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Experts warn that AI-powered policing could expand surveillance and amplify bias. By Amanda Watford for Stateline Hundreds of people fill a downtown street for a protest, waving signs and chanting as they march past businesses and government buildings. Overhead, a police drone records video of the crowd. Nearby traffic cameras and license plate readers capture faces…

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The Trump administration has awarded Clark Construction a $500 million no-bid contract to build the president’s ballroom—even as he has promised multiple times that it would either be privately funded and built at no cost to taxpayers, according to The Washington Post. Records show that the president was personally involved in the contract negotiations.

Competitive bidding is generally required for all federal contracts. However, the Trump administration filed this contract through the Executive Residence, which is exempt from competitive contract rules.

The White House justified the move by stating that under federal law, the president can spend however much on the “care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting” of the White House grounds. The Trump administration tried to cite the same law as authority to build the ballroom, but a federal judge rejected it in March. The administration’s no-bid contract, however, has yet to become a legal matter.

White House Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher noted on the contract that it skipped the typical bidding process because “the disclosure of the executive agency’s needs would compromise the national security.”

Trump has repeatedly said that private donors would foot the whole bill for the ballroom construction, but now it’s clearer than ever that’s not true. “They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump claimed earlier this year.

A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Supreme Court enshrines Trump’s racist BS into law…

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Two years ago, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old sociology graduate student at the City University of New York, was sitting in a tent on Columbia University’s quad as part of the pro-Palestine encampment on its campus. This month, Chevalier, the daughter of a truck driver and a case worker from the Dominican Republic, soundly defeated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat to become the presumptive next member of Congress for New York’s 13th congressional district, where Columbia sits. 

“I kept thinking of all of the folks who have really been let down by a lot of establishment Democrats. I was thinking of my friend Mahmoud [Khalil],” Chevalier said in an interview: the Palestinian campus organizer and recent Columbia masters graduate who became the face of a new, more punitive phase of Donald Trump’s policy of political detainment and deportation when DHS agents kidnapped him from his apartment building last year.

When Khalil was taken, Espaillat sent out a two-sentence statement urging due process: too little, too late, Chevalier said. Khalil was released the same week Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. A year later, with Mamdani’s backing, Chevalier won her own race alongside a slate of New York candidates who championed the Palestinian cause throughout their campaigns—often in ways that, until very recently, constituted a political third rail.

Those relative outsiders—many backed or recruited by groups like Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America, new kingmakers like Mamdani, and influencers like Hasan Piker—are notching upset victories against incumbents with decades of experience.

It echoes the wave that brought challengers like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar to office—and eventually made them icons of the Democrats’ left flank. But those races, close to a decade ago, didn’t feature Israel-Palestine politics in anything like the same way, a door opened in part by Zohran Mamdani’s unusual willingness to engage frankly on the issue, and language, of genocide.

Chevalier’s congressional cohort includes former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide and beat AIPAC-supported Rep. Dan Goldman by a 30-point margin, as well as New York State Assembly member Claire Valdez, who defeated Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso in a race for the House seat now held by retiring Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez, and who regularly joins protests calling for an arms embargo. Both candidates explicitly condemned US military aid to Israel, for decades a bipartisan pillar of US politics, in their campaigns.

“This electoral cycle has truly signified that we can no longer have a progressive-except-for-Palestine dynamic in electoral politics,” said Aber Kawas, a socialist candidate whose June win in a New York State Assembly primary will make her the first Palestinian-American in that body. Pro-Israel money is no longer a boon, Kawas said, but a liability. “The Israeli lobby, AIPAC, they’re still strong influencers in the Democratic Party, but this victory, and the victory of all of our races in this moment is chipping away at that in real substantial ways.”

In June, Army veteran and former combat surgeon Adam Hamawy, won his primary in New Jersey’s suburban, Democratic-leaning 12th congressional district—and he made opposition to AIPAC a cornerstone of his candidacy.

Hamawy, throughout his campaign, talked about his time as a volunteer physician in Gaza, and promised to fight for an arms embargo. “This is what prompted me to run,” Hamawy said to Al Jazeera of his time in Gaza. “I felt I had to go to Washington to fix this myself.”

In Philadelphia in May, self-described democratic socialist Chris Rabb beat two deep-pocketed and well-established candidates to win the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district. Two years earlier, when Temple University students faced trespassing charges for their participation in encampment protests, Rabb, then a state representative, was one of only a few local elected officials to back the students, calling their charges a “cruel and reckless abuse of power.”  

And in a primary taking place Tuesday in Denver, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist who calls herself a “recovering lawyer,” is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, who has held her seat since 1997.

Two years ago, as a new lawyer in New York, Kiros wrote an open letter defending law students who organized for Palestine. “I myself am from the northern region of Ethiopia, where a genocide had also taken place a few years ago,” Kiros, whose parents immigrated to Colorado when she was a baby, said.

Her employer asked her to take the letter down. Kiros refused, was fired, and moved back to Colorado within a week. She took a gig as a barista (“the best job I’ve had”) to make ends meet, and is now running on a familiar progressive platform: Medicare for All, universal childcare, AI regulation, ICE abolition and an arms embargo on Israel. The newcomer is polling well against DeGette, who is in her 15th term: the only available public poll, conducted by the progressive polling firm Data For Progress in June, has Kiros leading by 5 points. 

Dark money groups are all in against Kiros, including a trio of super PACs that have spent at least $1.3 million to oppose her in the final weeks of the race, the Colorado Sun reported. Much of that money has gone to attack ads that claim Kiros is from out of town (“I came here in ‘98!” Kiros said) and critical of Democrats (“So are most Democrats.”) 

AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying organization which has invested heavily in establishment candidates in many such races, has shifted to a diversity of electoral tactics: promoting spoiler candidates, creating new political action committees with names unrelated to Israel, funneling money through pre-existing but unrelated PACs, running ads that don’t talk about Israel at all.

But those efforts have targeted even mainline progressives who, for example, back the Block the Bombs Act, which would suspend arms shipments to Israel. Efforts to paint such candidates as far-left radicals are hard to maintain when only 13 percent of Democrats expressed positive views of Israel as of March—and by brooking no legitimate political opposition to Israel, AIPAC increasingly compels even mainline progressives to treat its wrath as a given.

AIPAC’s open support “is becoming a kiss of death to candidates they support in deep-blue districts, and I think that’s abundantly clear through the means in which they have had to operate throughout this cycle, which is through a network of shell PACs and pop-up PACs that obscures their funding,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros, Valdez and Chevalier.

Those who still take the group’s money are being more circumspect about it, even as those that refuse AIPAC cash trumpet their refusal with pride—much as candidates in the wake of Citizens United and the first Bernie Sanders campaign began advertising their rejection of dark money and emphasizing small donations.

“Money in politics is the issue,” Kiros said. “Every single thing that you care about, from social justice to economic justice to environmental justice, all of these things are intertwined with who has the money and the influence to wield power over our government.”

Voters rarely make their decisions based solely or even primarily on foreign policy, but candidates like Chevalier and Kiros have drawn connections between violence in Palestine and affordability at home.

“Our tax dollars are going towards a war machine that is just insatiable,” Chevalier said shortly after her primary win. “And when I hear from folks directly, they want their tax dollars to be coming back home. This is money that we are working hard for, right? We deserve to reap the benefits of it, to be able to use those resources to live dignified lives.”

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

It’s been nearly eight years since Congress reauthorized the farm bill, the massive legislative package that funds programs run by the US Department of Agriculture. What used to be passed roughly every five years, the farm bill touches nearly every aspect of agricultural production in the US. It puts billions toward conservation programs, nutrition assistance, rural development, crop insurance, and climate-smart practices. 

But persistent disagreements between lawmakers over these and other programs have stymied the process of passing a new farm bill. The federal government has instead resorted to stop-gap measures and one-year extensions of a small handful of programs.

“The farm bill…should not be a way for large industry groups to overturn the will of voters.”

If farmers were hoping to see a new farm bill this year, they may very well be disappointed—as a new schism between the two houses of Congress was made clear this week, when the Senate agricultural committee released a draft of its farm bill that excluded a law known as the Save Our Bacon Act. The measure was included in the House draft farm bill earlier this year with vocal support by Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-Penn.), who chairs the House agricultural committee. 

Save Our Bacon (SOB), would override state and local laws like California’s Prop 12, which bans the sale of pork, chicken, and veal products that come from farms using the most extreme forms of animal confinement, such as gestation crates for hogs. Factory farming operations where animals have the least amount of space to move around result in a lot of manure, which is typically consolidated and stored in lagoons that can pollute the local air and waterways.

Advocacy groups argue laws like Prop 12 are common sense and popular among voters who want to know where their food comes from. There are currently 14 states with similar laws on the books, according to the American Meat Producers Association (AMPA), an industry group that opposes SOB.

“It’s just disappointing that we’re even talking about this because the farm bill should be about supporting sustainable farming and healthy food and food security. It should not be a way for large industry groups to overturn the will of voters,” said Molly Armus, who works on animal agricultural policy at Friends of the Earth, an environmental nonprofit. 

Armus notes that transitioning away from extreme confinement of livestock can have positive environmental and climate impacts if producers move toward a pasture-raised system. (Prop 12 only establishes minimum space requirements for animals.) A recent analysis from the USDA found that 27 percent of hog farmers, or 1 in 4, are already Prop 12 compliant—suggesting that the transition away from extreme confinement is underway. 

“The industry is completely divided on this.”

“Most hog farmers do not support the Save Our Bacon Act,” said Holly Bice, president of AMPA, which was founded last year in response to an earlier attempt to skirt Prop 12 in a previous draft farm bill. For many hog farmers, Prop 12 has “been an important opportunity for them,” said Bice, because investing in crate-free operations allows producers to sell their products at a premium. “It’s helped them keep their heads above water at a time when consolidation has increasingly driven out farmers,” she said.

However, Brent Hershey, a hog farmer in Pennsylvania and member of AMPA, said the issue of extreme confinement has sparked a “civil war” among pork producers. “The industry is completely divided on this,” he added. Personally, Hershey said, he was reluctant to change the way his operation did things, but after years of receiving negative feedback, he began to see things differently. Today, Hershey’s farm has been crate-free for three years. Passing SOB, he said, would be “devastating” for producers like him who invested time and money into improving their operations.

Experts also argue that passing a farm bill that allows industrial animal agriculture operations to skirt state laws sets a bad precedent for broader environmental and public health goals. 

“When you’re doing something that, in a more macro sense, erodes states’ abilities to rollback some of the more harmful aspects of massive commercial agricultural operations, how does that impact any law that could impact agriculture?” said J.W. Glass, senior policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. For example, he added, “How does it impact state laws to restrict the use of pesticides?”

In the Senate, at least for now, it seems like a measure that allows animal agricultural producers to skirt Prop 12 is a nonstarter. “That is why [Boozman] did not put this in his bill. He knew it,” said Sara Amundson, president of the Humane World Action Fund (formerly the Humane Society). “And that’s why it’s critical to keep up the noise on it.”

Still, it’s unclear what happens next—whether the House will fold and exclude SOB from its draft farm bill, or whether, if the two chambers of Congress cannot reconcile their differences on extreme confinement, the gridlock lasts into next year.

It’s a blisteringly cold Monday night in February, and I’m sitting in an office building in Brooklyn trying to maintain eye contact with a woman I’ve just met. We hold each other’s gazes for several seconds, then I look away. My eyes return to her face, but I avoid her dark eyes, peering from under a ballcap, and instead stare at a spot on her forehead, maintaining the illusion of eye contact without actually holding it. I let my eyes wander and glance at the silhouette of the Manhattan Bridge looming through the nearby windows. My gaze returns to my partner, and we lock eyes again. She adjusts her hat. I give a slight, toothless smile. Her eyes flick away as she straightens her glasses. 

Over the next few weeks, I’d find myself in similar situations—staring at something or someone for a prolonged period of time, taking note of where my mind wandered—at a series of evening “Attention Labs” hosted by the Strother School of Radical Attention in Dumbo, Brooklyn. 

At these workshops, attendees explore “radical human attention” through various group activities, which might include studying a piece of music, talking with a partner, or observing the details of their physical surroundings. Whatever form the labs take, they all end with a call to action, inviting participants to join the School of Radical Attention in what it calls the Attention Liberation Movement. 

The School of Radical Attention is one of several projects created by a group calling themselves the Friends of Attention, an informal collective of artists, scholars, and activists founded in 2018. Earlier this year, the group published Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, with D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt credited as co-editors. Attensity! is the latest in a recent boom of literature discussing the attention economy, including Jenny Odell’s 2019 How to Do Nothing and Chris Hayes’ 2025 The Sirens’ Call, among many others. 

If you’ve read one of these books, you might have been motivated to change your personal relationship to technology. Maybe you’ve repeatedly deleted then redownloaded social media apps, bought a Brick, or attempted a “digital detox”—only to fall prey once again to the attention-sucking powers of Big Tech. The Friends of Attention aim to remedy that, arguing that to truly reclaim our attention from tech conglomerates, we need more than individual action; we need a collective movement. Attensity! is framed as a political manifesto, full of fiery language and liberal use of capitalization that can occasionally elicit an eye roll. The authors refer to Big Tech as “human frackers.” Just as fracking drills into the earth and extracts hidden oil and natural gas, human fracking “breaks up our deep reserves of attention into smaller and smaller fragments,” selling those fragments for a profit. To fight that, we need to engage collective resistance on par with the modern environmental movement or 19th-century labor activism, the authors argue. “The movement of attentional liberation exists and has a name: ATTENTION ACTIVISM,” they write. 

But what exactly is attention activism? To find out, I attended my first Attention Lab this winter, two days after a storm that left Brooklyn covered in about 20 inches of snow. On my walk from the train to the School of Radical Attention, I didn’t know what to expect. I had no idea what “exercises of attention” were, and the heated language of Attensity! made me half fear I was walking into a cult recruitment event. But I was curious. I already felt like my hours spent scrolling had made me less able to recall small details and information like I once had, so if someone was offering a solution, I was willing to listen. 

That night, I entered a warmly lit room with a circle of metal chairs filling most of the space and a table stacked with oranges, cookies, tea, and water in the corner. It felt less like a classroom than a cozy basement cafe, with bookshelves lining the walls, art hanging in a makeshift gallery wall, and plants in every available space. No more than a dozen people gathered that night, each drawn to the lab for different reasons. Over the course of the three labs I attended, I met academics and artists, New Yorkers and vacationers, young and old, believers and skeptics. Some were scholars of attention with a wealth of knowledge on the subject, like the anthropology PhD student I met who had flown out to visit the school from California. Others were brand new to the field, like a young guy I saw at two separate labs who had heard about the school from a stranger in a bar and found himself in an Attention Lab only days later. One participant said reading Attensity! had changed her life. 

Even the language we use to describe attention commodifies it: We’re conditioned to believe that attention is something to be paid, something owed to another person.

Each lab begins with participants turning to a partner and sharing their definition of attention. At my first one, I explained to my partner that growing up, attention always felt like something demanded from me by my parents and teachers. In school, we were always told to “pay attention,” and over the years, my math teachers frequently left notes about my “careless mistakes” and inattention to detail.

Even the language we use to describe attention commodifies it: We’re conditioned to believe that attention is something to be paid, something owed to another person. This definition of attention, rooted in focus and task completion, is itself indicative of the problem the School of Radical Attention is trying to solve. In a January New York Times op-ed, Schmidt, Burnett, and Loh describe this view as the “narrowest possible” perspective, which treats attention as “something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled.” Even our valiant efforts to remedy the problem by trying to improve focus or repair our attention span are a response to this narrow understanding. At work, the hours you spend focusing on a task will help generate profit for your employer; at home, the time you spend watching a movie on a streaming service or reading an article on your phone will be translated into ad dollars for Big Tech. 

Attensity! asserts that there’s more to attention than focus and task completion. “Indeed, the WORLDS of human attention are innumerable—genuinely infinite, and full of infinite promise,” they write. I think what the Friends of Attention hope to emphasize is that attention isn’t something that can be quantified—it’s in everything we do. Looking out of the window of a car or bus and daydreaming—that’s attention at work. Taking a walk around your block and stopping to pet a dog or chat with your neighbor—attention. Going through the motions of pulling a shot of espresso—also attention. 

When participants begin a practice at an Attention Lab, they receive a card with step-by-step instructions and an accompanying text excerpt or quote from an artist or scholar who inspired it—anyone from bell hooks to Langston Hughes to Yoko Ono or Karl Marx. The eye contact practice I engaged in during my first lab draws inspiration from Marina Abramovic’s 2010 “The Artist Is Present” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Rather than focus one’s attention inward, like in many forms of meditation, these attention practices direct you to focus on an object or person. There’s actually not much that feels radical about the attention practices themselves, except that you’re taking the time to deliberately direct your attention to new things and to appreciate how other people might experience those practices during the group debriefs that conclude each practice. Quinn Marchman, a facilitator at the school, called this the “ritual of listening” and said that taking the time to hear what other participants experienced is a key component of the Attention Labs. 

Like the distinctiveness of our fingerprints or eye color, our attention, too, is unique.

At one Attention Lab I attended, we did an exercise where we wandered through Dumbo alone, picked a spot, and took notes on what we observed. My tiny notebook is filled with notes from this lab, a very literal list of the sights and sounds of the block where I stood. “Overflowing puddles,” “dog poop but no dogs,” and “fake plants.” But in the debrief, others had written flowery, poetic lines describing the East River and the moon and the quietness of the street. Time and time again I learned that, while we each did the same practices, we experienced them differently. The practices manage to tap into each person’s unique interests and skills. Like the distinctiveness of our fingerprints or eye color, our attention, too, is unique. I didn’t notice the way the lights glittered on the water, but I did count the number of people on the street and watched as a puddle spilled over the edge of the sidewalk. Perhaps it’s my journalist’s impulse to compile small facts and details. 

At the School’s Attention Labs, facilitators compare the work of attention activism to a house fire—a dire situation in which there are different roles with different priorities working together to put out the fire. “There are some people that are carrying out all the furniture. There are some people that have water and they’re putting out the fire. And there are some people that are on the phone calling 911,” Jahony Germosen, the partnerships coordinator at the School of Radical Attention, explains. “We think that the attention activism movement is exactly like this.” 

The Friends of Attention identify the many different skills and talents needed to make attention activism work. In Attensity!, they argue that there’s room for everyone in attention activism because we all have distinct attention practices that we’re already doing. For example, rappers, poets, and stand-up comics—all people with unusually close attention to language—are “BARDS and RECITERS.” Meanwhile, people with a knack for bringing others together for shared experiences—dinner parties, game nights, etc.—are “GATHERERS.” It might sound a little cheesy, but the book captures something I felt intuitively at the labs I attended—that we all have something different to offer and learn when it comes to attention. 

I realized the School of Radical Attention is right about at least one thing: it feels good not to have to do this work alone.

After reading the book and attending a few labs, I’ll admit that there’s something that feels slightly woo woo about this whole thing. One minute you’re staring deeply into a stranger’s eyes, then you’re staring at your hand and trying to “feel” it, and eventually you’ll find yourself listening to the same song four times in a row, searching for new details and feelings. 

The latter exercise is part of a lab called “Deep Listening,” modeled after the work of composer Pauline Oliveros. The first time the facilitator played the song we were supposed to just listen. The second time we were to recall what we noticed the first time, the third time was to discover new things, and the final time we attempted hearing but “not listening.” By the third listen, hearing the tinny sound of the music, I found myself thinking about my middle school band class, remembering how it felt to practice a new piece of music until I’d committed it to memory. I imagined counting myself in and joining my classmates in an arrangement of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song. Perhaps counterintuitively for a group so focused on collective action, the Attention Labs often offer a space for introspection. But I think what’s gained through that introspection is a longing for a community to share it with. During the Deep Listening exercise, one attendee remarked that the music helped decrease the noise in her head, to which several other people sounded off in agreement. “This exercise made me think of listening to my favorite albums,” another participant said. “Did anyone else feel that way?” Not everyone did, but they started peppering him with questions, trying to understand what he meant, or sharing how their experiences were different. When someone mentioned that the sound of the train rumbling outside the window distracted them from listening, a chorus of people piped up, detailing the sound of the train and identifying other distracting noises. It was in these moments I realized the School of Radical Attention is right about at least one thing: it feels good not to have to do this work alone.

But I also left the labs pretty unsure of what to do next. The School of Radical Attention offers plenty of ways to stay involved in its attention activism: you can take online courses, participate in “sidewalk studies” in public spaces across the city, study the texts from its suggested reading lists, or even follow its toolkit for starting an “attention sanctuary” in your own community. The ideas the school is presenting are valuable, but it seems like a stretch to argue that sitting in a room listening to a piece of music four times is activism—especially when there are sections of Attensity! that situate the authors’ project among the work of suffragists and civil rights marchers. (“These are disputes about human dignity—about the fullness of what people are and what they deserve,” the Friends of Attention write. “Attention Activism stakes a claim for human dignity.”) 

I asked the school’s co-founder about this—doesn’t this all feel a bit abstract, I wondered, at a time when anti-ICE and pro-Palestine protesters are organizing for real political change? Schmidt, one of the co-founders, acknowledged that, because attention is hard to “nail down,” attention activism is different from how we think of activism otherwise. The school isn’t lobbying for antitrust laws that limit the power of the tech companies they call human frackers, or protesting AI data centers, or helping organize tech workers. Instead, they are pushing for cultural change, which Schmidt explained is about involving people and creating community. “The laws of a country cannot push through the people of a country,” he said. “You can’t have laws that protect something if you don’t have people who want to protect it.” 

It’s the early stages of the movement, so Schmidt said this is the kind of work that needs to happen now to regulate the tech industry later. The school wants to model its work after other successful social movements which often have a pre-existing community and shared language that allows them to flourish. Schmidt said there’s no equivalent to that with attention activism, so creating the attention liberation movement will require building a shared language for the problem, a shared understanding of attention, and a community who cares about it all. That can happen through the school’s programming—which is being offered in New York City, across the US, and even across the globe. 

I didn’t leave the School of Radical Attention newly fired up to take down Big Tech, but I did leave it feeling eager to connect with others who wanted to reclaim control of their attention.

Still, I ask if this isn’t a little like treating the symptom and not the cause. Schmidt resisted that characterization; the labs aren’t about “self-help” or having a group therapy session, he said. He makes what is a repeated distinction at the school and in Attensity!, which is that it’s not about fighting to improve our attention spans, but to enrich our understanding of attention in general. In this way, this work is about getting people on the same page, showing that attention is bigger than we think, and that the human frackers’ power is detrimental to humanity. 

It doesn’t mean the School of Radical Attention might not eventually get into policy work or forms of activism that we’re more familiar with, but for now the work is about building community organizing to create a “critical consciousness around attention” in our culture. 

I didn’t leave the School of Radical Attention newly fired up to take down Big Tech, but I did leave it feeling eager to connect with others who wanted to reclaim control of their attention, and with a more nuanced understanding of the many forms attention can take. That might not feel like much at a time when Meta is marketing discreet wearable tech and Google is training AI with your search data, but it’s a step in the right direction.  

In the broader attention activism landscape, the School of Radical Attention’s work is more about hope, Schmidt told me. “Right now, with like four dudes in this AI arms race that’s just very destructive and hubristic and depressing, it’s just very easy to despair,” he said. “And the real spirit of all this for me, and what makes all the people who come here so wonderful is, we’re not exactly optimists, but I feel there’s a lot of hope.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 30 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump lost a few big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. He also won a big one. But judging by the extended eruption of rage that followed after those losses, those are the cases he really cared about. And you can see why. In one of those losses, the court allowed states to continue counting ballots that arrive after election day, and that probably cuts off one of the pathways he was eyeing to help steal the midterms. Yet at the same time, his one victory was pretty substantial and underscored again the long-term crisis that the Supreme Court has thrust us into by continually expanding the power of this president.

We’re getting into all of it with Lisa Graves, former counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, who writes about the Supreme Court. Lisa, good to have you on.

Lisa Graves: Greg, thank you so much for inviting me.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s losses. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll after a jury found he’d abused her. It blocked him from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook without cause. And in the biggest loss of all, the court upheld a Mississippi provision that counts mail-in ballots that arrive late, which will deliver a real blow to Trump and Republican efforts to invalidate mail ballots in this fall’s midterms in many other states. Lisa, what’s your basic reading on that last one?

Graves: Well, the Watson case is one where, had the Roberts court ruled in favor of Trump, it would have caused further chaos for the elections. We’re already seeing some of the chaos the Roberts court has caused through the Callais decision and related rulings this spring around the maps and the redrawing of maps in the former Confederate states. But in this instance, the Roberts court said no to the effort of the RNC and Trump to block the counting of ballots that are postmarked by election day but that arrive after.

And obviously, people don’t have any control over how long it takes for the mail to be delivered. And it’s been increasingly slow in recent years. And in numerous other ways, the postmark is the thing that counts. It’s the thing that can’t be altered. And so it’s a really reliable indicator of whether a ballot is on time based on the postmark. And the reality is that even though the press covers election night in the sort of horse-race coverage of who won and who lost, those are projections, because in reality, in many counties across the country, particularly in cities, it takes days to actually count and verify those ballots.

And also there’s an opportunity for people to cure their ballots if they cast provisional ballots, come in later that week with their ID if they didn’t have one with these new ID restrictions. And so it’s not unusual at all for the counting of ballots that are postmarked by election day, and the ballots that are cast on election day, to be counted in the days after the election. Trump, as you point out, was counting on the court siding with him and the RNC to try to disrupt the counting of those ballots.

Sargent: This loss really triggered Trump’s anger more than anything else. He exploded in an extended rant on Truth Social. He said this:

“In light of the tremendous loss in the Supreme Court today concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that ‘people’s’ votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over, it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”

Lisa, it’s very rare that Donald Trump admits that he lost, but there he admitted it. And I also thought it was useful that he said straight out that he doesn’t think people’s votes should be counted. That’s very helpful. I think that’s a very clear window into how he saw this.

Graves: Yeah, that’s right. Those in the law would call them admissions against interest, that he confessed those things. And this idea that he’s concerned about voters’ intent—if he were concerned about voters’ intent, he would try to ensure that those votes get counted when people mailed them on or before election day. But of course, as you point out, he also used this to pivot to his pressure campaign to try to get the SAVE Act passed, which is really about trying to save his presidency by making it harder for millions of Americans to vote.

A lot of women—not me—took their husbands’ names when they married. And so their birth certificate is not the same as their driver’s license. And the SAVE Act would make it harder for millions of American women to vote if they can’t show, at that time or in registration, that they are who they are, even if they’ve been voting for years or decades using either their driver’s license or their residence—regular voters.

And so that SAVE pressure point is something Trump has been obsessed with over the last few days in particular, because I think, again, he sees this as a way to try to control the outcome of the election, even though millions of Republican voters would also be affected by this deeply misguided and reckless SAVE Act.

Sargent: This ruling—what it does is, provisions like this one that allow the counting of mail ballots that arrive after election day will now remain in place in many states, including ones with big elections in them this fall. And this is the critical point. For instance, if Democrats win a couple of crucial House seats in California, their path to the majority becomes easier. There are a few other states, maybe New York and Texas, where the upholding of this provision could really matter in the midterms.

It’s obvious Trump and Republicans were hoping to use the slow counting of mail ballots to try to steal those elections outright. They were going to combine this counting of late-arriving votes with an effort to get the Postal Service to slow the delivery of votes, but that’s all been thwarted. That was a big chunk of their plan, wasn’t it?

Graves: That’s a great point, Greg. And we already saw Trump try to run this game plan in Los Angeles with the attacks on the process for counting ballots after the most recent elections in California, including in the mayoral race.

So we know that I think he was itching to deploy that same tactic to discredit elections everywhere by claiming that this is somehow fraudulent, or the results aren’t fair if the votes are counted after election day—even though, as you and I both know, votes are almost always counted after election day, because that’s how long it takes to count the votes.

Sargent: He really hates the counting of votes. I want to dwell a little bit on his use of this moment to push the SAVE Act. It’s really revealing. He responds to this loss on mail ballots by demanding again that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation. But the thing is, Lisa, he has explicitly said this voter suppression legislation is necessary to holding power in the midterms.

So he’s more or less confirming outright that he understood this mail ballot case as a way to block voters from delivering a negative verdict on his presidency, and as a way to block voters from having their say in the midterms. It’s just right out in the open. It’s striking how direct it is, isn’t it?

Graves: It really is. And it’s appalling, quite frankly. Because we’ve never—well, I guess we did in 2020—but before Donald Trump, we never had a president who sought to attack the idea of voting. Obviously, there was litigation around Bush v. Gore and whether those recounts could continue in the southeastern counties of Florida. But that was couched not as just hostility to counting these ballots.

And the thing about this particular circumstance is that, had the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, it would have cast in doubt early voting across the country. Because by setting election day as a particular day, Congress wasn’t intending to say that only ballots cast that day at the polling place could count. That’s not been the practice in the United States for literally more than a century. The first real major mailed ballots were during the Civil War, as the Civil War was going on. And so this is a long-standing part of American history. But Trump doesn’t care about history. What he cares about is power.

And he’s been joined in this attack on voting by mail, and on the potential outcome of this election, by Mike Johnson, who made really clear just the other day how, if Democrats were to win, there would be oversight of Donald Trump. And he said out loud something like, I’m your protection—we’re going to protect you from consequences. Which is also really morally appalling.

Sargent: Protecting you from accountability is what they mean.

Graves: Yes. And the fact is that that’s what representative government is about. That’s what House elections are about. Every two years we get a chance—or at least we’re supposed to get a chance—to do a course correction. And people seem to want a very real and significant course correction.

But between Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and then the Roberts court’s rulings on Callais and the voting maps cases, what we see are Republican elected officials, or Republican-appointed officials, trying to squeeze and change the rules of the game midway to preserve Donald Trump’s power. Despite all of the extraordinarily outrageous things that Donald Trump has done on an almost daily basis, they seem determined to protect him at any cost—even the cost of representative government itself.

Sargent: Absolutely. But now we have to get to the bad part. The court ruled that Trump has the power to fire independent regulators, which is really going to increase Trump’s power over independent agencies and enable him and MAGA to bend agencies to his corrupt will more easily. The court carved out this exception for the Federal Reserve. Putting that aside for a sec, can you explain why this ruling on all the other agencies is such a disaster?

Graves: Well, it really is a disaster. And I wrote about some of this in my book, Without Precedent, which describes how John Roberts, the chief justice—who made an indelible image in people’s minds during his confirmation process, where he said he was just going to be a fair umpire calling balls and strikes—but in fact, he’s used the judiciary, used his post on the court, to advance some of these really fringe theories into law. And one of those fringe theories is the unitary executive theory.

It was invented during the Reagan administration. And we know that John Roberts was a Reagan revolutionary. He was at the top of the Justice Department at the beginning of Reagan’s term. He was then in the White House counsel’s office. Then he was in the George H.W. Bush administration as the political deputy in the SG’s office. And back then, what they were trying to do was to maximize presidential power.

And now, as a judge, what we’re seeing is John Roberts overturning decades, nearly a century, of legal precedent. Congress had passed this law saying that they wanted to make sure that there were independent agencies—that if the agency had sort of legislative components to its work, like the Federal Trade Commission, in terms of trying to implement Congress’s will of protecting against these mergers, and now they’re mega-mergers in the twenty-first century—that the president could not just fire someone without cause.

And the thing about what Roberts has done, along with his fellow Republican appointees in the Slaughter case, is that it has ripped away the power of Congress to create these independent agencies. And remember, the job of the president isn’t to invent the law. His job, the oath he takes, is to faithfully execute the law. Trump, for the most part, is not actually faithfully executing the law. From day one, minute one, after being sworn in, he started basically asserting that he could just change the law.

But in this instance, with mergers—this is an area where, like I said, going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Supreme Court had said, no, you cannot fire your predecessors’ appointees. It’s just not allowed. We want these agencies to do their job independent of who is the president. And what Roberts has done is change the law radically, dramatically, to empower Trump to have more power than almost any president in the twentieth and twenty-first century has had.

Sargent: Well, let’s step back for a second and really home in on that bigger point. Trump rages wildly over his losses and he attacks the court over them, but he actually got his way in the manner that’s probably most significant in the long term—not for these midterms, but in the long term. And I think that tension captures where we are, which is that Trump’s expectation is so strong that he’ll get his way from the Supreme Court, that the Supreme Court will continue to give him power, that he treats it as unusual and even outrageous when the court occasionally doesn’t do that.

But the big story is that Trump and his appointees on the Supreme Court, and the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, have conspired to vastly inflate the power of the president and arguably of the court as well, at the expense of Congress.

Isn’t that the big story? That it’s just basically whittled away Congress and reduced it and diminished it while inflating the power of the presidency and inflating the power of the court itself. They’re like allied in this effort, it seems to me.

Graves: Well, you’re exactly right. What we’re seeing is an imperial president being created by an imperial court. What we have is a sort of cult of judicial supremacy where Roberts is basically acting like the kingmaker. He is the one who invented and orchestrated his fellow Republican appointees to come together to give Donald Trump unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution for his so-called official acts, to allow him to commit crimes. That is extraordinary. It was unprecedented, and it has created the sense of entitlement of Donald Trump in this new term.

So it basically pardoned him when he was not in office, helped sweep him back into power by sending a signal to the American people that he did no wrong, in essence—could do no wrong, and then has empowered him.

And the bookend for that is that this court, through the shadow docket, has ruled in Donald Trump’s favor 90 percent of the time, while the lower courts of different presidential appointments have been ruling against him on a lot of these issues, because they are contrary to the Constitution, to statutes, regulations, legal precedents, and contracts in many instances.

And so what we see here is a Supreme Court majority, six to three—five of them served in the executive branch. They cut their teeth trying to expand and defend presidential power. And now they’re using their posts on the Supreme Court to expand presidential power from the bench, to invent new rules and ignore long-standing precedents to do so.

And in doing so, they also are carving out for themselves this notion that they are the deciders. They are the real people in power, and they are unaccountable to the American people. Which is why I, and an increasing number of my colleagues, are supporting an all-of-the-above strategy on court reform.

Sargent: Well, that is an absolutely awful occurrence, what we’ve seen happen—the big-picture occurrence. I just want to be sure we don’t take away from the importance of Trump losing on mail balloting, because we are going to need a Democratic Congress to challenge the state of affairs. And with these rulings, with the ruling on mail ballots, it has become somewhat more likely that we get that Democratic Congress, right?

Graves: Yes. The fact that they cannot stop ballots from being counted that are postmarked by election day—that is a big victory for the American voter. And it also takes place in the context of this court basically putting its thumb on the scale in these re-gerrymandered maps in ways that may already help Trump. But it’s not a done deal, because Republicans have lost a number of these special elections. And the turnout rates for Democrats versus Republicans in the primaries—there’s been a real disparity in terms of enthusiasm for Democratic candidates and lack of enthusiasm for some of these Republicans.

So, no matter the court’s intervention in general, people are clamoring for change. And this ruling by the Roberts court in the Watson case on mail-in ballots does protect the ability to have ballots be counted as they have been year in and year out for decades before Donald Trump became president.

Sargent: So here’s the bottom line then. With this imperial president getting enabled by this imperial court, as you put it, we’re going to need Congress to discover its power. And if Democrats can win one chamber or both chambers—which is hard but possible—they are going to have to use every last shred of power that they can lay their hands on. Lisa Graves, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on. That was just great stuff. Beautifully put.

Graves: Thank you so much, Greg. It was a joy to be on your show.

In late April, Virginia voters narrowly approved an aggressive gerrymander that would have given Democrats a largely unbeatable advantage in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House seats, counteracting GOP power plays in Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats exulted. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” a triumphant House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Data nerds proclaimed that Democrats had fought the mid-decade redistricting wars to a draw, and maybe even won. The Bluesky brigades rejoiced that their side had strapped on boxing gloves for a change.

The good feelings didn’t even last until May. Eight days after the Virginia vote, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its war on the Voting Rights Act with Louisiana v. Callais, unleashing lawmakers across the South to shatter districts that ensured Black representation across the old Confederacy and carve them into safe seats for Republicans. Florida, anticipating the court’s decision, moved first. Alabama, and Tennessee quickly followed. So did Louisiana, which canceled its congressional primaries after thousands of votes had already been cast.

Then, Virginia’s conservative-leaning state Supreme Court delivered the final insult, finding a technicality that allowed it to invalidate the referendum and the new 10–1 map.

There are lessons to be learned here, and if Democrats are serious about maximal warfare, or interested in rescuing government by and for the people, they must digest those lessons and stiffen their spines. They will need to fight back and enact big reforms, both locally and nationally, that reinvigorate and strengthen American democracy, all with the same speed and relentless determination that Southern lawmakers bring to ripping apart Black districts.

We might have one chance. It’s not now, although what we do now is important. It’s in the first 100 days of a 2029 trifecta, when for once electoral wins, electoral reforms, and political will may all align. But even if Democrats win that 2029 trifecta, they can’t lull themselves into declaring a premature victory. The project of saving American democracy will require a massive lift: redistricting, court expansion, and additional states, at once. Hard as it may be, however, we have no choice. Because if you think the redistricting power play this year is bad, just wait. The road to controlling the U.S. House and the White House after that gets decidedly more difficult.

There is a looming time bomb for Democrats hidden in the reapportionment that will follow the 2030 census. Defusing that—overcoming the census, the Supreme Court, and the filibuster with a package that ensures competitive elections and majority rule, just in the nick of time—will require the kind of coordinated, decisive action not seen since Die Hard or Speed.

Here’s the problem: Everything that the Democrats do in 2028 to level the redistricting playing field could be negated post-census. They could win or hold the House thanks to new maps in New York, California, and Illinois, then hand all those seats over to Texas and Florida anyway.

Winning a trifecta and then enacting redistricting reform through the minoritarian Senate, and protecting it from a court that has spent more than a decade tilting maps and electoral rules toward the GOP, are not merely options. They are existential.

Just do the math. Imagine that Democrats in 2028 claim four more seats in California, three in New York, and one apiece in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Then consider the consequences if Democrats hand each of these seats—along with one in Rhode Island—over to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho after the 2030 census. Because if current population projections hold, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

William H. Frey, the legendary Brookings Institution demographer, has developed three different models for what the 2030 census could look like, depending on how population patterns and immigration politics work out over the next five years. They range only in the magnitude of bleakness: Will California lose three or four seats? Will Texas gain four or just three? Will New York lose two, or just one? Will Florida gain three, or just two?

Frey cautioned in an interview that much remains unknown, particularly the state-by-state consequences of the Trump administration’s immigration policy that have thrown an historic kill switch on population growth nationwide. But what’s clear is that migration out of New York, California, and the industrial Midwest, coupled with low-to-zero immigration growth, come with what could be a historic migration of political power, almost all of it heading South.

“It should be on people’s minds more,” said Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson. “That’s why we need to run up our margins as much as we possibly can in every election, because this is exactly what happened to us in 2010. We had these two great cycles in 2006 and 2008, and then we just got our asses handed to us in 2010 ... and all the power we won, it evaporated.”

Somewhere between 12 and 14 seats will move away from states where Democrats are likely to draw the lines. The South, currently mapped almost entirely by the GOP, would have its largest number of House seats ever, some 40 percent of the entire body. The Northeast and industrial Midwest, meanwhile, would reach historic lows, abandoned for warmer climates and cheaper housing.

The House math gets more difficult when you add that dozen to the 19 that the GOP could pick up via Callais, which only highlights the urgency of reform. Yet the problem runs deeper than the House. When those seats move toward the Sun Belt and GOP-dominated Western states, presidential electors relocate with them—a shift that will transform the Electoral College map.

The brutal math of House apportionment combined with gerrymandering. A Senate weighted toward whiter, rural states, when 70 percent of the nation will soon live in 15 states. Twenty-five states that voted for Donald Trump three times, with 50 GOP senators: Right now, a majority means winning everyplace else, then expanding the map. A conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court will be with us into at least the 2050s, if Republican justices strategically retire and allow Trump and a GOP Senate to name replacements.

There is no easy way out of this structural mess that Democrats find themselves in. First, it requires winning elections and taking advantage of a weakened president and unpopular GOP in 2026. Then, it’s adding to those majorities in 2028 while building a mandate for change that restores fairness everywhere, beginning with redistricting and the House. As Democrats learned in 2021, 50 senators and the White House will in no way be enough for the heavy reform lift that will follow. “You’re going to need votes to spare on big-ticket agenda items and structural reforms, like the filibuster itself, or making D.C. a state,” says Jentleson.

The good news is that much of what is broken and unrepresentative can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it.

The good news is that much of what is broken can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. Two Democrats who have introduced far-reaching, visionary reform packages believe that the moment might be now.

Moreover, there appears to be significant energy in the party for the project. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said that he’s never seen this much interest in proportional representation from his colleagues. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, along with Raskin and a handful of other legislators, have co-sponsored the Fair Representation Act for almost a decade now. It’s the most complete national solution to end gerrymandering and would create a more proportional House with larger, multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. According to their vision, every district nationwide becomes a swing district, and every delegation would more closely represent the politics and racial demographics of every state. Members who have never wanted to talk about it in the past are now asking Raskin how it works.

After years of experiencing a radical restructuring of our constitutional order by way of presidential usurpation and a runaway court, Raskin said, Americans are ready for a pro-democracy restructuring that makes institutions accountable and elections matter. A proportional House is just a matter of passing a law, no constitutional amendment required. The program would protect the right to vote everywhere; add Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states; and maybe even include Supreme Court reform. “Ultimately, we need to get to independent nonpartisan commissions with multimember districts and ranked-choice voting all over the country,” Raskin said. “Those are some of the things we need to put on the table along with the national popular vote for president.”

Illinois Representative Sean Casten sees all of this as a long overdue corrective that would actually make Congress functional and more representative. “The Founders didn’t actually create a representative democracy,” he pointed out. “They created one representative chamber, another nonrepresentative chamber, a Supreme Court that’s not representative at all, and refused to allow most Americans to vote. The Americans they did allow to vote, they didn’t trust to vote for senators or presidents. We’ve not fixed all that stuff yet.”

Under his plan, only 12 additional senators, elected by a national popular vote, would require a constitutional amendment. Everything else is just fixing a statute. Tweak the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and suddenly the size of the House can be adjusted to the population again, as it was every decade before its passage. It’s effectively undoing the Apportionment Act, he said, and the larger House also negates any GOP reapportionment advantage in the Electoral College. Amend the Judges Act of 1925, and it’s easy to change the mix of cases that the U.S. Supreme Court is allowed to hear. The shadow docket, all of it, gone.

For Raskin, the key is to figure out the proper sequencing for all these “powerful and provocative ideas.” But all of them are linked. Everything happens or nothing happens. And if nothing moves through both chambers in the first 100 days of a Democratic trifecta, the likelihood of the reapportionment time bomb detonating—and the GOP’s adding hefty advantages in the House and Electoral College to its control of the Supreme Court and its demographic edge in the Senate—only deepens.

The most pressing change may be to abolish the filibuster. As Jentleson suggested, although nothing moves through the Senate without first addressing the filibuster, none of these structural reforms will stick without shifting the balance of the judiciary. “You need to not just win power, but you are going to need to hold those majorities for at least a few years beyond if you are really serious about the structural reforms that are necessary,” he said. Thankfully, the appetite and scope of what even centrist members will consider have been expanded, he pointed out, by the Callais decision and the behavior of the court. It’s now impossible not to see that “if you pass ambitious structural reforms, but the Supreme Court is still six to three, it’s just going to be a matter of time until they undo those reforms.”

There seems to be political will for big structural reform. Raskin points to D.C. statehood, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act winning near-unanimous majorities among House Democrats as proof that it exists. Those reforms met their end due to the filibuster. “We had a very similar national conversation after the first Trump election, and we had a very similar mass mobilization of people saying, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Casten observed. “We then signed almost none of that into law, because the Senate said it was more important to protect the rights of 40 senators than to protect the rights of 330 million Americans.”

There’s one other hardball play, should the Senate block reform again, or if Democrats fail to win the Senate back. What would happen if the president refused to report the census apportionment to the House? If Congress rewrote the statute governing the transmission of the numbers? Or if the clerk of the House simply declined to certify it? These have been ceremonial tasks in the past. But as Republicans have taught us, they need not be. Which is to say: The choice is clear. It is either big, structural reform or a constitutional, existential crisis.  

In the wake of victories by candidates who New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed, Senator Joe Manchin complained, “The extremes are driving the conversation while the majority of Americans are being left behind.” Responding to criticism of an article that the paper ran about one of those winning candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, The New York Times’ official account said on X, “The Times has been documenting the increasingly extreme viewpoints on both sides of the political spectrum for years.” Centrist Democratic politicians and center-left columnists are urging the country to reject both socialism and MAGA. 

But the idea that America now has a far left that is equally dangerous and radical as  the far right is entirely wrong, no matter how many powerful people and institutions hint or claim otherwise. America’s extreme right wing is by far the country’s big problem, and it’s hard to address that problem when powerful elites insist that the trouble is with “both sides.”

Why is this analogy so far-fetched? First of all and most importantly, the political left in America believes in and practices democracy. Until leftists collectively try to use judicial and then violent means to overturn an election that they clearly lost, as MAGA Republicans did in 2020, I don’t want to hear any bullshit false equivalences between leftists and MAGA conservatives. Conducting free and fair elections and respecting their results is fundamental to democracy. MAGA’s leader, Donald Trump, refused to accept the 2020 results, as did dozens of Republican members of Congress and state officials. To this day, Republicans tiptoe around the issue to the point where they can’t even give a straightforward answer to the question, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?”

In contrast, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America, Avila Chevalier and other powerful people and groups on the left don’t deny Trump was elected in 2024. And it’s not just ignoring election results. The socialist left is trying to win power the democratic way—getting average Americans to vote for their candidates. The MAGA right is trying to gain and expand their power through gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and other undemocratic means. They’ve spent years making up claims of voter fraud. 

I’m pretty sure the Times and the centrist Democratic who sing the “both sides” song know all that. It’s unfortunate that they choose not to distinguish between pro-democracy people with bold policy views and anti-democracy people with bold policy views. 

Let’s move to the allegedly “extreme” agenda of the far left. Avila Chevalier, Mamdani, and other socialist politicians are pushing ideas like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, cutting U.S. funding for Israel’s military, and limiting corporate monopolies. Much of their agenda is extremely popular because it takes on the rich and big corporations, as Americans desperately want. Some of those ideas are more contested. 

But guess what? None of that is anywhere as radical as giving an unelected billionaire (Elon Musk) the authority to fire federal workers, unilaterally shuttering federal agencies, and using the presidency to enrich yourself and your family. That’s what Trump has done over the last year and half. At least leftist politicians like Mamdani are open and honest about their controversial ideas. Trump and MAGA Republicans implement a radical agenda that they hide from voters during campaigns—just think back to the president’s constant lying about knowing nothing about Project 2025. 

Yes, some on the left, including Avila Chevalier in the past, advocate abolishing prisons, police, and borders. These are ideas that are truly radical. But ideas seem less outlandish after they have happened. And the right has managed to turn some extreme notions into U.S policy: the right to a “well regulated” militia in the Second Amendment actually means that virtually any restriction on gun ownership is illegal; the right to free speech means billionaires and corporations can spend almost unlimited funds on political campaigns; the constitutional amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War should be interpreted in ways that make it easier to force Black people from Congress. I am not sure that the wildest dreams of the DSA are much more radical than the policies stated in the aforementioned Project 2025 that is being implemented every day. 

Finally, any equivalence between the socialist left and the MAGA right falls apart when you consider the huge differences in power between the two sides. There are probably two dozen House Democrats, a dozen mayors, five senators, and two Democratic governors who would attend a DSA conference. And most of them would not call themselves socialists. In contrast, MAGA Republicans control the White House, about half of the seats in Congress, half the governorships, and at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito). Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, another socialist who won a congressional primary in New York last week, will be something like the 250th and 251st most powerful Democrats in Washington next year. MAGA Republicans are the president, vice-president, and top policy adviser to the president (Stephen Miller). MAGA Republicans are the dominant faction in one party; socialist Democrats are a minority bloc in another party. Anyone suggesting that the two blocs are anywhere close to each other in influence is either stupid or dishonest. 

The centrists annoyed by the left aren’t stupid. They are conflating the socialist left with the MAGA right as a rhetorical tool. The media, traditional Democrats, and swing voters will reject Mamdani and his ilk if they are convinced that socialists will be as destructive to America as Trumpists. But this misleading centrist rhetoric has real consequences. What America desperately needs is socialists, traditional liberals, independents, and pro-democracy conservatives to disagree with one another during Democratic primaries but then join together to defeat the MAGA right in general elections. That unity can’t happen if anytime centrist Democrats lose a primary they act as if a socialist candidate winning is as dangerous as a MAGA candidate winning. It’s not. I plead to those on the center left to stop calling people extreme unless they are trying to end democracy in America. 

In 2013, McDonald’s generated some ghastly publicity when it came out that the fast-food giant was advising burger flippers to go on food stamps. Why didn’t McDonald’s, a multinational corporation that generates more than $26 billion in annual revenue, simply pay its burger flippers a living wage? The answer in most (but not all) cases was that, appearances to the contrary, most McDonald’s burger flippers don’t work directly for McDonald’s. They work for McDonald’s franchisees—independent, mostly small businesses that contract with McDonald’s Corporation to lease and operate one or more McDonald’s restaurants according to a mind-bogglingly specific set of rules that guarantees every McDonald’s will be indistinguishable from every other McDonald’s.

McDonald’s is not an isolated example. Over the past half-century, corporate America has systematically shed low-wage workers, either by offshoring them, contracting out their work, or designating them as independent contractors. Only rarely today will a large corporation employ someone earning less than $30,000. That’s not because corporations have gotten more generous but because they’ve gotten more wary of assuming responsibility for low-wage workers. Off-loading them spares corporations bad publicity, and in effect allows them to delegate routine labor violations to much smaller companies that can easily liquidate and/or rename themselves if they run into serious legal trouble.

The contractors don’t try very hard to disguise the nature of the service they provide. In a Pulitzer-winning series on migrant child labor for The New York Times, Hannah Dreier reported that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. pitched itself on its website as being able to “take the liability and risk off your facility’s record.” Packers was as good as its word when the Labor Department in February 2023 fined it $1.5 million for assigning migrant children to overnight shifts in 13 meatpacking plants in eight states. Packers took nearly all the heat, while most of the Fortune 500 companies that owned the plants involved—Tyson, Cargill, etc.—went unpunished. Packers then “rebranded” itself as Fortrex and moved its corporate headquarters from Kieler, Wisconsin, to Atlanta. Problem solved.

The Brandeis economist David Weil labeled this phenomenon “the fissured workplace,” in an influential 2014 book of that name whose thesis was that changes in the structure of corporate hiring that are typically thought of as efficiencies are actually a conscious effort to evade union drives and government-guaranteed labor protections, such as child labor prohibitions and payment of minimum wage, overtime, Social Security tax, and unemployment tax. Weil did his best to reverse that trend when he ran the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under President Barack Obama. But when President Joe Biden renominated Weil for that post, the International Franchise Association, or IFA, a lobby group founded by franchisors and still dominated by them, campaigned against Weil and won sufficient support from the Senate GOP and three Senate Democrats (Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who later became independents, plus Senator Mark Kelly) to defeat Weil.

The IFA has had a much easier time during President Donald Trump’s two terms in office, as demonstrated by a proposed Labor Department regulation severely limiting the circumstances under which a corporation can be held accountable for work done on its behalf under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which governs minimum wage and overtime. (A separate joint-employer standard under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act governs union organizing and other concerted activity, and is enforced by the National Labor Relations Board.) The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, in a public comment sent last week to the Labor Department, estimates that the proposed rule would affect about 15 million workers in “fissured establishments,” of which about 10 million would be the employees of franchisees, and that the rule would cost these workers almost $1 billion annually.

Prior to Trump, the Labor Department followed a guidance document on joint employment drafted in 2015 by Weil. Regarding “vertical joint employment,” wherein an employee works for Company B, which in turn is contracted to Company A, Company A would be designated a joint employer when “the economic realities show that” the worker is “economically dependent on” Company A. This was less an interpretation than a description of what the FLSA actually says. Weil noted that the FLSA defined an employer very broadly as “any person acting directly or indirectly [italics mine] in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee.” (You can look it up.)

But after Trump came into office in 2019, his Labor Department tore up Weil’s guidance and issued a regulation that defined an employer as interacting only directly with an employee. If Company A did not hire and fire a worker for Company B, or schedule that worker’s time, or dictate that worker’s specific work conditions, or set that worker’s wages, or maintain that worker’s employment records, then Company A was not a joint employer. This departed quite blatantly from the statutory language—so much so that a federal court later threw the Trump rule out.

Now the second Trump administration is taking another whack at a Labor Department joint-employment rule, and if any substantive difference exists between Trump’s earlier version and this new one, I can’t see it. Once again, the regulation contradicts the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act by saying that indirect control over employees isn’t good enough to establish that Company A is a joint employer.

The best case the business lobby can make in defense of Trump’s proposed rule is that although it contradicts the statute, it captures the federal government’s past reluctance to enforce it, especially with respect to franchising. In what follows, I rely heavily on an excellent new book, Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy, by Brian Callaci, chief economist at the nonprofit Open Markets Institute.

When fast-food franchising took off in the 1960s and 1970s, it was often judged in violation of antitrust law, which did not permit collusion between Company A and Company B. The franchisors answered that prohibitions on such “vertical restraint” did not apply because Company A and Company B were essentially the same company. Judges didn’t always buy that, but it was kind of true. Indeed, for a long time the Small Business Administration refused to give loans to Company Bs on the grounds that these weren’t small businesses at all but rather the equivalent of branch offices for Company As.

Unfortunately, franchisors simultaneously contested responsibility for labor violations at Company B by arguing, no, actually, these are two separate companies … which was kind of not true. Yes, Company B signed a licensing agreement to run a fast-food joint for Company A on certain (quite extensive) terms. But Company A could later change that contract’s terms without requiring any sign-off from Company B. It was essentially sharecropping (Callaci more politely likens it to tenant farming), wherein Company B, after being sucked dry by Company A, eked out razor-thin profit margins by squeezing employees. Company A didn’t have to care very much about whether Company B was profitable because it took its money off the top.

Granted, there have been a few franchisee success stories wherein Company B purchased multiple franchises and scaled up sufficiently to earn a real profit. But most Company Bs are single-restaurant operations that barely get by. Callaci quotes one franchise consultant describing the sort of franchisee Company A was looking for:

An entrepreneur makes the worst franchisee. You might think that they would do well, but it is just the opposite. For one thing, they’ll never listen to you.… You don’t want any creative thinkers, either. Again, these people will not follow your system, and instead they’ll look for ways to do their own thing. You want someone who follows the rules.

Ouch.

Fast-food franchising became the behemoth it is today because of an FTC rule in 1979 that gave Company A a get-out-of-antitrust-jail-free card so long as Company A was fully transparent to Company B up front about what a terrible deal it was agreeing to. Franchising also got a boost from the adoption of the “consumer welfare standard,” which said antitrust violations occurred only if consumers were harmed. If franchisees or burger-flippers were harmed, it didn’t matter.

Today the consumer welfare standard is on its way out, but that transition is not happening quickly. Fast-food franchisors used to argue that it didn’t matter how much Company B abused its workers because they were just kids working after-school jobs. But that stopped being true some time ago. Now fast-food employees are mostly grown-ups, often with families, and their best recourse, if they can’t make ends meet, is to go on welfare. Trump’s proposed joint-employer rule will impoverish these workers even more.

“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, America is safer than it has been in over a century,” a White House press release declared in January, claiming the “monumental turnaround” stemmed from Trump “reversing the chaos and carnage unleashed by Radical Left Democrats” and by his administration “ridding the streets of savage criminal illegal aliens, backing law enforcement, and bringing back order where incompetent Democrat politicians surrendered to anarchy and despair.”

Putting aside the racism and xenophobia in that statement, the key word is “reversing.” The administration has been selling hard the idea that Trump, who ran in part on a law-and-order platform, has stepped in and calmed the chaos of our cities, restoring peace to streets made unsafe by naïve Democrats who care more about protecting undocumented immigrants than American citizens. Last week, Trump crowed on Truth Social, “D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, all down to record lows, and quickly!”

He and his acolytes not only are taking credit for the drop in crime, but using it to excuse or hand-wave away a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to ICE raids that continue to break up families and trample on human rights. They even use it to rebut critiques that have no relation to public safety.

In a recent appearance on ABC’s The View, Vice President JD Vance responded to questions about the administration’s whitewashing of U.S. history and its efforts to dilute minority voting power by arguing that it was actually doing more for minorities because crime in D.C., whose population is around 42 percent Black, is down. And FBI Director Kash Patel, during a Senate hearing last month, responded to a question about his indecorous behavior at the recent Winter Olympics—where he chugged a beer with the U.S. men’s hockey team—by holding up a sheet of arrest and crime stats, stating that the murder rate had fallen around 20 percent last year. (The following day, he was busted by MS NOW for inflating those arrest numbers.)

But guess who’s actually responsible for the drop in violent crime? Democrats, by and large—and it predates the Trump administration.

Last September, Trump woke up and fired off the following message on Truth Social: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” That’s not true, but no matter. Trump was going to send in the National Guard to clean things up. “We’re going in,” he told the press later that day. “This isn’t a political thing. I have an obligation. When 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks, and 75 are shot with bullets, there’s no place in the world, including—you can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you would think of—they don’t even come close to this. Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now.”

Sure enough, a month later, he sent guardsmen into Chicago and kept them there for three months before the Supreme Court intervened.

I’m not going to argue that Chicago hasn’t had a crime problem, but the data is very clear: The city has been getting dramatically safer. After hitting a quarter-century peak of 804 murders in 2021, the number fell to 719 in 2022, 623 in 2023, 587 in 2024, and 416 last year. The city not only halved its murder rate in four years, but hit its lowest number since 1965. This was likely achieved in part through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s restructuring of the Chicago Police’s detective bureau, his appointment of an effective superintendent in Larry Snelling, and the increased spending and attention given to mental health care and crime prevention programs.

Baltimore witnessed an even more remarkable drop, going from 334 murders in 2022 to 262 in 2023, 202 in 2024, and finally 133 in 2025—a 60 percent decline in just three years. Mayor Brandon Scott, who took office in late 2020, has focused on getting guns off the street and supporting community programs, which target the young people most prone to join gangs and commit violence, providing them with mentors and resources to prevent crimes from ever happening.

As for Washington, D.C., which Trump claims to have singlehandedly made safe by deploying the National Guard, the capital did see a 32 percent reduction in homicides from 2024 to 2025. But this followed from the previous year, when the city hit a 30-year low in violent crime, including a 32 percent decline in murders from 2023 to 2024, long before Trump’s troops arrived. Like Chicago and Baltimore, D.C.’s mayor over this period, Muriel Bowser, was a Democrat.

These drops are actually part of a larger national trend. Homicides have been falling across the nation since Covid—that is, since well before Trump’s second administration. The greatest decreases have been in cities, and 34 of America’s 40 largest cities are run by “Radical Left Democrats,” as Trump would put it. While the Covid pandemic may have fueled an aberrantly high rate, there’s also no doubt that crime fell drastically under President Joe Biden, and experts, such as Ben Struhl of the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab, credit Biden-era community-based violence intervention programs, or CVI programs, for making a major difference. “The evidence is strong,” he told The New York Times, “for citywide strategies that contain these programs.” These include community funding programs established in Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

Over $325 billion of ARPA’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package went directly to state, local, and tribal governments. The Biden administration encouraged grant recipients to use some of these funds on public safety, and these governments responded by injecting over $10 billion toward that purpose—not just for enforcement efforts, but for proven CVI programs.

Many cities put this to great effect. The most powerful example may be Boston, which is experiencing its lowest crime rate in nearly seven decades under Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu. Police Commissioner Michael Cox largely credited the city’s CVI tactics, declaring, “The Boston Police Department continues to rely on the community as our most valued partner in public safety in the city.” That effort has included over 4,000 officer-attended community events and new programs to empower young people and stop crime before it happens.

Adding to ARPA’s impact, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act not only increased funding for prevention programs, but expanded access to mental health facilities, strengthened background checks for gun purchases, and closed the “dating loophole” that allowed perpetrators of domestic violence to get guns.

This is all libtard propaganda, though, if you ask the White House. When The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky dared in February to suggest that Biden’s legislation helped reduce murders, deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson called the claim “absurd,” insisting that “crime is dropping because of President Trump’s law-and-order policies. Any suggestion otherwise is simply not based in reality.”

The irony is surely lost on her that the most lawless administration in American history, led by the most criminal U.S. president ever, is trying to take credit for a crime drop that it’s had little or nothing to do with. But that is the reality. The “carnage and chaos” around this country is being largely caused by Trump and his goons, and there is no bigger “hellhole” in America right now than that white neoclassical building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the one with the literal hole right next to it.

For most people, one of the highest-funded police departments in the country suing its own city for $67.6 million would sound absurd. In St. Louis, it is reality. This spring, the state-controlled St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners filed a lawsuit claiming that tens of millions of dollars from the city’s settlement with the National Football League over the departure of the Rams should be diverted to the police department. The board argued that the settlement funds, along with city reserves, should count as “general revenue” under Missouri law, which would require the city to divert 25 percent of the settlement to policing under a 2025 law.

Earlier this month, a judge rejected that argument, ruling that money received and accounted for in prior years does not suddenly become current-year revenue simply because the police department wants access to it. But the board, joined by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, intends to appeal the ruling.

After the unexpected windfall from the Rams lawsuit, city officials and residents spent years debating how to use the money. Under Board Bill 22, which is advancing through the city’s Board of Aldermen, the funds would go to repairing homes damaged by last year’s tornado, helping displaced residents find housing, demolishing unsafe buildings, rebuilding North St. Louis neighborhoods, repairing sidewalks and streets, upgrading aging water infrastructure, redeveloping vacant properties, and supporting small businesses. The settlement is a rare opportunity to make investments that cities often struggle to afford through ordinary annual budgets, but the police board’s position is that tens of millions of those dollars should be diverted to policing instead. The consequence of a board win in the lawsuit would be less money for rebuilding neighborhoods and more money for an institution that already consumes nearly a third of the city’s general revenue—and generates millions more in legal liabilities, settlements, judgments, and overtime costs.

The details are specific to St. Louis, but the underlying dynamic is far more widespread. The lawsuit offers a revealing look at the extraordinary fiscal and political power police departments enjoy in U.S. cities. At a time when local governments are struggling to fund schools, parks, housing programs, public health initiatives, transit systems, and basic infrastructure, a police department that already consumes a substantial portion of municipal resources is attempting to use the courts to suck even more funding away from other city services.

The board is pursuing this funding shift even as taxpayers already bear an enormous range of police-related costs that rarely appear in discussions about police budgets. When politicians and police advocates talk about police spending, they usually mean appropriations. They point to the department’s annual budget and argue that officers need more personnel, more equipment, or higher salaries. But policing’s true price tag extends far beyond the amount formally allocated to a department each year.

Cities also pay for police misconduct settlements. From judgments entered against officers and departments for excessive force to outside counsel hired to defend misconduct suits, to litigation arising from unconstitutional arrests, wrongful imprisonment, and protest crackdowns, the public bears the consequences of police misconduct long after the underlying incident has faded from public attention.

In St. Louis, those costs have been substantial. The city has paid millions of dollars in police misconduct settlements and judgments over the last decade. For example, it paid approximately $5 million to undercover officer Luther Hall after he was beaten by fellow officers during protests following the acquittal of former officer Jason Stockley. Hall was a St. Louis police officer working undercover when members of the department’s notorious “Civil Disobedience Team” attacked him, leaving him with serious injuries. A jury later awarded Hall nearly $24 million in damages against one of the officers involved. The city also paid millions more to settle claims arising from an infamous “kettling” operation in which officers indiscriminately arrested protesters, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders. Publicly documented misconduct settlements and judgments alone amount to tens of millions of dollars.

The department has other significant expenses outside of its annual budget. Recent city budget records show policing already consumes close to 30 percent of St. Louis’s general revenue. Meanwhile, police overtime spending has repeatedly blown past budgeted amounts, costing taxpayers millions more than anticipated.

Yet none of those costs seem to matter when police officials describe the department’s financial situation. The board’s position is effectively that no matter how much policing already costs the public, the police department is entitled to more. That attitude has become even more striking since Missouri restored state control over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in 2024.

Supporters of state control argued that local officials could not be trusted to prioritize public safety, and claimed the solution was to exclude key decisions from the oversight of the majority-Democrat city government and place them in the hands of a board appointed by the majority-Republican state government. Under this arrangement, local taxpayers fund the police department but have little control over how that money is spent. When disputes with the city government arise, the board can turn to state officials and the courts to extract additional resources. This current litigation is an example of that dynamic in action.

Taxpayers are effectively paying both sides of the dispute, funding the police board’s effort to obtain more money while simultaneously financing the city’s effort to defend itself. At the same time the board has been pursuing $67.6 million from the Rams settlement, it has also proposed double-digit raises for command staff. The proposal includes raises of 16 percent for lieutenants, 18 percent for captains, 20 percent for majors, and 22 percent for lieutenant colonels. City officials have warned that because of pay-parity requirements, the proposal could trigger nearly $6 million in additional spending when corresponding raises for firefighters are included.

Every dollar directed toward one function of government is a dollar unavailable for another. That reality applies to housing departments, health departments, libraries, schools, sanitation services, and parks; but in cities across the country, police institutions are often treated as exempt from the tradeoffs that govern every other part of municipal government.

Across the country, police unions and departments operate as political actors whose primary objective is securing ever-greater fiscal protection from democratic accountability. When cities attempt to reallocate funds or increase oversight, police organizations mobilize and aim the familiar “weak on crime” rhetoric unrelentingly at any politician who threatens their dominance. Nearly every other public institution is expected to justify its spending, but police budgets are often treated as presumptively legitimate and perpetually insufficient.

Public school teachers pay for basic classroom supplies out of their pockets, libraries have to scrape and beg for every scrap of funding, and public infrastructure wastes away, while any attempt to rightsize the police budget is treated like a five-alarm fire. This political asymmetry helps explain why police budgets have often remained resilient even in periods of fiscal stress. It also helps explain why a police board could look at a major municipal settlement and conclude that the money should belong to them.

The fight over this $67.6 million is about much more than a budget formula. The lawsuit is a test of whether city residents can decide how to spend their own money or whether the police’s trump card will continue to drain communities of vital services. And the implications are nationwide. For years, debates about policing have focused on questions of crime, accountability, and public safety. The St. Louis lawsuit highlights a different question that deserves equal attention: How much public money is enough?

The answer from the police board is pretty simple. Whatever the city has, the police should get more of it. Everyone else can go without.

Donald Trump lost three big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. His appeal of E. Jean Carroll’s verdict failed. He was blocked from firing a Federal reserve official. And most important, the court upheld the counting of late-arriving mail ballots. He ranted wildly over these losses. On the last one he exploded in a long and angry tirade, seething over the “powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country” and demanding again that Republicans pass onerous voter suppression. It’s clear why: This deals a major blow to Trump-GOP hopes of stealing the midterms by invalidating untold numbers of votes. Yet Trump won big at the court, too, securing the power to fire independent regulators at will. We talked to Lisa Graves, a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel who writes about the Supreme Court. We discuss what the ruling on mail-balloting does, why it will thwart a major piece of the Trump-GOP election-rigging scheme, how Trump and the Supreme Court are teaming up to empower themselves at the expense of Congress, and how a future Democratic Congress can fight back. Listen to this episode here.

Republicans face a brutal midterm election cycle. President Donald Trump is plumbing unprecedented lows. Their House majority is essentially gone. Even the Senate is far more competitive than it has any right to be. So pretend for a moment you’re a Republican strategist trying to find some reason for optimism, some way to stem the blue tide. You might push Congress to pass popular legislation…

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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. Thanks, GOP: Student borrowers face massive bills this week Can’t afford school, food, or housing. Is this the “American Dream”? The legality and inhumanity of 2 new Supreme Court rulings A look at the many ways the highest court has screwed us all.

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | The legality and inhumanity of 2 new Supreme Court rulings…

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The White House’s July 4 celebration is about to blow the ceiling off of Washington—and not in a good way.

Government workers were spotted by independent journalist Amanda Moore on Monday using forklifts to move pallets full of fireworks around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s semiquincentennial.

The location was not an oddity, as the federal government has traditionally chosen the Reflecting Pool as its primary launch site. What is exceptionally unusual is the amount of firepower behind the 250th celebration.

Donald Trump promised earlier this month that he would launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026. By the numbers, it’s not even close: A typical July 4 show in the nation’s capital uses roughly 17,000 to 20,000 shells for a 17-minute show, according to figures collected by The Washington Post.

This year, the Freedom 250 celebration has proposed a record-shattering 40-minute display beginning at 10:30 p.m. that will use more than 860,000 explosives. They’ll be set off along the Reflecting Pool, as well as in West Potomac Park and on eight barges on the Potomac River.

Pyrotecnico, the Pennsylvania-based vendor responsible for the show, told the Post that it would “not only” be a “once-in-a-generation patriotic spectacle but a landmark moment in fireworks history.”

The previous record was held by Manila in the Philippines, which earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.

But rules around Washington’s celebration are likely to make the spectacle an unpleasant evening for local spectators. The Department of Homeland Security has classified the ceremony as a National Special Security Event, the same security classification used for presidential inaugurations, since Trump is expected to deliver remarks in person ahead of the display.

That will forbid a long list of typical July 4 accoutrements, such as chairs, coolers, balls, frisbees, aerosols, metal or glass containers, lighters, vapes, and even spray sunscreen, reported WTOP News.

Beyond that, federal workers will also be fighting Mother Nature, which is expected to shatter weather records by bringing triple-digit temperatures to Washington amid a historic heat wave this weekend.

President Donald Trump launched into a rant about communism as the biggest threat to the United States, after being triggered by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Speaking to reporters in the White House, Trump was asked whether he was concerned by Mamdani assenting to be made the “poster child” for socialism.

“I think it’s a big threat to our nation, actually, because it’s not socialism, it’s really communism,” Trump said.

“I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11th. It includes the, uh, Pearl Harbor attack. I think this is the biggest threat,” Trump said. “People will smile when I say that, but the smart people are gonna say, ‘You know, he’s probably right.’ It’s basically introducing communism into the United States of America.”

Reporter: Mamdani said he was open to being the poster child for socialist candidates.

Trump: It's really communism. I think it's the biggest threat to our nation since our founding—that includes World War 1, World War 2, September 11th. It includes the Pearl Harbor attack . I… pic.twitter.com/NR3p3CZ9r0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

Clearly, Trump needs a bit of a history lesson. “Who’s gonna tell him about World War Two?” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote on X.

Does Trump honestly think communism is the biggest threat to the U.S.? The president is obviously rattled by all of Mamdani’s recent victories in New York City—and his growing popularity with voters.

Last week, Trump had a meltdown after a slate of democratic socialist candidates endorsed by Mamdani won their primary elections in New York.

The president also fumed after the city’s Rent Guidelines Board passed a rent freeze, enabling Mamdani to make good on one of his key campaign promises, help tenants living in the city’s nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments, and get under the skin of a former NYC slumlord.

Remember when it seemed like the most monstrous, unprecedented corruption was that, during his first term, President Donald Trump stomped all over the Emoluments Clause by owning a hotel where eager oligarchs and hangers-on could pay to stay? Doesn’t that just seem quaint by comparison to the orgy of corruption that is Trump’s second term? In the latest bit of grift, we’ve got another…

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President Donald Trump took a little tour of his plethora of hideous pet projects around Washington, D.C., over the weekend. According to The Associated Press, he “surveyed several of his construction projects around the nation’s capital,” which is something we now pretend is totally normal for the president to do. After his field trip, Trump went on Truth Social to tout his little golf…

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