Political News

Look, I get it. Democrats have been burned by hopes for a Texas miracle so many times that it feels risky to place stock in this year’s Senate race. But a new poll of the contest from The New York Times finds a dead heat, with Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton each earning 47 percent of likely voters. In short: This is a real race. In Texas.

Some have reacted with consternation to this poll, because previous ones had Talarico slightly up. This is, in my view, the wrong reaction. The Times poll is the gold standard—if this survey finds a tie, the race truly is a dead heat, meaning it’s actually winnable for Talarico. This was always going to be close. It will be very hard for Talarico to win. But it’s doable.

Talarico’s candidacy is an object lesson in what happens when liberals speak forcefully on behalf of what they truly believe—and here the Times poll sheds some light. For instance: Majorities of Texas voters say Talarico has “good character” and “the right moral values,” whereas majorities don’t say that of Paxton. And more see Paxton as extreme (49 percent) than see Talarico (43 percent) that way.

What should we make of this? Paxton and the entire GOP-MAGA apparatus are spending enormous sums of money to tar Talarico as unmasculine based on his previous positions on gender and religion. Talarico has walked back some of them. But, critically, he hasn’t done this fearfully and defensively.

Instead, Talarico has characterized the criticism as ludicrously trivial, and has highlighted how absurd it is for Paxton—who has a long trail of corrupt and adulterous conduct—to criticize the manhood of others. His tone toward Paxton has been one of incredulity: This corrupt lowlife is claiming he’s a man’s man and a good Christian? This guy? Seriously?

Meanwhile, Talarico has offered up a vision of masculinity that’s rooted in rectitude and integrity, in showing loyalty to neighbors (including immigrants, i.e., showing loyalty when it’s politically hard), in selflessly serving the community, and in protecting the vulnerable, all of it rooted in his own Christian faith.

Along those lines, here’s another striking Times finding: Talarico is leading by 27 points, 58-31, among independents. That’s probably too rosy, but it’s instructive. The real GOP game plan is to smear Talarico as a vaguely alien (read: homosexual) figure who isn’t one of “us” Texans. Talarico’s response is to be forthright on what he really believes—to say what he means, and mean what he says—while tarring Paxton as the person of truly low character. For now, it’s appealing to independents. The poll also finds Talarico winning 9 percent of Trump voters.

It would be wildly premature to conclude from this poll that all this is working sufficiently to win Texas. Talarico will get bludgeoned by hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads. And the poll shows Paxton holds a huge lead in areas of the state outside the big urban centers. Talarico is badly trailing among working-class whites, and he’s 8 points behind among all working-class voters.

Still, there’s cause for optimism here. To win, Talarico needs some Trump voters and a lot of independents. He’s on track to do that, though he’ll have to win more working- class voters and cut into Paxton’s non-metro margins. While the Democratic brand is tarnished here (53 percent say the party is too far left), Talarico is mostly escaping that.

Winning in Texas also requires running up huge totals in the Latino-heavy border counties—and here the poll delivers another surprise. Talarico is trouncing Paxton among Latinos by 61-29, or 32 points. This is a big deal. Trump’s success at winning Texas Latinos fueled all the post-2024 talk of a major realignment. But those gains have evaporated, even in Texas.

What happened? Well, Trump’s mass deportations, for starters. Texas voters approve of Trump on immigration by a bare 50-49—not great for this deep red border state. But Latinos disapprove by an extraordinary 64-33, with 60 percent disapproving strongly. That’s remarkable—it helps explain how Trump squandered those Latino gains.

Trump is hovering over all of this. The Times poll finds his overall approval underwater at 44-52. He’s faring worse on the economy (43-55), the cost of living (39-60), and the war (41-57). Those numbers are quite bad for Texas. And it gives Talarico an opening in another sense.

As I argued last month, Talarico and a number of other Democrats are developing a new moral language for the era of “Late Stage Trumpism.” The broad idea of a new politics is gaining traction: E.J. Dionne and Jennifer Szalai both have good pieces detailing how Democrats are embracing a newly moralized politics. They’re talking about the common good, depicting corruption as a moral scourge, and casting both liberalism and democracy as ways of life rooted in ethical public conduct, in mutual respect among differing citizens.

Yet one central ingredient to this should be an indictment of the moral and spiritual rot that MAGA has inflicted on our common life. This can coexist with good-faith outreach to Republicans and even some Trump voters.

Here’s where “Late Stage Trumpism” comes in. All that’s left is the corruption, the self-enrichment, the naked cruelty, the ethnonationalism, the upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, and the stoking of petty enmities as political bloodsport.

I don’t know how directly Talarico can criticize Trump by name—a majority says Talarico will “oppose Trump too much.” But he’s facing a candidate who perfectly exemplifies the very worst of MAGA, and most people just want to get past MAGA’s nonstop degradations already. Talarico needs to speak to that MAGA fatigue without appearing too partisan. It’s a tall order: Winning in Texas will be hard. But even if he comes close, it’ll suggest that a new politics is emerging from all the wreckage.

Republican Representative Thomas Kean Jr. is back at work, and finally explained Tuesday why he went missing in March without any explanation.

In a speech on the House floor, Kean said that he was hospitalized on doctor’s orders for depression. He noted that it was a “difficult speech” for him to make as he is a private person and talking about himself doesn’t come naturally, but said that “I believe I owe an explanation to the people of New Jersey’s 7th district, my colleagues in this chamber, and to the American people for my actions.”

Kean said that months ago, he underwent medical testing at a hospital and was diagnosed with depression. While Kean didn’t believe he would need a long-term hospital stay, he said he was advised to remain put by doctors. Early on, he didn’t understand his condition, he added.

Rep. Tom Kean says his absence from the House was due to depression pic.twitter.com/AbQRdc4d88

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026

“It is physical. It is emotional. And until you experience it yourself, it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be,” Kean said. He said he was hesitant to accept his doctors’ advice that a long-term stay would be the fastest way to recovery, given his obligations to his family, colleagues, and constituents.

“But, as the over 48 million of my fellow Americans being treated for this illness have come to discover, there is no timeline for healing. There is no timeline for recovery. Only the work of getting better, one day at a time,” Kean said.

It was a heartfelt speech, but the New Jersey congressman failed to explain why his social media accounts continued to post regularly and his office still introduced legislation while he was missing. Kean’s financial disclosures showed that he was also trading stocks in April while he was ostensibly in the hospital, and his reelection campaign racked up travel expenses showing him using Uber and Amtrak in San Francisco, far from his constituents, in that same month.

If Kean’s depression was so severe that he needed hospitalization, how does he explain personally trading stocks and racking up travel expenses on the other side of the country? Kean also missed several important votes in Congress, including on the budget. He’s not in a safe Republican district, either: Donald Trump carried it by just one percentage point in 2024, and Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill won it by two last November.

Kean is not the first member of Congress to deal with depression: Former Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. was treated at the Mayo Clinic for bipolar depression in 2012 and later resigned that year, and former Representative Patrick Kennedy dealt with depression throughout his congressional career, receiving in-patient treatment in 2006 and 2009 and deciding not to run for reelection in 2010.

While Kean won his primary unopposed, he faces Democrat and former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett in November’s general election. Kean may not be able to escape scrutiny for his lack of transparency over the last few months.

A deportation flight from the United States arrived in Venezuela last Wednesday, reportedly carrying 146 Venezuelans, including seven children, deported under President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration efforts. But just hours after their arrival at a hotel in La Guaira, twin earthquakes struck the area, leaving the number of surviving deportees currently unknown. The twin earthquakes…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Supreme Court enshrines Trump’s racist bullsh-t into law…

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Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts called out Justice Samuel Alito’s nonsensical argument about birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or temporarily in the country are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

In his separate dissent, Alito argued that immigrant parents, in order for their child to automatically be made an American citizen, could not be subject to any foreign power. But he contended that some people who had done “everything within their power to become United States citizens can be seen as no longer subject to any foreign power.”

But Roberts argued that this kind of “ad hoc exemption” was plainly inconsistent with Alito’s own interpretation of the Civil Rights Act.

“He does not explain how that exception can be squared with his view of the text, which (to repeat) is that anyone ‘automatically’ made a [‘national’] of his ‘parents’ native country’ was not entitled to citizenship,” Roberts wrote.

That wasn’t the only reason Alito’s dissent was a mess.

In closing, Alito argued that the majority’s interpretation “saddles this country with an ancient British rule that even the United Kingdom has abandoned,” referring to jus soli, or the right of soil. But the British government scrapped this law by passing the British Nationality Act of 1981—not by asking the courts to rewrite the nation’s founding documents.

President Trump’s supporters have begun to rail against the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling, a significant blow to their mass deportation dreams.

The court ruled 6–3 on Tuesday to strike down Trump’s executive order and uphold the constitutional principle that guarantees virtually anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Republicans weren’t pleased about this safeguarding of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision is wrong, dangerous, and disastrous for American sovereignty and the American people,” wrote GOP Senator Eric Schmitt. “If we can’t fix it with ordinary legislation, then we must do what the Constitution commands in moments of national crisis: We must amend the Constitution and restore American citizenship. We must again put ‘We the People’ first.… This ruling is the final alarm bell.”

Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025’s lead architect Kevin Roberts was equally upset. “The Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship is a tremendous betrayal of the republic. The Justices in the majority have inflamed the all-out assault on our sovereignty and cheapened the sacred value of American citizenship,” he wrote. “Universal birthright citizenship erases any uniquely American birthright—a distortion that was never the meaning or intention of the 14th Amendment. It is time for a constitutional amendment to correct this gross injustice.”

“We are supposed to be a country, not an orphanage. You can’t jump our fence, give birth, cheat the system, and expect our taxpayers to raise your baby,” right-wing influencer and Charlie Kirk disciple Brilyn Hollyhand chimed. “We will be a country again one day. Illegals will be deported and birthright citizenship will end. If you’re a legal immigrant and won’t assimilate you will be denaturalized. If we want to last another 250 years we can’t be trampled on anymore.”

Strangely, the president himself has remained silent, even as he celebrated two other Supreme Court rulings upholding state bans on transgender athletes and loosening campaign finance laws.

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—both Trump appointees—sided with the liberal justices in their decision to project birthright citizenship. Kavanaugh did argue that the law could eventually be changed by Congress, not via executive order, leaving the door open for a future attack on one of the most basic tenets of the American experiment.

The Texas Senate race between Attorney General Ken Paxton and James Talarico looks to be in a tie, according to several voter polls published in the past month.

A Tuesday survey by the New York Times and Siena University has the two candidates both locked at 47 percent of likely voters. A win for Talarico, a Democratic state legislator, would represent the first statewide election win for the party in Texas since 1994. 

The New York Times/Siena poll was conducted among 656 likely voters from June 19 to June 27, with a sampling error of 4.5 percentage points.

Polling suggests that Talarico’s numbers are largely down to a majority of likely voters seeing the Democrat as having good character—he is a former public school teacher and is currently training to become a minister—as opposed to Paxton, who was indicted for securities fraud and impeached as state attorney general by the Republican-dominated Texas state House (although the Republican-majority state Senate acquitted all 16 articles of impeachment against him). Paxton is also a Trump loyalist, and may be associated with President Trump’s mishandling of the economy amid a widespread struggle with affordability.

My colleague Tim Murphy, who has covered the Senate race extensively, noted that many Senate Republicans favored incumbent John Cornyn but Trump endorsed Paxton late in the primary race. And on Talarico, Tim wrote in March that Talarico is “unsullied by doings in Washington” and his “faith-based populism impressed Joe Rogan and Barack Obama and showed strength in the places the [Democratic] party has been hemorrhaging support.” 

Given that Democrats need to flip four Republican seats while defending all of their seats to win a Senate majority this November, Paxton vs. Talarico is definitely a race to watch.

This November, California voters will weigh what could become America’s first-ever tax on net worth. The Billionaire Tax Act, a ballot initiative put forth by health workers after President Donald Trump blew holes in the state Medicaid budget, would impose a one-time tax of 5 percent on personal wealth exceeding $1 billion. With polls indicating majority support, tech oligarchs have threatened an exodus and crafted competing measures, bankrolling them to the tune of at least $118 million—of which $82 million came from Google’s Sergey Brin, according to the Associated Press.

On the other side is University of ­California, Berkeley, law professor Brian Galle, who helped write the initiative, along with several other, federal, efforts to tax the obscenely rich. These bills seldom go anywhere, even though ordinary Americans would very much like their government to do just that, as a 2024 report from the amusingly named ­Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute made clear.

The nonprofit examined 56 national and state polls on specific redistributive proposals and found majority support for most. People favored surtaxes on incomes over a million bucks, and for the rich to pay at least the rate on their investment gains as workers pay on their wages. They also wanted Congress to kill intergenerational dynasty trusts that grow, untaxed, in perpetuity, and they favored a dramatic reduction in the gift and estate tax exemption—now $30 million—which is the amount of money a superwealthy couple can pass along to their heirs without paying a dime.

Direct wealth taxes were the most popular: Roughly two-thirds of respondents, including 51 percent of Republicans, favored the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act first introduced in 2021 by Sen. ­Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and again this year by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). That bill places a 2 percent annual tax on net household assets exceeding $50 million and 3 percent on those over $1 billion. Similar bipartisan support went to proposals from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), and others that would tax unrealized gains on billionaires’ unsold assets, paper profits the IRS currently won’t touch.

Nobody has managed to pass a federal tax on wealth, or on the unrealized gains that represent the majority of income for the very rich.

That these bills have not come close to passing hasn’t stopped new proposals like the Oligarch Act, reintroduced in 2025 by Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), which puts a 2 percent tax on wealth exceeding 1,000 times the national household median, rising to 8 percent on assets over a million times the median. (Only five families qualify, its author assured me.) In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, a 5 percent annual tax on net household assets exceeding $1 billion.

The challenge with any federal wealth tax, as Galle explains to me over chocolate-infused green tea at an Oakland cafe, is not just overcoming well-heeled opposition, but passing constitutional muster. Even the income tax as we know it wasn’t allowed until the 1913 ratification of the 16th Amendment. Before then, it was—as any federal tax on wealth would almost certainly be deemed by the Supreme Court—a “direct tax,” which the Constitution says is subject to “apportionment.”

To impose a direct tax, in other words, lawmakers would first have to decide how much money they wanted to collect, and then direct each state to raise its share of the total according to its share of the nation’s population—not its billionaire population. It was unworkable even in the 1800s. As Galle put it: “A direct tax at the national level has to ride in on a unicorn.”

But no unicorn is needed at the state level, where the Constitution’s direct tax rule does not apply. In fact, every state already taxes wealth by way of property taxes, though even those favor the rich: Most of a middle-class homeowner’s assets tend to be tied up in their primary residence, whereas a very rich family’s home usually accounts for a small fraction.

DC and seven states have passed so-called millionaire taxes, the latest being Washington, which enacted a law that will charge zero tax on incomes up to $1 million, but 9.9 percent on each additional penny. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) introduced a federal version in March.

Alas, such taxes don’t touch unrealized investment income—an exemption that enables America’s richest to dodge income tax almost entirely via an infuriating tactic known as “buy, borrow, die.” Rather than sell stock for money to live on, ultrawealthy investors simply take out low-interest loans against their assets. When they die, thanks to a legal abomination called the “step-up in basis” rule, their princelings inherit the unsold assets at market value—thus avoiding the 23.8 percent capital gains tax their parents have now deferred to the grave. “We don’t tax wealth, we tax income,” explains Harvey Dale, a New York University tax law professor who advises billionaire clients. “For people who have a huge amount of property and are ultrawealthy, they can avoid having very much income.”

“The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left [California].”

Unrealized gains are, essentially, ­income—just ask the bankers who accept them as collateral. But Congress has never touched them. If it did, the Roberts court has signaled it wouldn’t play along. “We all thought that there’s no way the Supreme Court’s going to say that income only gets measured at sale,” says Galle, who had helped craft one of Cohen’s efforts to tax unrealized gains. But the court’s 2024 ruling in Moore v. United States made clear that it would do just that. The takeaway is that a federal tax on either wealth or paper gains will require another constitutional amendment, the likelihood of which, Dale says, “seems to be something slightly below zero.”

Which helps explain why voters and lawmakers are exploring local options like New York City’s pied-à-terre tax (which passed) and San Francisco’s “Overpaid CEO” ballot measure (which didn’t). Every such move begets a flurry of op-eds warning that the “golden geese” will fly off to another city, state, or even country, as some of Dale’s clients have. History suggests few actually will. As an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, California already has the nation’s highest marginal tax rate, but boasts the second-lowest rate of out-migration among households earning more than $200,000. Then again, we’re talking about billionaires.

Allen Prohofsky, who spent 15 years as the chief economist at California’s Franchise Tax Board, told me he suspects the fear of billionaire flight is overhyped when it comes to the tax initiative, but he isn’t certain. “If anybody tells you they’re sure they know what’s going to happen,” he says, they’re either lying or “delusional.” He adds: “The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left.”

Brin, up in arms over the proposed billionaire tax, now says he spends just enough time across the border in Nevada to qualify as a resident—the Franchise Tax Board has a special enforcement unit that may ask him to prove it, Prohofsky notes. David Sacks, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, too, have made moves toward the door. But for most wealthy people with families and important business and social connections in the state, Prohofsky explains, there’s “a host of variables” that keep them around. Dale agrees. Leaving one’s state or country is “a very complicated and ultimately personal decision, but it doesn’t blend down easily into something simple,” he says.

It’s too late, anyway, to flee this tax, which is set to apply to any billionaire who was a California resident on January 1, 2026. Proponents calculate that the state will gain about $100 billion. Foes at the conservative Hoover Institution claim departures will ultimately cost California $25 billion. (Galle helped write a thoughtful takedown of the Hoover analysis, but emailed me a more succinct response: “LOL.”) Op-eds opposing the tax have pointed out that ­California’s richest 1 percent account for nearly 40 percent of income tax revenues, which, if true, is meaningless: The billionaires targeted by this proposal are but a tiny sliver of that 1 percent. An analysis by Galle, UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, and two colleagues estimates California’s roughly 200 billionaires account for only about 1 percent of state tax revenue.

Brian Galle’s “fair tax” proposal doesn’t touch wealth, but it does have the potential to eliminate “buy, borrow, die.”

Galle’s latest idea: taxing unrealized gains constitutionally through a “fair share tax,” a strategy he helped mastermind and that is on track to be introduced as a House bill this summer. The tax would apply only to households with more than $15 million in lifetime investment gains, targeting—and yes, this sounds weird—their realized unrealized gains.

Normally, when a rich family holds stock or another asset for years, they pay a 23.8 percent tax on the profits when they eventually sell—or pass the assets to their kids at death and pay zero. Under Galle’s proposal, the tab would be substantially higher, calculated as though the unsold stock’s appreciation were taxed every year—with interest tied to the annual increase. This would wipe out the advantage of holding stocks forever. It also deals with the “step-up” rule, because the tax burden moves with the asset, not the person. An heir can sell inherited stock or not, but either way, someone eventually has to pay up—with interest.

Because the tax is imposed only after the income is realized, Galle is convinced his approach will satisfy the Supreme Court. To be fully effective, though, it would need to apply to assets held in complex trusts. After all, an “inevitable part of the tax planning game,” Dale says, is that every new rule prompts an army of $3,000-an-hour lawyers to scurry for loopholes.

The Fair Tax isn’t an actual wealth tax, but something like Galle’s approach has the potential to kill “buy, borrow, die,” and to begin to tame a democracy-distorting gap between rich and poor in a nation where billionaires now flex their political power openly and shamelessly. Passing it would be quite the feat—if only our elected officials can somehow, miraculously, summon the fortitude.

The Supreme Court may have upended the White House’s attempt to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, but at least one justice pointed Republican lawmakers in a different direction to unravel the birthright citizenship clause.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Donald Trump to the bench in 2018, wrote a dissenting opinion in Trump v. Barbara, despite ruling alongside the majority.

His rationale: Trump’s plan to strip American-born second-generation immigrants of their citizenship could work if it were enacted through Congress.

“In my view, the Executive Order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Order does contravene a federal statute,” Kavanaugh wrote, referring to the law specifying birthright parameters. “Congress could—consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment—amend [this law] or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”

Kavanaugh argued that while Trump’s executive order violated federal law, it did not actually run afoul of the Constitution, even though the federal law echoed the same language employed in the Constitution.

The justice noted that Congress had considered numerous amendments to the law over the last 30 years but never actually enacted any of them.

Trump has tried and failed multiple times over the last year and a half to strip the constitutionally enshrined right. Mere hours after he was sworn into office, Trump signed an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally are not entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by several judges in different court circuits over the last year.

Everyone needs to hear the sound House Speaker Mike Johnson made when he heard the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or temporarily in the county are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

Johnson was in the midst of reciting his reasons for opposing birthright citizenship, when the ruling was read to him by a member of the press. The Louisiana Republican looked crestfallen.

“What’s your reaction to that?” one reporter asked, as other members of the press struggled to suppress their laughter.

“MmmmMmmm,” Johnson moaned, like he had a bad taste in his mouth.

an unhappy Mike Johnson growls when informed in real time by a reporter that the Supreme Court ruled to uphold birthright citizenship pic.twitter.com/VYMw0krto6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 30, 2026

“Well, uh, I need to read the opinion, OK? But uh, obviously that’s, I mean you could say that’s a textualist and originalist view,” Johnson stammered. “But, however, I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years, and that is the case that’s being made by the plaintiffs of the case, and we’re very sympathetic to that because it’s a serious problem.”

The House speaker then suggested that the conclusion from this ruling would be to push for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but he noted the significant obstacles to ratifying such a measure.

“I will say I’m very disappointed in that outcome,” Johnson added.

Let’s get this out of the way: There is no world where you can square the Supreme Court’s inherently contradictory Monday decisions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. On the one hand, President Donald Trump now has the power to fire the principal officers—think commissioners and chairs—of independent agencies, without even the remotest cause, further gutting the administrative state and…

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President Trump wants a master list of every foreign intelligence target, including potential recruits and people that U.S. agencies suspect are spies.

The New York Times reports that the White House, through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has asked federal intelligence agencies to turn over these names, alarming officials who fear that it would compromise operations or be misused. So far, senior counterintelligence staff at the CIA and FBI have resisted the demands, according to the Times.

Intel officials also can’t agree on how to create, maintain, and secure the list. Trump’s new acting director, Bill Pulte, has no intelligence experience, causing FBI and CIA staff to worry about how he’d handle such a document. And the relationship between the ODNI, FBI, and CIA has gotten worse thanks to former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who pushed Trump’s false claims of election fraud and cut the office’s staff.

Even creating such a list could jeopardize operation security, as it would put sensitive information that is normally compartmentalized into one place. It could also compromise long-term investigations and operations. Some of the targets on these lists are carefully protected even within federal agencies, with many staff not having access to their identities.

An official from Pulte’s office told the Times that it was only trying to follow National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the administration’s national security strategy targeting supposed anti-American activity on the left. That official said compiling a list of intelligence assets and targets would help with collaboration and information sharing.

As a Trump loyalist, Pulte is likely to closely follow the president’s orders. Under Gabbard, Trump used the ODNI, which is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence, to investigate nonexistent fraud from the 2020 presidential election and other elections where Trump didn’t like the results. What does he want with a full list of intelligence targets? Does he think there could be some foreign connection to elections, or does he have some misguided or odious foreign policy plans?

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld West Virginia and Idaho state laws banning transgender athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender, further restricting trans rights in the U.S.

This is the court’s first ruling on laws regarding trans athletes, and follows last year’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti allowing states to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The ruling contributes to an increasingly bleak legal landscape for trans people in the U.S. Both petitioners argued that the state bans are discriminatory, and violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. One argued that the restrictions are also a violation of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in schools on the basis of sex.

All three liberal justices dissented in the decision, noting that they would have sent the case back for further factual findings on the equal protection claim.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a partial dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

“States do have some room to legislate around issues when there exists significant, and genuine, scientific debate,” Sotomayor wrote. “At this point, however, neither the District Court nor the Fourth Circuit has passed upon any of the available evidence or made the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate.”

“The majority’s opinion ends by reciting the many wonderful ways in which playing sports can be valuable to young people. It can help build resilience, tenacity, leadership, and discipline. It can lead to life-long friendships, community, and a sense of belonging. It can bring joy and the thrill of victory, along with all the lessons one learns from experiencing defeat. The benefits are immense,” Sotomayor continued. “Because of the Court’s decision today, West Virginia, and any other state actor, can deny B. P. J. and others like her these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”

“A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cisgender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth,” Justice Jackson wrote in an additional dissent. “Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX.”

The majority decision will have national repercussions on transgender athletes competing in youth and college sports, even as the number of participating trans athletes participating is very slim.

Rachel Kahn contributed reporting to this story.

The Supreme Court has tossed out another of President Donald Trump’s efforts to kill birthright citizenship.

In a decision filed Tuesday, the court ruled in favor of the 1868 constitutional clause, which entitles any person born on U.S. soil to an American passport, further safeguarding the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Trump administration.

Trump has tried and failed multiple times over the course of his second term to strip away the constitutionally enshrined right. Mere hours after he was sworn into office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally are not entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by several judges in different court circuits over the last year.

In December, the nation’s highest judiciary agreed to hear another one of the administration’s birthright challenges, this time pertaining to a case out of New Hampshire. The executive branch argued in the case that language included in the Fourteenth Amendment—specifically, “subject to the jurisdiction of”—required applicable children not only to be present in the country at the time of the birth, but also to confer their allegiance to the United States.

The argument appeared thin at best, considering the administration did not clarify how it expected people who had just been born to declare their allegiance.

In legal arguments filed at the time, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the naturalized citizenship pathway had become “pervasive” with “destructive consequences.”

In May 2025, justices on both ideological sides of the court flamed the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite birthright citizenship, questioning why the government’s attorneys would even bring the case to the judiciary’s doorstep when “every court has ruled against” the administration on birthright citizenship.

At the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Sauer into a corner, forcing the solicitor general to admit that the Trump administration didn’t even know how it would enforce its birthright citizenship order. Sauer managed to appall another Trump appointee—Justice Amy Coney Barrett—by arguing that Trump has the “right” to disregard legal opinions that he doesn’t personally agree with.

This is a developing story.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Welcome, everybody. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m your host, Perry Bacon. I’ve done a lot of episodes on this show about the media, but most of them have often been very critical—bemoaning layoffs, the decline of local news to some extent, news organizations trying to placate Trump in ways that worry me. The mergers have been troublesome.

But I’m excited today, because we have a positive story about the news and a positive story about journalism. So I have Steve Sachs. He’s the managing director of The Guardian US. You probably have heard of The Guardian—it’s a well-known British paper, but they actually have a very strong US-focused edition and website that has great news about what’s happening in Washington, what’s happening in the country. So I want to talk about what The Guardian is doing here and what maybe other places can learn from it. Steve, welcome.

Steve Sachs: Thank you, Perry. Great to be here.

Bacon: So let me start from the beginning here, to tell people about the history. The Guardian started having a US operation a couple of decades ago. So talk about how that started and what the goal was initially.

Sachs: Yeah. At The Guardian, we’ve always had an editorial team here. But we started about a little more than 15 years ago saying, “Let’s expand into having an audience here and a business here.” And that was part of a strategy at The Guardian, really especially over the last 10 years, where we expanded in two key ways.

One was expanding outside the UK, and the second is expanding committing to being no-paywall, and then asking our audience to support us. Those were important strategic decisions, and expanding in the US was part of that overall strategy.

Bacon: And so let’s talk about pre-Trump—pre-Trump one, even. So as The Guardian opens in the US, you have staffers in New York and in DC and a little bit elsewhere. How big was the initial operation?

Sachs: We started with a team here. New York, DC, and California were our three main places originally. We were first in northern California. We then moved the bureau to southern California, to LA.

And honestly, Perry, in the first few years—first, say, five or six years—it was tough going. We lost a lot of money. We tried to figure out what our unique value is here, and it took us a while to figure out. And it wasn’t a straight line up. The news here—there’s lots of great players. It’s a crowded market.

And so for The Guardian to come in and figure out what is our value overall—what’s our, in business speak, what’s our unique value proposition—it took us a little while to figure out. And our business model took us a little while to figure out as well.

So we started there, but then really over the past, say, six or seven years, we really started to focus and understand what our opportunity is here. And as a result of that, we have grown significantly. We are now, typically in any given month, between 40 and 50 million uniques on our website and in our app, in total. That makes us bigger than the Wall Street Journal in the US.

And over the past five months, for the first time, we now have more page views and more unique visitors in the US than the Washington Post does. We have grown significantly as a result of the work that we’ve done. I could talk a little bit more about what exactly we did, but—

Bacon: We’ll come back to that.

Sachs: The headline is that we’re doing well, and more and more Americans are coming to us as their first choice for all kinds of news and journalism.

Bacon: Let me jump back. The initial goal—why did The Guardian decide to have more staff in the US? What was the initial impetus to start a US edition, or really focus on the US in the first place? Was it part of a worldwide expansion, or was there a specific need you all felt back in 2007?

Sachs: Yeah. So what happened was, 10 years ago—a little bit more than 10 years ago—we were losing a lot of money at The Guardian globally.

And people forget, with the great success of The New York Times—and I have so much respect for what they’ve done—people forget also that 15 years ago, The New York Times was really financially not on strong footing overall. They had to take a loan from a Mexican billionaire, a high-interest loan, in order to really help them shore up their financials.

The Guardian was similar. We were losing about £100 million a year. So that’s about, in today’s dollars, about $135 million. And we only had £700 million in an endowment. So that means we basically had seven years to live.

So what did we do? We decided that—at the time, we were the seventh-largest newspaper in the UK. And we decided that in order to change our economics and to also focus on a broader mission, we would target becoming one of the largest news organizations globally. And the US expansion was an important part of that.

The headline on that is that we are now, in 2026, the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

Bacon: CNN, New York Times, Guardian.

Sachs: So we have achieved our goal. New York Times, CNN, BBC, Guardian. So we’ve grown from the seventh-largest news organization in the UK to the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

We’ve also changed our economics. So 10 years ago, only 8 percent of our revenue was from outside the UK. Now it’s over 40 percent—it’s 41 percent of our revenue from outside the UK. And so just in 10 years, we successfully changed that. We are also now operating very well financially. And so that big loss that we had, we’ve changed as well.

Bacon: So I’m a journalist—I want to talk about journalism and the stories themselves for a little bit right now. What I found was, in 2017, during that first Trump period, the reason I started reading The Guardian more was, one, I liked the perspective that was international. It wasn’t so grounded in the US, and it helped me see the world a little bit broader, the way you all covered it.

And two, I felt like there was a little more directness about what Trump was doing. Sometimes I worried that NPR, The Times, The Post would do what I think of as a sort of both sides, and not honestly say what he was actually doing and the alarming radicalism. But how do you see that? What was the—how did the Trump era affect what you all did when he was first in office?

Sachs: It’s really interesting to hear what you found valuable for us back in 2017. I would summarize what you said as: we have more of a global perspective.

Whereas many news organizations in the US have more of an American filter. And also what you said was, we can report as is—so that’s really more of an independent view. And that’s exactly right.

A few years ago—when Betsy Reed, our editor, and I started, we both started three and a half years ago, within about a month of each other—one of the first things we did is we wanted to understand what our value proposition is in the US. And there was a lot of debate at the time about what it might be.

So we commissioned research. We did very sophisticated quantitative research with over 3,000 people in the US. They all took a 45-minute in-depth survey. And we did it—those 3,000 people represent that there are about 200 million people in the US who come to digital news every month.

And we wanted to understand what was The Guardian’s value proposition to those 200 million people, and clarify it for us and for the team overall. And the answer is—you got two of the three right. You figured it out in 2017. We didn’t figure it out until 2024.

The answer is that people come to us for the combination of global perspective, independent, and the other important one is no paywall.

Global, independent, and free is what’s unique about us. No one else in the US is doing that. So we are focused on that overall, and that helps us—whether it is what’s happening in DC, or what’s happening in climate, or what’s happening in soccer. Soccer—the World Cup, which is going on right now, or as my colleagues in the UK would call it, football.

There are all kinds of stories that you want to be able to report for an audience that’s looking for a broader global perspective, and independent—not held to, not having the conflicts of a corporate structure that has many different goals, or a billionaire owner that may have personal interests. And we make it all available on our site without any cost.

We then ask people to support us, which we’re very successful in doing. But that’s what we did back then, and even more, that’s what we do now: global perspective that’s independent, without cost, that’s free.

Bacon: Let me probe with all three of those ideas. Let me start with the paywall. The news industry—it was probably a mistake to give everything away for free at the beginning of the internet.

But that said, now when I do my stories and try to look for links and look for facts, I can’t read anything, because everything is behind a paywall now. I really love journalism. I can’t subscribe to every newspaper in every state, and the paywalls are very intense right now. My worry is a lot of the best-quality news—Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg—is all behind a paywall.

So tell me—I understand the virtue in having a paywall, but how does that work economically for you all? How do you make money? Just the core question. Everyone wants to have more access, but how do we make that work financially?

Sachs: Yeah. You’re exactly right that, especially even more so over the past couple of years—

When CNN has started a paywall. The BBC has started a paywall in the US. Others have tightened their paywall and made it—you get less for free before you hit the paywall.

Part of it is our mission. So let me tell you a little bit about it, and then I’ll circle back to the exact part of what you were talking about—how we make the economics work. But part of it is our mission, and it’s a mission that comes from the way we are owned and operated.

So The Guardian is owned by a trust in the UK, and the trust has only one mandate, which is to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity. Effectively—

Bacon: And the trust is not run by one person or one family?

Sachs: No, it’s not.

Bacon: OK, that’s important to say.

Sachs: It’s not. It is effectively a nonprofit. We are effectively a nonprofit organization. If we were headquartered in the US, we would reincorporate as a 501(c)(3). There’s no such thing as a 501(c)(3), of course, in the UK, but that’s effectively what we are. They operate us for mission. They operate us for longevity. We have a very large endowment, like a nonprofit news organization or a nonprofit here would have. It’s actually—we have a billion and we have almost a two-billion-pound—sorry, two-billion-dollar—one-and-a-half-billion-pound, two-billion-dollar, approximately, endowment.

And what it does is, that allows us to do the things that we’ve talked about. It allows us to operate independently, because we are—the board, just like ProPublica here has a board. We are like ProPublica, where we have a board that then operates us, governs us in a way that we are reporting and building and being sustainable for the long term. And it does not get involved in journalistic decisions overall.

So the fact that we don’t have a paywall is part of our overall mission to make high-quality journalism, like the other news organizations that you named. The Guardian also has over 1,000 journalists globally now. So we have actually grown. We’re one of the only news organizations that has grown our newsroom over the past few years. In fact, in the US, when I started, we had about 75 journalists. In the US right now, we have 150.

So we’ve doubled in the last three years. So we’re one of the few news organizations in the US that’s actually growing our newsroom too. And the reason why we can do it is, we don’t have to report earnings quarterly. We don’t even report them—we report them voluntarily, publicly.

We can draw down a small amount off of our endowment like a nonprofit would here. But we use that to invest for the future. So all the investment that we’ve done in the US is as a result of being able to draw down a couple of percent off of our endowment every year. And that endowment is still growing, because we’re so conservatively drawing down on it.

So the big picture on it is that The Guardian is different and has an advantage in serving an audience because of the way we’re set up, and because of the way we’re now funded and we’re in a strong financial position.

So then what does that translate into? If we’re going to make all our information available for free on our website, how do we actually make money then? And the answer is that 10 years ago, we started what we call a reader revenue program. It actually—we should really rename it now, because we’re much more than reading. It’s really an audience revenue or supporter revenue program. And when people come, we ask them to support us, in much the same way that, say, NPR asks people to support. We’ve become very good at it.

And in the US, about two-thirds of our revenue—so last year we broke $80 million of revenue in the US. About two-thirds of that comes from voluntary contributions that people don’t have to make, but they do. So that’s $58 million last year. Over 700,000 people in the US and Canada combined made a contribution. About 500,000 of those are actually on a recurring basis, either every month or every year, automatically on a credit card.

And two-thirds of our revenue in the US—$58 million last year and growing, that was up 35 percent, actually, the real revenue was up 35 percent last year versus the year before, so we’re growing—is as a result of people coming to our site or our app and really appreciating what’s there and saying, You know what? This is a different perspective, and I really appreciate it, and it’s made available for free, and I’m going to support it.

Bacon: Make sure I’m understanding this right. So half a million people are contributing to The Guardian in the US, even though they could get it for free. That’s an important statistic.

Sachs: It’s even more than that. It’s 700,000. And the way we look at it is US and Canada—we call it North America, so US and Canada, correctly. But the vast majority is US. Over 700,000 people did that. Of that, 500,000 are on a recurring basis—effectively a subscription.

The other 200,000 made a one-time contribution. And so we’ve got 700,000 people in the US and Canada, North America, that are contributing even though they don’t have to, because they really appreciate what it is that we do and find it really valuable.

Bacon: And I would say, as a person in that group, part of what I find valuable is other people can read the stories. I can send the story to someone, and they can read it without me having to do a bunch of gymnastics and passwords.

Sachs: That’s right. That’s a very important thing. And so there’s that benefit. We do a lot of research to understand, why is it? Why do people support us? And really interestingly, more than half the people that support us aren’t coming regularly. We track how often somebody comes to our site or our app.

Do they come every day? Do they come a couple times a week? Do they come once every 30 days? Have we not seen them in the past 30 days? What’s really interesting is, of the 700,000 people in the US that made a contribution in the last year, over half of them come less than once a month. So you would say, Why are they making a contribution then? They’re not actually coming.

And the answer is—we do a lot of research on this—the answer is that, as there are fewer and fewer news organizations that can report independently, that have the kind of global perspective we have and make the information available for free, they appreciate that and want to support that, even if they’re not coming.

Because it’s not just that they can share with others, it’s also they feel it’s important to have independent journalism in the US that is well-funded, and they’re willing to kick in 50 bucks, or 15 dollars a month, or whatever it is they can afford, in order to have The Guardian exist and be strong and growing.

So it’s really counterintuitive that somebody would give us 15 dollars a month when they don’t come to our site or they don’t come to our app, but they do.

Bacon: That’s amazing. I didn’t realize that.

Sachs: They do that because of the value that we have overall and the importance of that that people feel, for America and the world.

Bacon: Let me drill in on independent. So that’s a tricky word, in that everybody who works at The Guardian says, “We’re independent.” And I perceive you all as being more liberal—not in a high-taxes way, but in a sort of for-freedom, for-equality way. There are some values. So how do you see your values?

My guess is a lot of those 700,000 people, most of them voted for Harris—I don’t know if you want to say that or not. But when you say independent, you mean not owned by a billionaire. So what are the values of The Guardian? Let me put it that way, in terms of journalism. What are the values of The Guardian?

Sachs: Yeah. Independent is a really important one. And what we mean by independent is, in our news report, we are reporting the facts.

And there’s not—as you mentioned—there’s not a both-sides to it that comes into our report. Our opinion—we do opinion, of course. Our opinion is left of center, for sure. We’ve got great opinion writers—Robert Reich and Margaret Sullivan and others, Betty Hassan, who contribute. And our opinion’s left of center, but our news report is independent and is reporting facts without a bias to it.

Bacon: And you want Republicans reading—you want everybody to read it.

Sachs: Not only do we want—we look, sometimes we look at Democrat versus Republican, but what we find more helpful is asking people how they define themselves on a liberal-versus-conservative scale.

And so when we look at our audience and ask them to define themselves as either very liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative—when we look at that, only about 40 percent of people define themselves as either liberal or very liberal.

Another 35 percent define themselves as moderate. And 25 percent define themselves as conservative or very conservative.

Bacon: I would not have guessed it. That’s interesting. I’m glad you told me that. That’s good to know.

Sachs: So that, by the way, is different in the US than it is in other parts of the world. Because people didn’t grow up with The Guardian here. In the UK, people grew up with it and have a very clear view of what it is. Here, people are still discovering it. And so they come and they see our news report, and they see us being global, independent, and free.

And so they don’t read into it, Yeah, this is X. This is either very conservative, very liberal, whatever it is. And so we get a broader audience because of that. And that is something that we’re really thrilled about, because there’s so much polarization in the US when it comes to media, and so we would like to be able to reach a broader audience overall. It’s just part of our mission.

Bacon: Are the readers you’re getting people who also read the Times and NPR or CNN? Are they people who don’t? Are you a lot of people’s second read, or their first—maybe they also have a second read? I’m not trying to diminish you. But is it people who read a lot of media, or people who just read one thing? That’s what I’m asking.

Sachs: It’s a great question. The same research I was just referring to, where we figured out our value proposition, and we also asked about how people self-define, liberal versus conservative—we asked about this question because we always had this question of second read versus first read. And it turns out that it’s really interesting.

The whole idea of a first read and second read is actually an outdated idea. It’s from an idea of when a newspaper was thrown up on your driveway, and then you would go out and get it, or dropped off if you’re in an apartment in New York, dropped off at your front door or the front desk.

People now read—or watch or listen—really broadly, because they come to your podcast, and they come to The Guardian, and they go to The New York Times, and they might go to Axios, et cetera. And so when you look at what The Guardian is, we are part of the mix, in the same way that others are as well.

Most people—even when you look at something like CNN or The New York Times—most people would say, Oh, that could be a first, the first thing they turn to. It turns out that, based off of our research, less than 20 percent of the people that, say, go to the New York Times consider it their primary read or view of the world.

Because you’re discovering in your social feed, or you’re getting a newsletter or whatever, so you’re pretty broad here, and we’re now part of that mix as well—which is part of the advantage that we’ve had here, and why it is that we’ve been able to grow our audience while others are not growing their audience. A lot of news organizations have really had their audiences shrink in the last five years. And so it actually is an advantage that people are sampling so much, because they might discover us on Apple News.

And they may not have known about us before that. And then they discover us through that.

Bacon: Global is the third word you use. I think you might be using the word “global” meaning you all are based in Britain, you cover the world a lot. The other reason I think of you all as global being different is that—and I’m not trying to throw shade—when I read a story in the Journal, The New York Times, Axios about politics, it often reflects a DC-centric view of how politics works. And I read you all’s stories, and it’s, Oh, the broader picture. Sometimes the stories are like, sources close to say this.

And you all’s stories tend to be more, Here’s where this issue works, here’s how this thing is working. It’s written so my mom, my brother, and everybody else I know can read the story without having to need a translator. And I think that’s helpful—the domestic stories are written for everybody as opposed to written for the inside-DC crowd. That’s what I perceive. And I think that comes from also not being based in the US.

Sachs: It’s a really—you’re exactly right about that. So when I talk about global, what our audience says, and what we have adopted as part of our value proposition, is global perspective.

Bacon: Global perspective. OK.

Sachs: So what does global perspective mean? It means two things. Number one, it means that we do cover the world, because we now have over 1,000 journalists globally, of which a couple hundred—by the end of this year, a couple hundred—will be in the US. It means more than 800 in other parts of the world. That means that we just have really great coverage of what’s happening all over the world in ways that other news organizations don’t.

And so that is part of what people come to us for. About half of the stories that Americans read or listen to at The Guardian, about half in any given day or month, are created outside the US.

But the part that you’re focused on is exactly right, which is the other side of global perspective—and that is, when we’re covering the US, we cover it with what people call an outside perspective. And that is valuable, because what it means is two things. Number one, when we cover a story that others do also, we cover it with a different view. And number two, we frequently cover stories that others don’t.

So let me give you an example on the first one. Last month we published a series called The Slow Lane, which looks at how Americans’ love of cars caused our public transportation system to fall way behind other global cities or other countries. So if you look at Sydney or Barcelona or Hong Kong—we cover public transportation here with an outside view, more of a global view, while covering what’s happening in the US. That’s an example of something that’s different as well.

When we cover gun violence, or our broken healthcare system, or the death penalty, we cover them not as impossible-to-solve problems—because they’re not—but rather as issues that could be addressed if Americans look beyond their borders at how other countries have tackled them better. And I think that’s part of what you’re talking about, the unique value that you get from The Guardian, and that’s what our audience does too.

Bacon: So last question, just because of who I am and where I’ve come from. I worked at The Washington Post until about a year ago. Jeff Bezos wanted the opinion section to move to the right, and so it ended up making more sense to work at The New Republic now, and I’ve had a great opportunity here.

But I wanted to ask you—did the Washington Post and the LA Times decisions to cancel endorsements and signal a different kind of direction, and maybe even CBS—have some of those changes at other places... I know you all have had a big audience growth. Is some of that driven from those other places maybe making mistakes, or is that more organic? Talk about how the other media’s moves have affected what you all are doing.

Sachs: Yeah. I don’t want to comment on specific companies or people, but I can say that more and more people are discovering The Guardian as they’re looking for other alternatives.

And The Post does some great journalism.

Bacon: I agree. Oh, yes.

Sachs: They do some fantastic journalism. They have a much smaller team than they used to.

But I have a lot of respect for the journalism they do. And others as well. The news audience is very tuned in.

And as decisions are made, they say, I really want to look at other options. And over the past few years, more people have looked around, and we’ve benefited as a result. We’ve seen our audience grow. So for example, as I said, the Washington Post—a year ago we were smaller than The Washington Post in audience, in uniques and in page views on the site. Now we’re bigger.

And that’s because we’ve grown. They’ve shrunk as well. And they do great journalism, but people are making choices.

One thing that’s interesting about The Guardian also, and this points to opportunity in the US, is that we think there’s a lot more opportunity to grow here. So we’re at 40 to 50 million uniques a month now. But also, in our research, only about 59 percent of people in the US who use digital news have ever heard of The Guardian. That number in the UK is 85 percent.

Bacon: And I’m sure The Washington Post number’s up in the 80s or something like this—much higher.

Sachs: Exactly.

Bacon: Yeah, you would assume.

Sachs: And so there’s another 20-plus points of people in the US that still have never heard of us. That will help us as they continue to look around, as we continue to grow what we do. We’ve recently launched new kinds of coverage. We’ve invested heavily in soccer and covering soccer in the US for the World Cup, and so we’ve had huge audiences for that over the past few weeks.

We’ve increased our DC team. We used to do mostly breaking news. We now do enterprise and investigations out of DC also. As we have more for people to discover, and as people look around, I think The Guardian will continue to do well in the US. And others do great work also. I think the audience is frequently now kind of saying, Let me see what else is out there.

Bacon: Last question. I worry about this Trump bump, because you saw from 2017 to 2020, news organizations had a big audience, then it declined. How are you going to make sure you sustain this audience and this growth? Because Trump’s not going to be president anymore after two years or so, obviously. So how do you make sure you keep this audience and keep the growth and keep the momentum going after that?

Sachs: Yeah. There’s no doubt that we’ve had some wind in our sails over the past 18 months. People are coming to us for much more than Trump. So people are coming to us for—we’re among the best in the world in covering climate, one of the most important, maybe the defining issue of our time. People come for health-related, health-equity-related issues.

But what we’re doing is, we are investing heavily outside of hard news, so that when people come, and when the news cycle is less intense than what it is, people know and come to us for other areas. So for example, I mentioned soccer. We now have one of the largest teams in the US covering soccer, plus all the people we have in the UK covering soccer. And soccer has become much more popular in the US, and so even after the World Cup’s over, people are going to be wanting to come to that. They’ll come to The Guardian for that.

We started a heavily researched reviews site called The Filter—our version of consumer journalism, doing reviews like, say, Wirecutter does, or Strategist, or others. We started that a year ago. That’s doing really well. We launched wellness coverage a couple of years ago, with what we call, which is a realistic view on wellness. So much of wellness is really about perfection. That’s not about us at all.

So we’re investing heavily outside of hard news, so that both when people come, there’s more to go to, and also when the news cycle is less frenetic, people will continue to come to us for other reasons.

Bacon: And with that, Steve Sachs—I love the idea of global, independent, and free. Those are three great words to use. Steve Sachs is the managing director for The Guardian US. I highly recommend The Guardian US as a product. If you’re reading the Times and the Post, CNN—you should definitely add The Guardian to your reading list if you haven’t already. Obviously, read The New Republic too, but The Guardian is doing some really great work. So Steve, congrats on that, and thank you for joining me.

Sachs: Perry, thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.

Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.

Peace negotiations between the U.S. and Iran are once again inching along, days after the two countries exchanged strikes. But even top Trump officials aren’t confident in the burgeoning truce.

State Secretary Marco Rubio reportedly told lawmakers during a briefing Monday that the new peace deal wasn’t of the same caliber as the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove recounted Rubio’s admission while speaking with MeidasTouch’s Pablo Manríquez outside of the Capitol, claiming that Rubio had said the Obama administration’s set-up was a “real agreement with criteria and benchmarks and thresholds.”

“This [memorandum of understanding] is just a signed piece of paper saying we’re going to continue to talk about talking,” Kamlager-Dove said. “So you should ask yourself, a hundred-and-something billion dollars later, ‘What are these people doing with our money and our national security?’”

Kamlager-Dove on Rubio Iran Briefing: I have to say, the highlight—or lowlight—for me was when Secretary Rubio was asked about the difference between this MOU and the JCPOA. And Marco Rubio essentially said the JCPOA, Obama’s nuclear deal, was a real agreement with criteria,… pic.twitter.com/lwrulT9Hma

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026

The unpopular war has so far cost American taxpayers more than $1 billion per day (the current total is estimated at more than $113.3 billion). It has also sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. as the American public becomes more and more disillusioned with its increasingly infirm, unstable, and volatile president.

The country’s strained economy has also become a political talking point ahead of a contentious midterm season. The projected military expenses don’t encompass the heightened day-to-day costs for the average American. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told CBS News Monday that it’s likely every American household has spent roughly $1,000 more in heightened fuel and food costs since the war began in late February.

But those additional expenses have apparently not affected the White House.

Donald Trump has been remarkably cavalier about the peace negotiations. As the U.S. and Iran prepared Monday to send delegations to Qatar, the president said that the meeting in Doha would be “perhaps important, perhaps not.”

“We’re going to find out, but we’re winning militarily. It’s almost won militarily, I would say,” Trump said.

The envoys include special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Vice President JD Vance is leading the operation, though he is not expected to attend the upcoming talks.

Last August, we laughed at the travails of a group of Americans who decided MAGA America had become too liberal, packed up their families, and moved to the conservative paradise of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Predictably, things did not go according to plan. Let’s check in on our favorite anti-woke émigrés and see how they’re doing. When we last checked in on the Hare family…

Source

President Trump is once again building something at the White House without any warning.

Trump is building a new helipad on the White House’s South Lawn, The Washington Post reports, with construction crews already working on the project Monday. The helipad is being built on the lawn’s south portico, near where the presidential helicopter, Marine One, is traditionally kept. A large fence is now blocking off the construction.

The project has not been announced, but is meant to solve the problem of new Sikorsky helicopters built by Lockheed Martin possibly burning the White House lawn due to their exhaust vents. The defense company is reportedly donating $5 million to help pay for the helipad.

Other administrations have refrained from building a permanent helipad on the White House grounds due to concerns of historical preservation, as well as ruining the classical image of presidents boarding Marine One on the grass near the White House.

In his second term, Trump has shown that he has no regard for history or tradition where the White House is concerned, unceremoniously demolishing its East Wing to build a massive ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden and replacing it with a stone patio, and holding a UFC fight on the South Lawn.

Trump can at least argue that this project is operationally necessary. But he’s already done so much damage to the White House in order to push his own gaudy design aesthetic, and because he’s kept his helipad plans under the radar, nobody knows what it’s going to look like.

Trump has repeatedly shown in his second term that if he wants something built a certain way, he won’t listen to any criticism or preserve any history, no matter how tacky his designs. Just look at the hideous mockups of his “triumphal arch.”

“It’s not clear why we need these new cities.”

That’s what I told reporter Sean Morrow in More Perfect Union’s new video on the Network State cult and its bid to replace democratic government with rule by tech billionaires. The piece has already passed 175,000 views in under a day.

We get into Silicon Valley’s strange obsession with building new cities controlled by tech moguls—from Gaza, Greenland and Guantanamo to Próspera and California Forever.

“Wherever you look these days with Trump or with these tech guys, there’s always the idea of a new city that they’re proposing,” I told Morrow. “And it’s not clear why we need these new cities.”

Watch the full video below. Morrow does a great job of explaining the playbook. The more people see what this is and how it works, the harder it is to pull off. Please watch and share!

Nerd Reich Podcast Hits Major Milestone

The Nerd Reich podcast now has 25,000 subscribers on YouTube. It’s a pretty big milestone for us—especially since I did not really want to start a podcast, much less a video one.

Much praise is due to my producer, R.R. Robbins, whose hard work and expertise make all the difference. Someday we might tell you the true story of how we met and became friends. But only if you’re a paid subscriber.

That’s right. Our 779 paid subscribers make all of this possible. We’re only here because of them, and we’re just getting started. (Thank you!)

Make a billionaire squirm. Become a paid subscriber today. Click here to join.

The Nerd Reich Audiobook is Coming!

By popular demand, I’m locked in a dark studio this week to record the audiobook for The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy. I’m staying hydrated and drinking lots of Throat Coat tea, but I’m already tired of the sound of my own voice.

Pre-orders make a huge difference! So, if you plan to buy the audiobook, please do it this week in honor of my exhausted and struggling vocal cords. Click here for a range of purchase options.

On Monday night, the House passed a weaker version of the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, aimed at regulating the tech industry and protecting children online. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on whom you ask.

House leaders have taken four years to reach a compromise on their own version of KOSA, which the Senate passed in 2022. The House version, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety, or KIDS, Act, passed by 267–117 on Monday night.

Representative Frank Pallone Jr., the Democratic co-sponsor of the KIDS Act, lauded it as an example of bipartisan cooperation last week. “This agreement proves Congress can come together to deliver real online protections for our nation’s young people,” he said in a statement.

But Senate Democrats have suggested that they won’t advance the House version. “We’re not going to go with some weak standard,” said Senator Maria Cantwell on Friday. “We are going to go with a law that can be enforced and accountability, and we’re not going with a study, we’re going on with something that holds them accountable.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a co-sponsor of KOSA, even suggested that passing the weaker House version could give tech lobbyists ammunition to “exploit the kind of misunderstandings that can occur” between the two chambers and kill provisions they don’t like. “We need to stop this bill in the House and we need to prevent the White House from forming an alliance with Big Tech,” Blumenthal said.

Cantwell, Blumenthal, and their allies say the KIDS Act doesn’t include the strongest parts of KOSA, like the “duty of care” provision, which makes tech companies legally responsible for the well-being of children on their platforms, or the stipulation that KOSA doesn’t preempt states, allowing them to pass stricter measures in the future. The KIDS Act, on the other hand, includes federal preemption language that opponents say could harm states’ ability to enforce tech regulations themselves. In late May, 44 state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress opposing the KIDS Act on the grounds that it would preempt their legislative and legal efforts.

“This bill has no real duty of care. In other words, it has no standard to hold accountable the Big Tech companies that can drive addictive, toxic content through their algorithms and other technologies at children,” Blumenthal said in a press conference on Friday.

On Friday, nearly 100 digital- and kids-safety groups sent a letter to House leadership and the sponsors of the KIDS Act urging them to reject the bill on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough to protect children from Big Tech. In addition to the “duty of care” issue, the authors noted that the KIDS Act drops the requirement that tech platforms offer a chronological feed rather than an algorithmic, engagement-maximizing one. The authors are also concerned that the KIDS Act defines social media platforms too narrowly, leaving out apps and websites like Roblox, which has exposed some children to sexual and financial exploitation.

But others think both acts are a bad idea—that the provisions in KOSA and KIDS, instead of protecting kids, could harm their ability to engage in free speech and access resources for mental health, addiction, and other social issues. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and GLAAD say that measures meant to protect kids could push tech platforms to set age limits and push younger children off of their websites, harming LGBTQ+ kids or others who are looking for community and resources online.

“Maybe by different routes, [the bills] accomplish the same objective,” said Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’ve pushed online services to have legal obligations to police their content and exclude kids from vital places and space.”

Tech companies have pushed against both the House and Senate versions, but have spoken more favorably about the House bill. Zach Lilly, the director of government affairs for NetChoice, a tech industry group, said that the House bill “is a real effort to improve upon the disastrous censorship regime being championed in the Senate.”

After Monday’s House vote, it remains to be seen which bill will ultimately come out on top and head to the president’s desk—and whether the tech lobby will be able to exploit the rift between House and Senate.