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You were always funnier than most, so I’m waiting

for this joke to land. When I hear the phrase “grave

error,” I think of you being lifted out of the ground

& your mother loving you better. I think of your

tombstone hitting your stepdad over the head.

Grave error: the words slipping from their mouths

as your skin turns back elastic, as flesh reattaches

to your bones. Old friend, it’s been 10 years.

Grief would be easier if you were dead. Instead,

our songs, your voice, the sticky dampness

of your skin is vivid enough in my mind that I

can make a reader see you like I did. They can

feel the goose bumps forming on my skin as you

lifted me up out of my misery. I still see things

& go “damn, he would love this.” I still expect you

to come across some corner while I’m walking

& tell me it was all a grave error. You’ve been alive

this whole time. The poet wants their words back

like I want you to connect the setup to the punch line,

tell me why I’ve been sleeping with a corpse.

In 2019, I began a large-scale reporting project: I sent out surveys to 10,000 people incarcerated in the United States in women’s prisons on murder or manslaughter charges. I was trying to understand the scale of “criminalized survival,” as it’s been termed: wherein a person—almost always a woman or girl—is arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for actions she took to protect herself or a loved one from physical or sexual violence. I received more than 1,000 replies. I found that at minimum, 30 percent of my respondents were criminalized survivors, and I knew I had to write a book. I would interweave my survey findings with three deeply reported stories of individual survivors. Early on, I settled on two women as my subjects, but I hadn’t found a third. Then, a few years into the project, I came upon TC Brooks’s letter. She wrote that she was serving 25 years to life for killing her stepfather after “abuse, more abuse.” She had spent most of her time in prison working to heal and help others. TC included a booklet she had created to educate prisoners about domestic and sexual violence. She’d signed the cover: “Caged no longer on the inside, I sing a song of rebirth. Free from the inside.” Immediately, I began trying to get in touch with TC. Her story was remarkable. She would soon become the third subject of Unreasonable Women.

On July 10, 2019, TC sat before the parole board for the fifth time. She compared the process to being a human roulette ball; she’d been trying to stop the wheel for decades, but it kept spinning. And she kept bouncing around, hoping for some good fortune to strike.

The hearing was overseen by Kevin Chappell, a Department of Corrections career man who had been working for the prisons even longer than TC had been inside them. He had risen in the ranks from guard to lieutenant to administrator to deputy warden, employed in men’s facilities across the state, from Folsom to San Quentin.

TC once again detailed the extensive sexual abuse she had endured, the abuse that led to her murder conviction, and she recounted her fear of being subject to scrutiny and doubt. She once again vowed rehabilitation and accountability, once again unpacked her traumatic past, a past that she had held deep shame about for so long, before a group of imposing strangers.

Chappell wanted to know why TC hadn’t been able to prevent her own rape on the night of her crime. He wanted to know why she hadn’t spoken up sooner about the sexual abuse she had experienced. She wished she could tell him the truth: ’Cause I didn’t wanna be in a room like this, sitting in a chair like this, talking to a man like you.

After two hours, the board broke to deliberate. When they returned 20 minutes later, they told TC and Lilli Paratore, a staff attorney at a legal nonprofit, that they would, in a rare continuance, need additional time to make their decision. They needed to investigate TC’s “violence risk.”

On December 6, 2019, TC and Paratore returned to the parole hearing room at the prison. Commissioner Chappell told TC that while they had taken her youth into account, they could not consider the abuse a mitigating factor.

“We found no information to corroborate your claims of the severe sexual or physical assault at the hands of the victim,” he said. TC still posed “an unreasonable risk to public safety.” She’d be heading back to the California California Women’s Facility. There, he continued, she should focus on creating “healthy boundaries in regards to your relationship with your mom.… I think you’ll learn a lot about yourself in that regard.” She could apply for parole again in a few years. He wished her luck.

TC was accustomed to parole denials, but she was crushed that the commissioner had doubted her about the abuse. “It took so many years and so much courage to face those demons,” she said. “How dare he?”

When Chappell spoke to her, she had been hot with anger, but she had to suppress it. If they saw a hint of fury, she was never, ever getting out. Paratore also presented as calm, though she had internally gone, she told me, to “a place of rage.” She spent weeks writing informal appeals late into the night, arguing that the board had revictimized TC. The questions Chappell had asked, Paratore believed, “reveal a disturbing lack of understanding by the panel about the dynamics of power and control in abusive relationships and how fear, shame, and embarrassment prevent survivors from coming forward about their experiences.”

A month later, in January 2020, TC and Paratore reconvened. They decided that parole wasn’t happening. “Unless her story changed significantly and she just lied,” Paratore told me. “Which, you know, I can’t counsel a client to do.”

Paratore wondered: Maybe there was a different route, one she hadn’t quite put her finger on. She discussed it with her colleagues. Nancy Lemon, the domestic violence expert and law professor, had remained invested in TC’s case. Lemon knew Nancy O’Malley, the elected district attorney in Alameda County, a woman whose predecessor had successfully tried TC.

The D.A.’s office, no matter who led it, had always opposed parole, which was typical for prosecutors. But a new law had recently come into effect in California, allowing a D.A. to support a resentencing for someone who may not have had a fair trial outcome. Lemon and Paratore thought that if O’Malley got to know TC’s case, her office might suggest a new sentence to a judge, who in turn could hand TC a sentence that would mean she’d served her time.

O’Malley met with Lemon and Paratore but made it clear that she didn’t want to be involved in resentencing. In Paratore’s interpretation, it was a political gamble: Were TC to reoffend, the D.A. didn’t want to be linked to letting her out. However, in a highly unusual move, Paratore told me, O’Malley said that if TC requested a commutation from the governor, asking that her sentence be shortened, she would back the request.

Paratore began to immediately compile a packet to be sent to Governor Gavin Newsom. As promised, O’Malley wrote a letter of support for TC. She asked that TC not be allowed to live with her mother, since the relationship was problematic. Otherwise, she wrote, “as all parties are seeking the outcome in the name of justice, I hope to see Ms. Brooks released soon.”

Newsom had a clear path to letting TC go. The same D.A. who had always opposed release now endorsed it. There were no roadblocks for the governor.

In January 2021, Paratore submitted TC’s packet.

On March 12, the Central California Women’s Facility was still under Covid lockdown. Nobody was allowed out of their pods except for critical workers, like laundry or kitchen employees.

“Brooks, open your door,” an officer said over the intercom.

TC poked her head out.

“Put on your states. You’re going to B Yard.”

“The Cop Shop” in B Yard was a building where the warden took calls, and where, as far as the prisoners could tell, the rest of the guards sat around all day, eating food from large tubs they’d brought in from home. It was also where the phone conferences were held.

TC sped across the grounds.

“Where you going, Brooks?” an officer asked.

“Gotta go to Bravo yard,” she said. “To the program office.”

“What for?”

“I’m goin’ home.”

“You sure?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

She approached the Cop Shop and took a seat on a bench. A few prisoners filed in and out of a room. Then it was her turn.

The warden was waiting. She stood before him.

“Brooks?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your number?”

“W45882.”

“You know why you’re here?”

“I believe I do. Am I gonna get a phone call?”

“You are. Do you know who’s gonna call you?”

“The governor’s office.”

The warden looked her over and leaned back. “What do you think of your stay here?” he asked.

“It was a long haul,” TC said diplomatically. “I’ve learned a lot.”

“I read your file,” the warden said. “The past got you here. And I am sorry about your past.”

The phone rang. The warden answered and then handed the phone to TC.

A woman was calling on behalf of Governor Newsom. She had the pleasure and privilege, she told TC, of informing her that Newsom had signed her commutation paperwork. He agreed that she deserved a second chance. TC was ordered for immediate release, within the week. Was there anything she wished to say to Mr. Newsom, the woman asked.

“Tell him I appreciate the second chance, and he will not regret this decision,” TC said. “I promise him, I’m gonna be a feel-good story he can tell.”

She headed back to her cell. She needed to concentrate on getting her affairs in order. She had been confined for 31 years.

She had seven days to go.

From the book Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival, by Justine van der Leun. Copyright © 2026 by Justine van der Leun. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro occupies something of an intriguing position among Democrats. He represents a state that Donald Trump won twice—a state that’s both deeply divided and pivotal in deciding presidential elections. Yet Shapiro also consistently garners high approval ratings there, and polls regularly show he enjoys the support of around one quarter of Republicans. On top of all that, he manages this while remaining sharply critical of Trump—and without pandering to MAGA voters.

Case in point: In an interview with me, Shapiro confirmed for the first time that Pennsylvania will not participate in Trump’s big planned gala celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary on the National Mall. The way Shapiro is addressing this decision deserves notice. It shows that it’s possible for a Democrat to sustain enduring public support in a swing state—including nontrivial backing among voters who helped elect Trump—while casting Trumpism, appropriately, as an overwhelmingly destructive force in American life.

“This president routinely makes patriotism partisan and personal—and it shouldn’t be that way,” Shapiro told me, referring to Pennsylvania’s decision not to join the so-called Great American State Fair, which Trump has described as “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”

Shapiro said his office had canvassed opinion among many Pennsylvania businesses about Trump’s gala. Shapiro’s aides enlisted the help of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce, which communicated with companies across the state, small and large alike, about whether to join the coming festivities.

“None were interested,” Shapiro said. “It reflects this sad state of affairs that we find ourselves in—that the president has politicized this to a degree that businesses don’t want to participate.”

Pennsylvania’s decision is significant, given that Trump’s flipping of the traditional “Blue Wall” state was pivotal to his 2016 and 2024 victories. Its deliberations over Trump’s fair had been closely held. The New York Times recently reported that Pennsylvania was “known to” be pulling out, based on unclear sourcing and with no confirmation. By contrast, CNN and NOTUS reported that the state was undecided.

But Shapiro confirmed to The New Republic that the decision to withdraw is now official. In joining eight other states that appear to be pulling out (Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, and North Carolina), Pennsylvania becomes the first swing state that has flipped between the parties in recent presidential races to do so. 

Coming after many musical artists have declined to participate, it’s another sign of how badly Trump—and his approach to this hallowed national anniversary—have alienated the middle of the country. Trump’s treatment of this moment as akin to a monarchical festival is of a piece with his ballroom, his triumphal arch, and other efforts to transform the nation’s capital into something more like a czar’s imperial court. It’s giving Democrats like Shapiro an opening to decline to participate in the president’s Bonapartist self-glorification while giving voice to a disinterested, public-spirited patriotism more in sync with the virtues of republican governance.

“We don’t celebrate one individual,” Shapiro told me. “We celebrate ‘we, the people.’ Unfortunately, the president doesn’t seem to get that. He wants to make it all about himself. What’s clear is that’s not where the American people are.”

When Shapiro was first elected governor in 2022, he made big inroads with rural, Trump-backing Pennsylvanians. Though data on this is sporadic, he’s managed to hold on to the support of around a quarter of Republican voters through late 2025 and early 2026. He holds a wide lead over his MAGA opponent in his campaign for reelection this year.

What’s notable is that Shapiro has done this without pulling punches in his criticism of Trump. Shapiro hasn’t proceeded as if the 2024 election revealed Trump as a tribune of the people who mystically identified a deep strain of right-wing populist nationalism in the American psyche. Some (though hardly all) Democrats reacted that way, leading them to trim their ideological sails, stick to kitchen table issues, and treat immigration as a largely lost debate while seeing engagement with Trump’s ethnonationalist and authoritarian abuses as a distraction from the route back to relevance.

Shapiro, for his part, has forcefully opposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plans for vast detention camps in central Pennsylvania. And while some immigration activists would like him to go still further in this regard, Shapiro has reinforced prohibitions against state law enforcement asking for people’s immigration status or participating in enforcing federal immigration law.

In a sense, Shapiro gives something to different elements of the Democratic coalition. Democrats who favor an “abundance agenda” cite Shapiro as a model, in that he stresses removing bureaucratic constraints to unshackle effective government and deliver concrete economic results.  Yet Shapiro doesn’t treat “deliverism,” as this form of politics is sometimes called, as sufficient in itself. He’s also willing to defend immigrants while engaging ideologically with the rank ethnonationalism—and even the Christian nationalism—driving Trump’s efforts at mass violent removals. 

“We now have a president who tries to bring us to the lowest common denominator every single day, who attacks people who don’t vote like him, or look like him, or pray like him,” Shapiro said.

And at a time when Democrats are debating how to win back Trump-supporting working-class voters, Shapiro says the answer is to bluntly inform them that Trump’s policies are, well, shafting them royally. He highlights the tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who, his office says, have been at risk of losing food stamp benefits and the more than 100,000 at risk of losing health care access. He also points to the 300,000 people who could lose Medicaid coverage next year.

“More than half of the people losing health care and food assistance come from counties that Trump won,” Shapiro told me. “He screwed over the very people that put him in the White House. He turned his back on them, and he lied to them.” 

Shapiro suggests that Democrats can go right into these communities and make this case to Trump voters, as he does. “I don’t rub it in their face by any stretch that their choice for president has made their lives worse,” he continued, stressing that his posture is always one of “fighting every day to make their lives better.”

Asked if the decision not to participate in Trump’s gala is rooted in a rejection of Trumpism, Shapiro said it’s not. He noted that the lack of interest of businesses drove the decision, and said joining the gala would have required the state to shell out $700,000 in taxpayer money, which will instead fund celebrations throughout the state.

Still, one can discern a through line linking all of this. It’s that winning the middle of the country is fully compatible with a full-throated indictment of Trump and Trumpism as truly toxic forces in American life. The ethnonationalist cruelties, the endless corruption and self-dealing, the massive upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, the displays of dictatorial self-glorification, the desecration of hallowed republican symbols in the nation’s capital—most ordinary people just want to be done with Trumpism and all its enmities and degradations already.

“I think people are exhausted by his chaos, his cruelty, and his corruption—and they’re seeking something better,” Shapiro said. He looks at all the ordinary Pennsylvanians coming together across social and ethnic lines at events commemorating our 250th anniversary across the state, all motivated by simple, selfless patriotism, and he concludes: “We are better as Americans than the negativity that Trump injects into our lives.”

If this approach can secure solid majority support in must-win Pennsylvania, that seems like something Democrats can learn from.

Donald Trump was all set to sign a bill passed by Congress that’s designed to reduce housing costs for the American people. But an angry Trump abruptly canceled the signing and blurted out a demand that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation instead. This surprised Trump’s own advisers and shocked Republicans in Congress. Why? They apparently couldn’t fathom that he’d so openly prioritize disenfranchising voters over helping Americans overcome their economic travails. We talked about all of it with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, author of a new piece identifying Trump’s narcissism as the through line for many of his recent follies. We discuss now Trump’s pathological self-regard led right to this moment, why this voter suppression effort would likely backfire on Trump if it were to pass, and what’s likely to come next as Republicans seek to flatter their way out of this latest impasse. Listen to this episode here.

Donald Trump is the most effective president in my lifetime. There, I said it. Not because he’s accomplished good things. Quite the opposite. I can’t think of a single thing he’s done to improve the country. But effectiveness isn’t the same thing as benevolence. And by any objective measure, Trump has been extraordinarily effective at using the power of the presidency to get what he wants.

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump almost makes this horrible industry sympathetic Is there anyone Trump hasn’t pissed off? Mamdani’s got Trump and Fox News big mad Yet another sign of an incoming blue wave … Susan Collins helped overturn Roe. That’s coming back to haunt her. Luckily…

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

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The Supreme Court, as per usual, has saved the worst for last, with a big stack of cases remaining—too many of which are about whether President Donald Trump can continue dismantling democracy. Indeed, The New York Times’ tracker of remaining cases has an entire section called “Trump’s Agenda.” Yikes. All of the dozen cases that have yet to be decided are big…

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FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend and wannabe country singer Alexis Wilkins just got added to the lineup for tonight’s extremely prestigious Freedom 250 rally starring President Donald Trump—and she wants you to know that she totally got there on merit. After the Freedom 250 music festival collapsed spectacularly—with artists racing to wipe their names from the garbage—Trump declared that…

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New York City’s right-wingers, who evidently cannot handle losing elections, are dealing with their anger by once again attempting to fearmonger Jewish Americans into leaving New York, the most Jewish city in the country.

Last night, allies of Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept the New York City Democratic primaries. Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—all of whom have condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza—each won a congressional seat, consolidating socialist power in New York. The socialist New York Jews of generations past might perhaps have jumped for joy. But the Republican party figureheads of today would like Jews, specifically, to panic instead of celebrating.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone. We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening,” Meghan McCain wrote on X. As a beautiful Jew in America, I was not initially sure what she was talking about.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer joined McCain in telling the one million Jews who call the five boroughs their home to go on ahead and pack their bags. Loomer, helpfully, made it clear that unconditional support for Israel is not and has never been about American Jewish safety: for her, it is about fighting the supposed “Islamic takeover of America.”

If you’re a Jew in NYC, now is your time to move. After tonight’s election in New York, nobody who is Jewish is safe.

I’d love to see the Trump administration address this Islamic takeover of America and the exploding Jew hatred.

We need leadership on this issue. It’s…

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 24, 2026

Loomer is, of course, a crank. But more serious people, like Dan Goldman—the Congressman ousted by Brad Lander last night—have also invoked the specter of antisemitism in this week’s elections.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), in concession speech: “Jews have given back so much to this country. As history has taught us, antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, some of which I heard personally on this campaign, will ultimately be the undoing of our democracy if we all don’t lean in…

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 24, 2026

Goldman, who is Jewish, lost by an absolute landslide to the also-very-Jewish Brad Lander, a man who named his children after a Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish labor organizer. Nonetheless, Goldman reportedly accused Lander of using “dangerous antisemitic tropes” to win. It is not clear whether the trope in question was Lander’s attack of Goldman for taking AIPAC money, something Goldman did do while publicly disavowing AIPAC donations.

Serious conversations beginning over whether there is a future for Jews in the United States. Israel is in a dangerous neighborhood but it controls its own borders. Nobody voted for the kind of migration that allowed New York to go from Jewish capital to capital of antisemitism.

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) June 24, 2026

Some serious thinkers have once again begun to wonder whether New York Jews might be better off living in Israel than in the United States. Joel Pollak of the California Post wasted no time casting the blame for antisemitism vaguely on “migration,” by which he presumably means “very scary Muslim mayor” and/or “very scary immigration.” Stephen Miller and Katie Miller joined in: “New York will now be run by foreign communists.”

Jews, who not so long ago were being blamed for encouraging hatred of white people by supporting immigration, are now being told that in a city of immigrants they should be afraid of immigrants, because some of those immigrants might not like Israel.

When Zohran Mamdani was elected earlier this year, the very same commentariat crowed for a Jewish exodus from Gotham. Such an exodus, by all accounts, did not happen then, and won’t happen now.

Why would it? Antisemitism is real, but it isn’t caused by critics of Israel winning elections. And it isn’t solved by Jews fleeing New York.

President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a bill signing ceremony Wednesday for a landmark bipartisan housing bill that aims to make it more affordable to buy a home, saying he won’t sign it because Congress has yet to pass his voter suppression bill. “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT…

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It was a good night for a young and charismatic nepo-baby, leveraging his name to inject new energy and ideas into a moribund Democratic party. But it was a very bad night for John F. Kennedy’s grandson.

On Tuesday, as a slate of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani knocked off two incumbent members of Congress and cruised to victory in another open House district, Jack Schlossberg finished a distant third in a race the Democratic Socialists had stayed clear of—the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The Kennedy scion, a Democratic activist and content creator, entered the race last fall as a front-runner, but, with most of the votes counted, was hovering at just under 11 percent.

Instead, the race for a seat centered on some of Manhattan’s most affluent neighborhoods became an extraordinarily expensive proxy battle between Silicon Valley donors. Alex Bores, a state assemblyman who positioned himself as a Big Tech skeptic, benefited from $11 million in spending from Public First Action, an Anthropic-funded vehicle. Leading the Future, a super-PAC that’s been funded by the venture-capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, spent $8 million attacking Bores—which boosted eventual winner Micah Lasher, another state assemblyman and a former Nadler chief-of-staff.

There’s an urgency in politics now that makes dynastic inheritance look small.

It would be unfair to view the results in the nation’s most geographically compact congressional district as a straightforward referendum on the Kennedy family (even if Schlossberg did helpfully include his more famous surname on the ballot). But the results suggest that voters weren’t exactly clamoring for a dynastic reboot, either—his loss is the third successive defeat for a prominent Kennedy in a Democratic primary, after uncle Bobby’s abandoned campaign against then-President Joe Biden, and cousin Joseph Kennedy III’s 2020 defeat to Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. Caroline’s 33-year-old son learned the hard way that the Kennedy brand just doesn’t mean what it used to. His strange campaign only underscores why.

Schlossberg is not the worst kind of Kennedy, by any stretch. He didn’t kill anyone, for instance. He didn’t appease Hitler, grope a waitress, send troops to Vietnam, promote eugenics, or publish a book trampling on the legacy of Reconstruction. If the decline of the WASPs (and their WASP-like Hyannisport cousins) has taught us anything, it’s that there are much worse things in this world than over-educated, well-meaning dilettantes. But you can also perhaps understand why, in this moment of all moments, the Democratic voters of Manhattan weren’t lining up for someone who so closely matched that description.

Schlossberg’s qualifications were slim. None of his previous jobs could historically be described as stepping stones to Congress. He was a political correspondent for Vogue for a period of several months. He was a Democratic content creator—a role that often consisted him doing weird vocal impressions of personas he’d made up. (“I think satire is a really powerful political tool,” he told the New Yorker, which is the kind of statement that never seems to accompany powerful satire.) He was part of the committee that handed out the Profile in Courage awards, a prize that takes its name from the aforementioned book his grandfather mostly didn’t write. He may have meant to merely shore up his district bona fides, but it felt appropriate that the first candidate I’ve ever seen list his pre-school on campaign literature was a Kennedy—and that it came with a boast that he’d graduated not just from Yale, but from Harvard. Twice. (Do you know how hard it was for Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandson, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s great-grandson, and President John F. Kennedy’s grandson to get into Harvard?)

In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash last May, Schlossberg boasted that his campaign was catching fire because it had released more policy plans than anyone else in the race. You could argue that the idea that people (including House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi) were lining up to support JFK’s grandson because of his position on Social Security was as insulting as anything in Profiles in Courage.

Again, there are worse things than having a familial sense of responsibility to public service that you don’t quite know what to do with—you could instead have a familiar sense of responsibility to selling cryptocurrency and hotels. As Reeves Wiedeman reported in a deeply illuminating New York magazine story last year, being one of the political Kennedys can be a grind. No one’s sitting around the old compound telling you you should really become a dentist.

But if there’s one thing Tuesday’s results showed, it’s that there’s an urgency in politics right now that makes dynastic inheritance look small. The energy that’s animating Democrats in the city where Schlossberg attended pre-school isn’t nostalgia for the lost Kennedy idyll. Across much of the city, primary voters showed up at the polls to tear down the old way of doing things, newly empowered by their 2025 defeat of Andrew Cuomo, another Kennedy-adjacent scion. Like it or not, they’re motivated by idealism and a desire for something new—ironically, the kind of vibe shift the family once purported to embody.

The last few years ought to have once and for all blown up the myth of Camelot—that it was desirable, that it was ever even real. American politics is haunted by a different sort of Northeastern family, ruled by a calcifying and domineering patriarch, digging its pincers into the national story and flaunting its multi-generational ambitions in the service of a misbegotten golden age. The Kennedys are down to their last and thorniest public servant—a sun-baked, worm-addled, crank incubated in a world of entitlement and unaccountability.

Now all that’s left is the ruins. I’m reminded, like a good Kennedy, of Shelley: Look upon their works and despair.

White House advisor Stephen Miller spent his Wednesday posting racist, anti-immigrant dog whistles on X as he coped with the election sweep for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsed progressive candidates in New York City the night before.

“In 2026, half of NYC residents speak a language other than English as their primary language and one-quarter of NYC residents lack English language proficiency,” Miller wrote Wednesday morning.

“Half of all college graduates in NYC are immigrants or from immigrant households,” Miller said in another post hours later. “So when observers say college grads in NYC are embracing communism this is not a home-grown phenomenon.”

“Change the voters, change the country,” he said in yet another post, alluding to kicking out legal immigrants to make his right-wing white nationalist agenda more tangible.

Miller’s posts was immediately lambasted by commenters noting that NYC is historically the hub of east coast immigration—which Miller’s immediate ancestors were a part of.

“The guy’s great-grandfather was a Yiddish-speaking peddler who arrived at Ellis Island in 1903, and somehow New York endured his presence,” journalist David Klion wrote in response. “No one kidnapped him off the street or sent him to a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

“Every day a Republican on here tells me Zaid we only oppose illegal immigrants and every day on here Stephen Miller makes clear he hates all immigrants, legal or not,” journalist Zaid Jilani chimed in. “Pay attention to your own leaders!”

Miller—who is seemingly unfamiliar with the basic history of New York City—is once again making his biases loud and clear. Immigrants aren’t embracing communism—they’re voting for progressives and the Democratic Socialists of America because the cost of living is too high. Forcing people to speak English won’t change that.

President Donald Trump berated Senate Republicans during a visit to the Capitol Wednesday for allowing a vote to block his war in Iran, further escalating a feud that has diverted GOP efforts to focus on election-year affordability issues and brought much of the chamber’s business to a halt. Invited to speak at the GOP luncheon by Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Trump had signaled ahead of time that…

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President Donald Trump and outgoing Republican Senator Bill Cassidy got into a shouting match over the war in Iran at a GOP lunch Wednesday.

Cassidy told Morgan Rimmer of CNN that he “lost his temper.” One source said that Trump called Cassidy a “lunatic.”

CNN reports that Bill Cassidy lost his temper with Trump and "berated the president for what has transpired in Iran, for not being clear with Congress about his actions in the region" pic.twitter.com/4tq7GC3pU1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

Many suspected the lunch would center around discussion of the SAVE America Act that Trump is trying to push through the Senate, but instead the conversation turned to Iran. On Tuesday night, the Senate voted to limit Trump’s war powers, and remove U.S. military forces from the country.

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy was one of four Republicans who voted with Democrats to pass the law. When Trump asked why these Republicans voted for the resolution, Cassidy reportedly responded, “Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really want to know the answer?”

Cassidy then berated the president for not being clear with Congress about his actions in Iran, and argued that until he got a fuller briefing of what was going on, he’d keep voting to limit Trump’s powers.

Trump raised his voice in response, and Cassidy did so as well. Cassidy reportedly called the war a “blunder,” according to Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News, and the president interrupted him. Cassidy joked to CNN that he shouldn’t have lost his temper but that it was “the Irish in him.” However, the senator had no regrets.

“I make no apologies for standing up to the president,” Cassidy told CBS. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”

Congratulations to Donald Trump, the first and only president to have both chambers of Congress pass a War Powers Resolution against him. That’s quite the achievement! It’s a testament to how little support there is for Trump’s war in Iran that enough members of his own party peeled off and voted with Democrats, handing him what the media keeps calling a rebuke, framing it as nothing more…

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Yet another Trump administration effort to gain access to trans kids’ private health information has been, for the moment, halted. A district judge today handed down a temporary restraining order, preventing the Trump administration from forcing disclosure of the health records of trans children treated at New York University Langone and Mount Sinai hospitals in New York City. The injunction will remain in place at least until July 8.

The US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas sent out a grand jury subpoena to the hospitals seeking confidential information about patients under age 18 according to a statement released by NYU Langone May 11.

The Trump administration spent much of the past year seeking similar information from hospitals across the country via administrative subpoenas, none of which have succeeded in court. “ But undeterred by its disastrous showing in the courts, DOJ decided to issue nearly identical document requests in the form of grand jury subpoenas emanating from the Northern District of Texas,” District Judge Katherine Polk Failla said.

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”

“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter told me at the time. “This is mafia-type behavior.” Three families of trans kids sued in early June, alleging the subpoena violated their children’s rights.

“We’re thankful the court has granted our emergency request to protect the privacy interests of transgender New Yorkers and their families,” said Chase Strangio, Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project, in a statement. 

“For the past year, the Trump administration has not only decided that it knows better than these families and their doctors what their medical needs are, but has also sought to obtain troves of sensitive information about patients in New York.”

Donald Trump totally isn’t bitter about having his name removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Nevermind the fact that his administration put up a massive tarp obscuring the building’s facade after a judge made the president take his name down.

The white tarp attached to the front of the Kennedy Center blocks most of the building’s lettering. (The nameplate now confusingly reads “THE JOHN F. — ORMING ARTS.”) It was erected on June 13, along with some extra scaffolding, one day after the court deadline to remove Trump’s name from the prestigious theater.

Workers took down the letters spelling out Trump’s name in a “predawn operation,” reported Reuters, and installed the tarp immediately afterward. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper demanded the administration explain “the purpose and status of ​the tarp and scaffolding,” though he gave the White House a lengthy deadline, July 31, in which to do so.

Democratic Representative ​Joyce Beatty, a board member at the center, filed the initial lawsuit against Trump after he renamed the center after himself in December. Her lawyers have alleged that the tarp is the White House’s “effort to frustrate the ⁠restoration ​of the status quo as it ​existed prior to the renaming.”

Beatty herself called the new tarp an “act ​of petty defiance.”

The pettiness of this administration is indeed something to behold. Lest we forget, Trump also tried to close the Kennedy Center for two years for “renovations” after multiple artists canceled their performances in the public backlash to the name change. Cooper blocked the two-year closure, too, though the federal government has filed an appeal.

The national median price for a house is now three times higher than the median household income for Americans under 40—an obvious explanation for why nearly all young people say it’s harder for them to buy a home than it was for their parents.

A study from the Pew Research Center released Wednesday shows home prices spiking tremendously in the beginning of the 2010s, and median home value rose 30 percent (from $269,600 to $350,000) from 2019 to 2024. This surge occurred at almost three times the pace of median income, which has risen very slowly.

Pew also noted that a whopping 89 percent of Americans under 40 think their parents had an easier time buying property—and that 60 percent of metro areas in the U.S. were classified as “unaffordable.”

This comes as President Trump canceled the signing of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act on Wednesday—the largest bipartisan housing affordability bill in decades—to pressure Republicans into passing his anti-voting rights SAVE America Act. The housing affordability crisis seems to be on everyone’s list of priorities except the president’s.

Amid an influenza outbreak, major branches of the U.S. military are reinstating mandatory flu vaccines for recruits just over two months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth threw out the longstanding policy. ABC News reported on Tuesday that recruits for the Army, Navy, and Air Force will be required to take flu shots, and that the Air Force now has set the goal of vaccinating all…

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