the University of South Carolina drew all kinds of out-of-state students for football.

Bacon: Or sororities and fraternities.

Warner: Or sororities, and things like that. God forbid we now have these institutions drawing people from out of state because it’s a good, affordable education with great faculty among interesting people. Why not?

Bacon: Charlie?

Eaton: Yeah, no, I agree. So one thing we’re doing in California—the California system, with the support of its labor unions, is putting a ballot initiative on the ballot to raise tens of billions of dollars in bond funding to support research, which is the other side of the university that we haven’t been talking about. That’s to maintain our strength as the greatest public university system and research institution in the world.

And the one thing about why aren’t other universities sticking their neck out and saying, Hey, if you don’t want to be required to take some crazy right-wing crank-off-the-streets civics course, you can come to our university—another reason is that university leaders are just keeping their heads down. Everybody’s afraid that if you stick your head out, then you’re going to get the next lawsuit or the next ultimatum.

But here’s the other thing. We’ve got to do something about the elites in particular. As was mentioned, there are public universities that enroll more total students than the entire Ivy League combined. UC Berkeley, which is a pretty prestigious institution and pretty selective, enrolls more low-income students in many years than the entire Ivy League combined.

And so something has to be done about the endowment and donor wealth of these elite institutions, to incentivize them or encourage them to do more with those resources to serve more people visibly. And the fake endowment taxes by the Trump administration have not done that. They haven’t done anything to get those schools to enroll more students.

Princeton’s a useful example for this. Princeton’s endowment has grown more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s. Its undergraduate enrollment has barely grown, and so it went from spending $10,000 a year per student from the endowment to spending $180,000 a year per student enrolled from the endowment. That is a crazy amount of money to be spending per student.

Princeton should double its enrollment. And if we’re going to give it a big endowment tax exemption, that’s fine—it’s good for people to have decentralized resources that they can use to their own ends, but they should have to do more with it. They should have to enroll more students. It should have to be structured so that they can do that.

Those kinds of incentives—you don’t want to just drop a hammer on these schools and say, You’ve got to do it tomorrow, or we’re going to tax your endowment, and we’re going to tax your endowment in such a way that you’ll have layoffs and it’ll destroy the institution. We need to do it in a way where we’re incentivizing it, but we’re using some of the funding incentives of the federal government to say, But you have to do this, and we’ll help you do it on a manageable transition that builds the institution rather than destroys it.

Which is different than what the Trump administration’s doing—because literally what Marc Andreessen has said is, What we need to do is make these institutions go bankrupt and then rebuild. That’s almost a verbatim quote.

That is not what people who want to make higher education more equitable and a more important institution for society—we shouldn’t destroy these institutions. But we have to use the regulatory and funding power of the federal government to particularly push the most elite privates to be more like our public universities in how they serve society.

Bacon: Let me press you just briefly. So it’s not that President AOC should say, Yale, you’ll lose $500 million unless you enroll 5,000 more working-class students, but it’s that, Here’s a special pot of federal money for research, but you’ll only get it if you enroll more students from states that are not New York and California, or whatever. Some kind of incentives to push them. Is that what you’re getting at here? But it needs to be more direct—not in the Trump way, but some other way.

Eaton: If you want to keep your endowment tax exemption that you have, you need to make this kind of transition to enrolling more working-class students on a reasonable time scale. So you actually design it so that institutions will want to do it. The trade-off for doing it, rather than just losing your endowment, will be worth it.

I think that has to be part of the policy equation, or we’re going to keep having this problem where the failures of the elite institutions put a target on the backs of all of higher education.

And one other smaller thing—where I think you might have to be less forceful to persuade elite universities to do this—is you’ve got to take down the fences and the gates on the campus. The campus needs to be a treasure for the state and the nation in which it is located. There’ve been moves lately to go in the opposite direction—

Bacon: Columbia, increasingly. Yes.

Eaton: It is a public treasure. You’re privately governed, you’re a nonprofit, privately governed, but you’re chartered by the state and you’re a public treasure. And you need to keep your doors open to the public, because everybody should have the pleasure of strolling through your campus and using your library and enjoying the wonderful campus grounds. Having that kind of ethos, I think, will change how universities are perceived.

Warner: It’s closer to the ethos of elite universities in the UK. If you go to a place like Oxford or Trinity College in Dublin, these places are open. They’re public. Part of what Charlie’s describing is these institutions choosing to become less elite. If Princeton doubles its class, it becomes less selective—although it could probably get enough applicants that it would still not admit all that high a percentage of people.

The perverse structure of elite higher ed is these schools forever have had no real incentive to grow. Meanwhile, public institutions for decades—their main desire was to grow students, because the only way to grow revenue is to realize more tuition from more students over time. This has actually left some of these schools a little vulnerable—they’ve overgrown, maybe, what they can sustain.

But there’s no lack of qualified students, additional qualified students who could go to Harvard and Yale and Princeton and these kinds of things. There’s no lack of qualified faculty who could teach in these institutions. So I’m with Charlie. It would be better for these institutions to be like, We want to grow. We don’t want to just increase our yield and our selectivity. We actually want to increase the number of students we have. And if we can create incentives for them to do that and spend some of that wealth—

I am somewhat sympathetic to the difficulties of discharging these endowments once the money has been taken in. There’s all kinds of rules, and there’s all kinds of caveats that came with the money, and this kind of stuff. But you cannot deny their size. These are enormous pots of money that just sit there making money.

And it is part of this larger societal problem of the oligarchy, particularly the tech oligarchy, where we now have billionaires or near-billionaires in the world—all that money just sits there making money, not doing anything. And we have a huge swath of society that feels, I don’t even have the opportunity to buy a house or rise economically.

And places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et cetera—we keep naming these three because maybe they’re the most elite—do have responsibility. As Charlie says, they are privately governed, but they are nonprofits. They benefit from all of the tax laws that allow them to escape additional sharing of their resources with the public coffers. This has been happening for literally centuries, and they’ve become what they’ve become. And now we need them to become something else if we’re going to succeed as a country and a society.

Bacon: Great place to end on. Charlie and John, tell people where they can find your work, and some of the work you most want them to see.

Eaton: Yeah. So I publish a newsletter called Axis of Oligarchy, and folks can find it at charlieeaton.org or charlieeaton.net.

Warner: I do a bunch of stuff. I oversee the newsletter for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, On the Line. There, and Inside Higher Ed, is where I do most of my work in this space. But I also have my own newsletter, The Biblioracle Recommends, where I spend a lot of time writing about books and writing and why this stuff still matters in the age of AI. That’s my main day job. Saving higher education is my sideline.

Bacon: And your higher ed book is called what? Give me the book title again.

Warner: Sustainable, Resilient, Free: The Future of Public Higher Education. It’s from Belt Publishing, a great independent Midwestern publisher. It’s only about 160 pages. I wrote it during the pandemic, when I thought we were really all going to go down the tubes and I thought it was an opportunity to change. Some stuff doesn’t quite hold up, but the core—that these are public spaces, public institutions that should serve the public—I think is more relevant today than at the time I wrote it.

Bacon: And Charlie, you wrote a piece in the Times. What was the title? “Fifteen Billion Dollars Is Enough”?

Eaton: “Fifteen Billion Dollars Is Enough to Fight a President” is the essay I wrote in the Times a year ago about how Columbia could use its endowment to stand up and fight back.

Bacon: Columbia didn’t, but Harvard at least took your advice, I think.

Eaton: Yeah. I think Harvard did, and a number of institutions have held the line in some respect, even if we’ve wanted them to do more. And if people want to read my longer-form work that kind of provides the data and reasoning behind those kinds of arguments, my book is Bankers in the Ivory Tower, which is University of Chicago Press.

Bacon: Good. Guys, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. Thanks for joining.

Eaton: Sure. This was fun.

Bacon: See you soon. Bye-bye.

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

The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse. 

The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.

“The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future.”

This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the Upper Basin states, led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico), and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.

Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of projects that could increase supply—a reversal of President Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.

Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river.

“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”

During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators in both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.

The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of Joe Biden’s administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry. 

The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.

Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.

Desalination
As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015 and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to the Interior Department requests as much as $6 billion to build one across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.

The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.

But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.

Taming tech and power
Nevada uses less water than any state on the river and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but they dominate usage in the Silver State.  

The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.

Squeezing rain from the clouds
Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it. 

These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington, DC. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding—spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain—has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent. 

In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.

Mining a hoard of desert groundwater
The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.

This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.

The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.

“This isn’t a competition; it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent the Interior Department.