The New Republic

President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair was off to a rocky start.

Dozens of attendees Wednesday were seen flocking toward the exits in the middle of Trump’s address, which was meant to kick-start the two-week event.

Crowds flock towards the exit in the middle of Trump's speech. pic.twitter.com/bM3DPhsM4M

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) June 25, 2026

Rather than celebrating America’s 250th anniversary during his speech, Trump chose to focus on the last two years of his disastrous presidency, the BBC reported. Within half an hour of the president beginning to speak, the crowd had thinned out significantly, according to The Bulwark’s Jared Poland.

And one person was even spotted sleeping.

Trump’s snooze-worthy speech comes after several musical performers pulled out—leaving FBI Director Kash Patel’s country singer girlfriend with a great new gig. Trump’s kick-off event also featured several military flyovers and music provided by the U.S. Army Band Downrange. The president delivered a brief, albeit highly partisan address, which finished after just 30 minutes.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 25 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 privately raged at Republican senators during a lunch on Wednesday. He declared he won’t sign a bill reducing housing costs for the American people until Republicans end the filibuster and pass a vile piece of voter suppression legislation first. This shocked Trump’s own advisors and angered Republicans who see it as undermining their hopes in the midterms.

What’s striking about all this is that ordinarily a president would let members of his own party get distance from him in order to survive the elections. But he can’t do that. And he’s likely going to be the one who gets screwed by this. We’re talking about all of it with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a good piece digging deep into Trump’s narcissism as the through line to all his current foibles. Amanda, good to have you back on as always.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump was expected to sign this housing bill bringing down costs, and instead he tweeted the following: “Today’s housing news conference and signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE America Act, which I consider to be a national emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Amanda, the SAVE Act would probably disenfranchise millions and millions of people. The real national emergency here is that Trump’s deep unpopularity will cost his party one or both chambers of Congress. This isn’t subtle, is it?

Marcotte: No, not even slightly. I’m beginning to think he actually genuinely believes that the SAVE Act is what’s going to save the Republican Party in the midterm elections. And I don’t see that that’s necessarily true, because it’s got these voter ID restrictions that are so severe that it seems to me the only way you may even be able to successfully vote is if you have a passport, which I feel benefits college-educated urban voters the most of all—who tend to be Democrats.

Sargent: Right. I mean, Republicans don’t want this thing to pass for a reason, and it’s not because they altruistically really want people to vote.

Marcotte: We know for a fact that Republicans in the past have been all over the map when it comes to Trump’s fantasies about stealing elections. And he really—I think he doesn’t just want to steal elections because he thinks it’s the only way he’s going to win. I think he just really likes the idea of stealing elections. I think Donald Trump would rather cheat to win than just win outright. It just gets him off somehow.

And so he’s gotten really fixated on the SAVE America Act, and he just cannot understand that it is not at all the slam dunk for Republicans that he thinks it is.

Sargent: I agree. I think that Donald Trump sees cheating as another form of winning, as another form of getting over. But let’s put off that for a second. Again and again we’ve learned that Republicans simply did not have the votes to end the filibuster and pass this voter suppression bill. And yet, I want to highlight something from Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio. He reports that in this private meeting, Trump was in a sour mood throughout, and he again demanded that Republicans pass the so-called SAVE Act. And get this—according to this reporter, nobody pushed back.

Amanda, just to reiterate, it’s typical for presidents who are this unpopular to let members of his party get some distance from him, but Trump won’t allow that because it would constitute an admission that he’s unpopular, and that can’t be allowed. And on top of that, these Republicans won’t challenge him on this. What do you make of that?

Marcotte: It’s so ironic, isn’t it? He can’t admit he’s unpopular, but he’s still pushing legislation that’s premised on the idea that he’s so unpopular that he can’t win an election without it. But yes, I think it’s sad at this point in time that Republicans are afraid of at least being singled out as being anti-Trump.

They voted in the Senate to stop his powers, to continue to fight the war in Iran—even though I think that’s kind of toothless at this point. But they do resist him sometimes, but always with this sort of eyeball towards never catching his evil eye, never being seen by him, or by the average Fox News viewer, as resisting Donald Trump. Because he still has this intense hold over the party even as he’s losing all of his power everywhere else in the American public.

Sargent: It’s a really interesting dichotomy. And to go to your point—literally minutes before he tweeted this announcement that he won’t sign the bill until Republicans suppress millions of votes, he tweeted this: “My real poll numbers are the highest they have ever been. Thank you.”

So one minute his poll numbers are showing that he’s astronomically popular, and then the next minute he’s saying, goddamn it, please prevent lots and lots of people from voting, otherwise we’re going to get killed. There you have it right there, right? That’s all of it right there.

Marcotte: One of the wildest things about watching Donald Trump in the second term is seeing how much worse his narcissism has gotten. I didn’t think it was possible, honestly, in the first term, but the spiral that he’s in—he’s talked himself into incoherence. I don’t know if it’s that he’s 80 years old and he’s just falling apart, or if it’s just that the stress of the situation is getting to him, or if it’s a combination of those two things.

But he ping-pongs wildly between the two problems that narcissists have, which is this overblown sense of self and this constant insecurity. And so it is just that. Like, I can’t win this election without cheating—I’m also the most popular president of all time. And it’s like, you’ve got to choose, man.

Sargent: Yeah, well—you’d think, although maybe MAGA doesn’t have to choose. Let’s listen to MAGA Senator Tommy Tuberville talk about Trump’s demand that Republicans pass this voter suppression legislation.

Tommy Tuberville (voiceover): If we don’t do something with the filibuster and we don’t get things passed, it’ll be the last time we’ll have a Republican president or Republican Senate or a House. That’s how fast this country’s going down to communism. And we need to stop it. We can stop it. It’s—the ball’s in our court. President Trump said it, ball’s in our court.

Sargent: I mean, there you have it, Amanda. Things are so bad that Republicans will never win an election again if they can’t figure out how to prevent millions and millions of Americans from voting. Could that be clearer?

Marcotte: This was a wild interview for a couple of reasons. One, the word “communist” is just a blunt dog whistle to mean, you know, non-white conservatives—not conservatives, rather. He’s using demographic change as a scare point. So there’s genuinely white supremacy right there. It’s right under the surface. And he would probably argue with me, but I think it’s communists, really communists. They keep putting Zohran Mamdani’s face up when they say the word communist. So we all know what’s going on there.

And two—if you are in a democratic system, and I know that Tommy Tuberville is not the brightest of guys, but if you’re in a democratic system and you can’t win an election, too bad, so sad. Your job is to change your party so that you can win elections. And it’s also delusional.

I mean, unfortunately, Republicans are the ones who have an unfair advantage in our electoral system. They’re the ones who punch way above their weight, who often lose the popular vote and yet somehow still win elections because of our Electoral College and Senate disproportionality and other problems like that. So this entire thing was just bonkers.

But it goes to show that they’re trying to whip the base into a state of hysteria over this. And you do have to wonder why, because it feels like it only is to please Trump—because the voters that Tommy Tuberville is speaking to are some of the people that would probably be disenfranchised.

Working-class white, suburban white, rural white voters are not likely to have the level of ID that is required to vote under this system. Who has their birth certificate in their house? I do. But I’m a college-educated urban voter. I’m the kind of person who has that ID.

Sargent: I want to highlight a couple of other tidbits. The Post reports that this announcement surprised even Trump’s own advisors, who had spent the morning touting this legislation. And the Times reports that Republicans were shocked by this announcement, and even that they regard it as an effort to undermine their chances in the midterms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune “appeared almost dazed,” The Times says.

I just want to reiterate—Republicans know that this is absolutely terrible for them, yet they still can’t say it that way. They have to dance around the fact that this absolute madman is fucking them in every possible way he can.

Marcotte: It really gets to the heart of a conflict he’s having with the GOP during the midterms, which is they understand they can’t steal this election. They understand that they have to win seats by appealing to voters and trying to get votes. And so the whole point of this housing bill was to try to address the affordability concerns that are motivating voters to turn against Republicans in this election. It’s very standard politics, right?

And Donald Trump’s attitude is like, why bother with all that stuff? I don’t care about any of that. And he’s almost mad at voters for making him have to care about their stupid poor people concerns about affording housing and gasoline. And so he’s just like, why don’t we just steal it? Can we just please steal it?

But they can’t steal it. This bill is not a way to steal it. There’s not a mechanism to steal it. And he just can’t get past the idea that there’s got to be a way to steal it.

And we know that he thinks like this because this is what caused him to behave the way he did in the run-up to the riot on January 6. He just can’t get it out of his head that there’s got to be a cheat code, there is an “I win” button hidden somewhere.

Sargent: Right. I really like that idea that he just wants to cheat his way through rather than change the policies and change the approach. Because again, I think that gets at the deep narcissism here, because doing that would be an admission that he’s failed. And that isn’t allowed.

And yet at the same time, the need to cheat to win is also an admission that he’s failed, but he’s too narcissistic to admit that to himself. It’s like there are so many layers of narcissism here, you can’t even penetrate it. And that’s sort of the nature of narcissism, right? It’s like the turtles going on top of the turtles. It’s just a bottomless pit, in essence, isn’t it?

Marcotte: Yeah, they get caught in these cycles of shame and bombast. And unfortunately for Republicans, he’s caught them all up in it. But I think that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group of people. Here’s the thing—if they held hands and jumped together, they’d be fine. And in fact, in a sense, they’re going to have to do that on the SAVE America Act. It’d be wild if they try to pass it just to placate him.

But anybody who’s ever dealt with a narcissist in real life knows that you can’t just constantly placate them. You eventually have to give them the boot, or at least set a strong boundary with them, because they will continue to do this stuff. And I don’t know, these Republicans just can’t do it because they know he’ll single out anyone who turns against him. But again, the answer to that is solidarity—not to sound like a leftist.

Sargent: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Marcotte: Always to sound like a leftist, actually.

Sargent: Well, I just want to highlight how this is backfiring for Trump in every conceivable way. It shows the voters that Trump doesn’t care about people’s economic struggles, and that will drive down his approval, which is the coin of the realm in midterms. It prevents Republicans from getting distanced from the unpopular president.

And all of this makes it more likely, rather than less, that Trump and the GOP lose control of one or both chambers of Congress, which means investigations of Trump. His own narcissism is fucking him, basically.

Marcotte: Every single time. I mean, it’s just like the Reflecting Pool, right? He got it in his head that the way to prove his greatness was to fix this pool. And instead he made it much, much worse. And now he’s panicking and denying what everyone can see, which is that he failed miserably. And we’re getting a preview from that of what’s going to happen after they lose the midterms, I suspect.

Sargent: Yes, that’s going to be really interesting. So Amanda, how do you see this playing out? I mean, I really hate to dismiss the possibility that they could pass the SAVE Act. Do you think it’s possible? And if not, how do you see it unfolding?

Marcotte: I agree. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility, because the lengths that the GOP will go to to placate Trump and his ridiculous ideas have been fairly bottomless. That said, they usually tend to be more passive than active when they disagree with him.

There’s a reason that he just goes around Congress to do things like start the Iran war—which is, he does still, I think, on some level understand that they might actually get in the way if they’re required to take action to do what he says. They’ll passively go along with it.

But I imagine whipping the votes on this is going to be really hard when you’re talking to congressional members who are like, look, dude, none of my voters have the level of ID that you expect. You’re going to ban all the married women from voting because their married name doesn’t match their birth certificate. The SAVE America Act is truly ridiculous. And I think that’s one of the obstacles here.

But they’re going to try to—I feel like we’re going to continue to see what’s happening, which is they’re not going to pass it, but they’re going to try to publicly placate him, because he’s also very shallow. And as long as you’re praising him and telling him he’s the greatest president of all time, he can be distracted, like a cat with a toy.

Sargent: Yes, and that’s the ultimate irony—that if Trump gets his way, it backfires even more dramatically for him and the GOP than if he doesn’t.

Marcotte: Yeah. But I mean, we should genuinely oppose this, because we really don’t want a system where only a small percentage of people can vote because they’re the kind of people who have all their paperwork in big files in their cabinet.

Sargent: No, a hundred percent. Well, we really got to hope it doesn’t pass—and it does look like it won’t pass. What do you think’s going to happen? How are you feeling about the midterms these days?

Marcotte: I feel like a lot of the people that are flirting with voting for the Democrat in red states will panic and at the last minute find their—”James Talarico said God is non-binary” excuse to vote for the Republican. So I’m always worried about that.

But the very fact that there are people in places like Texas and Iowa considering switching their vote from Trump to a Democrat for this midterm election is pretty significant. And I think that it’s possible that we win the Senate. I think we’re definitely going to win the House.

Sargent: It sure looks that way right now. And I got to say, Trump is doing everything possible to drive his own approval down as much as he possibly can, which I guess—thanks, Donald. Amanda Marcotte, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Republican senators proved yet again that their spines are made of pudding on Wednesday, rejecting a resolution to limit President Donald Trump’s war powers, the AP reported.

The flip-flop came after Trump blew up at GOP senators for voting “yes” on a similar bill just one day earlier. He got into a shouting match with Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, calling him a “lunatic” for voting with Democrats to pass the legislation.

Cassidy told reporters after the meeting that he had lost his temper. According to Cassidy, he berated Trump for not being clear with Congress, and with Americans, about what’s going on in Iran.

But it turns out Cassidy, who lost his primary election last month to a Trump-backed opponent, just needed a little hand holding. After the heated exchange, Cassidy was invited to a personal briefing at the White House from JD Vance and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, according to the AP. He then went back to Capitol Hill and promptly voted the other way on a nearly identical war powers bill.

“I want to thank Vice President Vance and Special Envoy Witkoff for the thorough briefing this afternoon on Iran. I appreciate the quick invitation to the White House to address many of my concerns,” Cassidy posted on X.

Republican Senator Rand Paul also switched his vote. Paul, who has voted multiple times with Democrats to block the war in Iran, voted “present” as “a way to give the President more space and leverage to negotiate a lasting peace,” he posted on X.

Trump celebrated the news on Truth Social, thanking Senators John Thune, Lindsey Graham, and Bernie Moreno, and noting that Cassidy and Paul had changed their votes.

“This vote puts Iran on notice!” he wrote.

Ultimately, the back-and-forth on the bill doesn’t change much: Both votes were largely symbolic, and neither resolution would have had the power to actually force Trump to change his actions in Iran.

But this vote symbolizes something we already knew: that even the Republicans who claim to have principles will gladly sacrifice them at the altar of Trump.

Madeleine Rotzler’s new film, O Horizon, offers an odd vision of dystopia, even as it’s billed as a “sci-fi comedy drama.” The film itself is not always much to look at, but sometimes a film in its very strangeness can reveal a great deal, precisely because of all that it obscures. After all, so much of what matters these days is happening out of sight, suppressed by algorithms, hostile media, and even more hostile governments, and increasingly one must learn to look under the surface of simple things. Rotzler’s film gets its title from the layer of decomposed plant matter on the forest floor, the “O horizon,” but it’s what’s lying beneath O Horizon that truly matters.

In a near-future New York, Abby (Maria Bakalova) works in a neuroscience lab tracking the brain waves of monkeys, struggling to deal with the recent death of her father, played by David Strathairn. An intrusive, Siri-like AI assistant encourages her to visit a shabby-looking tech start-up called Seeking a Friend Store; there, a lone employee played by Adam Palley offers to recreate someone you’ve lost or are missing. After uploading a parcel of photos, documents, and other archival material to its servers, the company creates a digital avatar that you can call on your phone whenever you like. After some initial reluctance, Abby creates a digital version of her dead dad, and soon begins talking to it as a means of managing her grief as she tries to go forward in her life.

As an AI chatbot, her dead father acts like all AI chatbots: supportive, deferential, complimentary. The AI is always there with a new prompt to fill up dead air (“Tell me something fun that happened today,” “What’re you up to tonight? Having fun?”) or a little ego boost (“Dr. Williams is so lucky to have you. You’re excellent.… Somehow you’ve managed to develop excellence in all that you do. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”). It’s always working to keep her engaged and affirmed, and anytime there’s any friction between the two of them, it backs off, eager to keep her on the line. If Strathairn’s dialogue wasn’t actually written by ChatGPT, the script does an excellent job of imitating it, and the bot’s lines have all the hallmarks of an LLM: cloying and irritatingly sentimental.

These are strange scenes. For narcissists, incels, and sociopaths, the appeal of a chatbot is that it will always tells them exactly what they want to hear, so you can imagine how uncomfortable it is to listen to such a thing telling someone else what they want to hear. As the platitudes and clichés dribble out of Abby’s phone, not even an actor with Strathairn’s delivery can save them.

We never learn how much Abby pays for her subscription, but in real life these businesses have a financial incentive to get their users hooked, so to speak, on their product. As Mary-Frances O’Connor, professor of clinical psychology at University of Arizona, told Scientific American’s David Berreby in 2025, the danger here is that people struggling with grief can be uniquely vulnerable to Big Tech’s long-honed engagement and gamification strategies. Researcher Nore Lindemann has further noted that “users are likely to become dependent on their bots, which may make them susceptible to surreptitious advertising by deathbot providing companies and may limit their autonomy.”

That vulnerability offers real possibilities. For emerging companies like You, Only Virtual, HereAfter AI, Super Brain, and Silicon Intelligence, grief represents an exciting new market. Researchers are already beginning to identify the obvious financial incentives for such companies to alter the “informational bodies” of the dead to increase engagement and revenue. Rather than moving people through the process of grieving, AI companies would seem to benefit more from keeping them in the phase of acute bereavement, distorting their memories to give them what they want, all the while promising the false allure of being perpetually free of loss. Indeed, one wonders if Abby’s dad was really this asinine in life, or if Seeking a Friend Store has already tweaked his personality to keep her paying subscription fees.

While Rotzler’s movie doesn’t much explore the ethical implications of what it might mean to get addicted to a product that promises to take the pain away, it does depict what a world without pain might look like. And it turns out to be a truly banal one. For it’s not just the dialogue. Strathairn’s chatbot doesn’t push back or try to challenge or trouble Abby in any way, and strangely, O Horizon’s plot does not try to challenge or trouble the viewer, either. Throughout its hundred-minute run time, hardly anything happens. There is no real conflict, no real rising tension, no climax, no real denouement.

O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback.

At one point, the AI develops the ability to call Abby of its own initiative—you think this may signal a turn in the narrative, some malevolent warning about technology getting out of control, but it doesn’t. At another point, Abby begins dating a man named Douglas (Avi Nash), and the viewer thinks maybe he will turn out to be a jerk, but he doesn’t. The viewer thinks perhaps her AI dead father will get jealous, or otherwise turn haywire. He doesn’t. You may think Abby will have to learn to let go of her father to be with her boyfriend, but she doesn’t! The few conflicts that do arise have such low stakes that they are resolved within minutes and forgotten almost immediately. No character conflict has any kind of lasting ramification or seems to matter for any serious length of time. Anytime it seems like there might be any kind of friction, the plot backs off.

It’s as if the story is as deferential and sycophantic as AI itself. O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback. It is a movie made by real humans, but it feels like it’s made by AI, made without an awareness of what makes film interesting or ultimately pleasurable. For one of the most basic reasons we experience narrative art, be it a film or a novel or a television show, is some kind of tension, some kind of drama. No one actually wants a smooth, flat surface. We do not want art to smile placidly back at us for one hundred minutes telling us we’re excellent, that the world is lucky to have us, that nothing matters.

We’ve known this for thousands of years; it’s one of the most basic lessons of Aristotle’s Poetics. Catharsis—the purging of negative emotions that happens through the experience of watching something difficult; of dealing with a character’s actual pain and suffering; of being engaged with issues of actual tension, drama, hardship, impossible decisions, insurmountable odds, tragedy, and resolve in the face of despair—matters not just because it allows us a safe venue to release these emotions, but because it gives us perspective on our own troubles and hardships. Grappling with pain through art is one of those very existential things that makes us human, that allows us to experience the world fresh and anew. That word itself—catharsis—has remained so elusive since Aristotle’s days, so hard to pin down, precisely because it’s hard to say exactly what it is we need from great art. There is no simple definition, no easy formula, no predictable algorithm that can deliver it to us. It seems cheesy to have to say this, but we live at a moment when AI-generated art that fails to deliver this is being passed off as legitimate, and sometimes just stating the obvious becomes an act of resistance against this dreck.

Dulled of sensation, the world of O Horizon is emptied. The same opiate that griefbots would offer the grieving, Rotzler’s narrative offers her viewers: soporific, painless.

In a strange way, the fantasy of painlessness is particularly fraught for Rotzler. Her previous films appeared under her maiden name, Sackler. Her grandfather, Raymond Sackler, was one of three brothers who founded Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company behind OxyContin; her father, Jonathan, sat on its board and was its vice president for years.

While Rotzler herself has never worked for Purdue Pharma, in 2023 Artnet reported that a number of the production crew of O Horizon became uncomfortable during filming, viewing Abby’s relationship with her father as being an autobiographical depiction of Rotzler’s relationship with her own father, who died in 2020, and an attempt to whitewash his image.

In the decades when Jonathan Sackler was involved with Purdue Pharma, it generated billions of dollars by distributing Oxycontin throughout the United States and abroad. In 2007, the company pleaded guilty to misleading the public about the addictive properties of OxyContin, and the year Jonathan died the company reached a settlement in which it admitted that for years it had “knowingly and intentionally conspired and agreed with others to aid and abet” doctors in dispensing the drug “without a legitimate medical purpose.” (The consulting firm McKinsey & Company additionally agreed in 2024 to a $650 million settlement for its work in helping “turbocharge” Purdue’s sales of OxyContin during the epidemic.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 1999 and 2018 alone, 450,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses.

The father of O Horizon is a kindly, generous man—a sculptor, a fan of David Bowie, and a reader of scientific journals. It was this depiction that apparently caused friction among the crew during filming. “The script is extremely parallel to Madeleine’s experience of the loss of her dad, and clearly very related to what he did with drugs,” set dresser Caroline Pigou told Artnet. “Everyone on the crew would talk about how fucked up and weird it was that this movie was getting made in the first place.”

Rotzler has insisted that the film is not autobiographical. “This film is about artificial intelligence and there are no parallels between my father or his work and the characters in the film,” she told Artnet through a representative. Fine. That’s her take. Still, the film’s theme of painlessness is one that resonates with the family business of selling pain relief; and the film’s obliviousness to the shallowness of the AI bot’s consolations echoes with Purdue’s years of denying the dangers of its opioids.

Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain.

It’s not the first time Rotzler has proven determined to ignore the ways in which her films might seem to audiences to be in conversation with her family’s scandals. In a New Yorker feature on her earlier work, the documentary It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It and the feature O.G., both filmed inside an actual penitentiary in Indiana, Nick Paumgarten wrote that “one might suppose that Sackler’s concern and sympathy for the incarcerated is some kind of expiation,” given that so many incarcerated Americans are there for opioid-related offenses, but she “thinks this is baloney.… It pains her to think that the perception of her project, and of the hard work of everyone involved, would be tainted in some way by her pedigree.” In Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe relates how Jeffrey Wright, the star of O.G., emailed her before the film opened, asking her to address the “elephant” in the room: why so many of the men were in the prison where they’d been filming. “You never spoke to me about any of that. I was aware and only once tried to broach the subject with you. You didn’t open up about it.” As the premiere approached, Wright wanted to know: “Do you think you should take into consideration that this will become part of the dialogue around these films?” According to Keefe, she never wrote Wright back.

If there’s an animating impulse in O Horizon beneath its facile resolution of grief, it’s denial: the steadfast inability to contemplate how this story of a daughter conjuring a smoother, simpler version of her late father might play to audiences who have followed years of news of the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers’ central role in it.

O Horizon is not much of a thing in and of itself. But it offers an almost perfect distillation of our relationship to pain in 2026. Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain, all the while completely misunderstanding what that pain is, why we suffer it, and what it means to actually endure it.

Rotzler’s uncle Richard Sackler once wrote of those overdosing from his company’s drug, “These are criminals.… Why should they be entitled to our sympathies?” Why indeed. I think of Susan Crathern, whose son Kevin broke two teeth on the playground when he was 10 and was given OxyContin for the pain, his mother assured by the dentist that it was not addictive. Ten years later, he died from an accidental overdose after years of struggling from addiction. In her 2020 testimony to Congress on the damage wrought by the opioid crisis, Crathern wrote: “In my mind his death is a truth that can’t be true.”

This is how grief actually is for too many people, down in the wreckage, where it is a paradox that can’t easily be solved, one that can’t be glibly assuaged with pabulum and clichés, a thing not to be solved with subscription fees, engagement algorithms, and prefabricated compliments but faced with rage and guilt and sorrow and carried every day without reprieve. For too many people’s lived reality, grief is the unimaginable weight of memories, the ugly truth that can’t be true. There’s no money to be made from it, so it gets hidden away, pushed down out of sight, past the detritus, down here, below the horizon.

President Donald Trump surprised just about everyone in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, when he announced on Wednesday that he was canceling an afternoon signing ceremony for the biggest housing bill to pass Congress in decades. He’s holding the bill hostage over his unreasonable demand that lawmakers first pass the Save America Act, the Republicans’ voter suppression bill, which doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate. As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a key supporter of the bill, said, “He could be over here trying to claim a victory lap. And instead, he’s saying no, no he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

The bill will automatically become law in ten days if Trump refuses to sign it. (He could also veto it, but it passed with veto-proof margins.) So one way or another, more than 60 measures will take effect with the goal of increasing housing by waiving some regulations, increasing grants to communities that encourage building, updating rules on manufactured homes, and preventing large investors from buying single-family homes. Much of the provisions were big asks from the abundance movement.

Proponents of these measures hope that they will increase housing supply and therefore lower prices, putting homeownership back within reach for middle-class families. But there’s a smaller provision that could be just as important. The bill includes pilot programs to address a gap in the housing market which keeps families from getting mortgages on already inexpensive homes because it’s often not profitable for lenders to issue smaller mortgages. Addressing this gap could bring the best idea of the abundance movement—that public policy should focus more on increasing housing supply—to distressed and rural communities where aging, inexpensive homes already exist.

The provisions deal with “small-dollar mortgages,” defined as those less than $100,000, for homes that are often called “naturally affordable”—which is to say, cheap. They’re often priced affordably because they’re small, old, in a less expensive neighborhood, or some combination of the three. Such homes are not a big part of the market, but they could be exactly what working-class families who want to move from renting to homeownership need, especially in certain areas of the country.

“These small-dollar, or low-cost, homes comprise only about 3 percent of active listings, that’s about 32,000 homes that are under $100,000 today,” said Aniket Mehrotra, a policy coordinator at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center​. “However, in rural areas of the country the share of active listings is greater.”

Yuliya Panfil, director of the Future of Land and Housing program at the nonpartisan think tank New America, calls this “affordable housing hiding in plain sight.”  While many homes are simply too expensive for low- and moderate-income families to buy, these are well within their price range but difficult if not impossible to get mortgages approved for. “The result of these often-invisible challenges is that millions of starter homes sit in a financing no-man’s-land — too complicated for most buyers to access and too overlooked by policymakers to fix,” Panfil wrote at Bloomberg CityLab. “We are struggling to build new homes fast enough as millions of existing affordable homes quietly go to waste.”

Researchers at The Urban Institute in 2018 documented the problems families face when trying to buy these less expensive homes. “Lenders weren’t originating small-dollar loans even where affordable properties existed, locking out working-class families not because of creditworthiness, but because the loan economics didn’t work for lenders,” said Alanna McCargo, a Senior Fellow for Inclusive capitalism at the Clinton Foundation and non-resident Fellow at the Urban Institute who worked on the original report. This dynamic keeps families out of homeownership, pushes them into less secure loans, or encourages them to buy more expensive homes they struggle to afford.

It’s unclear what banks need in order to issue more of these loans, so the bill creates pilot programs to study and implement possible fixes, including requiring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to study compensation rules and caps on fees to mortgage lenders to potentially encourage more small-dollar lending, and a Housing and Urban Development pilot program to increase access to these loans.

But encouraging more lending isn’t the only solution. Much of this housing stock is in smaller cities far from the booming coastal megalopolises where abundance proponents live, and the homes are also aging. Even if families find willing lenders to buy an older home, the houses may not appraise or pass inspection. Families already living in them are also often locked out of financing to make necessary repairs that would enable them to put their homes on the market again and move on, freeing them up for new families to buy.

The bipartisan housing bill only provides limited provisions on rehabilitating old homes, primarily for elderly and low-income homeowners, and doesn’t provide new funding for existing grant programs. “Focus on this bill is predominantly on building new housing,” Mehrotra said. “However, we have an aging housing stock in this country. The majority of our housing stock was built before 1980, which indicates that many homes are in need of repair, particularly in certain markets, like in rural areas, [and] in cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore, and so it is critical that we also prioritize home rehabilitation.” Developers are also often unwilling to renovate or rebuild older homes in neighborhoods where they can’t get their money back. Mehrotra said that proposed legislation to tackle that problem was not included in this bill but could be revisited in the future.

Still, Panfil’s colleague at New America, Sabiha Zainulbhai, called the measures “exciting progress on figuring out how to unlock this critical housing supply for first-time and low and moderate income buyers, especially at a time when homeownership is inaccessible for a growing segment of the population.”

There’s other work to be done on housing, of course, like more rental assistance for low-income families, which is a nonstarter in this GOP-controlled Congress. And while Trump sits on the housing bill, many American families have already given up on the homebuying dream because they simply can’t afford it. This bill won’t fix those problems overnight. “Implementation takes time, and families who need a small-dollar mortgage today and thousands of families already left behind by rising home prices over the past decade won’t benefit from this,” McCargo said. “But it’s a step in the right direction, and one we’ve been working toward for years.”

It’s rare for a judge to acknowledge that they are handing down a prison sentence for political reasons. But that is precisely what chief district judge Reed O’Connor stated from the bench in a North Texas federal courtroom this week, during the sentencing of eight defendants in one of the Prairieland cases, so named for the defendants’ participation in a July 4 demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Facility, a federal immigrant detention camp in Alvarado, Texas. In a hearing on Tuesday, as O’Connor handed down sentences of decades in prison, the judge said he was ordering the maximum allowed in each case because “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology,” according to a support committee for the defendants.

The bluntness of the sentiment struck some of the defendants’ supporters hard. “We’ve always known the U.S. government has punished dissent every chance possible, but for it to be so blatantly pointed out was such a hit,” said Kels Menchaca, a member of the DFW Support Committee, which provides practical support to the defendants and works to educate the public about these cases. The group is now preparing for the long-haul support the defendants will need over what may be decades in federal prison, pending appeals or possibly pardons. The Prairieland cases are an emergency in their own right, but they are also a warning. This is not the last case of dissent to be punished so severely by the Trump administration. Defending them could help us stop the next one.

The Prairieland cases should be understood as the government’s effort to heroize ICE in the face of community defense efforts to stop mass deportations, and to shift the blame for political violence from federal officers to the left. Last summer, in Los Angeles and other cities, people took to the streets in massive numbers to demand an end to the flood of federal officers assaulting and abducting people profiled as immigrants in chaotic operations that were often captured on video by teams working for the government. As people organized regular demonstrations at federal sites used for the mass detention of immigrants, Trump threatened to send in troops to stop them. No one knew how these events would escalate, but it was clear the administration was looking for scapegoats.

On July 4, 2025, community members held a demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Facility. As the demonstrators made noise and set off fireworks outside that night, hoping the people locked up inside would hear them, a few split off. A security booth and some employees’ cars were graffitied, and a security camera was broken. The detention center guards told the demonstrators to leave; most did. A police officer arrived on the scene, his weapon drawn. One of the remaining demonstrators was open-carrying a rifle. An officer was shot in the shoulder. He was briefly hospitalized and survived. Within hours, what followed was garnering breathless coverage in right-wing media as an antifa assault on a federal facility.

There was no such assault. But the facts weren’t enough to stop the government from punishing eight people with effective life sentences, convicting them of “providing material support to terrorists” for acts such as printing and distributing leftist zines, joining an anarchist book club, communicating on the same messaging app, or having visited the same shooting range. These people are now facing 30-, 50-, 70-, and 100-year prison sentences. “These are friends,” Menchaca said. “These are people’s family, and they’re being given extraordinary sentences for things that are supposed to be protected actions. Fireworks on the 4th of July being called explosives and terrorism? Political literature is something worth taking 30 years of someone’s life?”

In all, 21 people were arrested for their alleged connection to the Prairieland demonstration, some that night, but many much later. In a press release on July 8, ICE claimed that “nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons attacked the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility.” Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE, used the arrests to hammer home the administration’s narrative. “This is precisely what we have been warning against, as disinformation and dangerous politically motivated rhetoric spreads,” Lyons said. The department promised terrorism charges, and “vowed” to charge “anyone obstructing ICE operations or assaulting federal law enforcement officers.”

The government’s story diminished before any of the defendants made it to court. Multiple shooters became one, and up to 30 rounds fired dropped to less than a dozen, as Steven Monacelli found in an investigation for The Barbed Wire. Months passed before the defendants, some of whom remained in custody, were arraigned. But in that interval, the president issued an executive order claiming to designate “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” (there is no such designation), and signed a national security memo authorizing sweeping investigations for alleged “political violence” from the left. Finally, when grand jury indictments were made public, the official story had settled: The Department of Justice had taken down a “North Texas antifa cell” that had “created and distributed insurrectionary material called zines,” “dressed in ‘black bloc’—dark clothing with head and face coverings,” and used “an encrypted messaging app to coordinate with each other that had auto-delete functions.”

Now, just shy of one year after the demonstration, we are witnessing the part of the government’s narrative in which the administration thinks it has won. Its position is clear, Menchaca said: “Not allowing the government to abuse people will cost you most of your natural life. Not allowing the police to murder an unarmed protester fleeing means your life is now forfeit to the state.”

But since the Prairieland defendants were indicted and as their trials wound on, we’ve seen many of the government’s attempts to charge people for disrupting ICE operations fall apart, some in now high-profile scandals such as that involving the former Broadview Six, a group of demonstrators at an ICE facility near Chicago, who were indicted on charges of conspiracy to impede a federal agent. (The charges were dropped after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.) Still, such failures have not slowed the government down. Last week, 15 people in Minnesota were indicted on federal conspiracy charges related to allegedly impeding federal officers.

The lesson here is not that the Prairieland defendants did something uniquely dangerous, but that they faced the same political repression any number of us could. The government, Menchaca said, is “trying to set the stage to criminalize every person who doesn’t agree to their atrocities. And our loved ones are suffering for their compassion.”

It was rumored to have been made from the tree

Of the first spinning place. Some said the side

Of a Spanish slaver spit from the sea.

Others church bench, chunk of stage, courthouse wall.

A widow swore her grandfather had helped

Drag it from his swamped fields after a storm.

One leg longer than the others, it leaned

Left. It belonged to no one and was ours.

Years pressed down on it with tobacco ash, peach

Pits, coffee rings, the impress of elbows,

A knife-mark widened by a thousand thumbs.

You can’t run your hand across the surface

Without passing through three or four fables

And a splinter that always finds the hand.

Such a common thing in an uncommon

World: this table, so worn down that it shines.

There’s room here. There’s never any room here.

It’s hard to keep clean. We all eat off it.

The Supreme Court decided two cases on Tuesday that, at least at first glance, have nothing to do with one another. One involves the People’s Republic of China, Silicon Valley, and the Judiciary Act of 1789. The other involves Louisiana prisons, Rastafarian spiritual beliefs, and contract law. In both cases, however, are two shared and recurring impulses from the court’s conservative majority: a nearly boundless contempt for Congress as an institution.

The first case, Cisco Systems v. Doe, involves a group of plaintiffs who claim that the Chinese government has persecuted them for their religious beliefs. They filed lawsuits against Cisco, a major U.S. tech company, alleging that the company sold surveillance software to the Chinese government that was later used to surveil, torture, and otherwise abuse them.

In theory, no federal law is any more “constitutional” than the other. But laws from the First Congress tend to be seen as indicative of how the Constitution’s Framers intended the government to function. Among the early laws they passed was the Alien Tort Statute, or ATS, which allows federal courts to hear “any civil action” against a foreign national for any “tort” that was “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

Congress enacted the ATS as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789—the first federal law it enacted to structure the federal courts. Though it was only occasionally invoked in those courts until the 1980s, one might think that its founding-era pedigree might entitle it to a little more respect. Apparently not. The modern-day aversion to this longstanding law was on display in the 2004 case Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, a complex case about whether a man arrested by federal agents on drug charges could sue a Mexican national for temporarily apprehending him.

In his majority opinion, Justice David Souter wrote that the ATS “was originally understood to be available to enforce a small number of international norms that a federal court could properly recognize as within the common law enforceable without further statutory authority.” Those norms included “offenses against ambassadors, violation of safe conducts, and piracy.” Accordingly, he rejected Sosa’s more novel claim against Alvarez-Machain.

Does this mean that only that “small number” of claims described by Souter could be pursued under the ATS? Souter said no. He left open the possibility that the high court might recognize future implied claims beyond the more traditional ones. Justice Antonin Scalia took the opposite approach. He wrote in a partially dissenting opinion that he disagreed with the majority’s “reservation of a discretionary power in the federal judiciary to create causes of action for the enforcement of international-law-based norms.”

Scalia argued that this approach would “amount to judicial lawmaking” that the federal courts are “neither authorized nor suited to perform.” Souter, on the other hand, took a more deferential approach to the framework that Congress had created in the ATS. He noted that Congress could correct the court’s work through its own legislative powers by amending the ATS itself or adding new constraints to it through separate legislation.

“While we agree with Justice Scalia to the point that we would welcome any congressional guidance in exercising jurisdiction with such obvious potential to affect foreign relations, nothing Congress has done is a reason for us to shut the door to the law of nations entirely,” Souter explained. “It is enough to say that Congress may do that at any time (explicitly, or implicitly by treaties or statutes that occupy the field) just as it may modify or cancel any judicial decision so far as it rests on recognizing an international norm as such.”

The court’s conservative majority was never satisfied with that ruling. In case after case over the past 20 years, the justices repeatedly narrowed the scope of ATS claims, including by ruling that it could not be used to sue foreign corporations and by holding that domestic corporations can’t be sued for “general corporate activity” linked to human-rights abuses. In Cisco, Justice Amy Coney Barrett finally transformed Scalia’s dissent in Sosa into the court’s new majority opinion.

“Since Sosa was decided, we have firmly committed to the view that judicially created causes of action offend the separation of powers in almost every circumstance,” Barrett wrote. “As a result, we have virtually eliminated the practice of fashioning them.” She finished the job by “clos[ing] the door that Sosa cracked to judicially created ATS liability.” The Supreme Court’s rulings on these matters are often described as “closing the courthouse door” on wronged plaintiffs, but rarely by the majority itself.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent, chastised the majority for its transparent about-face. “The Court nonetheless closes the courthouse doors not just to [the plaintiffs], but to virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law under the ATS,” she wrote. “It thus overrules Sosa, without even acknowledging that it is doing so. Today’s decision marks yet another low point in this Court’s esteem for its precedents.”

Okay, you might think, maybe that’s a defensible reading of an archaic founding-era law. Perhaps there is good reason not to lean so heavily on a 18th-century statute in novel contexts. So then, what happens when Congress does provide unambiguous guidance on how to sue someone? Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections shows that even this is not enough to satisfy the justices.

Again, it is worth tracing the history of the underlying law in question. In 1990, the Supreme Court held in Employment Division v. Smith that litigants could not invoke the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to challenge what the court described as “neutral laws of general applicability,” meaning general laws that applied to all people with few or no exceptions. Congress and President Bill Clinton responded to the perceived curtailment of religious freedom by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA.

RFRA originally required laws and policies that infringed on free-exercise grounds to meet the highest threshold of judicial scrutiny. In 1997, however, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not apply RFRA to actions by state and local governments for federalism reasons. In response, Congress enacted the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA, in 2000 that sought to apply RFRA protections to the states on narrower grounds.

One of those contexts was state prison systems. Under RLUIPA, states that accept funds from Congress for their prisons must also allow private plaintiffs to file Free Exercise Clause lawsuits against them and (more importantly, in this particular case) their employees. This framework sought to place Congress’s goals on firmer constitutional footing—namely, Congress’s Spending Clause power—even though its overall impact would be more limited than at the federal level.

It would be hard to find a more clear-cut violation of the Free Exercise Clause than Damon Landor’s treatment by Louisiana correctional officials in 2020. Landor, a Rastafarian, grew out his hair into lengthy dreadlocks in keeping with the practices of his faith. Long hair is generally disallowed in prison systems for safety and hygiene reasons, but Landor had previously obtained exemptions on religious grounds.

When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor told the prison personnel that his hair was kept long for religious reasons. He also provided them with a copy of a 2017 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, that held that it would be a RLUIPA violation for state prison officials to cut a Rastafarian’s hair. Nonetheless, prison officials threw the ruling in the trash and shaved Landor’s head.

In response, Landor sued both the Louisiana Department of Corrections, or LDOC, as well as the guards themselves in their personal capacity under RLUIPA. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously held that RLUIPA could not be used to sue prison officials in their personal capacity. In 2020, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Tanzin v. Tanvir that plaintiffs could bring those claims against federal officials under RFRA. Landor now sought to apply that reasoning to RLUIPA.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, declined to do so. He framed the dispute not as a question of religious freedom, but of Congress’s power to impose conditions on federal funds. The decision is an unusually muddled one for Gorsuch. He insisted that Congress’s choice to provide federal funds to Louisiana so long as the state abides by certain conditions is a contract of sorts. While Congress can impose conditions on those funds for the states, Gorsuch argued, it cannot contractually bind people—in this case, the prison officials—who didn’t consent to the agreement in the first place.

This reasoning is too clever by half. The Louisiana Department of Corrections is not some sort of cosmic entity or demiurge. It does not independently exist in a metaphysical sense despite its legal personality. It is, at its root, a group of people in buildings who sit behind desks and walk down hallways and occasionally violate people’s constitutional rights. Gorsuch nonetheless hypothesized about ways that Congress could, in theory, rewrite the law to properly bind those employees in a private capacity.

“For example, Congress could have said that, as a condition of federal funding to LDOC, its officers had to agree to enter separate contracts with the federal government consenting to answer suits under RLUIPA,” he wrote. The officers arguably fulfilled that condition by agreeing to work at the Louisiana Department of Corrections in the first place, which is supposedly still bound by RLUIPA’s conditions.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented with the court’s other two liberal members, also argued that the majority’s reading of the Spending Clause upended decades of precedent about congressional powers. “Today’s decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized,” she explained. “No matter that laws, as opposed to contracts, don’t ordinarily work this way.”

At the root of Gorsuch’s opinion, she hinted, was a fundamental lack of respect for Congress as an institution. “In the end, the Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party,” she warned.

Gorsuch did not forthrightly address the Tanzin argument, apparently because his reductive Spending Clause interpretation made it unnecessary to grapple with. Nonetheless, Jackson argued that Tanzin’s reasoning applied with “even more force” to RLUIPA because damages would often be the “only form of relief available” to prisoners when their religious freedoms are violated.

“The Prison Litigation Reform Act’s exhaustion requirement and strict limitations on injunctive relief in prisons, coupled with States’ ability to transfer prisoners and thereby moot claims for injunctive relief, mean that withholding a damages remedy will often leave prisoners with no remedy at all,” she explained. A right with no remedy, it goes without saying, is not really a right at all.

For most of the 20th century, the Supreme Court confined itself to interpreting federal law instead of rewriting it. Thanks to the conservative legal movement, that posture has changed. The court’s Republican appointees have developed a wide array of tools to second-guess Congress, sometimes even under the cynical guise of defending its prerogatives.

Under the major-questions doctrine, for example, the Supreme Court has claimed the power to strike down federal rules and regulations if the statute they rely upon does not “speak clearly” on the issue in question. What is often framed by the conservatives justices as a check on executive-branch overreach is actually a curtailment of Congress’s legislative powers. By denying it the power to pass broadly worded legislation, the court is denying it the ability to legislate for unforeseen circumstances.

The justices are also either ignorant of, or hostile to, the basic nature of the legislative process. Congress typically enacts legislation after a long period of debate, consideration, and jockeying between various factions—from groups and movements that can be partisan, civic, business, special-interest, activist, and so on. Entire election cycles can hinge on a specific bill, as the 2010 and 2012 elections did for the Affordable Care Act.

This democratic process receives no deference or validation from the high court, either implicitly or explicitly. Thus, the work of years of activism, negotiation, and compromise can be undone with a few friend-of-the-court briefs and the right five justices on the court. When the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance formula in 2013, it invited Congress to simply draft a new one—knowing full well that congressional Republicans would never agree to it.

When the justices don’t want to overturn a law, they simply rewrite it. In VRA decisions in 2021 and earlier this year, the court’s conservatives added atextual limits on the law’s protections under the guise of interpreting it. Baseless fears of voter fraud can be used by states to evade challenges to voting restrictions; states’ rights to partisan gerrymander can be used to defeat racial-gerrymandering lawsuits. Thirteen years later after Shelby County v. Holder, with the rest of the VRA now in ruins, it is clear that the court wouldn’t have approved a new preclearance formula anyway—it wouldn’t have mattered how “clearly” Congress managed to speak on the matter.

“Heads I win, tails you lose,” has become this court’s judicial maxim. Tuesday’s rulings underscore how far these impulses will go. It does not matter if Congress broadly intends for courts to hear civil lawsuits over human-rights violations. Nor does it matter if Congress narrowly seeks to ensure that Americans whose federal constitutional rights are violated via federal funds can seek redress in federal court. Whatever Congress does, the Supreme Court will happily insert its own judgment in favor of that of the people’s elected representatives.

In the past, conventional wisdom would have us believe that any victory by the Democratic Socialists of America was due to their overwhelmingly white, young, transplant membership—bike lane users, co-op members, and Bernie 2020 voters. Meanwhile, DSA candidates struggled with working-class Black and brown voters due to a lack of trust, gentrification-fueled disdain, and communication failures. And more than anything, socialism just wasn’t something Black and brown people were “comfortable” with historically. 

But recent election victories have thrown out that entire narrative. Nowhere was that more evident than in Washington, D.C., last week, where the DSA-backed mayoral candidate won the Democratic primary thanks to support in majority-Black neighborhoods, while the candidate packaged as the preference for native Black voters actually lost them by a landslide.

In the weeks leading up to the primary, moderate Democratic Councilman Kenyan McDuffie framed himself as a measured, natural progression from current Mayor Muriel Bowser. He promised to be tough on crime and focused his rhetoric on the native residents of D.C.’s historically Black neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Councilwoman and Metro DSA member Janeese Lewis George represented a progressive vision for the city that focused on universal childcare, housing, and affordability—a vision that political commentators and media outlets said was more salient with the transplant-heavy neighborhoods. 

The New York Times wrote that Lewis George was “expected to be preferred by younger white residents who’ve lived in Washington less than 10 years.” CityCast DC featured a “Newbies Vs. Natives” analysis stating that “the Democratic Socialists of America member Lewis George does not seem to be cleaning up among D.C.’s poorer and less-educated voters,” and that “the younger, better educated, and newer you are to D.C., the more likely you are to support Lewis George.” 

Lewis George’s primary victory put that narrative to rest. She won seven of the eight wards in D.C. and had secured more than 50 percent of the vote even before the first round of ranked-choice tabulation. 

McDuffie only won Ward 3—which contains affluent, majority-white neighborhoods like Woodley Park, Chevy Chase, Foxhall Village, Friendship Heights, Palisades, and Tenleytown. Ward 3 is 69 percent white, with nearly 90 percent of residents holding a bachelor’s degree, an average age of 40 years old, and a median household income of around $144,877. And yet this younger, white, more educated, more affluent ward is the only one that went for McDuffie, and just barely. NBC reported that the specific neighborhoods that went for him were “among the most heavily white neighborhoods in D.C.”

Conventional wisdom would have had McDuffie cleaning up in DC’s Ward 8—81 percent Black with an average household income of $52,769 and less than a third of its residents holding a bachelor’s degree. Lewis George won it by 15 points. And in Ward 5, which is 55 percent Black and where McDuffie grew up, George won by 20 points. In the end, it was McDuffie who found the most support in the city’s whitest neighborhoods, while Lewis George overwhelmingly carried Black and Latino ones.  

There are plenty of theories as to why McDuffie lost so handily both across D.C. and specifically in poor neighborhoods of color. His focus on crime—calling Lewis George’s decision to vote against a teen curfew a “failure” after a chaotic teen brawl in Navy Yard—may have been overshadowed by a more imaginative platform from Lewis George, who was trying to address the constant struggles that the district’s most vulnerable residents face. Hyperfocusing on teen crime—an issue that Lewis George will eventually have to address—may not have landed well while hundreds of National Guardsmen roam the streets of D.C. at the behest of the president. His ties to Bowser (who has a dismal 49 percent disapproval rate) and the city’s centrist political establishment didn’t help either, as the outgoing mayor gave him her support without offering an official endorsement. 

It’s easy to make comparisons between Lewis George and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Two DSA members ended long reigns of neoliberalism in two major East Coast cities, and expanded their voting blocs well into the Black and brown working class even as pundits expected them to be successful only in “commie corridor” neighborhoods from Bushwick to Mt. Pleasant. But there are notable differences. Lewis George never got a Bernie Sanders or AOC endorsement. Lewis George stated that she has no relationship with Mamdani. And D.C. operates in a different landscape given its lack of statehood—another unique issue Lewis George will face as she likely squares off with President Donald Trump, who has had no qualms about strong-arming D.C. leaders.

Lewis George will certainly face a host of doubts and challenges in her tenure, as will DSA as a whole. Of course this movement would be nowhere without the college educated, mostly white transplants that move to cities like New York and D.C. But it’s equally true that they have made legitimate connections with older, more moderate natives that are skeptical of them. That tension will remain. But Lewis George’s victory—bucking stereotypes and punditry to deliver a resounding, mandate-securing election—shows that democratic socialism can no longer be viewed as a disqualifier for Black working-class voters. It’s mainstream now. 

Donald Trump dreamed of turning the Lincoln Reflecting Pool “American Flag Blue” in advance of celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. Instead, he got a pungent, bright green embarrassment. National Parks employees have yet to fully remove the algal bloom that sprang up after Trump’s ill-fated paint job, despite applying vacuums, hydrogen peroxide, and nanobubbles to the problem; the next step will be to drain the now-swampy basin for the second time this month and restore the blue sealant that has been floating to the surface in unsightly chunks. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Washington D.C.’s Department of Energy and the Environment was conducting an investigation into what killed the multiple ducks that have been found dead in the pool’s waters.

It’s all a bit too on the nose. The tacky $16.4 million vanity project was carried out in part by giving a $1.7 million no-bid contract to a firm called (appropriately enough) Greenwater Services, which is owned by an already scandal-laden Trump loyalist, John J. Cafaro. On June 15, workers reported that one or two of the four algae-killing machines Greenwater used weren’t working at any given time. Trump has—without evidence—blamed the algae problem on “vandals,” alleging that anonymous hoodlums sabotaged the pool with knives and fertilizer; this does not seem to be true. Still, as of June 24, the Parks Police, National Guard, and U.S. Marshals have been patrolling the usually placid site. As of Tuesday, six arrests had been made. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed—also without evidence—that those detained included “longtime donors to the Democrat Party, to Barack Obama, to ActBlue.” Newly installed fencing around the pool is apparently meant to deter what Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin has called an “increase in vandalism by leftist activists.” Trump pledged to drain the metaphorical swamp. Instead, he’s created one.

Algae, however, are much more than either smelly sludge or a tidy narrative device. While algae play several critical roles in freshwater and saltwater ecosystems, algal blooms like the one now bedeviling the Reflecting Pool are “a growing problem,” said marine biologist Gregory Dick. He’s the director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, or CIGLR, a partnership between the University of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. “They’re becoming more frequent as water pollution becomes more of an issue, and they grow more in warming condition,” he explained. “The Reflecting Pool is not an exception.”

The government’s newfound war on algae contrasts starkly with its repeated attempts to defund the experts who protect the public against harmful algal blooms not appearing on Washington, D.C., landmarks. The Trump administration’s cuts to research funding and federal agencies like NOAA have already undermined the federal government’s essential role in monitoring, responding to, and understanding harmful algal blooms. Deeper cuts outlined in next year’s federal budget would lower the public’s defenses against those blooms just as climate change helps them proliferate.

Trump’s talk of vandals and knives notwithstanding, you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain how algal blooms happen. Experts suspect that the Reflecting Pool algal bloom began as a cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. Those generally grow thanks to abundant nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, warm temperatures, and calm waters. “The Reflecting Pool has those three ingredients,” Dick said. There’s no official definition for what constitutes a harmful algal bloom, and the one in the Reflecting Pool hasn’t received that designation. But they tend to give off a foul smell and are known to kill birds. Cyanobacteria produce a toxin called microcystin that can fatally poison animals and cause nausea, vomiting, and skin rashes in humans. A 2014 microcystin outbreak in Lake Erie left nearly half a million people in the greater Toledo area without running water for three days.

An enormous amount of local, state, and federal resources are needed to keep the country’s waterways safe. NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab—which houses CIGLR—monitors and responds to algal blooms throughout the Great Lakes watershed, including Lake Erie. Researchers there use a range of technologies to keep tabs on algae in real time. Remote sensors let them track the distribution of harmful algal blooms. Buoys and remotely operated vehicles measure nutrient levels in the water, and scientists analyze physical samples to understand which species of algae are present at any given time and what environmental conditions cause them to give off certain toxins. If the scientists spot a potential threat, NOAA alerts municipal water treatment plants so that they can proactively safeguard the water sources that some 40 million people use to hydrate, cook, and shower. Algal blooms pose dangers not only to public and environmental health but to local economies that rely on revenue from tourism and fishing operations, which depend on the Great Lakes Lab to help determine when beaches should be closed down and which fish are safe to catch and sell.

In spite of its crucial role in monitoring blooms, the lab lost roughly 40 percent of its staff last year. That was thanks to cuts imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, which laid off newly hired and promoted staff and encourged federal employees to accept buyouts and retire early. The lab still hasn’t received all of the funds it was appropriated by Congress. The White House’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027 also includes an 18 percent cut to NOAA’s overall budget; it would completely eliminate funds for “Ocean, Coastal and Great Lakes Research.” Funding for the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies—the technical backbone of the National Hurricane Center, which houses researchers that forecast harmful algal blooms—is also at risk.

Thankfully, these sorts of proposals tend to be aspirational. The budget Congress passed last year avoided the steepest cuts to NOAA outlined in the White House’s FY2026. So far, Project 2025’s authors in the Trump administration have not been able to follow through on their pledge to dismantle and privatize the agency. But those funds remain under constant threat. What was already a bare-bones team at the Great Lakes Environmental Lab, or GLERL, pre-DOGE has had to make do with a lot less.

The reduced funding has already had some very concrete effects. Some of the Lab’s autonomous sample processors—which collect samples and measure water quality—“did not go out last year because of funding delays and lack of personnel,” Dick said. “Reduction in support and capacity for places like GLERL would have big impacts on boots-on-the-ground operations” he added, endangering researchers’ ability to provide up-to-date measurements and forecasting to (among many others) beach managers, drinking-water treatment facilities, and charter boat fishing captains.

Dick worries too that continued cuts will hamper researchers’ ability to understand how algal blooms are responding to rising temperatures and climate-fueled extreme weather. Cyanobacteria thrive in warmer temperatures. Heavy storms can wash their favorite nutrients into the water, fueling algal growth. Lake Superior, for instance, was long thought to be “the coldest and cleanest of all the Great Lakes,” Dick said. In the 2010s, it suddenly started seeing substantial algal blooms, following a series of 500-year storms that washed off nutrients from the landscape. Lake Superior is also among the fastest-warming lakes on earth; over the past 30 years, summer surface water temperatures have increased by five degrees.

Unlike Lake Superior, the Reflecting Pool has long hosted algae. As Washington’s summers become increasingly swamplike, eliminating the algae altogether may well prove impossible. As it has stretched out over the last several weeks, the Reflecting Pool debacle has been something of a microcosm for Trumpist governance, combining handouts to inexperienced loyalists with gaudy kitsch and baseless accusations against the left. It is also about as good a summary as any for the right’s approach to a climate crisis that’s fueling harmful algal blooms the world over: When it becomes impossible to keep denying a problem you helped cause, blame it on your political enemies and try to throw them in jail.

In one corner above a field: a kid’s drawing of the sun. But with fat, round rays, like yellow petals, and a smiling lion’s face—cleft lip attached to a pink, upside-down triangle nose; black ovals for eyes. Something in me has awoken. A spark. A love. A sensation, by definition, must be felt. And then die off. No one still talks about the dentist who killed the lion named Cecil. I shut that in a box, along with learning that cats wounded in the wild don’t heal—that they die without the strength to hunt. I don’t understand much. Not suffering. Not the nature of risk. My fears—captive, domestic—yawn and flex their feet. Another version of me was sixteen and drove a yellow truck named Frisky. She drank with her friends beneath the shade of a tree. She could let her thoughts out. But she never put them down.

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

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

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

& your mother loving you better. I think of your

tombstone hitting your stepdad over the head.

Grave error: the words slipping from their mouths

as your skin turns back elastic, as flesh reattaches

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

Grief would be easier if you were dead. Instead,

our songs, your voice, the sticky dampness

of your skin is vivid enough in my mind that I

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

feel the goose bumps forming on my skin as you

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

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

to come across some corner while I’m walking

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

this whole time. The poet wants their words back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In January 2021, Paratore submitted TC’s packet.

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

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

TC poked her head out.

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

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

TC sped across the grounds.

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

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

“What for?”

“I’m goin’ home.”

“You sure?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

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

The warden was waiting. She stood before him.

“Brooks?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your number?”

“W45882.”

“You know why you’re here?”

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

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

“The governor’s office.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had seven days to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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