The lone exception was the 2020 presidential election. Cornyn accepted Joe Biden’s victory as legitimate, and he pushed back — “gently,” in the words of the Texas Tribune — in the weeks after the election when Trump fired Chris Krebs, an election security official at the Department of Homeland Security who called the president’s claims of fraud were “unsubstantiated.” Still, Cornyn voted against Trump’s impeachment following Jan. 6. But three years later, after the president declared his candidacy for president in 2024, he said “President Trump’s time has passed him by.” (He later admitted he was wrong about that.)

The Texas senator has since been a devoted foot soldier — and a tremendous help to Trump. As one of the most powerful members of the Senate, Cornyn is prolific at passing bills and raising money. He’s been the majority whip and very nearly became the majority leader in 2024, losing only to Sen. John Thune of South Dakota by 5 votes. If Texas Republican voters wanted an effective, strong leader who has been successful at pushing right-wing policy, they could not do better than Cornyn.

As it turns out, that is not what the Lone Star State’s GOP primary voters wanted. On Tuesday, a slim plurality of Republican voters picked Cornyn as the nominee in November’s Senate race, a dismal result that sends the contest into a run-off against MAGA firebrand Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. As of Wednesday morning, with 94% of votes counted, Cornyn had received 41.9%, with Paxton trailing close behind at 40.7. Rep. Wesley Hunt, a latecomer to the race who was an early backer of Trump in 2024, earned 13.5% of the vote and will not advance to the run-off. The election, which will take place May 26 with early voting beginning six days earlier, promises to get ugly.

Were Paxton to prevail in May, he would be a nightmare candidate for the GOP in such an important election. He’s a bundle of red flags and, at a vantage point from outside the reality distortion field that is the MAGA movement, Paxton has no discernible upsides. But as we have learned, in today’s Republican Party, scandal and corruption don’t hurt candidates. To the contrary: Being the worst has become a selling point to GOP voters, who conflate odious behavior with being a “fighter” on behalf of their increasingly tribalistic interests.

Paxton frequently brags about being an evangelical Christian, and he has even argued that his faith should be imposed on students in public classrooms. He also had a messy public divorce that involved a confession of adultery. This became the focus of his 2023 impeachment trial — which was led by other Republicans — due to accusations that he broke the law and abused his office to cover up the affair and get his mistress a job. But that episode is just one in a staggeringly long list of corruption scandals dating back to his time in the Texas statehouse in 2008 and includes an indictment over securities fraud and an FBI investigation of potential bribery.

On top of the relentless odor of scandal emanating from Paxton, his actions in office would likely alienate swing voters in a general election. He loves wasting taxpayer money on go-nowhere lawsuits that excite bigots and conspiracy theorists, but that annoy everyone else. He targeted Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue over false claims that Tylenol causes autism. He went after a school district for not forcing the Ten Commandments on students. He sued to overturn the 2020 presidential election by block swing states from having their votes for Joe Biden counted. He’s repeatedly filed suit against out-of-state doctors for prescribing abortion pills to women in Texas. He tried to stop community organizers from registering people of color to vote.

Paxton often loses these lawsuits, but that’s not the point. His apparent aim is to stir up the MAGA base and please an extensive network of far-right billionaires who have spent the past two decades turning the Texas GOP into a fascistic, Christian nationalist party. 

State Rep. James Talarico, the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, will no doubt be pleased if he’s pitted against Paxton in November, and so will many down-ballot Democrats. (Talarico’s opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, conceded and endorsed Talarico on Wednesday morning after telling supporters the night before that Democratic voters had “been disenfranchised” in Dallas County. ) The attorney general would likely energize Democratic voters to turn out against him. Cornyn spent a record-setting amount of money reminding Republican voters of that problem, but his efforts weren’t enough. The very qualities that will hurt Paxton in a general election — his reported corruption and his belligerent personality — are what endear him to the people who turn out to vote in Republican primaries.

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Last month, Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark posted the findings of a focus group of Texas Republican voters illustrating that Paxton’s aura of scandal is his main selling point to the party’s MAGA base. Most of these voters didn’t want to say that they like it when politicians are hypocritical. But as Longwell explained, Paxton’s bad behavior gets interpreted as evidence that he’s a “fighter” who is willing to cut corners to “get things done.”

“If I was voting on deacons for our church, definitely Ken Paxton wouldn’t be part of it, would not have my vote,” one woman explained. Instead, she backed the attorney general because “politically, I thought he would represent us.”

The entire MAGA base, but especially evangelical Christians, have spent years inhaling propaganda painting them as victims of an oppression campaign at the hands of a woke mob. They’re told by fundamentalist preachers and religious leaders that they’re engaged in “spiritual warfare” with a powerful cabal of progressives who want to destroy Christianity and steal their children’s hearts, minds, bodies and souls. These claims are validated by Trump, who falsely asserts that children are being forced to change genders behind their parents’ backs and releases nonsense “reports” claiming that Christians are the targets of rampant religious discrimination.

Despite his personal behavior, Paxton has endeared himself to conservative Christians by deploying the same lies about MAGA’s alleged persecution. With Trump’s assistance, Paxton portrayed Republicans who were prosecuting him during his impeachment trial as “RINOs” — Republicans In Name Only — who were secretly working for Democrats to destroy him because of his success at advancing the right-wing cause. This was all nonsense; Republicans who opposed him were just as conservative as his supporters, but they held a residual desire for the state’s top enforcement agent to be an ethical, law-abiding citizen.

But MAGA voters love villains, foolishly convincing themselves that a candidate who demonstrates a professed willingness to break laws or flout ethics will redound to their benefit. This dubious quality is framed as a form of self-defense against those dastardly liberals. They don’t want to be the bad guys, they tell themselves, but the evil Democrats gave them no choice but to fight dirty.

There’s not a shred of evidence that people like Paxton or Trump are actually warriors for any cause outside of their own ambition. The great irony is that Cornyn, and others like him, has done far more to advance conservative policies than Paxton, with his flashy but groundless lawsuits, ever has. But the results of Tuesday’s primary show that Texas Republican voters are divided. Paxton’s style ran neck and neck with Cornyn’s substance. If the former trumps the latter in May’s runoff, it could easily benefit Talarico and Democrats.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to reflect Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s concession and endorsement of Texas state Rep. James Talarico as the Democratic nominee.

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But Democratic grandees have to get it through their heads that ICE is too politicized, too bloated and too corrupt to be reformed into anything like a legitimate agency of government operating under the rule of law. One might as well hope that the Ku Klux Klan could be reformed into a charitable social organization. ICE must be dismantled and another, different agency built over its bulldozed ruins.

To understand why that’s necessary may require a fuller examination of the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency’s full title. It was conceived in a lie, birthed through political logrolling by panicky politicians who didn’t know what they were doing, and housed within an equally dysfunctional parent bureaucracy. As a professional staff member of Congress, I was present at the creation. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time, except as a congressional effort to be seen as “doing something,” and an attempt to divert attention from George W. Bush’s failure to take seriously the many warning signs that preceded the worst terrorist attack in our history. In retrospect, it looks even worse than that.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave rise to many evils. One of the most pernicious and least recognized was the Bush administration’s scapegoating of federal intelligence and law enforcement over the disaster. That there was complacency and lack of focus in the bureaucracy is incontestable. There often is. But if there was complacency and lack of focus in the lower ranks, the responsibility lay with the captain of the ship — President Bush — and his executive officers, meaning the vice president and Senate-confirmed senior administration officials.

9/11 was less an intelligence agency failure than a cognitive intelligence failure of the Bush cabinet. In early August 2001, while Attorney General John Ashcroft (who relegated terrorism to a lower priority than the Clinton administration did) was staging a major press conference on the menace of internet porn, Bush was dismissing the CIA presenters of the President’s Daily Brief on Aug. 6, which stated, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” “You covered your ass,” Bush told them, before going back to golf and brush-cutting during his four-week vacation.

At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld was fulminating over a Soviet-style bureaucracy in the Defense Department and dreaming of a future ballistic missile defense rather than attending to current threats. Ashcroft formally rejected a $50 million FBI request to hire additional counterterrorism agents and intelligence specialists on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks.

On the Navy’s principle that a ship’s captain is automatically responsible if the vessel runs aground or suffers some other avoidable mishap, Bush was clearly in charge and responsible, a circumstance aggravated by his flippant disregard of the CIA’s threat briefing. Given his nonfeasance and blame-shifting, a functioning parliamentary system would have removed him, just as the British Parliament forced the resignation of Neville Chamberlain after the Norway debacle in 1940. In this country, the supposed remedy is impeachment, but ever since Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, accountability for presidents has been practically nonexistent.

Congress, having bought into the Bush cabinet’s scapegoating of the bureaucracy, proceeded to solve this supposed bureaucratic failure by creating a lot more bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security, a brand new Cabinet agency with a huge budget, designed to perform a hodgepodge of functions loosely defined as securing the “homeland,” a sinister-sounding name rarely used in colloquial English. (We may wonder: Who pulled that name off the shelf?)

DHS pulled into its structure several preexisting agencies, such as the Coast Guard, which continued to perform their traditional missions. But now they performed them under an additional bureaucratic layer, DHS departmental management, which added no value. The department also contained wildly disparate functions: What does FEMA have to do with collecting customs duties, and what does either of those have to do with cybersecurity? Yet they were all thrown into the same department. DHS was and is less than the sum of its constituent parts.

As a new agency staffing up rapidly, DHS wanted to hire people fast. Thus it became a dumping ground for everybody’s brother-in-law or the sons of rich donors to the Republican National Committee. This aspect received national exposure after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, when we could all witness the sterling performance of FEMA director Michael D. Brown, whose previous disaster-relief experience consisted of breeding Arabian horses. His accomplishments also provided a catchphrase that summed up the competence of the Bush administration: “Heckuva job, Brownie!”

ICE itself was a classic bureaucratic creation. The legacy organizations dealing with immigration were the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Border Patrol, both under the Department of Justice. It would have been logical to consolidate them into one agency within DHS, but some administrative genius made the Solomonic decision to form two different agencies with overlapping functions, Customs and Border Protection and ICE. CPB has gone on to greater infamy for its corruption (for instance, agents taking bribes from drug smugglers) and even for its cameo role in the Jeffrey Epstein saga: providing concierge service to the serial abuser during his frequent trips to Little St. James Island (which became known to Caribbean locals as Pedophile Island).

For a decade after its 2003 creation, DHS was a governmental orphan, given that even a nascent bureaucratic empire has to establish its headquarters in Washington, where space is precious and physical proximity to the Capitol or the White House correlates with access and influence. In 2013, DHS finally opened its headquarters on the disused tracts of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mental institution best known as the postwar home of modernist poet Ezra Pound, whose wartime radio broadcasts from Rome on behalf of Mussolini were sufficiently unhinged that he was found mentally unfit to stand trial. In Washington, where everyone takes himself seriously, few saw the irony.

DHS has always been a problem child, but under the second Trump regime it has reached new levels of corruption. Under the stiletto heel of current secretary Kristi Noem, along with her presumed lover and de facto deputy secretary, Corey Lewandowski, the department decided to purchase a $70 million Boeing 737 MAX8, allegedly to deport illegal aliens. But the department has not explained why a jet supposedly meant as a flying prison van seats only 18 passengers while boasting showers, a kitchen, a bar and a bedroom with a queen bed, as well as four large flat-screen TVs. In the Trump Cabinet, having your own luxury jet is simply a means of keeping up with the Joneses.

With Noem’s attention focused on her need to travel in the style of a Persian Gulf emir, the actual administration of the department has suffered. Around 10 percent of all DHS employees have left in the past year, and 80 percent of senior management has been fired or demoted. Apparently, “leadership” in Noem’s world means instilling a culture of fear. Whatever institutional knowledge might have been built up over the last two decades is gone. America is in a highly precarious security situation because of this: Cyber-defenses against attacks on critical U.S. infrastructure are now weaker, and with Trump contemplating an attack on Iran, the potential for disastrous asymmetric retaliation has risen, even as DHS leadership concentrates its attention on its own perks and pursuing vendettas against career employees.

The current state of DHS and its components is exactly what a jaundiced observer of the Trump regime might have expected. Identifying, understanding and countering overseas terrorist threats is hard. Detecting and defending against cyber-hacking is perhaps harder, and requires both expertise and critical thinking. Such qualities are not in demand in Trump’s regime. On the other hand, abducting kindergarteners is easy. Teargassing bystanders is easy. Shooting protesters is easy, and requires no brains at all, just brute force and a pathological disposition. In retrospect, it is easy to understand this reprioritization — from keeping Americans safe to harassing and tormenting them — that DHS and its agencies have undertaken.

DHS is a disaster, but not just as a matter of bureaucratic complication, jobs for the boys and systemic corruption. In the long run, the more significant issue for both the rule of law and the concept of federalism was the creation of a single huge agency comprising both intelligence and law enforcement functions and with a wide remit that was fuzzily defined. Did Congress create a ministry of the interior like those found in authoritarian states, a centralized, politicized and unaccountable police function operating at the behest of an autocrat, and overriding local sovereignties and local law enforcement? At a remove of more than two decades, we can conclude that it did.

We are now seeing the results of 20 years of lax oversight of this bureaucratic monstrosity. It has only recently been reported that DHS has issued administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit and Discord, demanding the names, addresses and phone numbers of social media users who criticized ICE or identified the location of its agents. All the companies except Discord have complied. One of the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes — as with Russia’s FSB investigating social media critics of Vladimir Putin, or Chinese security agencies “sanctioning” citizens imprudent enough to complain about their political masters — has firmly lodged itself in the so-called Land of the Free.

For decades, Congress has not done a competent job of exercising control over the agencies for which it appropriates money. In the case of ICE, the agency has slipped every bond of congressional oversight. How can Congress even attempt to perform oversight when its own members are barred from ICE facilities?

When the Republican majority rubber-stamped the Trump regime’s budgetary request last spring, it not only appropriated $10 billion for the agency’s “regular” budget, but a “supplemental” $75 billion. At the current rate of exchange, ICE’s current budget is slightly larger than the £62 billion budget for the entire British defense establishment, which includes an army of 75,000 troops, a nuclear submarine-equipped Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force.

With its mammoth cash infusion, ICE has gone on a hiring spree that has more than doubled its personnel from 10,000 to 22,000 in less than a year. Even the most careful organization is unlikely to increase its personnel on such a scale and maintain quality. In the case of ICE, with its notorious reputation and its ability to wave $50,000 bonuses before potential recruits, it is easy to imagine the sort of people it will entice.

According to the testimony of former ICE counsel Ryan Schwank, the agency has cut 240 hours from its 548-hour recruit training program. The classes cut, Schwank said,

included classes on the fundamentals of the Constitution and the officers’ duties within the structure of our legal system. They cut out classes on — multiple classes on use of force, multiple classes on how to use their firearms safely. They took out testing requirements that were set to allow us to measure whether or not the cadets that were coming out of the academy could actually exercise their authority in a safe and lawful fashion. They took out classes that tied back to our understanding of due process within the legal system.

Add to that the ICE agents’ habit of wearing masks, a practice usually confined to criminals, Klansmen and Putin’s FSB, and any reasonable person can conclude that we now have an American secret police — not in embryo, but fully achieved.

Imagine the end of the Trump regime and the reinstitution of rule of law. Maintaining anything resembling ICE — ideologically extreme, disdainful of the Constitution, armed to the teeth and with access to real-time information on the location of the president and his Cabinet — and you have the recipe for a potential coup. If a motley rabble of civilians nearly overthrew the government on Jan. 6, 2021, future prospects with an intact version of the current ICE are much darker.

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ICE is broadly unpopular with the American public. While a plurality favors reforming it, as opposed to abolishing it or leaving it to operate as it does today, when offered a straight-up choice between abolishing or retaining ICE, a slight plurality already favors abolition. Even then, the public is responding without the full facts or a full context, as they do in most polls.

It is incumbent on Democrats to go on offense for once, to lead public opinion, to explain why this agency is so pernicious, and to impress upon low-information Americans who may still believe it only arrests undocumented aliens that ICE harasses legal residents and even citizens, and that the alleged “bad apples” among its personnel are so numerous that they’ve spoiled the whole barrel. If Democratic politicians cannot convince a majority of Americans that kidnapping 5-year-olds is intolerable, then either the party ought to fold its tent like the antebellum Whigs or there is something seriously wrong with the character of the American people — in which case the American experiment in democracy is over.

Some may object that abolishing ICE while creating another agency to perform the same functions (or at least those that are legal and constitutional) is purely symbolic. But symbolism is important in maintaining a democratic society under the rule of law. When the Allies occupied defeated Germany, they systematically removed the symbols and regalia of Nazi rule, as at the Nazi Party’s rallying grounds at Nuremberg. Does anyone think it would have been a good idea to keep an allegedly “reformed” Gestapo in place as a postwar law enforcement agency?

That same logic should apply to DHS, its parent agency. Perhaps the department’s cybersecurity operation, a new function that was only of great importance after 9/11, can be spun off as an independent agency, given the heightened government-wide role in countering hacking and cybercrime over the last two decades. As for its traditional functions, they should be reintegrated with their former parent departments, where once upon a time functioned with far less controversy, and where they would no longer constitute the building blocks of a secret police ministry.

It is long past time for America’s political class to admit that it made a dreadful mistake. DHS was yet another product of the Bush administration’s lies and Congress’ frequently buffoonish need to take action without understanding the problem. So let’s get rid of ICE for good, and break up DHS.

The post Abolish ICE? Absolutely — and DHS too appeared first on Salon.com.

Hillary Clinton gave roughly six hours of testimony in Chappaqua, New York, to the House Oversight Committee, telling congressional investigators she had never met convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and had no knowledge of his crimes, and it went exactly how most people thought it would. 

It was supposed to be the Republican Party‘s ultimate revenge fantasy. They wanted the base to salivate over the idea that, at long last, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee would be forced to answer tough questions. Instead, thanks to their own hubristic overreach and compulsive need for social media clout, the whole thing quickly imploded. 

Before the deposition started, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted a photo of herself and fellow Republicans heading into the session, captioned with “Game on.” Boebert, who previously live-tweeted the location of then-Vice President Mike Pence during the Jan. 6 attack, has never met a moment of solemn responsibility she couldn’t convert into content.

Before the GOP committee members had even warmed their seats, Boebert pulled out her phone, snapped a photo of Clinton and texted it straight to Benny Johnson, a conservative influencer and former BuzzFeed writer who was fired from that outlet for plagiarism. Johnson, who has been identified as having received funding from the Kremlin-linked organization Tenet Media, immediately posted it to his X account with the breathless caption: “BREAKING: The first image of Hillary Clinton testifying under oath about Jeffery Epstein to the Republican Oversight Committee.”

The committee’s own rules, read aloud at the start of the proceedings, explicitly prohibited photography inside the room. The hearing abruptly went off the record as staff scrambled to figure out who had violated House rules. Clinton’s adviser Nick Merrill stepped outside to inform the waiting press, directing reporters to check Johnson’s social media feed to see exactly what had happened. The secretary’s team, which had been pushing for a fully public proceeding from the very beginning — the committee had rejected that request — suddenly had an unambiguous example that Republicans can’t even handle a closed-door session without leaking to their propagandists. 

Democrats on the committee immediately demanded Comer release the full unedited transcript and video within 24 hours. Ranking member Robert Garcia, D-Calif., said he was “very taken aback” by the rules being “not enforced and certainly just broken immediately.” Virginia Rep. James Walkinshaw described the whole exercise as part of a “long-running fever dream” to lock up Clinton.

When reporters asked Boebert why she had sent the photo, the congresswoman offered this gem: “Well, I mean I really admired her blue suit. So I wanted to capture that for everyone.” Boebert later posted that “Benny did nothing wrong.”

Democrats on the committee argued from the outset that transparency was the best disinfectant. But Republicans insisted on a closed-door format, presumably to control the narrative and selectively leak whatever snippets suited their storyline.

After the pause, Clinton reportedly asked that journalists be allowed into the room. That didn’t happen. When the hearing resumed, what followed was, by all accounts, a catastrophic embarrassment for the committee — one entirely of its own making. Clinton, who had stated in a four-page opening statement shared publicly on social media that she had “no knowledge that would assist your investigation,” proceeded to spend the better part of six hours saying exactly that. 

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“You have compelled me to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers,” she said to Republicans. 

Hillary Clinton is not even prominently featured in the Epstein files. Meanwhile, there are well-documented connections between Epstein and a number of powerful men, including Trump. The president and Epstein were photographed together multiple times in the 1990s and early 2000s. Epstein thought of himself as Trump’s “closest friend,” and Trump once described Epstein as a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.” Yet Republicans have shown remarkably little appetite for aggressively interrogating Trump about those ties. Clinton also highlighted the fact that not a single Republican had attended a recent closed-door deposition of retail billionaire Leslie Wexner in Ohio, one of Epstein’s most significant former associates and a major donor to GOP candidates.

“I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein,” she told reporters afterward, standing outside the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center. “I never went to his island. I never went to his homes. I never went to his offices. So it’s on the record numerous times.” 

She was also, according to her own post-deposition account, asked about UFOs. And Pizzagate. By members of the House Oversight Committee, in a deposition theoretically focused on a sex-trafficking investigation.

This is the pattern Republicans learned decades ago: When your own administration is mired in scandal, invoke the Clintons. It’s a reflex so ingrained deeply ingrained in the GOP’s DNA it deserves a name: Clinton Derangement Syndrome. The mere mention of Hillary Clinton’s name is enough to redirect conservative media cycles away from whatever fire is currently consuming their own house.

This is the actual Epstein scandal hiding in plain sight, right behind the carnival mirror of the Clinton witch hunt. This week, the Department of Justice quietly removed from its public Epstein file portal an authenticated photograph of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick standing alongside Jeffrey Epstein on Little St. James — the island where the convicted sex offender’s crimes against young women took place. CBS News confirmed the photo was real. A spokesperson for the DOJ claimed the image was “part of a batch of files that had been flagged for nudity,” but every man in the photograph is fully clothed. The photo was later restored after CBS published its story, but the damage to the administration’s credibility — such as it is — was already done. Now that Republicans on the committee have been cornered, they are calling on Lutnick to testify. 

This deposition was supposed to be Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s big shot: a marquee moment in the long-running effort to re-litigate the Clinton era and tie it to Epstein in the public imagination. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about the perils of governing-by-influencer. In the end, Boebert and Johnson did more than briefly derail a deposition. They exposed the hollowness at the core of this latest Clinton crusade. When your investigation can be derailed by a thirst for retweets, it was never about truth in the first place.

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When he returned to office in January 2025, the president promised to return America to a new “Golden Age” in which the country would always be “winning” and the envy of the world. Instead, America’s prestige has been greatly diminished. No longer the world’s greatest democracy, the country has become a cautionary tale of self-sabotage and rising autocracy. The economy is struggling, inflation is persistent and working families are worse off than when Trump took office. In just one year, the American Dream has moved even further out of reach for a large number, if not a majority, of working- and middle-class people.

Behind this great destruction are real people, and many of them are Trump’s own voters. There are Hispanic Trump voters who thought, “We are the good ones — Trump wouldn’t hurt people like us.” Black Trumpists who ignored his overt racism. White working-class Americans who assumed they would be unaffected by his attacks on the Affordable Care Act and SNAP benefits. Business owners who didn’t think their companies would be impacted by his mass deportation campaign. They have all been proven wrong.

Many of the president’s voters supported him because he promised to break the rules and punish groups they dislike and even hate — Democrats, liberals, Black and brown people, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, feminists and others. Now the same policies they supported have boomeranged on them. 

But after all they have endured — and are continuing to face — are Trump’s voters actually abandoning him? Are they now ashamed or embarrassed for supporting him and the MAGA movement?

In the end, the answer to these questions may be no, and Democrats, liberals, progressives and other pro-democracy Americans have been projecting onto Trump’s supporters what they desperately wanted to believe is true for their own self-comfort.

While his approval rating is at near-historic lows, Trump remains highly popular among GOP voters at 73%. However, polling also shows him losing support among non-MAGA Republicans, low-information voters and right-wing Independents.

Trump’s rainbow coalition of rage, resentment and anger is also fracturing. Hispanics and Latinos have moved away from him. Young men and non-college-educated voters are also souring on the president; both groups were critical to his victory in the 2024 election.

During a recent interview in the Bulwark, Democratic pollster Margie Omero explained that in focus groups run by the polling firm Navigator, approximately 14% of Trump’s voters say that they regret voting for him. That is a modest number, but in a very close election it could prove decisive. A larger percentage are increasingly disappointed and indifferent towards Trump and MAGA.

Trump’s enduring support remains a mystery and an object of derision for those who are outside of the MAGAverse, TrumpWorld and the larger right-wing echo chamber. From their perspective, given Trump’s failed policies and the widespread harm he is causing huge swaths of the American public, his support should be even lower.

In a recent essay, political psychologist Stephen Ducat explained why Trump’s MAGA followers remain tethered to him.

“[W]hen it comes to autocratic power in government, there is no ‘safe word,’ only obedience or obliteration,” he said. “But naked coercion makes political control brittle and unstable. And it can provoke rebellion. Much better to induce what psychologists call identity fusion, a state of mind in which, through imagined merger with the group and its leader, submission is reframed as vicarious domination.”

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The collective behavior of Trump’s MAGA followers, according to Ducat, is a classic example of the unhealthy behavior known as identification with the aggressor. “The fusion message to his base takes many forms, but the central theme is always: his self-interest is the tribe’s interest, which makes it your interest,” he said. “When he fights for himself, he’s really fighting for you. Each time no one holds him accountable for crimes, it is also you who are untouchable.”

For pro-democracy Americans — and others who generally want a return to some sense of normalcy — the Age of Trump has been a time of tears and laughter of frustration at a country where enough people were so nihilistic and desperate that they voted to put the president and his MAGA agenda back in the White House. There will be a flood of great joy and laughter if Trump and his MAGA Republicans are voted out of office in the midterms and then in the 2028 election.

But we must also be cautious about the dark allure of partisan schadenfreude and what it could signal about America’s deeply broken social and political culture. Political scientist Steven Webster warned that its “implications stretch beyond attitudes. In fact, it predicts the candidates that Americans support. Our study found that schadenfreude is the strongest predictor of an individual saying that they would vote for someone who promises to ‘harm supporters of the opposing party’ through the legislative process.”

Trump is a very skilled propagandist and charismatic leader, making it far from guaranteed that his most loyal voters will ever leave him. Even more troubling, the president gave his voters a license to indulge and engage in their own worst behavior — and that permission structure is greatly overriding their material and other rational self-interest. 

Pro-democracy Americans must be careful not to confuse mockery with tangible results and power. Dismissing Trump’s voters who are being hurt by his policies may feel good, but such behavior is no substitute for the hard work, organizing and alliance-building that will be necessary to save America’s democracy and renew its broken civic culture. If we don’t put in the effort, Trump and his MAGA coalition will cement their control over the country — and we will end up being the sad clowns.

The post Trump continues to make his own voters suffer appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump turned the address into a two-hour variety show, complete with medals awarded, standing ovations and carefully staged anecdotes about “regular Americans.” He bragged about ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and about kicking two million people off food stamps. He applauded a World War II veteran who liberated an internment camp — a genuinely moving moment — while simultaneously cheering new detention facilities for migrants and asylum seekers. He claimed gas is down to $1.85 a gallon in some places, a figure ridiculously divorced from reality. He said he “ended eight wars” and that his administration has secured $18 trillion in investment commitments. (His own White House website puts the figure at under $10 trillion.) Crediting himself with “a turnaround for the ages,” Trump dismissed the cost-of-living crisis as a “dirty, rotten lie” cooked up by Democrats. 

This attempted rebranding relied, as always, on scapegoats. In one of the evening’s ugliest moments, the president accused an entire ethnic community of pillaging the country. He launched into an attack on Somali migrants in Minnesota, linking them to what he called a “war on fraud” and claiming Somalis had stolen $19 billion in welfare dollars from the state. 

“That’s a lie,” Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota shouted from her seat in the House chamber. 

The figure appears to be a grotesque distortion of a statement by a federal prosecutor who estimated that perhaps half of $18 billion in certain high-risk Minnesota Medicaid programs might be fraudulent — a hypothetical maximum of roughly $9 billion across programs, not a confirmed loss, and never attributed to one ethnic community. Trump, in his special way, doubled it and aimed it at a minority group on national television.

This is what passes for economic populism in 2026: invent a number, attach it to a racialized community and dare the media to call it what it is. The most galling part is how rarely they do. We are still litigating comments from more than a decade ago about “deplorables” and “bitter” Americans “clinging to guns or religion,” while Trump goes on national television and calls Somali immigrants “pirates” to a distinct lack of media outrage. 

Bigotry has become so routine it barely registers. Worse than normalization; we have descended into numbness.

And yet here is what the political and media class insists on calling normal. They note, approvingly, that the act of inviting press to a pre-speech briefing “carried on” a tradition, as though Trump’s ongoing threats against broadcast licenses and his administration’s active Federal Communications Commission investigations into ABC and CBS over their coverage of him make the whole thing a collegial Washington ritual rather than an exercise in coerced access. Breitbart was the only print outlet invited to the White House. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire podcasters were invited to Tuesday’s address by House Speaker Mike Johnson. This is the media ecosystem being built before our eyes. 

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“It was an extraordinary speech,” CBS News’ Tony Doukopil remarked. “In some ways, vintage Trump: combative, populist. Historic for other reasons, as well.” Bari Weiss’ Free Press, which she continues to run after taking over CBS News, suggested Trump had “reset” his presidency with a “feel-good state of the union.”

Calling it “a little bit Reaganesque,” Fox News’ Laura Ingraham lauded the speech. “I think this could’ve been the best speech he has ever delivered, and I’m interested to see perhaps a little bump in the polls.” Brian Kilmeade, co-host of “Fox and Friends,” described it as “dynamic, diverse and entertaining.” Washington Post columnist and frequent Fox News guest Marc Thiessen called it “​​truly one of the best SOTUs ever.”

The Blaze’s Glenn Beck hailed it “The most effective speech I have seen a president give in front of Congress.” The New York Post’s cover headline read, “Trump wins gold.” 

What they celebrated was a performance engineered to dazzle the president’s base and humiliate everyone else. It’s a reminder that for much of conservative media, the bar for greatness is not policy coherence or factual accuracy but emotional catharsis. If MAGA feels seen, if the libs are owned, if Democrats are forced into awkward stillness as Republicans leap to their feet, then the speech is a triumph. That it may be riddled with falsehoods is beside the point. Even Wall Street Journal editor-at-large Gerard Baker, hardly a left-wing firebrand, quipped that the address was so full of fictions he was beginning to doubt whether the USA men’s hockey team actually won gold.

There was one detail from Tuesday night that exemplifies the corruption of our media during this moment. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., posted a picture on X with Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, both grinning and giving the camera a thumbs up — Trump’s signature gesture, performed with the enthusiasm of men who understand what signaling can buy. 

Meanwhile, Tuesday marked four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilized European security. Trump’s discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war lasted approximately 20 seconds. Twenty seconds for the most significant European conflict since World War II — with no mention of the anniversary.

If the president dazzled parts of the media and thrilled his base, he also exposed the limits of his vision. Two hours on the biggest stage in American politics, and the offer was the same as ever: fear them, cheer me. It’s stale to nearly all but his biggest sycophants. Holly Neaton, a swing voter in Minnesota, told MSNOW she was offended by Trump’s display of religious bigotry. 

As Trump held court inside the Capitol, Democrats were winning elections outside it. Not one, not two, but three state legislative seats flipped or held in Pennsylvania and Maine while the president was still mid-ramble. In Pennsylvania, Democrat Jen Mazzocco won her race in Allegheny County by 64 points — doubling the margin her predecessor had posted in 2024. Democrat Ana Tiburcio won hers with more than two-thirds of the vote. Since Trump was elected, Democratic candidates have flipped 26 state legislative seats across the country. Republicans have flipped zero. 

The split screen couldn’t have been more brutal: the man who claims to have delivered an economy “roaring like never before” was being repudiated at the polls in real time — and by working people in swing districts.It’s a harsh reality too apparent for even Fox News to ignore. When Vice President JD Vance took to the network on Wednesday morning for a post-speech victory lap, even network anchor Bill Hemmer threw a wet blanket on the parade. “It seems like you’re pushing a car uphill and you’ve got nine months to turn it around,” he said. “You know Democrats are juiced. They are ready to vote tomorrow.”

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Tuesday’s address was boring, but at least it was mildly entertaining to watch Republicans in the House of Representatives chamber compete with each other to give standing ovations that made the performances in “The Death of Stalin” look understated. Of course there is always performative applause at the annual speech, regardless of party. But the GOP’s eagerness to show the narcissist-in-chief how they love him the most got out of control. Republicans seemed to hop out of their seats every five seconds as Trump lied about how he turned a “dead” country into the “hottest.” It was enough to wish a charley horse on them, as the theatrics were meant to prove the president’s lies about the country experiencing “a turnaround for the ages.”

Going into the speech, Trump’s polls had fallen to five-alarm levels for Republicans in the midterms, ranging from 37% to 39% approval for his performance in office. In a recent poll, CNN found that only 32% of Americans think Trump has the right priorities. Even Republican voters — who tend to read every question as “Are you willing to admit liberals were right yet?” — are showing some signs of growing wobbly. Increasingly, GOP voters are avoiding answering YouGov poll questions like “Is Donald Trump racist?” In response to the 41% of Republicans who replied “not sure,” popular liberal commentator Adam Bonin argued that this is the “safe harbor” answer for party members who know Trump is in the wrong but can’t bring themselves to admit it out loud.

Trump’s levels of denial about his unpopularity have grown so comically whiny that it would be easy to wonder if he’s truly deluded, instead of just lying as usual. “It’s just amazing to me that there’s not more support out there,” Trump complained in remarks on Monday, before reassuring himself: “We actually have a silent support.” He then proceeded to lie about the 2024 election, claiming to have gotten millions more votes than he actually did — even though he won more votes than Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Someone on Trump’s team understood that it would backfire if casual viewers were subject to his usual whining and crying, so the first part of Tuesday night’s speech wisely took a bland, positive tone. He celebrated the U.S. men’s hockey team, though he still had to take a swipe at the equally successful women’s team that skipped the speech. He gave out some medals and bragged about his alleged accomplishments, aware that most people tuning in would not read the dutiful fact-checkers online, who pointed out that the president’s claims were exaggerated at best, and were often outright lies. Trump rolled out a bunch of false promises about lowering housing and health care prices, hoping to seed good vibes while obviously having no intention of following up with real help.

But sure enough, as the speech dragged into the first hour — after non-political junkies have grown bored and turned it off — the real Trump came out. He complained about the ingratitude of those who don’t understand his singular economic genius in pushing tariffs. He griped about the word “affordability,” implying Democrats made that concern up, while also blaming them for prices. He groused repeatedly that the party was not giving him the same phony love bombing that Republicans offered. Some Democrats did angrily shout back, but I wouldn’t make too much of it. Most Democrats did not give Trump the angry reaction he wanted. A few were caught sleeping on camera, the only response this speech deserved.

Once he could be certain that most sane people had shut the TV off, out came the unvarnished racism. He attributed crime and fraud explicitly to non-white immigrants. Crime, he argued, is mainly, if not solely, the result of “importing these cultures,” an especially rich claim from someone who, by all appearances, spent over a decade as the best friend of the American-born Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender whose records are being covered up by the Trump administration in the most ham-fisted way. The president even pretended that the budget will be balanced simply by ending immigrant fraud, a laughable claim that even his most racist fans will have a hard time buying.

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None of this is surprising, coming from the same man who campaigned on false accusations that Haitian immigrants kidnap and cook people’s pets. And it was no shock either when, well over an hour into the speech, the same man who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election started raving about how Democrats supposedly “cheat” in elections.

Trump also turned his attention to his truest love: weird, misleading and titillating stories pretending that right-wing America is under threat from “sick people” — liberals — who are “destroying” the country for no other reason, in his telling, than their relentless need to do evil. He claimed that schools are trying to force kids to change genders. And, of course, he shouted out Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who he claimed was a “martyr” to these shadowy forces of woke.

“These people are crazy, I’m telling ya, they’re crazy,” he said, and rolled out a laundry list of supposed victims of the “terrorists” and “murderers” who were supposedly unleashed by the cackling cabal of progressive baddies. Some of the stories, such as the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, did happen. But the conclusion, especially from someone who knew Epstein as well as Trump did, is an outright lie: that violence is caused by outsiders, and all we need to be safe is to expel anyone who doesn’t look like him or his old friend.

Listening to Trump’s nonsense was very much like being buttonholed by an addled old man who spends his days reading nothing but white supremacist forums and conspiracy theorist newsletters. Or really, it’s exactly like that — except he has a microphone, a sea of sycophants and power granted to him by a nation that has gone very wrong. But as the president’s team no doubt was aware, most people didn’t stick around long enough to see the real Trump.

It’s the trick they have mastered, keeping his lunacy where plugged-in liberals see it but others, who pay little attention, cannot believe it is really that bad. Thankfully, it won’t ultimately matter. His polls are collapsing because the real world effects of Trump’s incompetence are sinking in with voters. And no amount of manipulation at the State of the Union can change that.

The post Trump hides in plain sight at the State of the Union appeared first on Salon.com.

What will the president say? If you’ve been paying attention to his fundraising emails, then you already know.

Trump will attack his enemies in the deep state, along with other so-called traitors who hate America and the MAGA movement because he believes the country’s greatness and his administration are being torpedoed by the evil Democrats and the left. None of this, of course, is normal. This is the behavior of an authoritarian who conflates loyalty to the country with personal fealty. 

But the president’s recent fundraising emails are part of a larger messaging campaign that has become increasingly menacing — even by Trump’s standards. Like an obsessed former lover, the president has been telling his MAGA voters that he loves them but is hurt because they appear to be ignoring him. He is wounded that they don’t answer his multiple emails or pick up the phone when he calls. Trump’s emails also ask his supporters if they are avoiding him or if they have blocked his number. 

Then his guilt-laden message turns threatening: “Does ICE need to come and track you down?”

In a spew of fundraising emails and social media posts in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, Trump pleaded for his followers’ affection, declaring that his “love language is MAGA” and that he needs “MAGA hugs.” And in an especially disturbing fundraising email sent in the very early morning hours of Feb. 13, Trump evoked the image of a lonely lover pining for company. “I’m sitting here,” he wrote. “Alone. In the war room. Fighting for you. The rest of the staff went home hours ago. It’s just me, one dying laptop, and the 72-hour countdown clock to my first mid-month deadline of the year just RANG.”

Mocking these communications is easy. They are often dismissed by the mainstream media and pundits as weird and bizarre, evidence of Trump’s apparently troubled mind. They should instead be taken seriously as an example of the power he still exerts over his MAGA base, and how he won the hearts and minds of tens of millions of Americans in the first place — factors that have long proven a competitive advantage that Democrats have struggled to overcome in recent presidential elections.

Trump’s fundraising emails also demand attention as a matter of realpolitik. From small donors, the mega-rich and big business, he claims to have amassed more than $1.5 billion dollars in his political war chest. Public finance disclosures show more than $600 million across the Republican Party, its congressional super PACs and Trump’s own political machine. By comparison, the Democratic National Committee has only approximately $137 million dollars.

Research consistently shows that Trump’s MAGA followers, and today’s conservatives more broadly, exhibit an authoritarian personality and a social dominance orientation — they seek out strong leaders to submit to and follow who, in turn, give them permission to dominate and control some designated Other or perceived enemy.

Social scientists and other experts have also shown that members of authoritarian populist movements like MAGA appear more likely to feel socially isolated and alienated compared to other groups. In many ways, they are joiners who are seeking a political tribe and family.

Conservative authoritarians are also attracted to the strict father archetype and personality whom they believe will protect them against a dangerous world. But this strong father figure is also punitive in nature; they want to earn his approval to avoid being punished.

In total, the MAGA movement and Trumpism function as a type of unhealthy, undue influence organization — a type of political personality cult — where the members police each other by enforcing loyalty and groupthink.

In an email conversation, political psychologist Steven Ducat explained why Trump’s fundraising emails and larger communication style exert such a powerful hold over his MAGA followers. “[T]he leader is both the source of fear and the protector against it, it generates what social psychologist and cult researcher Alexandra Stein and others have called a trauma bond,” he said. “An examination of Trump’s email fundraising appeals on the eve of his State of the Union address shows his and his handlers’ reliance on this psychology. Trump is presented as a source of punishment and love, threat and promise.”

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Fear is also part of the equation, as former Republican and right-wing pundit Rich Logis wrote in a 2025 essay for Salon in which he observed that many MAGA supporters stick with the movement because they are afraid of “losing their community” and worry about being blamed by people on the left for having supported Trump.

Trump’s team knows this. Today’s political campaigns and their consultants and other experts have access to a vast amount of data, which they use for psychographic profiling, microtargeting, donor analytics and other sophisticated ways of modeling, predicting and manipulating voter behavior. His fundraising emails are not random. Instead, they are tailored to the psychological profiles of Trump’s MAGA followers and others, who appear to be receptive to the messaging. 

As the president’s support among the American people continues to crater, he will seek to exert even more control over his base. They, in turn, will likely feel even more compelled toward Trump, whom many view as their Dear Leader and personal savior, a dynamic common to political and other forms of personality cults.

But like other such authoritarian movements, MAGA’s members and leaders will turn on each other if and when the movement finally collapses. As history has repeatedly shown, such movements do not implode in isolation; the American people and their democracy and society will be the collateral damage.

In a speech at last weekend’s Principles First summit, a conference dedicated to “restoring principled conservatism in America,” former commander of the U.S. Army’s European forces Gen. Mark Hertling offered a warning. “Our nation’s institutions have been shaken. Our alliances have been strained. Our credibility has been damaged. And our nation’s values have been cast aside.”

His voice breaking from emotion, the general predicted that reconstructing the nation’s democracy, civil society and standing in the world would take many years. “The question is not if we are going to return to what we once had,” Hertling observed. “The question is whether we will build something better.”

This fourth Reconstruction will require substantial investments in public education, arts and civic organizations. It will demand that we restore legitimacy to the rule of law by holding corrupt elites responsible for their crimes, support independent and local news media, address extreme wealth and income inequality, and strengthen the social safety net. Finally, it will call on us to protect and expand access to voting, and to also find ways to make elected officials more responsive to the needs and demands of the American people. 

“Enough Americans still believe that principles matter more than power,” Hertling said. “We’re going to be…back, but only if we earn it.”

The post Why Trump’s creepy emails work for MAGA faithful appeared first on Salon.com.

Inheriting a strong economy and with control of the House, Senate and White House, the momentum was on President Donald Trump’s side. Just over a year later, however, the feeling has changed. Trump’s job approval ratings are low due to his handling of the economy, immigration and the massive political fallout stemming from the Epstein files. This change of affairs has high-profile Republicans getting worried about the looming November midterms. Some are even outright panicking, with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, saying it will be a “bloodbath.”

Though the Democrats’ national ratings are still down, the party has achieved some notable victories, which have largely come in recent state-level races and special elections. Relatively small, these have been important wins for the party, since many were contentious fights or were blind-siding upsets.

Iowa

Last year, Democrat Mike Zimmer flipped a state Senate seat in January held by Republican Katie Whittington. Zimmer won by a margin of 52% to Whittington’s 48%, in a district that picked Trump over Kamala Harris by 21 points in 2024.

In April, Democrat Angelina Ramirez won her race for Iowa state representative with nearly 80% of the vote, while first-time Democratic candidate Catelyn Drey‘s state senate win in August ended the Republican supermajority in the Iowa senate. Her win flipped a longtime Republican seat in a district that Trump won by 10 points. Drey told Salon in September that Democrats should be “capitalizing on the frustration” of voters.

“The takeaway is just speaking to voters as if they are human beings. They’re not dumb. We have to remember that voters are not stupid and reach them with a message that resonates about their everyday life,” Drey said.

A few months later, Renee Hardman became the first Black woman in the Iowa Senate. The Democrat beat her opponent by a margin of 40 points, preventing Iowa Republicans from securing a supermajority in the state House. Hardman secured 71.4% of the vote, a full 27 points higher than Harris got in 2024.

Georgia

Two Democrats won positions on the Republican-dominated Georgia Public Service Commission in November. The elections of Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson to the five-person board of utility regulators ended a twenty-year Republican winning streak in winning statewide elections for state-level offices.

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“Affordability is front and center in voters’ minds, and today they overwhelmingly said they’re tired of subsidizing corporate interests at the expense of their families,” Hubbard said at the time.

Mississippi

In Mississippi, Black Democrats won two key state Senate races in November. As in Iowa, the wins in the normally red districts broke the Republicans’ supermajority and will give conservative leadership an uphill battle.

“Mississippi voters reminded us that change is possible when we show up together,” Mississippi Democratic Party Vice Chair Jodie Brown wrote in a statement. “Breaking the supermajority means restoring checks and balances — and ensuring that every Mississippian’s voice counts in their state government.”

Texas

This winter has been hot for Texas Democrats. Taylor Rehmet won a state Senate seat in a conservative Dallas-area county by 14 points in early February, despite Trump urging voters to back his opponent, Leigh Wambsganss. Rehmet’s win broke Republican control in Tarrant County for the first time in more than forty years.

A week prior, Rep. Christian Menefee, D-Texas, won a runoff election for a spot in the US House. His win narrows the Republican majority in the House to just one vote.

The wins certainly give the Democrats a feeling of momentum going into November. They stand poised to take back the House, as well as gain some seats in the Senate. However, the wins may not be true bellwethers.

“They’re a good sign, but not a sure sign,” Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Salon.

Burden said that Democrats are “overperforming” in the small-scale elections, but noted that the party of a sitting president usually suffers in midterms. This year is no different, but voter grievances are more acute.

“His approval ratings are sitting around 40%,” Burden said of Trump. “He has party control in Congress. A lot of the discontent Americans are feeling can be put at the feet of Trump,” noting a rapidly growing discontent among independent voters and a desire for “accountability against the administration.”

Burden pointed to the numerous first-year failures for Trump. Despite inheriting a strong economy, Trump failed to lower prices for many Americans, dropping the ball on the affordability crisis, which he called a “hoax.”

Additionally, Burden said Trump’s handling of immigration by way of turning Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers loose in cities has proven “unacceptable” to the public.

“The public mostly sees him as having done neither of those very big tasks,” Burden said. “Trump promised to do things about them on day one, and that hasn’t happened.”

Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, said the combination of “highly mobilized” college-educated Democratic voters joining forces with independents who feel “alienated by the GOP” has helped Democrats win early elections.

“Usually, the mobilization of partisan and swing voters persists longer in a midterm election,” Voss told Salon. A specialist in elections and voting behavior, he noted an “enthusiasm gap,” in which voters of the party in power grow complacent, has been playing into Democrats’ hands.

“We see an enthusiasm gap coming into midterm elections, where voters for the party out of power feel motivated because they are reacting negatively to the present administration,” Voss said. “So far, we’ve seen a much more powerful enthusiasm gap.”

Still, Voss said the nationwide political situation is “highly volatile,” and while Democrats appear to have the momentum, he gave them some advice: just win.

“The bigger concern is the Democrats overplaying their hand: nominating candidates who are a bitter pill to swallow for swing voters,” Voss said. “A party out of power usually looks for electable candidates because they don’t want to stay in the wasteland.”

“If Democrats feel that this election is their destiny and start nominating more extreme candidates, they may lose elections that they would otherwise win.”

Burden said Democrats should run on affordability and daily economics. “History shows it’s bread and butter issues that typically work best,” he said. However, Burden noted that a “remote possibility” of a Republican midterm miracle still exists.

“Trump needs to admit that affordability is an issue,” Burden said.

Massive tax refunds would have to show up, along with tariff dividends, some timely tax cuts, and truly stellar jobs reports, according to Burden. “It might be just enough to mitigate the serious losses that could happen. It’s at least possible.”

Voss said it would be “really hard” for Trump to win back his swing and Independent voters, barring an “extreme” event, like a catastrophic natural disaster, an economic miracle, or even “another 9/11.”

“Democrats should feel very upbeat but not arrogant,” Voss said.

“The general consensus is that Democrats are advantaged. If one party were to romp, it would be them,” Burden agreed.

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His incessant demands to revisit the 2020 election means he will go down in history as the man who refused to accept his loss and inspired an insurrection. Trump will forever be known as the president who was intent on sowing doubts about the integrity of America’s elections — despite a total lack of evidence and dozens of investigations and judicial findings. When all is said and done, this may be his greatest legacy. 

But as much as Trump has taken these cries of voter fraud and rigged elections to an extreme, it is not one of his narcissistic innovations. He merely took what has long been conservative orthodoxy and put his own deceitful spin on it. Decades before he came along, the right was pushing the voter fraud myth — and using it as an excuse to suppress the vote.

The South’s discriminatory practices during Jim Crow were justified as fraud prevention. Conservatives claimed that unless a poll tax was instituted, poor people would sell their votes. They believed that Black people, regarded as intellectually and morally inferior, were especially likely to do so. Similarly, some “reformers” in Northern cities went to great lengths to make it difficult for immigrant populations to vote, creating barriers to registration and constantly changing the rules, all in the name of stopping so-called fraud. States openly gerrymandered districts in a way to deny Black people representation and created “whites-only” partisan primaries.

But there was never any real evidence of voter fraud, according to historian Alexander Keyssar. In “The Right To Vote: The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States,” he details how the accusation was simply raised as a method to suppress the votes of groups the people in power wished to disenfranchise and disempower. The desire was a precaution — a reflexive response to the idea that the votes of the poor, along with racial and ethnic minorities, might overwhelm the elite and, once in power, they would use the government to seize their property. This was a key part of the systemic strategy in the Jim Crow South to ensure Black Americans retained their second-class status throughout society — a system that remained in place at least until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act finally guaranteed their right to vote. 

The Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent switch of Black voters’ partisan loyalty from the GOP to the Democratic Party led to the Southern Strategy, in which the Republicans exploited racism as an electoral game plan by pandering to the Southern white voter backlash. The strategy’s blueprint formed the basis of modern conservatism’s war on voting rights that has persisted to this day. 

Years ago, conservative activist Paul Weyrich put it plainly at an evangelical gathering. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said, “as a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” From that point on, every attempt to make it easier to vote and open up the franchise was met with fierce resistance. 

President Jimmy Carter’s proposals for Election Day registration, public financing and abolition of the Electoral College were met with shrieks of horror by GOP activists, who labeled the plan “Fraud and Carter’s Voter Registration Scheme.” The legislation was never taken up by Congress. Ten years later, the motor-voter legislation, which allowed people to register when they renewed their driver’s licenses and car registration, was derided as an open door to corrupting the voting rolls; it was vetoed by George H.W. Bush before finally becoming law under Bill Clinton. After the voting age was lowered to 18, states with GOP legislative majorities created onerous rules for college students designed to keep those younger citizens from voting. But in 2000, when the election of George W. Bush turned on a tiny margin of 537 votes in Florida, Republicans went into overdrive, recognizing that as the country was becoming increasingly polarized they could manipulate rules to ensure themselves an advantage. 

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The party homed in on one particular form of exceptionally rare voter fraud: voter impersonation. As Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center for Justice pointed out, the potential cost for an individual to impersonate someone at the polls is very high, while the return to a particular candidate is very low — how much can one vote really matter? Throw in the idea of undocumented immigrants committing this fraud and you can see why it’s so absurd. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Nonetheless, Bush’s attorney general John Ashcroft pursued dozens of investigations into voter fraud, as did Republican attorneys general across the country, and they came up with nothing. 

The GOP’s strategy with crying “voter fraud” has always been to get their base motivated. By the time Donald Trump came on the scene in 2015, his advisers had schooled him on all the right-wing tropes, and illegal immigration and voter fraud were at the top of the list. As the man who had put birtherism — the lie suggesting that Barack Obama was born outside the United States and had thus illegally run for president — on the map, he was a perfect messenger. 

Even before Election Day in 2016, Trump was claiming that the election was rigged and that he would only accept the results if he won. As president, he convened a voter fraud commission to prove that he had not just won the electoral vote but the popular vote as well. Ten years later, he continues to promote that lie as truth. Month in advance of the 2020 election, he teed up the false notion that mail-in votes were fraudulent. We know the rest. 

Now we are awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could see the Voting Rights Act completely gutted if the conservative justices, as is expected, decide in favor of the state. This is a long-held dream for the American right — and for Chief Justice John Roberts, who served as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration arguing against the act.

As for Donald Trump, he is surely one of the sorest losers in history; his fragile psyche cannot accept defeat. But he had over a century of help with his lies about voter fraud. Conservatives laid the groundwork — and he took it to the next level. 

The post Conservatives cried voter fraud long before Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

Ordinarily, a Supreme Court justice’s book is an opportunity to line their pockets with a hefty advance, enjoy the perks of a lecture tour and sit for gentle interviews with hand–picked partisans who gullibly swallow the usual line about how they’re students of the Constitution, not robed, opportunistic hacks. 

Yet The Nation’s Elie Mystal noticed something unusual about the publication date of Alito’s forthcoming doorstopper “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and the Country.” It’s scheduled to hit bookstores on Oct. 6, the second day of the Court’s 2026-27 term. Alito, whose appreciation for private jet travel is well-established, would ordinarily be due at his day job.

Unless, as Mystal suggested, the justice plans to retire. 

Certainly, Alito must be enjoying life as a leader of the Court’s conservative supermajority. You know, making it more difficult to vote, overturning reproductive rights and gutting the regulatory state, all while being feted each summer at a religious summit in Rome or hosted by a princess at a European castle. 

Yet the 75-year-old is also enough of a savvy political analyst to understand that this could be his last chance to preserve his seat for conservatives for decades to come. Republicans remain favored to hold the Senate this fall. But what if Democrats ride a blue wave and take control, summon their inner Mitch McConnell to block any late-term Trump selection and then take back the White House in 2028? 

In that case, Alito might then need to white-knuckle it through six years of annual physicals to ensure the GOP retains its current edge. It’s a tough call: hobnob with European aristocrats and feel the thrill of executing the innocent if they, whoopsie, miss an appeal deadline, or allow some younger, red-robed Federalist Society/MAGA partisan the opportunity to abet pay discrimination against women.  

As Democrats ruefully learned in September 2020 with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, riding it out, fingers crossed, is a really dopey strategy.

So given the high stakes and the Court’s role as the true source of GOP political power, the smart money suggests that Alito, with his eye on the long game, may well step down. After all, Republicans have long understood the power of each Supreme Court seat. In the end, they know that what matters isn’t the brilliance of any individual justice — that there is no indispensable justice. Power flows from ensuring that they are replaced by someone who wears the same color robe.

Republicans play this game far better than Democrats. Back in 2013, when Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House, liberals, with an eye toward locking in power, encouraged then-justices Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, who were both known to have health difficulties, to step down and hand their seat to any younger, replacement-level jurist. Louder, less strategic voices instead built a cult of personality around Ginsburg, crafted dissent collars to sell on Etsy and dismissed any calls for a justice with pancreatic cancer to step down as sexist. These deep thinkers hopefully appreciate their Christmas cards from Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

It’s time to hate the players and the game. An Alito retirement, after all, makes perfect sense. He has dedicated his life’s work to the conservative legal movement. A well-timed retirement allows a president of his own party to fill the vacancy. The incentives are obvious to all. Every justice appointed since Clarence Thomas in 1991 who has left the Court voluntarily has timed their departure to allow a president of the same party to name his or her successor. 

Congress must fix this. It is dangerous enough for the rule of law that the Court has been captured by ideologues determined to use it to impose a radical, religious agenda upon a representative democracy that would roundly reject those outcomes at the ballot box. No nine people should hold this kind of veto-proof, extra-legislative authority for life, and then be allowed to choose who replaces them as a robed god for the next four decades.

The nation badly needs Supreme Court reform. It should be enlarged to protect the Constitution and the rule of law. There should be ethics codes so that hidden, cozy financial relationships between justices and right-wing billionaires with business before the Court are disallowed, along with the private planes, tuition payments, luxury vacations, real estate deals and European junkets from which the justices and their extended families benefit. There should be term limits and a mandatory retirement age to ensure no single person or political party can blockade themselves on the Court for life.

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An unelected supermajority of six — the masterfully achieved goal of five decades of conservative scheming, bought and paid for by billionaires, wielding its power swiftly and steadily on behalf of wealthy donors, the religious right and the Republican Party — has created an existential crisis for democracy and majority rule. The American public understands this: The Court’s credibility has cratered to its lowest ratings ever in recent opinion polls, which often show that fewer than four in 10 Americans view the institution favorably.

Alito, Thomas and other conservatives insist that the only thing partisan about their rulings is the critique that they are partisans. They play-act befuddlement that they might possibly be viewed as anything but scholars following the original intent of the Constitution. This they either expect us to believe — even as Christian nationalist and distress flags hang in the Alito’s front yard, or they are simply so safely and permanently ensconced in power as to no longer care. 

There are many reasons not to believe the conservative justices when they deny being partisan actors. But strategic retirements like this might be the most compelling argument. After all, if justices of either side were simply following the Constitution and the rule of law, the political party which appoints them shouldn’t make every world of difference. Few among us remain this naive. 

Large majorities back the obvious fix. Congress could impose term limits. Each justice could be limited to 18 years on the bench, with each president receiving two selections during each term. The stakes of presidential elections would be clear. Historical accidents like Donald Trump receiving three appointments and Jimmy Carter none would come to an end. There would be no unseemly deal making between the White House and the justices, such as the reported arrangements between Trump officials and Justice Anthony Kennedy before he stepped down in 2018 and was replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, one of his former clerks.

The nation’s confidence in the institution has dramatically eroded. The Court’s own actions, unseemly ethics and the obvious-to-all connection between its decisions and political outcomes — say, granting a Republican president unbound powers under the made-up unitary executive theory, but tying the hands of a Democrat with the equally made-up major-questions doctrine — are to blame. 

Back in 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts told C-SPAN that the “most important thing for the public to understand is that we’re not a political branch of government. They do not elect us. If they do not like what we are doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”

But we can, and we must, act. Reining in this imperious, arrogant Court might be the most important first step toward placing this nation on a road toward a rebuilt, strengthened democracy. Putting an end to these phony strategic retirements — by both sides — would be an obvious place to start.

The post Samuel Alito could give Trump another Supreme Court pick appeared first on Salon.com.

Now this very coalition is splintering as his support spirals downward. On top of that, low-income whites and low-information voters are moving away from him too.

What do these voters want? What are they in search of? If Democrats and the larger pro-democracy movement can answer these questions and communicate the answers clearly and boldly, they may be able to secure a new front in the fight against Trump and his neofascist movement.

Low-information voters, which comprised about 25% of the electorate in 2024, supported Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 points. These voters don’t follow politics closely; they tend to get their news from social media, YouTube influencers and people they trust. These factors, as we saw in the 2024 election, make them very vulnerable to disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories and other forms of manipulation by malign actors.

While the Democratic Party’s leaders and some voices in the mainstream news media were correctly warning that Trump’s return would be disastrous for the country, low-information voters were more concerned about their immediate economic and other personal needs and distractions from the attention economy.  

New polling from Strength In Numbers/Verasight shows that low-information voters now disapprove of Trump by 13 points, which marks a 24-point shift since 2024. The percentage of voters who supported the president in 2024 and now disapprove of his performance in office stands at more than 55%. This is important, and not just because of the numerical change showing them backing away from the president. It also indicates a potential change in behavior. As they increasingly feel the pain from his failed economic agenda and other policies, these low-information voters are beginning to behave more like the politically engaged voters who have long opposed him and the MAGA movement.

At Strength in Numbers, data journalist G. Elliott Morris explained that “they were unhappy with Biden, unhappy with prices, and voted accordingly.” Their support of Trump, he said, should not have been seen as them “making an ideological commitment to Trumpism — most aren’t even ideological at all.” Morris predicted that, if Trump continues to stumble, “these voters will keep moving against the president.”

All this amounts to bad news for the GOP, he said: “If Republicans aren’t winning high-knowledge respondents because of the negative news, and they aren’t winning low-knowledge respondents because of conditions…then they’re not winning elections.”

Contrary to the stereotypes and cultural myths, poor white people are far from monolithic in their support of Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party. While the shift to Republicans began in the late 1970s around cultural issues such as abortion, many poor and low-income white voters still support the Democratic Party’s economic policies. There is also a long tradition of populism and multiracial alliances in rural America, most notably Appalachia. This nuance can be seen to call into question the permanence and depth of their connection to any given political party or ideology. 

While the president is losing support with voters across all incomes, his losses are especially acute among low-income voters. In 2024, he won voters who made less than $25,000 a year, but as polling analyst Lakshya Jain detailed in a new report for The Argument, Trump has lost 26 points of support among lower-income white voters. 

By comparison, Democrats have gained only one point of support among voters who make more than $200,000 a year. But they have gained seven points among voters who make less than $50,000 a year. These disparities in support help to explain why Democrats have been dominating the Republicans in generic congressional ballots, as well as in special and off-year elections. 

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Trump’s policies have greatly increased the economic and financial misery of working-class and low-income Americans, and now they are punishing him for it.  

There are tens of millions of poor and low-income — and low-information — voters in the United States. As the Rev. William Barber III, leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, has argued, if mobilized properly this group could radically improve American society by supporting politicians and movements that create economic opportunity and expand freedom for all Americans, not just the rich and the powerful.

“Poor people are not driving the extremism in American politics, nor are they the true base for Trump, whose major policy achievement has been to cut government programs that serve everyday people so he can give tax breaks to corporations and wealthy Americans,” Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove argued in an essay for Time published in 2025. “Poor and low-income Americans are, in fact, the largest swing vote in the country… If a moral fusion movement, led by poor and low-income people, can rise up in America today, we have the numbers to change the political conversation.”

Democrats need to mobilize these voters for the long-term by emphasizing economic concerns, quality of life and speaking in direct ways about problems and solutions, or they risk a permanent rupture with the working-class. Most importantly, politicians across all spectrums of the party need to be much better listeners. Lecturing these voters will not win them over.

In a 2024 interview with me, sociologist Arlie Hochschild explained this in the context of what she called “a material economy and a pride economy” that exists for poor and working-class voters. “In politics, sometimes the material economy matters more, and sometimes the pride economy matters more… [Trump’s] voters feel that language and take it personally.”

She highlighted the role that racism and social dominance behavior plays in the president’s appeals. “Yes, Trump is lifting them up psychologically and emotionally by putting other people down — in particular, nonwhites and others deemed by him and the right as not being ‘real Americans,” she said. “But that psychological and emotional wage in the pride economy is very real and very powerful — sometimes, even more than the wages paid in the material economy.”

But that’s not all: Democrats will have to overcome structural obstacles as well. Political scientists and other experts have repeatedly shown that America’s political elites are not responsive to the policy demands of poor and working-class people.

Tens of millions of low-income and low-information Americans are already turning against Trump — and Democrats should not take that for granted. Although the sleeping giant is stirring,  it can still be lured back to Trumpism by promises of free money and easy answers to complex problems. The question is whether Democrats have the conviction and smarts to wake it all the way up.

The post Even Trump’s forgotten Americans are turning against him appeared first on Salon.com.

When the president has shown up in public, it’s been at events that are carefully staged to avoid contentious questions — particularly after he walked a rope line outside the West Wing in the days following Pretti’s shooting and said, “You can’t have guns.”

Sources close to Trump say the reason he has rarely been seen is that he is preparing for his upcoming State of the Union message, which he is scheduled to deliver on Tuesday, Feb. 24. Others, noting what appears to be a physical and mental decline, say it is health related. Some have explained it is because he angered the National Rifle Association and many of his supporters with his rope line comments about limiting firearms. As usual with Trump, more than one statement can be — and often is — correct. In this case, all three probably are.

Trump is resting. He is prepping for his speech. And he’s still trying to figure out how to spin the Minneapolis debacle after White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and drew the ire of both Democrats and Republicans.

But the president’s silence will soon come to an end. As he said in an email to supporters on Thursday as he headed to Georgia, “I’m moments away from delivering a MASSIVE announcement — one that will shake American history, crush the radical left, and send the fake news into total meltdown. This is HUGE. Bigger than big. The kind of move only I, President Trump, can pull off. They won’t know what hit them.”

He is, of course, talking about the State of the Union. Trump’s trip to Georgia on Thursday served as a dress rehearsal for his big night — and it signaled that we should expect a typical Trump speech next week, a rerun of his greatest hits. He will tell us how great the country is because of his appearance on the political scene. He will acknowledge no mistakes and offer no apologies for anything his administration has done.

As Presidential Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday, Trump is “still digging his way out of the Joe Biden mess.” So you can also be sure that he will blame the Democrats for anything wrong in the world.

Trump will tell us how safe cities and states are because of his actions — despite the protests, killings of innocent people and thousands of federal troops deployed in major American cities. On Wednesday, appearing at the White House for a Black History Month reception, the president told us we need law and order. “Washington, D.C. was a crime capital. Now many people are saying it’s safe. Many people. It happened very fast. It’s safe to walk down the street again,” he said before bragging about deploying the National Guard to Memphis and New Orleans. 

During his address, Trump will tell us the Dow is at 50,000 and gas is at $1.99 per gallon. (Fact check: This near-daily rant about gas still isn’t true). He will also say that before he returned to the White House, Joe Biden was the worst president in history and we were a dead country — and that many are now saying that we’re “the hottest country on the planet.”

Some say his claims about heat have more to do with canceling Environmental Protection Agency guidelines and policies. Others argue it’s because Trump is a minion from the darkest circle of a mythical hell. Either way, Trump will claim it’s because manufacturing is back, our economy is great and he has solved all of America’s problems. 

He will say that we are loved, respected and feared overseas. Trump will tell us he’s making Americans healthy again and that 80% of Americans believe we should deport violent criminal immigrants living among us.

He’ll praise God and family, and brag about bringing the country back from whatever dark hole he claims we inhabited prior to his arrival. He’ll tell us, as Leavitt did on Wednesday, that not only is he the “president of peace,” but that he has solved seven or eight major wars. He’ll smile and say he’s gotten us close to peace in Ukraine, though the war didn’t start on his watch and is not his fault. 

And he’ll be sure to call Democrats cheats and liars. 

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He won’t mention the Epstein files or how he has dismantled the EPA. He won’t mention his ongoing destruction of the free press. 

He won’t talk about the rapidly rising measles epidemic or how he has gutted government agencies that oversee the safety of our food and drugs. He won’t mention skyrocketing health insurance premiums or how some middle-class Americans have taken to selling blood plasma to make ends meet. He won’t talk about the persistence of inflation and how recent polls show that Americans don’t share his enthusiasm for the economy.

He won’t talk about how he is separating families and stoking fears about immigrants to justify abandoning due process. He won’t talk about shooting American citizens while his federal shock troops invade American cities and ignore police procedures, good sense and the Constitution.

He won’t explain how we’re loved by Russian President Vladimir Putin and feared by our European allies. He won’t tell us how America is no longer trusted enough to receive intelligence from our closest allies, including the United Kingdom, or how little they think of us.

He’ll leave out details about how his administration has killed people in the Caribbean, bombed independent countries and is currently threatening a war against Iran.

He won’t talk about the billions he’s made from his presidency since he took office or about the alleged money-laundering schemes with the United Arab Emirates through crypto currency. 

He won’t talk about the corruption of his own government, and how he has stoked fear and anger. He won’t talk about the growing concerns of a renewed arms race, the widening education gap or how many people now must be 40 before they can afford their own home.

He won’t talk about any real issues that affect people unless he can make you scared or angry.

He will never admit to a single misstep. 

The conspiracy theorists among us think he could announce the presence of aliens from outside our solar system, especially after former president Barack Obama’s recent off-hand comments raised eyebrows. Leavitt laughed that off on Wednesday, saying that any speech about aliens is “news to me.” I wonder if any of these “aliens” have been deported? 

Republicans in Congress will cheer. Democrats have been told by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries they have two options: “either attend with silent defiance, or to not attend, and send a message to Donald Trump in that fashion.” Supreme Court justices and the Joint Chiefs will nod quietly. A few might shake their heads.

And millions of Americans will believe the fiction. 

You can’t blame them. We love our American fiction. We’re the country that invented Superman and Captain America. We are righteous: truth, justice and the American way. We are God’s children. It’s true, we think a lot of ourselves. 

Trump is just the festering symptom of the fictional cancer we worship and subscribe to here in the United States. We often think movies are reality. If you doubt our love for fiction, then consider this; Our most popular sport is called football. But in that sport we rarely use our feet, and we don’t, strictly speaking, play with a ball. In baseball, we refer to the championship tournament as the “World Series,” though only American and Canadian teams play for the title.

We say we have free speech and due process. We say we have the right to bear arms, that all are created equal and that no person is above the law. We say that we value education, health care and family. But none of this is true. Here in the United States, we only value money and power.

On Tuesday, Trump will use our values against us in an effort to take away the things we hold most dear. He will spread more of what my dad used to fertilize his roses. So ahead of his speech, the real question is not what Trump will say, but how many people believe his appearance on the public stage is coming to an ignominious end?

That’s the real reason we should be careful to listen and watch Trump. Everyone who has covered him, including me, has noticed a marked change from his first administration to his second. Could he last another 1060 days in office? Maybe. 

But his absence on the public stage and his speculative nature, as well as lingering questions about his health, are all adding up to one great big and sometimes terrifying question: What the hell happens should Trump not reach the end of his term?

He may well try to answer that in his State of the Union address — if only because of his desperate desire for immortality. With that in mind, what exactly could he try to pull off in an attempt to secure the historic status he believes he is due?

Aliens? No midterm elections? Martial law? Will he change the NFL kickoff rules?

“What will he say?” could be the most frightening question of all.

The post What Trump won’t say in his State of the Union appeared first on Salon.com.

That image of Bush has become a meme — a symbol of presidential hubris that any leader with a drop of sense would seek to avoid at all costs. But Donald Trump apparently didn’t get the message. 

Hubris is Trump’s middle name. He is so defined by ego and narcissism that he declared the affordability crisis to be over; the president has apparently fixed America’s economy once and for all. In an interview for the Super Bowl, Trump told NBC News, “The one thing that they don’t say anymore is ‘affordability,’ because I fixed the problem that they created. I’m very proud of it.” 

Trump is a reflexive braggart and a hype artist, so his claims of success where none exists are so common as to be unremarkable. But this time, he may have stepped on Bush’s landmine. Even former president Joe Biden, who was punished for his inability to fully tame inflation while maintaining his insistence on touting impressive jobs numbers, didn’t go that far. And Trump’s dismal approval ratings show that most Americans are anything but convinced. 

“Affordability” is a concept that really reflects how people feel about the cost of living and their ability to get ahead. Polls phrase the questions differently, often in ways that obscure more than they reveal. But generally large numbers of people still feel that prices are going up, and that they are unable to buy the things they need or desire. 

A recent YouGov poll found that 53% of Americans said the economy is getting worse. Twenty-one percent believed it is getting better, while 19% said it was about the same. Most believe, though, that their own personal finances will get better or remain the same, so this is a generalized feeling about the economy-at-large. Still, the poll found that “79% say the price of food has gone up a lot (54%) or a little (24%), while only 9% say it’s gone down.” A whopping 72% reported that housing costs have “gone up a lot,” versus 47% who said a little and only 6% who responded that rent or mortgages have declined. 

These are things that average people deal with all day long. But Trump, living in his gilt mansions in New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida, believes that the rise of the stock market — which experts say is due to the artificial intelligence bubble and not great economic fundamentals — is the avatar of a soaring economy. He continues to believe that the manufacturing boom that only exists in his imagination will convince people they aren’t seeing what they say they’re in fact seeing. 

Economist Paul Krugman knows a little bit more about how the economy actually works than Donald Trump, and he recently quoted another economist, Paul Samuelson, who famously joked that the market had predicted nine of the last five recessions. In other words, the stock market is an unreliable indicator of the country’s economic health. Beyond that fact, the American market is not doing nearly as well as the rest of the world’s market; our economy is anemic by comparison. As Krugman noted, “Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Despite one good month, employment growth has shriveled. And it keeps getting more difficult to find a job.”

Having people such as Attorney General Pam Bondi declare that Americans should be celebrating the stock market instead of worrying about the massive pedophilia scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein that has enveloped some of the world’s decadent elites — including Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — is tone deaf on virtually every level. Not only aren’t people in a celebratory mood about the markets, they are downright sour on the future. That affects consumer spending, business start-ups — everything. 

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Back in December, the White House announced that Trump was planning to hit the road to sell his economic accomplishments, with the thinking apparently being that if people can just see the president saying it in front of enthusiastic rally goers, the country will go along. His first foray into Pennsylvania was, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye noted, a dud. In between his usual forays into windmills and racism, the president lied repeatedly about the economy claiming, for instance, that he had obtained $18 trillion in investments when the reality, as reported by Politifact, is that the number was closer to $9 trillion, and most of the projects were “aspirational, multi-year goals that may not come to fruition.”

Trump claimed inflation was way down from when he took office. In reality, it’s right about the same: elevated. (The number declined a bit in January, mainly due to lower gas prices, while other energy costs went up substantially.) Health care premiums are through the roof, and the president’s TrumpRx website certainly isn’t going to solve that problem. The administration has also made false claims about the Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts in hopes they will appease the masses into believing that their ship has finally come in.

Interestingly, beyond a couple of small-scale events, there hasn’t been much talk of sending him out on the road again. Perhaps the White House is realizing the limited utility of bringing more attention to the fact that the president is either lying about people’s lived reality or is completely out of touch. Either way, his poll numbers have been cratering for the last two months. 

Ahead of the midterms, Democrats are gearing up for a fight on the economy. Trump made big promises during the presidential campaign that, despite his claims to the contrary, have not come to pass — and he’s actually made things worse. Democrats hope to hang Trump’s failures around his neck, and it’s likely the GOP will fare even worse than Kamala Harris did in 2024, largely due to his unfulfilled economic promises.

But there’s more to it than just that. The president’s insistence that the economy is great despite the public’s feeling otherwise is contributing to a general sense that the country is hurtling out of control on Trump and the GOP’s watch. That sense, combined with his horrific mass deportation policy and violence in the streets, his weird obsessions with unnecessary White House renovations and the Nobel Peace Prize, military incursions and threats of imperial seizures of sovereign territory, and public health being dismantled, signals to the American people that we are in a period of overwhelming chaos. 

Republican pollster Whit Ayres recently observed in POLITICO that “there’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration and it seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term.” It’s all of a piece — and if Democrats can find a way to synthesize this into a message that voters need to give them a congressional majority in November, the country will begin to at least some sense of relief. Between a bad economy and the escalating violence, people are simply yearning for a break from Trump’s chaos.

The post Trump’s “Mission Accomplished” moment gives Democrats an opening appeared first on Salon.com.

But MAGA media has a very different idea of how to measure the worth of a father. They believe it’s by how many kids he has produced. In this worldview, the father deserves most of the credit, despite putting almost no effort into the production side of having babies. In an era when most people can barely afford to raise one kid, this focus on quantity isn’t just tone-deaf. It reduces kids to a commodity, which in turn encourages neglectful, toxic or even abusive approaches to parenting.

Before his death, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was a perfect example of these damaging ideas. He hyped the idea that having “a ton of children” is inherently virtuous, at least for white people. (He was less happy about Black people having a lot of kids.) But Kirk also argued that people should “get married young and have more kids than they can afford” — a message that was no doubt pleasing to his old-fashioned GOP donors who want their daughters to give up their careers and move back to their parents’ suburban neighborhoods. But for actual families, it’s a bad idea, especially as Republicans like Kirk want to simultaneously gut public education and social spending. Growing up in poverty isn’t fun or romantic. It’s stressful and leads to long-term problems for a lot of kids. 

From Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bragging about his seven kids to Vice President JD Vance gloating about his fourth that is on the way, the idea that having a big family is the same as having a happy family is ubiquitous on the right. As I explained on a recent episode of “Standing Room Only,” Fox News even had a segment where they ranked Donald Trump‘s Cabinet members by how many kids they have.

Most famously, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is so obsessed with having kids — he has at least 14 — that he reportedly hits up women he’s never met up on X, asking them to have babies for him, often through in vitro fertilization. He is exhibit number one in why this casual conflation of quantity with quality in fatherhood is so misguided.

Musk is a terrible father. This is most obvious when it comes to his eldest daughter, who he has reportedly rejected for being transgender. But the billionaire appears to have a strained relationship with many of his children, in no small part because he can’t stop getting into pointless conflicts with their many mothers. He appears to be estranged from his young son with reformed influencer Ashley St. Clair; apparently he’s mad at her for trying to get him to acknowledge their child. Musk does seem attached to X, a son he had with the musician Grimes, but he’s been accused of neglecting his other children with her and refusing her visitation time with her son.

Neglect, and in some cases, even outright abuse, is normalized in the MAGA world. Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, hosts a podcast that seems to exist for no other reason than to give MAGA leaders a friction-free environment to present themselves as idealized fathers and husbands. And yet even in that context, the men give unconvincing performances. Hegseth sounded like he barely knows his kids, and he admitted that his wife Jennifer is “the rock and the stability” of their home. Vance copped to responding to a child’s tantrum poorly: “I immediately grab them, take them to the bathroom and say, ‘You got to cut that s**t out.'” In perhaps the weirdest admission, Katie Miller griped that her husband wears shoes in the house against her will, which she dislikes because “the kids eat off the floor.”

The most glaring example of this is Trump himself, who seems to know so little about his youngest son that the only qualities the president can name about Barron is that he is really tall and knows how to turn on a laptop. But since Trump is a father of five, he gets treated like a parenting expert in conservative media. Christian podcast host Dave Ramsey even asked Trump about his rules for parenting. He nodded along as the president, clearly having no idea what he was talking about, grasped at “no drugs” before arguing that all that matters in the end is “genetics” — which is exactly what a dad who had no hand in raising his own kids would say.

None of this registers as weird or bad on the right, though, because MAGA is all about retrograde gender roles that treat raising kids as women’s work. When dads do dip in, it’s often about pushing toxic, backward notions about gender and sexuality on their kids.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a long, public history of being really creepy about his kids and sex. He has made his daughters pledge their virginity and has monitored his son’s electronic devices to prevent him from accessing adult content. Johnson has learned nothing from being widely ridiculed for this behavior. When asked on Katie Miller’s podcast how to prevent kids from being trans, he acted like this was a perfectly normal question. “What we tolerate in moderation, our children excuse in excess,” he replied, which was just a fancy way of saying that he punishes even the slightest perceived gender deviance — as if stopping your son from crying now will keep him from being queer later.

Katie Miller and her guests avoid talking too bluntly about how disciplining children is achieved. But make no mistake, the right has not given up on their faith in beating children into submission. On her podcast for TPUSA, Alex Clark recently interviewed Doug Wilson, the far-right pastor who leads the denomination to which Hegseth belongs. Wilson spent the entire interview advocating for spanking as a way to teach “obedience” and to drum “bad attitudes” out of children. His view of a “bad attitude” is, unsurprisingly, rooted in sexism. Boys “have to be tough,” he argued. But his belief also reflects a larger tendency on the right to commodify children.

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Wilson insisted that he wants kids to have “emotional control” to prevent living in a “clown world,” a point that makes sense at first glance. After all, teaching kids to behave appropriately is a big part of parenting. But seen within Wilson’s larger worldview, this is dangerous stuff. “Don’t lie. Don’t disobey. Don’t disrespect your mother,” he has ranted. “Life is simple.”

But life is not, in fact, simple. It is complicated, and so is raising kids. Wilson clearly desires children to be quiet little automatons, instead of living, complex human beings. He has argued, “In this family, we prioritize being in fellowship.” But people who can read right-wing Christian lingo know that “fellowship,” at least in this context, is code for being in lockstep.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is the father of nine, and in December he offered an odd defense of the Trump administration lowering fuel efficiency standards. “This rule will actually allow you to bring back the 1970s station wagon — maybe a little wood paneling on the side,” he said, as if gas consumption — and not changing tastes — explain the shift in automative exteriors. It was a weird statement, but also the perfect distillation of what’s so wrong with MAGA views on fatherhood.

By reducing fuel efficiency standards, Duffy is actively doing harm to children. In the short term, this change could lead to an increase air pollution, which results in chronic conditions like childhood asthma. In the long term, of course, this will also contribute to climate change, which will do real, lasting damage on the ability of today’s young generation to have safe, comfortable adulthoods.

But that’s MAGA fatherhood in a nutshell: all the focus is placed on appearances, at the expense of what families actually need to raise happy, healthy kids. 

The post MAGA loves bad dads appeared first on Salon.com.

I’d say I was shocked by what I saw on Capitol Hill, but many of the loathsome legislators there long ago put decency and professionalism in its review mirror. Even young staffers, at least those who understand the concepts of the Constitution, are appalled by what they’ve seen since Donald Trump came back to town.

“It’s like all [members of Congress] want to do is to s**t in each other’s mouth,” I was told. “No one wants to work together to solve problems.”

And after two days of contentious hearings on Capitol Hill, Trump must be jealous. For once, since he returned to office, the president is not the center of attention. His staff, however, is overwhelmingly thankful for the respite. They know the danger of Trump talking. Besides, many members of Congress and Trump appointees are as shallow and demeaning as the president, so their rhetoric sounds the same. 

We saw that this week when Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed up on Tuesday to testify before House and Senate committees, and when Attorney General Pam Bondi — “the worst attorney general in history,” as a Republican staffer from Texas described her — appeared the following day before the House Judiciary Committee. 

For three hours, Lyons had a hard time defending ICE actions in Minneapolis before a House oversight hearing on immigration enforcement. Across Capitol Hill, Lutnick floundered while testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing broadband funding and budget issues that ended up diving into the cancerous Jeffrey Epstein scandal following detailed revelations about the secretary’s connections to the convicted sex offender. Democrats, and even many Republicans, were left stunned when Lutnick admitted that he took his underage children and his wife to Epstein’s Caribbean island for lunch. 

Still, nothing was as odd as Bondi’s performance, which was unprofessional and combative. She lashed out at legislators, telling them they had no right to accuse her of breaking the law, and called Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a “washed up loser lawyer.” Many Democrats and even some Republicans told me privately that her testimony will probably help the Democrats during the fall midterm elections. 

But every one of Trump’s people so far this week have probably helped Democrats. Republicans are wallowing in overconfidence, ignoring reality and are their own worst enemies. 

When a dog gets busy chasing a moving tire, it’s easy to miss the car attached to it until it is too late. That’s what the Republicans look like to me. And in the process, they’ve made the very city of Washington unrecognizable. At least that’s the thought that occurred to me as I walked in the snow to the White House, and then from Union Station to the Capitol and Supreme Court.

Trump has told us on numerous occasions how safe the District of Columbia is these days due to the presence of the National Guard and how he’s “cleaned up” the city. He’s told us it is safe to go to restaurants — “like never before” — and how people can walk the streets safely now. 

Having lived in the area for the last 30 years, I can tell you that Washington has always been safe to travel through — especially near the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court and most dining establishments. Where there are pockets of poverty there is crime, but that’s not unlike any other large city.

When I returned this week to a slate full of hearings in Congress and a Tuesday presidential press briefing, I didn’t think D.C. looked like a peaceful, safe city. I saw tall fences going up once again — this time for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit. I saw federal troops stationed at several Metro stations and on many street corners. I talked with Uber and taxi drivers who are suffering because of all the Department of Government Efficiency firings. I spoke with restaurant workers who said business has been unusually light. I saw a city without its energy. A city hollowed out. A city under siege.

When Trump says you can find a table at a restaurant, he’s not kidding. Less business. Fewer people. Less energy. As a city, Washington seems to have grown tired of Trump. Certainly the senators and House members have. 

And while the District seems tired, Trump seems more so. It doesn’t even seem like the president is trying his hardest to lie to us anymore. He just repeats the same lies with less energy, as if he too has grown weary of his own rhetoric. He’s telling us to turn the page on the Epstein scandal. But he’s on that next page too. 

After meeting in private with Netanyahu on Wednesday, Trump didn’t even bother to compete with Congress for attention. He didn’t do a bilateral press conference. He didn’t come out in public and speak at all. He was content with a post on Truth Social. “There was nothing definitive reached other than I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a Deal can be consummated,” he said of his meeting with Netanyahu. “If it can, I let the Prime Minister know that will be a preference. If it cannot, we will just have to see what the outcome will be. Last time Iran decided that they were better off not making a Deal, and they were hit with Midnight Hammer — That did not work well for them.”

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It was a low-energy Trump who showed up on Thursday in the Roosevelt Room with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to announce he was repealing the federal government’s authority to regulate climate change. The landmark shift, Zeldin said, marked “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” He added that “the price of a newer, safer vehicle was too high.” Cheap, unsafe vehicles for everyone? 

Well, billionaires will be fine. A lethargic Trump prattled on, saying he was proud of himself for supposedly reducing prices: “And now they’re coming down by — depending on, you could say, 500, 600, 700% — depending on the way you want to — or you could say 80%, it doesn’t matter.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., coming out of a vote on Department of Homeland Security funding, told me Thursday that nothing will change “as long as Trump is president,” and that Trump is a mountain of contradictions — saying what he wants, when he wants, with little care for reality. 

He’s for the Second Amendment. But he’s going to get the guns. He’s for the First Amendment, but he doesn’t want to hear anything he doesn’t like. 

“I think he’s running out of steam,” a few of my D.C. happy hour comrades confessed Wednesday after the hearings, “Or he’s really sicker than he lets on.”

Since the National Rifle Association rebuked his statement about confiscating guns following the killing of Alex Pretti by federal officers in Minneapolis, Trump has been seen very little. Maybe it’s just the politics. 

By Wednesday afternoon, the president had apparently decided to try to bring some of his verve and bombast to the White House’s East Room. He showed up to get a trophy for being “The Undisputed Champion of Coal” from the Washington Coal Club, an industry lobbying group. It means about as much as his FIFA Peace Prize, but Trump loves getting trophies, so he thanked everyone and said, “We love clean, beautiful coal.” He bragged about his “nice easy life” and told audience members that America is still the “hottest country.”

He sounded flat. Even when his administration announced good job numbers Wednesday, it sounded flat. “Who can believe them?” SiriusXM radio host Dean Obeidallah asked on his show Wednesday. “He fired the people who produced numbers he didn’t like, so I don’t know whether to believe him or not. He lies about everything.”

This was a theme the congressional staffers I spent time with Wednesday also pounded home. “It’s hard to believe him, and I voted for him,” a late-30s mid-level staffer explained. “We’re seriously f****d.”

Bernie Sanders echoed that sentiment as he left the floor of the Senate on Thursday after casting his vote against funding DHS. When I asked the Vermont Independent what could be done to return to some semblance of normalcy, he seemed testy, waved his hands and said, “We’re doing the best we can.”

Members of the United Auto Workers, in town this week from Detroit, shared their frustration with Trump as well and were unmoved by the latest jobs report. “He says he’s America First, but we’re not feeling it,” a UAW officer I ran into explained.

On Thursday, Trump claimed union workers loved him. He said the same thing to coal workers the previous day. “Those other presidents didn’t take good care of you,” Trump said. But clearly, many are no longer buying what he is selling.

As I visited congressional offices this week, meeting with sources and watching members of Congress interact with their constituents, it felt perfunctory — and, in some cases, sad. Trump’s fans have placed posters proclaiming his greatness on the walls outside their offices. It looked like high school.

The most enjoyable people I’ve interacted with since I’ve been back aren’t my colleagues, who — if they aren’t burned out — have become mindless automatons and propagandists who can’t think for themselves. The National Guard members, however, are different. Many of those I met are from Florida and are serving to pay for college. Bright and eager to talk, they told me that most people have been nice to them. “But there’s nothing much to do here,” one guardsman said. “We’re only for show.” 

That show is growing duller, and more lethargic and repetitive, by the day, like watching reruns of a canceled sitcom.

I’ve seen a lot of change in the last year. It isn’t as good as Trump says. People are struggling to make ends meet and gas still isn’t $1.99 a gallon as he continues to claim. But the biggest takeaway after leaving the District for several months and now returning is that it has become painfully apparent that this is no longer the land of the free and home of the brave. That’s the dream, but the harsh reality is that we live in an authoritarian regime ruled by a man who cares only for himself, and the capital is now looking more like those of many authoritarian countries I’ve visited in my life. And Donald Trump did it all in just one short year.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to identify the party affiliation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

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Trump has always bragged incessantly about himself and his alleged accomplishments. But ever since he returned to the White House in 2025, he’s been touting his presidency as a “Golden Age,” even going so far as to make the expression tangible by slapping gilt on everything in sight. He genuinely believes he can change reality simply by relentlessly stating something as fact in the face of all evidence to the contrary. His repeated insistence, though, that the country has never been as successful as it is today has so far landed with a thud.

We are, in fact, living in an historic time. Americans have rarely been more pessimistic about the future. According to the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, Americans who believe they will have high-quality lives in five years declined to the lowest level since the organization began asking the question 20 years ago. Those who believe that both their current and future lives are good enough to be classified as “thriving” dropped to 48%. If this is America’s Golden Age, it doesn’t appear that people are seeing it.

In fact, the right-wing polling organization Rasmussen asked the question outright and found bad news for the president: Only 27% of those surveyed see this as the country’s “Golden Age,” as compared to 58% who do not. Even more galling to Trump has to be the finding that 48% of voters now say that Joe Biden was the better president. Only 40% said the same of Trump. (A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll similarly reported that 51% favored Biden over Trump, a dramatic — and recent — switch from December, when Trump was on top at 53%.)

Some of these findings are no doubt driven by partisan swings according to who is in the White House. But these polls are finding that even Republicans are feeling pessimistic, despite all of Trump’s happy talk. In fact, I would think that his portrayal of the country as having never been better sounds downright delusional to even some of his ardent supporters. 

All this despondency appears to be having an effect on the GOP leadership. Trump and his acolytes have been sent into paroxysms of anger by the mild criticisms offered by American athletes at the Winter Olympics. When skier Hunter Hess had the temerity to say “Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” the president called him a loser and said he shouldn’t have tried out for the team. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X, “Raise your hand if you think Olympic Skier Hunter Hess should be disqualified off the U.S. Team.” That idea got a ringing endorsement from Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who posted, “If you can’t stand up for your country while abroad—at the Olympics or otherwise Stay home.” Podcaster Megyn Kelly said that “Hess should be stripped of his ability to rep the USA & sent home.”

Many of Hess’ fellow athletes have made similar comments, reflecting the overwhelming attitude among the majority of young people in America who are deeply pessimistic about the country. Their messages weren’t about the price of eggs or worries about getting ahead. If there was one overarching concern, it was about being perceived as endorsing the hateful behavior and attitudes the world is seeing acted out under the leadership of the Trump administration every day.

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“I’m racing for an American people who stand for love, for acceptance, for compassion, honesty and respect for others,” cross country skier Jessie Diggins wrote. “I do not stand for hate or violence or discrimination.” Chris Lillis, a freestyle skier, said, “I feel heartbroken about what’s happened in the United States. As a country we need to focus on respecting everybody’s rights and making sure that we’re treating our citizens, as well as anybody, with love and respect. I hope that when people look at athletes competing in the Olympics they realize that that’s the America we’re trying to represent.” 

Those are values that these young Americans hold. But it isn’t just young people. Rich Ruohonen, who at 54 is the oldest man to ever represent the U.S. in the Winter Olympics — and happens to hail from Minnesota — gave a spirited speech during a press conference explicitly calling out the authoritarian tactics deployed by the Trump administration in his home state, while simultaneously declaring his love for his country and its freedoms. As of Tuesday, not one American participant in the games had stood up for Donald Trump or his policies.

There have been protests before at the Olympics, and they were always met with angry denunciations from the right. Their reflexive reaction to anyone suggesting that America isn’t perfect has always been “Love it or leave it.” But Trump, with his own constant carping about the United States both at home and abroad, has turned that notion sideways. While the president often proclaims that things have never been better, his endless insults and criticisms of his fellow Americans actually convey the clear impression that the country is a chaotic mess of mutual loathing and factional hatred. No wonder everyone is so pessimistic. 

This is a change. America has certainly had its dark periods, and there were no doubt times that the people felt the future was grim. But for the most part, America has always been an optimistic nation, with the future beckoning a better day for everyone. The proverbial image of the U.S. as a “shining city on a hill” once resonated with immigrants who came to this country believing that here was a place to build a better life for themselves and their families. 

The sight of those Olympians feeling the need — and the freedom — to champion liberal values of diversity, kindness and compassion, as well as opposition to injustice, is a sign that all is not lost. And perhaps the best example of all came on Sunday when global superstar Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl halftime show and served up a roaring example of those values before over 128 million people all over the world. The joy expressed in his message of inclusion and universality said more about the America that most of its people actually believe in than any golden monuments to Trump will ever do.

The right’s cramped vision of American greatness, with its sour, white nationalist ideology and cruel authoritarian methods, is a good reason to be pessimistic. But the resilience of the American people from Minneapolis to Milan is telling a different story. For all of our gloom about the future, it appears we aren’t giving up. Perhaps the Golden Age really is upon us after all. It’s just not the one Donald Trump thinks it is. 

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Super Bowl visitors who discovered the truth over the weekend got a glimpse behind the curtain of right-wing media manipulation. While the game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots was played about 40 miles south of San Francisco, much of the NFL’s activities and media opportunities were staged in the city that’s served as conservative media’s favorite punching bag for decades. What right-wing media does exceptionally well is curate reality by looping the same context-free footage. With former Speaker of the House — and San Francisco resident — Nancy Pelosi serving as a convenient caricature of liberal elites, Fox News, MAGA talk radio and right-wing social media influencers have relentlessly portrayed the city as a dystopian hellscape of human feces, discarded needles, rampant crime and zombie-like drug addicts stumbling through streets abandoned by anyone with sense or resources. 

Eventually, mainstream outlets — afraid of being accused of bias — often start to treat such right-wing narrative as a legitimate debate. If we’re lucky, the actual truth one day emerges, but by then the false portrayal has already done its damage, shaping policy debates and even electoral outcomes. 

The collective cognitive dissonance on display in San Francisco during Super Bowl LX exposed how warped many American’s perceptions of our greatest cities are. 

There’s no denying that San Francisco faces serious challenges. Anyone who actually lives there — or has lived there, as I have — knows that. Wealth inequality is glaring. Housing costs are obscene. The fentanyl crisis is real. The pandemic greatly exacerbated existing fractures and hollowed out downtown retail. 

But here’s the part that the propaganda machine depends on people not understanding: None of these problems are unique to San Francisco, and none of them tell the whole story of the place. 

If the city were truly the apocalyptic hellscape it’s been portrayed as by conservative media over the last decade, why would the NFL — one of the most brand-conscious, risk-averse organizations on earth — stage its biggest week of the year there? 

Scroll through social media and you’ll find NFL reporters and podcast bros posting video after video of themselves walking through San Francisco in disbelief. 

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who has spent years cultivating an audience that overlaps heavily with conservative media consumers, took his followers on a pizza tour of the city and surrounding areas, ultimately crowning a spot in Oakland as the best. Jake Malasek, the company’s content creator who was visiting from Florida, tweeted his surprise: “I may have been too harsh on San Francisco in terms of its beauty. This is pretty sweet.” Senior Barstool producer TJ Hitchings was effusive about the city’s iconic Tonga Room, calling it “the best bar I’ve ever been to in my life.” 

Perhaps most striking was the conversion of Pat McAfee, the ESPN host whose show caters to a young, predominantly male audience. During his first national broadcast from San Francisco, McAfee was candid about his expectations: “What we thought we were walking into here was, uh, a dump. It’s not at all. It was a beautiful walk this morning.” He elaborated during an interview with San Francisco 49ers legend Joe Montana. “We were so surprised by what we had been told and expected versus when we walk through the streets and got here,” McAfee said. “The buildings are beautiful. There are so many hills, there were people running, it was a very active city. It felt like, I’d not known this about San Francisco.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted the ESPN host’s comments approvingly, recognizing the rare opportunity for actual reality to puncture the bubble of manufactured perception.

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But not everyone got the memo. Boston radio hosts Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti still described San Francisco as a “zombie apocalypse,” likening it to the “Mad Max” films. When confronted with reality, some people update their beliefs. Others double down because the myth is more useful to them than the truth. Felger and Massarotti’s resistance to reality, even in the face of direct contradictory evidence, speaks to how deeply these narratives have been internalized on a broader scale. 

Cities across America, regardless of their political orientation, are grappling with similar crises as those experienced by San Francisco. The opioid epidemic continues to ravage red and blue states alike. From Los Angeles to Phoenix to Austin to Atlanta, homelessness has become a national emergency. But San Francisco is arguably the most liberal major city in the United States — and that is precisely why it’s been turned into a boogeyman. 

Right-wing commentators need liberal governance to fail spectacularly in the public imagination; their entire political project depends on convincing people that collective solutions don’t work. If San Francisco can be reduced to a cautionary tale, then universal healthcare, housing investment, addiction treatment and worker protections can also be dismissed with a sneer: “Do you want your town to become like that?”

This mythology serves another purpose for Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition: It allows them to maintain a sense of superiority among conservatives in small-town and rural America. The narrative gives them permission to feel that their communities, despite confronting their own struggles with economic decline, opioid addiction and lack of opportunity, are morally and practically supreme to degenerate liberal cities. Never mind that many small towns now have higher per-capita crime rates than San Francisco. Never mind that the romanticized vision of Mayberry hasn’t existed for decades, if it ever did. The comparison isn’t based on facts; it’s based on the comfort of believing that one’s own political tribe has the answers while the other side’s policies inevitably lead to ruin.

What’s wild is how fragile the myth turns out to be. Super Bowl LX forced a confrontation between a false narrative and reality in a way that political discourse rarely allows. Sports media figures and podcast bros couldn’t simply dismiss San Francisco sight unseen because they had to be there for their jobs. And once there, the gap between what they’d been told and what they actually experienced was too large to ignore. You can’t Fox News your way past a beautiful morning walk. Some, to their credit, publicly acknowledged their surprise.

I’m a Californian by birth. I’ve spent years of my life in the Bay Area. I know its flaws intimately. I also know why people all over the world want to live there, why it’s expensive and why it inspires such fierce loyalty. The reasons are not despite the city’s progressiveness; they are intertwined with it. San Francisco’s openness, creativity and diversity, and its dogged insistence on trying to build a society that takes care of more than just the winners, are its very strengths.

Members of the right-wing media aren’t dumb — they understand the power of cities, which is why they spend so much time trying to destroy them symbolically. Cities are where diversity is unavoidable and where art is cultivated. Where people see, up close, that difference isn’t dangerous. That’s why they must be caricatured. That’s why California, in particular, must be turned into a national warning label.

This won’t be the last time. The World Cup is coming this year. The Olympics will be held in Los Angeles in 2028. On Monday, the NFL announced that L.A. will also host next year’s Super Bowl. 

Millions of visitors are going to experience American cities that they’ve been told are unlivable wastelands. They’re going to see that Seattle didn’t burn to the ground. That Portland still exists. That antifa did not, in fact, take over the charred remains of the West Coast. They’re going to see vibrant, complicated, imperfect places that are nonetheless worth loving and defending.

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One is reminded of the anecdote about a Communist cell in New York in 1939, in which the members were discussing how the vile Hitlerite thugs had to be resisted to the death. Whereupon one party member excused himself to go to the restroom. When he returned, he was confused to see the group toasting the fraternal comradeship of the Third Reich and the USSR. News had just come that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been signed; the party line had changed. Of Stalin it could truly be said: When Father turns, we all turn.

One by one we have watched Republicans’ cherished shibboleths fall into the scrap heap. Free-market capitalism? The economic religion of Friedrich von Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and a legion of other GOP savants has been buried under an avalanche of tariffs, the government buying equity in private companies, capital controls, capricious stop orders to privately funded projects, manipulation of mortgage markets, capping credit card interest rates by tweet and on and on. All of it sheer heresy to any actual conservative. Yet they swallowed it with hardly a murmur.

In foreign policy, Republicans have managed a full 360 over the last two decades. Following 9/11, they enthusiastically geared up for what Bush administration functionary Condoleezza Rice called a “generational struggle” all over the world, occupying entire countries indefinitely if need be. They excoriated Barack Obama for withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, and candidate Mitt Romney proposed a get-tough policy with Russia in 2012.

But as soon as Donald Trump clinched the nomination in 2016, it was “America First”: Vladimir Putin was our buddy, Ukraine was unworthy of assistance against aggression and NATO was obsolete. Except that now, under Trump 2.0, we’re not only back in the intervention business, as in Venezuela, but behaving as out-and-out imperialists — threatening to annex countries and steal their resources. And Republicans are all for it, whatever “it” is, as long as it is decreed by a recognized party deity.

And then there are “family values,” a whole range of social issues usually related to sexual behavior and typically expressed in censorious, moralizing terms. But the entire GOP family-values façade collapsed in 2016 at the mere utterance of two words: “Stormy” and “Daniels.” Likewise, the QAnon obsession with an elite, shadowy pedophile ring experienced a now-unsurprising twist when Donald Trump appeared in thousands of pages of the Epstein files. One could expand this list of Republican policy flip-flops almost indefinitely, but one of the more intriguing examples only recently hove into view, and deserves closer examination.

This is the about-face of Donald Trump, the cronies he has placed in office and a large portion of the Republican base on the issue of firearms and the sanctity of Second Amendment rights. By now, everyone knows about the unprovoked killing of demonstrator Alex Pretti by federal agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, and the horrified reaction of the president (“you can’t have guns”) and his flaks that Pretti had a pistol (which he did not draw or threaten the officers with).

Whatever happened to Republicans’ reverence not only for firearms ownership, but legal carry, either concealed or open, as well as their ingrained suspicion of federal law enforcement agencies? This abrupt change for a party that only recently was enamored of “Second Amendment solutions” and the public brandishing of AR-15s can be found in the post-World War II history of conservatives and guns.

The American relationship to firearms has for two centuries been different from that of European nations or even that of other largely white “settler nations” like Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Even in 1842, Charles Dickens noticed the near-ubiquity of guns in America, describing the “grisly assortment of guns and knives” Americans carried and pointing out how quickly fatal disputes developed. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any place outside the tribal areas of Afghanistan or Waziristan where the firearm is such a cultural totem.

While guns had always been a cultural peculiarity of America, until the late 1960s they were not a notably political issue. The National Rifle Association was not overtly partisan, and devoted itself mainly to hunting, target shooting and teaching firearms safety. That began to change. The violent crime rate had already begun a steady climb beginning about 1960, and by 1970 it had more than doubled. Urban unrest in Watts, Newark, Detroit and other cities added the crucial ingredient of racial and political fear to issues of crime, guns and personal safety.

Initially, many Republicans, like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, favored gun control in the wake of the violent crime upsurge, which should remind us that 60 years ago, the GOP actually had a moderate wing. But counterintuitively, there were some conservative Republicans like California Gov. Ronald Reagan who also opted for gun control. The California legislature, in a bipartisan vote, prohibited the public carrying of firearms without a permit, principally to disarm the Black Panthers. Reagan signed the bill. At that time, even the NRA was in favor of gun control legislation.

This political constellation began to change in the 1970s. While Democrats generally continued to favor restrictions, the GOP and the NRA turned sharply against gun control. Whether popular culture in that period of rising crime shaped contemporary political views or simply reflected them, the 1970s was a pivotal decade. People could see the new zeitgeist emerge at their local movie theaters.

Traditionally, cinematic gunplay had been used as a last resort by reluctant heroes (epitomized by the exhausted, careworn face of Gary Cooper in “High Noon”), the ’70s hero was a gunslinging, vengeance-minded rogue cop or citizen vigilante who shot first and asked questions later. Among the most famous vehicles of the decade were the first three of the “Dirty Harry” quintet, “Death Wish” and “Walking Tall.” All were box-office hits, and all spoke to the revenge fantasies of a public worried about street crime.

The vigilante movie also shaped (or reflected, as the reader prefers) the growing conservatism of the era, which contributed its share of taglines to popular culture, including, by the 1980s, then-President Reagan’s employment of Clint Eastwood’s famous line, “Go ahead, make my day,” when promising to veto any potential tax increase.

(The significance, and the irony, of the vigilante craze was not fully evident till much later; it turns out that the real-life model for the protagonist of “Walking Tall,” who sought violent revenge after his wife was supposedly murdered by a criminal gang, may have actually been her killer, a conclusion based on modern forensics).

By the time I arrived on Capitol Hill in the early 1980s, the pattern on guns had already been established. While there was still a considerable number of mainly Southern pro-gun Democrats (they were replaced over the course of a decade, one-by-one, with Republicans), the driving force on the issue was overwhelmingly the GOP. The NRA had become a power center that Republican candidates heeded like iron filings obeying a magnet — only AIPAC and the American Bankers Association could match it in lobbying muscle. Second Amendment fundamentalism, like tax cuts for the rich, became a key element of the GOP catechism.

That fundamentalism took a turn towards extremism in the 1990s, as Reagan’s smile faded like the Cheshire cat’s, to be replaced with Newt Gingrich’s scowl. Ruby Ridge, Waco and other incidents, fueled by endless exaggeration and fulmination on right-wing radio, ignited a militia movement for which open access to all kinds of firearms became the defining issue. This culminated in 2001, when Bill Cooper, well-known in conservative circles for his hallucinogenic conspiracy theories, was killed in a shootout with police. Then came the 1994 Firearms Act, which banned assault weapons and limited magazines to 10 rounds. It was passed by the Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, factors that clearly contributed to the Republican sweep in the midterm elections later that year.

The 1990s Republican catechism, as propounded by NRA president Wayne LaPierre, now held that gun possession wasn’t simply an individual right, but a kind of duty for the American sovereign citizen to guard against a tyrannical government. LaPierre described federal law enforcement as “jack-booted government thugs”; more than a decade later, responding to the Sandy Hook school shooting on “Meet the Press,” LaPierre literally appeared to be frothing at the mouth.

His pronouncements, which raised eyebrows in the 1990s, became standard boilerplate in the 2000s and 2010s for Republican politicians eager to prove they were the most right-wing candidate on offer in a GOP primary campaign. This rhetoric included the now-familiar “Second Amendment solution,” a euphemism meaning the right to shoot anyone who gets in the way of a true conservative. This message was emphasized by a series of campaign ads in which various GOP candidates leveled an AR-15 (weapon of choice for gun nuts) at a target depicting the face of his opponent or the tax code or EPA regulations or maybe Joe Biden.

This carefully nurtured ideological bubble around the Second Amendment has now been shattered by the killing in Minneapolis. This is more than just another instance of political flip-flopping or hypocrisy. Just as the Republican obsession with alleged Democratic election fraud masks the GOP’s own election-rigging efforts, the about-face on guns is another example of psychological projection. Hypocrisy is the more-or-less conscious habit of saying one thing and doing another; projection is the mostly unconscious process of displacing one’s own unacceptable intentions onto other people’s presumed desires.

The emergence of guns as a potent political issue in the ‘60s should have told us what ICE’s free rein to shoot protesters is all about: not the rights of the citizen, but the prerogative of a specific faction to dominate when in power, and to lash out with violence when not. Conservatives were not about to concede gun rights to the Black Panthers then, nor to their political opponents now. At other times, as they fantasized that they were groaning under the monstrous tyranny of Clinton or Obama or Biden, they felt they were not merely entitled to carry firearms, but to use them. Inconvenient public safety issues like school shootings were either dismissed as false-flag operations or rationalized, as Charlie Kirk did, as the price “we” (meaning other people’s children) have to pay for “our” (meaning conservatives’) God-given rights.

One abiding characteristic of the right-wing personality is that when he is not dominating others, he feels persecuted. That explains LaPierre’s outbursts in the 1990s just as it explains the lies that Trump, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, et al., require to rationalize their abandonment of a conservative shibboleth now that they are in power.

Sixty years ago, political scientist Richard Hofstadter recognized this syndrome:

For pseudo-conservatism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission. The pseudo-conservative always imagines himself to be dominated and imposed upon because he feels that he is not dominant and knows of no other way of interpreting his position.

This syndrome reached an apotheosis of sorts when Jeanine Pirro, best known as a reality TV judge and right-wing blowhard, and now (because of course!) appointed by Trump as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, issued this edict: if anyone brings “a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.”

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This assertion flatly contradicted the landmark 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court decision, which explicitly declared a constitutional right to own a firearm unconnected with militia service, and the 2014 Palmer v. District of Columbia opinion, which found both an express right to carry a firearm and ruled out a categorical prohibition of firearms to non-residents in the District. Both decisions were widely publicized and universally lauded by conservatives; one might expect even a reality TV judge to have better knowledge of the law.

So what is to be done?

There are no rules in politics anymore, and If Democrats wanted to be anything more than a moribund, fake opposition party, they would eagerly adopt the slogan that Trump has abolished the Second Amendment and spread the news far and wide. Given the opinions of the Democratic base on gun-rights absolutism, it wouldn’t mobilize many of their own voters, although it would continue to remind them of what happened in Minneapolis.

Would it work on Republicans? Nothing is likely to cause them to vote Democratic, but it might depress their turnout (in the same way GOP turnout fell in the 2025 off-year elections) while causing confusion and discomfiture among the GOP hierarchy. More important, it could peel away a reasonable number of Republican-leaning swing voters in battleground states. And who knows, miracle of miracles, the Second Amendment might finally cause John Fetterman to support his own party rather than Trump.

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None of this should come as a surprise. Their figurehead, Donald Trump, is a paragon of eternal grudge-holding. He rode his resentment at being iced out of Manhattan parties all the way to the White House, and his beefs have steered American politics through a long red-a*sed decade. In his second term, Trump has put the full power of the state behind repeatedly debunked conspiracies about criminal immigrants and how the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by Joe Biden and Democrats, with the help of everyone from Venezuela to China. It was this latter grievance that got him in hot water on Friday morning, after he shared a video on Truth Social that resurrected his false claims of widespread voter fraud and international conspiracy and also included a racist clip of former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. (After Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the post amid bipartisan criticism, it was deleted and the White House blamed an unidentified staffer. On Friday evening, the president refused to apologize.)

All the while, conservatives have blindly followed Trump’s lead, with some even dropping their supposedly bedrock beliefs in the Second Amendment and opposition to government overreach in the process.

The degree of rage MAGA has been able to sustain over a small number of petty squabbles is impressive, really. The choice to include pronouns in bios has caused conservative conniptions for years. A belief in “cancel culture” run amok is an ever-burning tire fire of the right that has been raging since the ‘70s, when it was called “political correctness.”  When something gets stuck in the right’s craw, it stays stuck.

All this makes it even more infuriating that the messaging gurus of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign abandoned the “weird” tag so quickly. The insult, which was first launched at Trump and Vice President JD Vance by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, clearly rattled a party that conceives of itself as the voice of the average American. (The epithet was also largely responsible for elevating Walz to become Harris’ running mate.) In response, the GOP attempted to flip the script in classic rubber-glue playground fashion. Democrats were “the weird ones,” Trump said. “I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.”

The bait-and-switch didn’t work. Democrats from then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy pointed to specific GOP statements and policy goals that deviated from the American mainstream. “Your party’s obsession with drag shows is creepy. Your candidate’s idea to strip the vote away from people without kids is weird,” Murphy wrote on X. “The right wing book-banning crusade is super odd. It’s just so, so far outside.”

“Weird” became a meme and an effective shorthand to frustrate the online efforts of conservatives. It faded into the background as Walz was seemingly sidelined in the closing days of Harris’ historically short 107-day campaign.

A former Harris aide told POLITICO in a postmortem that Walz was “encouraged to stop focusing on the ‘weird’ criticism.” Another described Walz as “bubble-wrapped” and criticized the way he was used.

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But Walz was right. These guys really are weird. The average American doesn’t know who former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter is, let alone why they should hate him on Trump’s behalf. They’re not privy to the power politics of Manhattan after parties. And Vance’s shift from liberal-Appalachian whisperer to a pseudo-Groyper veep betrays a craven desire for power that most of the country would find off-putting.

The numbers bear it out. In 2025, nearly 128 million people watched the Super Bowl compared to the 12 million or so who tuned into Animal Planet’s long-standing counter-programming, the Puppy Bowl. Mocking “Sportsball” types are well-represented among the extremely online-right from which Trump’s inner circle takes their cues, but Trump’s decision to skip this year’s Super Bowl puts him in the extreme minority of Americans who would jump at the chance to attend, regardless of who is appearing in the halftime show. His dislike of this year’s performer, superstar Bad Bunny, makes him an outcast twice-over. Turning Point USA’s alternative “All-American Halftime Show,” which is being headlined by the grisly has-been known as Kid Rock, is unlikely to peel many eyeballs away from the Big Game.

As Trump’s FBI launches raids on Georgia polling facilities, most Americans — including a majority of Republicans — believe the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. While the Department of Homeland Security cooks up strongman memes to sell its ongoing raids in Minnesota, a majority of Americans support ICE’s complete abolition.

Pointing out that the GOP’s beliefs are abnormal won’t make the violence and lawlessness stop, of course, and it certainly won’t shut Trump up. But Democrats should still reclaim Walz’s deceptively simple epithet while also taking up the cause of normal Americans by highlighting issues including affordability, housing and infrastructure. The throughline of the midterms should be simple: These creeps don’t speak for us.

The post Donald Trump is still weird appeared first on Salon.com.

In the aftermath, most commentators have pointed to what is looking very much like a national turn away from Republicans and toward Democrats after a year of Trump’s failures and scandals. That’s certainly a big part of the story, but it’s still probably not enough to explain such a shocking result in a district that has been deeply red for decades. To fill out the picture, it’s important to look at that most local of issues: education.

There are strong signs that Rehmet won in no small part because suburban Fort Worth has long been on the frontline in the culture war over book banning. Wambsganss built her political career advocating for strict censorship in schools and libraries, and her loss signals that, even in this very conservative district, people are getting sick of the far-right telling them what they cannot read.

Oscar-nominated director Kim Snyder was not as surprised as the pundits over Rehmet’s win. She has spent a lot of time in Texas in recent years, both to shoot and promote her documentary “The Librarians,” which premieres on PBS on Feb. 9. The film follows the struggles of school librarians who are facing off against Moms for Liberty and other far-right organizations attempting to purge library shelves of books that portray LGBTQ characters or contain historical information about racism or fascism. Snyder told Salon that the screenings of her movie, even in conservative areas, have been selling out.

“It’s showing that people really care about the issue of censorship,” she explained.

Snyder’s film follows the journey of a Courtney Gore, a Texas mom who initially supported Moms for Liberty, believing their falsehoods about “pornography” in school libraries. She “felt hoodwinked,” however, when she educated herself on the books being banned and realized they were not what she’d been led to believe. Soon, Gore discovered that the book banning campaign was the tip of the spear for what was a larger effort to dismantle public education in Texas that was funded by actors like Wambsganss and shady far-right billionaire donors like the Wilks brothers.

Gore is not alone, Snyder suggested. “A lot of moms were finding” they were being tricked into backing groups intent on “tearing down public education” and ending “separation of church and state,” she explained.

Audrey Wilson-Youngblood is a librarian in Rehmet’s district who used to work for a local school district but was driven out after Wambsganss and her political action committee, Patriot Mobile, helped elect a huge swath of pro-book banning candidates to the school board. Wilson-Youngblood is also featured in “The Librarians,” recounting her story of trying to fend off an all-out war of harassment and censorship aimed at the library staff in her district.

She agreed there is a “relationship” between Rehmet’s win and the backlash to the book bans. Wilson-Youngblood told Salon that screenings of “The Librarians” in the north Texas area have turned into de facto community organizing events due to the “conversations and connections that are formed.” At least one screening, she said, “turned into a candidate forum.” And Democrats aren’t the only ones turning out. She has met both moderates and “staunch generational Texas Republicans” who are “coming because they’re unhappy” with the assault on public schools.

“It can feel very lonely sometimes here in Texas,” Wilson-Youngblood said, but learning that large numbers of other Texans share a distaste for Moms for Liberty’s book-banning agenda has been “emboldening” people and driving them to get organized and vote.

Rehmet, a union leader and first time candidate, credited his win to issues like “lowering costs, health care and focusing on working people.” But he also notably told ABC News that “people are tired of campaigns of outrage.”

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Wambsganss was every inch the wild-eyed book-banning culture warrior he’s obliquely referring to. When the Republican spoke at the 2023 Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia, which Patriot Mobile sponsored, she declared “Our children belong to the Lord, not the government.” Wambsganss added that their school board takeover efforts are “a spiritual war.”

On Steve Bannon’s show in 2022, she argued that all books with LGBTQ characters should be banned on the grounds that it’s “normalizing a lifestyle that is a sexual choice,” even if there’s no sexual content in the books themselves. But Wambsganss’ efforts weren’t just restricted to homophobic censorship. The fear of crossing swords with authoritarian forces in the community got so bad that one school official was recorded saying that if a teacher had a book saying the Holocaust is wrong, they needed to balance it with a book that offered “opposing” views and “other perspectives.” If that sounds paranoid, it’s worth remembering that in 2020, Wambsganss posted that Black Lives Matter protesters “need to die.” With that in mind, it’s not ridiculous for educators to worry that she and her allies would get mad at criticism of historical fascist movements.

Far from running away from so-called “culture war” issues, as overpaid political consultants often prescribe, Rehmet’s victory suggests that anger over MAGA excesses can be harnessed to help Democrats win — including in improbable places. A J. David Goodman of the New York Times wrote before the election, Republicans in Texas have been trying to cede control of local school boards in places like Houston and Fort Worth over to the state. Progressives correctly believe this is part of a larger, radical agenda backed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to decimate public schools entirely, forcing parents to enroll their kids in religious private schools — or go without a decent education altogether. Even a lot of Republican voters do not want to lose robust public education, which is likely why Rehmet got a last minute surge of votes to propel him into a position to protect Texas schools.

As someone who grew up in the Lone Star State, it’s not a surprise to me that a lot of voters somehow found a way to back Trump but not Wambsganss. A lot of voters, especially those who don’t pay close attention to the news, saw the president’s playboy persona and crassness as reassurance that he’s not on board with the religious right’s book-banning agenda. Trump encouraged the false view that he’s a libertarian with campaign lies about how he would protect “free speech.” In reality, his first year in office has seen an all-out war on the First Amendment coming from the White House that includes banning books, destroying museum exhibits, trying to push comedians who mock Trump or MAGA off-air, and suing or even arresting journalists for reporting the news. Still, for people who don’t read real news, which unfortunately includes many Republican voters, the president’s loathing of free speech may not penetrate their consciousness.

Wambsganss, though, is a type of woman who is instantly recognizable to anyone who has lived in the Bible Belt: the crazy church lady who wants total control over the lives of her neighbors, dictating what they read, who they socialize with, how they spend their free time and who they have sex with. While most Republicans in the MAGA era either support or at least tolerate giving miserable theocrats that much power, there are still some holdouts who believe in personal liberty and separation of church and state. As Wilson-Youngblood pointed out, some of them out there want Patriot Mobile and Moms for Liberty to go away — and they may have even been willing to cross party lines in this election to make that happen.

The lesson from Texas’ ninth district certainly won’t apply to every Democrat running in this year’s midterms. Plenty of districts were untouched by the Moms for Liberty nonsense, while others, like Bucks County in Pennsylvania, displaced far-right candidates a couple election cycles ago, draining the issue of some salience.

But Rehmet’s win shows that, at least in some places, MAGA’s threats to peace and freedom on the local level remain a pressing concern. A lot of voters want the culture war chaos to go away, especially when it comes to schools, so the kids can concentrate on learning. In many places, Democrats can win with a message of protecting the right of kids to learn in peace, instead of being the targets of a mind control project run by Bible-thumpers. If it worked in suburban Fort Worth, it’s a strategy that could rack up Democratic wins in other red districts.

The post Shock Democratic upset in Texas shows voters still hate book bans appeared first on Salon.com.

When asked about this curious arrangement over the weekend, Trump told the press, “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself… We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Evidently, American taxpayers are going to have to pay for yet more of Trump’s grievances — and give him what will almost certainly be a nice tax write-off. That’s assuming these “very good charities” aren’t along the lines of his defunct Trump Foundation, for which he was sued by the state of New York for funneling funds to himself and barred from ever running a charity in the state again. 

Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, told the New York Times in October that Trump’s “the ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it… It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.” 

There was a time when that would have been true. But today, the administration’s corruption and profiteering are so blatant and commonplace that they hardly merit anything but a brief notice in the media. 

When the Times asked him why he was openly doing deals in his second term after largely adhering to long-held norms against conflicts of interest in his first, Trump wasn’t wrong in his response: “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.” (He went on to claim that he previously prohibited his kids from doing business and didn’t get any credit for it, and then he saw “what went on with Biden.” Trump also noted that he “has a very honest family.”)

But it isn’t exactly true that nobody cared. There were several lawsuits filed against Trump during his first term over his business interests. The Supreme Court sat on them for months, as they often do with thorny questions that might require them to let their partisan flags fly, and then dismissed the cases after Trump lost the election, saying they were moot. As the Brennan Center noted at the time, “[A]ny future president can use the Trump experience as a guide to avoid the constitutional prohibition on foreign emoluments. So long as foreign governments’ political spending is laundered through a future president’s business, he or she can make the argument that this is perfectly fine since Trump did it.”

Was that prescient or what? The Brennan Center also noted that all a president with only one term has to do is run out the clock, which the courts are happy to help him do. And Trump, lucky fellow that he is, essentially has had two single terms and will almost certainly be able to do the same thing again. 

Now he is openly fast-tracking pardons, handing them out to everyone from drug kingpins to personal business associates willing to pay top dollar to lobbyists who will advocate for them. The going rate is reportedly set at a million dollars. The money mostly goes to the middle men, but one can assume it gets spread around in various ways. 

In the case of “crypto’s richest man” Changpeng Zhao — a billionaire felon who was sentenced to a four-month prison term in 2024 after pleading guilty to federal money laundering charges — the money spreading reportedly came in the form of a deal his company struck that hinged on using a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency from World Liberty Financial, a stablecoin company partially owned by a Trump family entity. The result, according to the Wall Street Journal: World Liberty’s credibility was enhanced and its market capitalization skyrocketed to over $2.1 billion (from $127 million). The paper also reported that “World Liberty raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year…far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually.” In October 2025, Zhao received a pardon from Trump.

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The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick has been tracking Trump’s graft for the last several months and recently published an update to mark the president’s first year back in office. By Kirkpatrick’s reckoning — and he’s very conservative in his estimates — Trump and his family have made at least $4.05 billion in the last year alone. This does not count any of the pre-existing Trump Organization properties and businesses, and he even generously left out the “funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value,” such as Trump’s shares in his social media company Truth Social. 

Most of the profits have come from crypto markets, which Trump’s son Eric is spearheading, along with special envoy Steve Witkoff’s son Zach. There is American Bitcoin, a company to which Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have lent their name and nothing else in an arrangement that makes Hunter Biden’s penny-ante Burisma deal look like a sidewalk lemonade stand. But the big one is World Liberty Financial — the very company that became entangled with Zhao. According to Kirkpatrick, the president is listed on the web site as a “co-founder emeritus” with sons Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron, along with Witkoff and his son Zach, who serves as CEO. (Again, recall the GOP’s shrieking over Hunter Biden “trading on his father’s name.”) 

There have already been several scandals associated with this scheme. But this past weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported on what appears to be a massive bribe from the man known as the United Arab Emirate’s “spy sheikh.” Sheikh Tahnoon, a senior member of the Emirati royal family, reportedly took a secret ownership deal worth $500 million in World Liberty just prior to Trump’s inauguration. A couple of months later, the U.S. agreed to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to the UAE, a move that surprised most national security experts, since up until then there had been serious concerns about them being diverted to China. According to the Journal, Witkoff — Trump’s Middle East envoy — also got a $31 million piece of the action. 

Considering the vast sums that are changing hands, it’s grimly amusing that Trump himself is still hawking consumer goods, including an online merchandise store owned by the Trump Organization. (He also has a little “store” in the White House where he keeps the merch to give away to foreign dignitaries anxious to get their hands on a “Trump was right about everything” hat.)

At this point, you may be wondering if the Republican House Oversight Committee, which spent years investigating Biden and his son’s dealings in Ukraine from a decade before, will be looking into these billion dollar deals. The answer is no. Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who chairs the committee, explained that “the difference between the way the Trump family operates and the Biden family is they’re admitting they’re doing this.” 

Apparently, the new rules are that the more flagrant the corruption the more legal it is.

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“The crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee wrote in the Atlantic. “Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?”

She highlighted the gross hypocrisy of the Christian right and its role in the MAGA movement, comparing Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old nurse killed by Border Patrol officers while helping a fellow protester, to the Good Samaritan. “Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and help those in need,” Clinton wrote. “‘Do this and you will live,’ he says. Not in Donald Trump’s America.”

The former secretary of state concluded her essay with a call to action: “These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption.”

Clinton joined former presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and her husband Bill Clinton, as well as former First Lady Michelle Obama, who have also condemned the Trump administration in the aftermath of the killings of Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents in Minneapolis.

The moral stand of the former presidents and their wives made it clear: Congressional Democrats have a choice to make. Will they hold the moral high ground on immigration and use it to gain momentum against Trump and Republicans? Or will they, as Democrats have so often done, retreat into “compromise,” “bipartisanship” and play the performative role of “adults in the room,” effectively surrendering to Republican hostage-taking?

At least for now, Democrats in Congress appear to be finding their spine. Over the past week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have used the threat of a government shutdown as leverage to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Trump’s larger machine of mass deportation. 

On Thursday night, Senate Democrats agreed to a two-week extension of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that houses ICE and Border Patrol. But since the legislation hasn’t been passed by the House, the government has been in partial shutdown since Saturday. According to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the House looks set for a Tuesday vote on the measure, although with Republicans holding only a one-vote majority and many Democrats in the chamber taking a harder line than their Senate counterparts, the outcome is far from assured.

Schumer’s strategy is to use this window of time to force Republicans to agree to modest, common sense reforms that include adopting a universal code of conduct for all federal law enforcement agents and officers, banning masks, requiring DHS officers to wear body cameras, stopping the use of roving patrols and expanding the requirements to obtain warrants.

House Democrats have staked out a far stronger position. They propose banning ICE from operating anywhere in the United States, and barring the federal detention and deportation of American citizens.

In an interview with reporters last Thursday, Jeffries explained, “In what country are we living in where ICE and DHS have free rein to detain and deport American citizens? That’s inconsistent with the Constitution. And so if the extremists don’t get it, it should be made explicit.”

This is an easy real-life morality tale for Democrats to tell voters about the Trump administration’s extremism versus the country’s democratic values and traditions. The story has high stakes, with clear heroes and villains. There is little moral ambiguity when video footage shows unarmed people being shot and killed by federal agents, or children and other innocents being taken away by heavily-armed men in masks.

Public opinion is on the Democrats’ side. A range of high-quality polls show that a majority of Americans oppose the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Nearly half the public — including approximately 20% of Republicans — wants to abolish or greatly restrict ICE. 

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Democrats, then, do not need to lead public opinion on this issue. The American people and the party’s own voters are already far ahead of Democratic leadership when it comes to restraining ICE and ending mass deportations. For them, the fight is both deeply personal and painfully political. The administration’s mass deportation campaign has produced a trail of human misery and suffering, including a harrowing account in USA Today from Patty O’Keefe, a Minneapolis resident who was detained by ICE and released eight hours later without charges.

“On my way to that cell, I passed holding cells filled with people who appeared to be of Latino and East African descent,” she wrote. “The despondent faces and the screaming, wailing and pleading from these men, women and children — reportedly as young as 5 years old — will forever haunt me… Perhaps more haunting still was the sound of agents nearby laughing.”

Schumer, Jeffries and other Democratic leaders should read O’Keefe’s words. They should also take seriously a new CNN/SSRS poll showing that a scant 28% of registered Democrats approve of the party’s leadership — and that 71% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents believe the party has done too little to oppose Trump and Republicans. Nonetheless, rank-and-file Democrats continue to be much more motivated than Republicans about the upcoming midterm elections.

If congressional Democrats do not boldly take up the moral crusade of stopping ICE thuggery as part of a larger defense of American democracy — at a time when Trump’s fascist grip is tightening — they will have more than earned the ire of the American people and their own base. 

They are already in danger of doing so. As the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland warned, Schumer’s decision to negotiate may “have let slip their moment of maximum leverage.” In other words, the two-week negotiating period, coupled with the near-week that it could take the Senate bill to pass the House, could cause a loss of pressure and momentum. “They will have walked right into Trump’s trap,” Freedland wrote, “as spelled out by the administration official who admitted that this week’s ‘de-escalatory measures’ were designed to placate Senate Democrats just enough that they failed to seize the moment.”

Democratic leaders must decide whether they are going to be narrowly focused, single-minded seekers of reelection, or if they will instead use their power to advance the moral good in defense of the country’s democratic life.

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Later that afternoon, as Trump signed yet another executive order in the White House, the chanting was repeated. In neither case did the president entertain questions from the press — though we still have many after the recent killings of two American citizens in Minneapolis at the hands of federal officers. During the Cabinet meeting, Trump didn’t even allow Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem the opportunity to speak. 

It is apparent we’ve reached the point of no return. Untethered by reality, the Trump circus can no longer surprise any of us. But it is a growing danger to all of us — and the Republicans know it. 

When I heard this week that Trump nailed a photo of himself and Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader accused of war crimes, on a wall in the White House, I couldn’t pretend to be surprised — even after several Republicans with private courage and public fealty reached out to me. “That’s sending the wrong message,” they said. “What is wrong with him?”

The delusional, demented president, along with the elected nattering nabobs of narcissism in the MAGA party who inhabit Congress and dominate the Supreme Court, have left us at a point where facts do not exist. This is made worse by an independent press that has been decimated and replaced by magpies chirping for attention and any chance to go viral.

As a result, after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, our television screens were replete with anchors and color commentators, each holding a variety of inexperience, going over every millisecond of the 37-year-old’s killing as if they were trying to decide the status of a pass on “Monday Night Football.” Is it a catch? Was he out of bounds? Let’s call in a former referee to tell us what he thinks.

The quality of reporting in this country is far from ideal and, as a result, the mindset of many Americans rivals that of the president. We are confused, angry and some of us are losing it.

There is good reason to despair, but also to laugh out loud. Trump, talking to us on the rope line outside the White House in one of his rare “Chopper Talk” moments of his second administration, told us Tuesday, “You know, you can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. Can’t walk into this. You can’t do that.”

Yes, I laughed. He not only sounded like a liberal, but he also sounded like the fictional ultimate-liberal POTUS Andrew Shepherd in “The American President” when the character, played by Michael Douglas, announces, “I’m gonna get the guns.”

Trump doubled down on that sentiment in a rare public speech later that day in Iowa. His deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller echoed those thoughts and called Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital, a “domestic terrorist.” Noem claimed he wanted to “massacre” ICE officers before facing bipartisan criticism for her own misleading and incendiary information on the shooting. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem said in published reports.

Sounds like she’ll soon be testifying in court. It’s also, according to some White House sources, why she wasn’t allowed to shout “one of us, one of us,” during the Cabinet meeting. 

Meanwhile, in response to the president’s declaration against guns, the National Rifle Association declared in a statement that “all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be.” In fact, history shows that the Second Amendment was adopted to allow citizens to defend themselves against an abusive federal government — the very scenario that has been playing out in Minneapolis.

“I can’t believe I’m siding with the NRA,” more than one liberal Democrat has told me. And in the strange bedfellows political department, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called the Pretti shooting “very troubling” and said an investigation of the Department of Homeland Security is necessary. Two of his staffers also said that Trump’s statement “is not consistent with someone who supports the Second Amendment.”

By midweek, with the NRA against him, the president backed off his remarks and decided it was time to “turn the temperature down” in Minnesota. That came more than a week after Vice President JD Vance, standing in for Trump in the White House Brady Briefing Room, said the administration was going to put the screws to Minnesota and turn up the pressure after Renee Good was shot and killed on Jan. 7. 

The administration also responded to the disaster in Minnesota by reassigning Customs and Border Patrol “commander at large” Greg Bovino and apparently urging him to retire quickly. Bovino, widely criticized for his choice in coats and haircuts, could be just the first of many to fall because of the disaster in Minneapolis. “Bovino is very good,” Trump said, “but he’s a pretty out there kind of guy. And in some cases, that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here.”

The president also said he had a productive conversation with Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz about de-escalating, but not eliminating, the ICE presence in Minnesota. On Tuesday, border czar Tom Homan, whom Trump dispatched to replace Bovino, met with Walz and the two “agreed on the need for an ongoing dialogue.”

Noem and Miller are among those whom Washington wags say could also be on the chopping block. If his past treatment of his former fixer Michael Cohen is any indication, Trump would eagerly sacrifice anyone to avoid responsibility for anything he’s done. Of course, speaking in Iowa, Trump also left himself plenty of room to blame former President Joe Biden and radical Democrats for all problems big and small in the country, calling them “crooked” and “morons.”

Speaking of morons, take a look at a man who attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., at a Minneapolis town hall on Tuesday, spraying her with a liquid-filled syringe that looked like, ahem, apple juice. “Oh, my God, he sprayed something on her,” a witness can be heard saying in video footage of the incident, before adding that it had a foul odor. (It was later confirmed to be apple cider vinegar.)

Afterward, right-wing social media exploded into accusations that Omar, a frequent Trump target who had called for Noem to resign or face impeachment, had faked the attack.

A short time later Trump himself weighed in: “I think she’s a fraud. She probably had herself sprayed!” 

“He’s an idiot for saying this,” radio host Dean Obeidallah said on his Sirius/XM radio show. “A lot of people will see it as deflection and accuse him of faking his shooting on the campaign trail.” Some, as Obeidallah pointed out on his show, already have.

The craziness is accelerating as Trump and his regime continue to disintegrate before our eyes. On Jan. 28 the “totally independent FBI,” as he has routinely called it many times during the past year, searched a government building in Fulton County, Georgia, which has been at the center of the president’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The FBI sought “a number of records” related to the election Trump lost — including all “physical ballots from the 2020 general election” in the county, according to a copy of the warrant viewed by the New York Times.

This occurred more than five years after that election. Anything rather than talking about the Epstein files, right?

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Worse? Several reports place Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the scene of the ballot seizures, and according to former Trump administration official Miles Taylor, “This stinks to high hell. If I were on one of the Congressional oversight committees, I’d announce an investigation TODAY into this situation and subpoena the Director of National Intelligence to explain her presence and what directives she was carrying out.”

But we’re not done. This week Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that Venezuela had agreed to submit a monthly “budget” for approval by the Trump administration, which will control an account funded by the country’s oil sales. Trump continues to claim he is the ultimate authority in the country since he authorized 150 aircraft, tomahawk missiles and military personnel to kidnap Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro. The Washington Post reported that Trump’s “deals” in Venezuela include firms tied to bribery charges.

There’s even more: Trump renewed his threats against Iran, demanding that it enter nuclear talks or face potential attack by an “armada” of U.S. warships. During the Cabinet meeting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added, “They have all the options to make a deal. They should not pursue nuclear capabilities. We will be prepared to deliver whatever this President expects.”

But none of that compares to the absolute cartoonish insanity of the president sending off an email to supporters on Wednesday encouraging them to take a “Citizens Only Survey.” While Trump has backed down in Minneapolis, he admonished his supporters to respond to a survey unless, “Don’t tell me you’re an illegal alien?” Trump claimed it could not be true; he wanted the recipient to fill out the survey. The message ended with “Are you a proud American Citizen or does ICE need to come and track you down?”

He’s like a Bond villain without the witty repartee. 

“That’s just nuts,” a Republican senator told me. “He’s falling apart.” 

Maybe. Certainly the NRA’s reaction to the president is cause for concern in Trumpland. And it is worth noting that even Stephen Miller had to shift his course in response to the disaster caused by ICE agents in Minneapolis and Trump’s proclamation against guns. On Wednesday, he admitted that federal agents “may not have been following” protocol before the Pretti shooting — just a day after he claimed Pretti was a domestic terrorist and the shooting was entirely justified because Pretti “tried to murder federal agents.”

That afternoon, the two Border Patrol officers involved in the killing were placed on administrative leave. 

Trump was still begging supporters for money on Wednesday night, but because of the day’s activities, he sent a new email in which he backed off from threatening his supporters with being hunted by ICE. “Respectfully, I’m asking, do you still love me?” he asked, and requested his supporters to take another poll.

For those who recognize this madness, remember Mahatma Gandhi’s words: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it—always.” 

Of course, in Trump’s universe, Gandhi is referring to Biden and the diabolical Democrats.

In the meantime, the stoics among us will just wait until this too shall pass — like a bad kidney stone. 

The post Even Republicans are asking what is wrong with Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

Democrats have objected to the spending package over its funding of the Department of Homeland Security. In the wake of unrest in Minneapolis and the killings of several U.S. citizens by ICE agents, the minority party has pressed for a rewritten budget bill without appropriations for the agency. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said  earlier this week that his caucus “will not pass the DHS budget until it is rewritten.”

“I will vote no on any legislation that funds ICE until it is reined in and overhauled,” he shared on X.

None of the Republican legislators who voted “no” mentioned ICE funding in their explanations. Most of the defectors cited concerns about government spending more generally as the inspiration for their vote.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott criticized Democrats for their stance on ICE while joining them in voting down the package.

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“I don’t like the bill. I don’t like the six-bill package because it doesn’t balance the budget and it’s got all this wasteful spending through all these earmarks,” he said. “They’re talking about proceeding to cut out the ICE portion of the funding. I don’t support that, I support ICE. I think it’s crazy that at the last minute Democrats think they can dictate and shut down the [Homeland Security] funding.”

Scott was joined by Sens. Ted Budd, R-N.C., Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Mike Lee, R-Utah, Ashley Moody, R-Fla., Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. The bill failed by a vote of 45-55. It needs to pass a 60-vote threshold to move forward, meaning all eight Republicans and seven Democrats would need to change their vote.

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In the middle of the mayhem, an elderly man stood his ground. “They f**king killed him!,” he screamed. “I’m 70 years old, and I’m f**king angry!”

This man was channeling the pain and anger of America — and the world.

Immigration has long been one of Donald Trump’s most popular issues. A new poll conducted by POLITICO shows that 49% of Americans support Trump’s mass deportation campaign. According to the results of a nationwide New York Times/Siena poll, his support continues to collapse, with only 41% approving of his performance as president. 

But while tens of millions of Americans are outraged by the growing cruelty of the Trump administration, including his mass deportation campaign, many tens of millions of others are cheering it on. Ninety percent of Republicans expressed support in a recent CBS/YouGov poll. The breakdown on racial lines is stark: A majority of white Americans support the president’s immigration policies, while a majority of non-whites oppose them.

Ten years ago, in the heat of his first presidential campaign, Trump bragged, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He was right.

But a new report by the Public Religion Research Institute reveals something even more troubling about Trump’s MAGA base and the extremes to which they will go to support his mass deportation campaign and larger project to Make America White Again and creating what would be a de facto police state in America.

• For example, a majority of Americans (61%) agree that “immigrants, regardless of legal status, should have basic rights and protections such as the ability to challenge their deportation before a judge in court.” But only 37% of Republicans agree with this basic principle of American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. 
• A majority of Republicans also support arresting and detaining immigrants who do not have a criminal record. Most Americans and the vast majority of Democrats (88%) oppose such a policy. 
• Republicans, by a large majority (69%), also support putting “illegal immigrants” in internment camps until they can be removed from the country. 
• Predictably, a majority of Republicans also want “illegal aliens” to be sent to foreign prisons, or gulags, in such countries as El Salvador, Rwanda and Libya without due process. A majority of Americans (68%) and an overwhelming majority of Democrats (90%) oppose such inhumane policies.

Ultimately, for Trump’s MAGA followers and the larger anti-democracy right-wing, the man screaming at the site of Alex Pretti’s killing is music to their ears. They see dystopia as a utopia. This warped vision of unlimited power, the silencing of critics and ability to impose their beliefs on those deemed to be the Other serves their goal of ending the country’s pluralistic democracy and replacing it with a White Christofascist plutocracy ruled by a very small number of powerful White men. This new America would be a union of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Jim and Jane Crow, and technofeudalism. Rank-and-file MAGA followers and other members of the right-wing will not live better material lives in this world, but they will enjoy the psychological wages of being told they are inherently superior over the Other as their need for social dominance is validated. 

This moral inversion further reveals a society in the grips of fascism, authoritarianism and the culture of cruelty. But the GOP is experiencing little if any cognitive dissonance between their expressed family values and Christian morality and their support for the cruel, antisocial policies of the Trump administration — and the great harm they are causing huge swaths of the public. For them, power, domination and control are what ultimately matter. 

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To combat this, Democrats and other Americans of conscience need to speak in much clearer language that connects fundamental questions of right and wrong, the good society, human freedom and happiness to the country’s current democracy crisis. In the Age of Trump, the pro-democracy movement is fundamentally a site for moral struggle and contestation, and it needs to draw upon the spirit and teachings of the Civil Rights Movement and other great people’s movements if it is to prove successful.

There is more danger ahead. On Saturday, Trump accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of “inciting insurrection” to distract from widespread “fraud” in that state. The president has also repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act as part of his mass deportation campaign. Many suspect that such a move could serve as pretext to order the military to occupy Democratic-led cities as part of a plan to ultimately nullify the results of the 2026 midterms.

There will be many more Alex Prettis, Renee Goods and other people whose names are not yet known in the months and years ahead as the machinery of Trump’s mass deportation campaign gets up to full speed. But Pretti’s killing, as Walz said in a press conference on Sunday is an inflection point, a reckoning.

“To Americans who are watching this right now, and I don’t know, maybe you’re watching it with curiosity, bewilderment, horror, scorn or sympathy,” he said. “I’ve got a question for all of you: What side do you wanna be on? The side of an all-powerful federal government that can kill, injure, menace, and kidnap its citizens off the streets? On the side of a nurse at the VA hospital who died bearing witness to such a government? Or the side of a mother whose last words were, ‘I’m not mad at you.’”

The American people are divided, living in the same country but not the same reality. Tens of millions will answer Walz’s question in ways that may rock and break Americans of conscience — especially mainstream liberals and centrists.

Democrats and other pro-democracy voices cannot assume that the increasingly not-so-silent majority who oppose Trump’s policies on immigration will give them a victory in the upcoming midterm elections. There remains a deep base of support for Trump’s policies — and their cruelty. The Democratic Party needs to stake out a firm, unequivocal moral position and then lead from there. One of the first steps toward this will be for Senate Democrats to vote against funding for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security — or at least imposing severe limits and strict oversight — and explaining in clear direct language how this will be a vote about the country’s character and the type of people we Americans want to be.

The post Why GOP voters still love ICE appeared first on Salon.com.

Minneapolis-based attorney Chris Madel announced his decision in a video posted to X.

“I cannot support the … stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so,” he said. “United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong.”

Madel’s law firm, Madel PA, provided legal counsel to Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot Renee Good on January 7 in Minneapolis, sparking widespread protests in the city. While an advocate for deporting undocumented immigrants involved in major crimes, Madel said ICE’s Operation Metro Surge has “expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.” He said that ICE’s actions, ordered by a Republican president, have made winning a statewide election as a Republican “nearly impossible.”

I am ending my campaign for Minnesota Governor. I describe why in the below video. Please watch until the end. (It is 10 minutes, 52 seconds.)

Thank you,
Chris pic.twitter.com/2nfyAyTzNZ

— Chris Madel (@CWMadel) January 26, 2026

“At the end of the day, I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them: ‘I believe I did what was right.’ And I am doing that today,” Madel said.

In his announcement, Madel expressed support for Minneapolis law enforcement, who he said were caught between “a rock and hard place” in being ordered not to assist federal officers as protests continue throughout the city.

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The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party called on other Republicans in the state to “stand up to Trump” in the wake of Madel’s announcement.

“Will other Republicans finally stand up to Trump and stand with their fellow Minnesotans? Or will they put their political careers first and foremost while their neighbors suffer?” Chair Richard Carlbom said in a statement.

The post “It’s wrong”: Minnesota Republican ends bid for governor over ICE surge “disaster” appeared first on Salon.com.

One couldn’t help but think of that call to arms just a couple of days later when former special prosecutor Jack Smith appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify for the first time in public. While his opening statement will not have the historic significance of Carney’s speech, the sentiment was very much the same: There has been a rupture and something important is at stake. 

“I have seen how the rule of law can erode,” Smith said. “My fear is that we have seen the rule of law function in this country for so long that many of us have come to take it for granted. But, the rule of law is not self-executing — it depends on our collective commitment to apply it. It requires dedicated service on behalf of others, especially when that service is difficult and comes with costs. Our willingness to pay those costs is what tests and defines our commitment to the rule of law and to this wonderful country.”

The rupture in America was Jan. 6, and the subsequent destruction of the rule of law is now in full effect as the president of the United States openly abuses his power to wreak revenge on his political enemies, allows paramilitary troops to commit mayhem in the streets of American cities by defying all rules, norms and legal constraint. The people of Minneapolis — including Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs intensive-care unit nurse and a U.S. citizen who was needlessly gunned down by Border Patrol agents on Saturday — are paying the costs of what Smith described, as are others who’ve been targeted by the Trump administration. 

Just as Carney aimed his speech at the other democracies that have depended on the American security guarantee, Smith was speaking to Congress, perhaps in the vain hope that even some Republicans would listen. He surely hoped that his statement might reach the majority of the public that is appalled by what they are seeing the administration do to rule of law. 

Smith testified in a straight, “just the facts” manner, refusing to take the bait from Republicans on the panel who were trying to make him lose his cool. A long-time career prosecutor, he knew better than to fall into their traps. But that didn’t make his testimony any less dramatic.

“Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6,” Smith said. “[T]he evidence established that he willfully broke the law, the very laws he took an oath to uphold. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions as alleged in the indictments they returned.” The facts, he testified, remain clear: “President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

Smith was also direct about Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, stating that he “illegally kept [them] at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

The clean, spare way that Smith laid out the cases proved a reminder of what the country might have been spared — a second Trump presidency — had the Justice Department under former Attorney General Merrick Garland moved faster, had the courts not indulged Trump’s delaying tactics and had enough Americans not inexplicably decided to ignore mounds of credible evidence and put Trump back in the White House. The former special counsel’s obvious confidence and competence made it all the more depressing; he would have held Trump accountable.

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And it’s clear Smith possessed incriminating testimony. “Some of the most powerful witnesses were witnesses who, in fact, were fellow Republicans who had voted for Donald Trump, who had campaigned for him and who wanted him to win the election.”

Smith’s appearance reminded us that these cases weren’t big mysteries. The only defense Trump could have possibly presented would have been that the law shouldn’t apply to him. It’s hard to imagine that a jury would have felt the same way. 

Over and over again, Smith repeated that he and his team had turned up enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had committed the crimes for which he had been indicted. And when asked if the president knew that he had lost the election, the former special counsel pulled no punches. “Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump was not looking for honest answers about whether there was fraud in the election,” Smith said. “He was looking for ways to stay in power… He, in fact, knew that the fraud claims he was making were false.”

Republicans on the panel pushed their narrative that Smith and his team had operated as partisan operatives at the behest of former President Joe Biden, which we know is not true. And Smith’s testimony obviously incensed Trump, who spent the rest of the day and half the night obsessively attacking his nemesis and posting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The former special counsel, Trump said, is a “deranged animal” and accused him of “large scale perjury” in his congressional testimony. The president all but directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “[look] at what [Smith’s] done” and said that “a big price should be paid” by Smith and the witnesses he had — nearly all of whom were Republicans — “for what they put the country through.”

Smith was asked if he anticipated facing prosecution from Trump’s Justice Department. He replied, “I believe they will do everything in their power to do that because they have been ordered to by the president.” Considering what Trump was posting, it’s hard to argue otherwise. 

It’s doubtful that Smith’s testimony will have changed anyone’s mind. Trump’s cult following believes that Jan. 6 and the classified documents case were all a hoax perpetrated by Democrats. But it’s important to have Smith on the record — and for the country to see him as the sober, serious public servant he is. If there’s any hope for restoring the rule of law in this country, we must preserve the idea that such people exist. The Republican Party’s corrupt abuse of power has made it all too easy to forget that.

The post Jack Smith lays it out: Trump has shattered the rule of law appeared first on Salon.com.

We know this because Trump mentioned it in the White House briefing room. Going on and on (and on) about his alleged economic genius, shouting out nonsensical numbers for what felt like hours, he couldn’t help but whine a little. “I mean, I’m not getting — maybe I have the — bad public relations people, but we’re not getting it across.” Coming from the man who bills himself as the greatest leader, the best deal maker and the most compelling salesman the world has ever known, his words were a tell. 

Trump knows that people aren’t buying his lies. Some of his own voters are, to quote Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, “sneaking away.” But because he has no idea what to do about it other than slap tariffs on everyone and misrepresent the results, the president’s only move is to go on camera and tell the American people that they aren’t experiencing what they’re in fact experiencing. 

The latest polling holds very bad news for Trump. According to the most recent Economist/YouGov poll, which was taken Jan. 16-19, 37% of Americans approve of his job performance, while 57% disapprove. At a net approval of -20%, this is the lowest rating he has received in any Economist poll save one during his first term. 

The stark numbers were apparently driven by a drop in GOP voters’ approval, which fell nine points to 79% over the course of a week. Americans’ opinions of Trump’s “strength, honesty and likeability” have also fallen precipitously. (Did people actually once rate him more highly on those qualities?) Those who say the country is on the right track (31%) versus the wrong track (61%) are similarly dismal. 

If it is true that the midterm elections are a referendum on the party in power, and that presidential approval ratings serve as a signal for how that’s going, then Republicans are in trouble. According to G. Elliott Morris’ Strength In Numbers/Verasight analysis, Democrats hold an eight-point lead on the generic ballot — a figure even greater than their numbers in the historic blue wave of 2018.

All the polling shows that Democratic voters are much more motivated than Republicans at this point, and it appears that is largely because of negative partisanship. A recent Pew survey found that Democrats do not have a high opinion of their own party compared to Republicans, which could explain why the party is so much less popular than the GOP in polling. However, voting patterns in off-year elections, combined with findings that Democrats have a large advantage in the generic ballot, indicates that many Americans may loathe Trump enough to overcome their antipathy to vote blue.

What’s more, the GOP gerrymandering shenanigans appear to have backfired, with the Blue states stepping up to fight fire with fire. We are also awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision on Louisiana v. Callais, the voting rights case that might eventually give the GOP a structural lock on the House for decades to come. Whether that will affect 2026 depends on when they hand down the opinion and how quickly the states could adapt. At this point it seems unlikely that the Republicans will be able to exploit this advantage, if they get it, until 2028.

Until recently, it seemed that Democrats might not have even a slim chance of winning the Senate, but a possible path has emerged in recent weeks. If everything breaks perfectly, the party could possibly pick up seats in Alaska, Maine, Ohio and North Carolina, with an outside chance in Iowa, and get a majority. That outcome could prevent the unthinkable legacy of Donald Trump leaving office having put five justices on the Supreme Court should Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito retire, as some court watchers have speculated.

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The Democrats are, as usual, publicly navel gazing about what kind of messaging they should use to leverage what looks to be a solid advantage. Should they use the term “abolish ICE” and campaign on the president’s toxic wrecking ball of the Homeland Security Department, or should they adopt less aggressive rhetoric, such as “restrain and reform ICE” to insure they aren’t tarred as soft on illegal immigration? Are they better off focusing exclusively on “affordability,” since it’s the issue that most people name as their top priority (and on which Trump’s dreadful performance is dragging down Republicans into the low 30s)? Should they follow the polls that say that the public wants more compromise in Washington, or should they take a strong stand against the GOP’s authoritarian onslaught? 

There is a great temptation, as happens so often in politics, to fight the last war. Working under the assumption that because voters said they voted for Trump in 2024 because of the economy, too many strategists still seem to ignore the fact that the country had just gone through unprecedented national trauma with the Covid-19 pandemic and, like virtually every country in the world, reacted by tossing out incumbents. It’s not that people weren’t reeling from the economic upheaval; they were also reeling from five years of death, disruption and despair. It was never just about the eggs.

American voters inexplicably thought that Trump could restore the relative tranquility that existed before that maelstrom. Instead, he has created even more chaos and fear. 

However Democratic congressional candidates ultimately decide to approach this, they simply cannot behave as if we are living through a time of politics as usual. A Republican majority that is allowing Trump to use tariffs as a weapon that hurts average Americans, occupy American cities with paramilitary forces, brutalize immigrants, depose foreign leaders, threaten allies, blackmail law firms and universities, defund science and education, and essentially tear up the Constitution, all in order to appease a tyrant, is simply not something they can ignore. Democrats can’t pretend the only thing that matters is the economy.

All of those are now kitchen table issues. People know that things are hurtling out of control, and they’re talking about it. They’re taking to the streets to protest in their own neighborhoods and in huge numbers all over the country. If voters aren’t laying out that whole panoply of atrocities to pollsters and canvassers, it’s not because they aren’t feeling it — it’s because they’re terrified by the apparent impotence of everyone with any power to stop it. 

According to the latest CNN poll, 58% of Americans say Trump’s first year back in office has been an abject failure. The number one job for Democratic candidates is to make it clear to the American people that every single member of the Republican Party is complicit in everything he is doing — and the only way to fix that is to elect a Democratic Congress to fulfill its constitutional duty as a co-equal branch of government. 

From the looks of the latest polling, that’s fundamentally what people want from the Democrats right now, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to make the case that they’re prepared and equipped to make that happen.

The post Democrats: It’s more than “just the economy, stupid” appeared first on Salon.com.

Jokes aside, all these pregnancies would likely be unremarkable except for the fact that the MAGA movement is obsessed with making babies. Vice President JD Vance famously spent years denouncing childless women as “miserable,” “sociopaths” and claiming they “must be stopped” from having a role in public life. Billionaire Elon Musk frequently rails about the supposed dangers to humanity from slightly lower birth rates. Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025 who heads the Heritage Foundation, even ranted in his book about the evils of dog parks on the unpersuasive grounds that well-to-do urban women were substituting pet ownership for their duty to have more children. The late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, frequently scolded women to give up their careers to have “more kids than they can afford.” There’s even Natal Con, an annual right-wing conference attended mostly by men, who get together and hype the idea that American wombs are being under-utilized by the women who still have control over them. 

The result of this “obnoxious hyper-independent girl boss mentality,” as the Federalist’s Brianna Lyman put it? The “country is dying.” In a typically overheated article, she directly linked declining native birth rates to the alleged evil of immigration. “If we don’t make more Americans, we won’t have any more left,” she wrote, skirting the obvious fact that, by her definition, no one outside of a small minority of Native Americans count as real Americans.

It would be funny if these views weren’t tied to dangerously bigoted policies and tactics, from funding anti-birth control propaganda to Trump’s unleashing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize people of color in Minnesota, whether they are citizens or not. Underpinning all this happy talk about “more babies” is a hateful project aimed both at white-ifying America and destroying decades of women’s progress.

The “great replacement” conspiracy theory is mainstream in the GOP these days, as most Republican leaders, including Vance and Stephen Miller, endorse the false belief that Democrats are deliberately trying to “replace” white Americans with supposedly more pliable voters of color. This view, in turn, creates the rationale for indefensible efforts to actually engineer the ethnic make-up of the U.S. through mass deportations and abortion bans.

The GOP’s mini-baby boom is happening in this context, and unsurprisingly, MAGA media is hyping these pregnancies as hard as possible. In her Fox News segment on Leavitt’s pregnancy, Lara Trump warned “we’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming,” while falsely claiming Trump’s policies provide “safety and security for every child.” (In reality, Trump has stripped health care from millions, undermined public education and rained terror on families targeted by ICE for not being white.) “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate,” Katie Miller wrote on X, as if a rich woman being pregnant was the same thing as making it easier for anyone else to have kids. 

Pro-natalists always hide behind a paper-thin pretext that they’re merely concerned about the future economic health of the nation, even as they ignore that immigration stands to solve labor market shortages that could, in theory, arise. But sexism is never far from the surface. On Tuesday, Kid Rock laughably claimed that the “low birth rate” is due to “ugly ass broke liberal women” being so allegedly untouchable that “dudes” only “want to sleep with each other.” Katie Miller agreed, saying the reason conservatives supposedly have more babies comes down to aesthetics: “Conservative women are just factually more attractive than liberal women.” Her claim comes just a few months after she attacked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Fox News as a “sad, petty, childless adult,” all because the New York congresswoman described Stephen Miller as a “clown” giving off “4’10” energy.

If readers are skeptical that the Millers will convince anyone that Mr. Miller is besting Ocasio-Cortez in the attractiveness category — well, let’s just say equally unpersuasive is the entire effort to sell the MAGA mini-baby boom as a meaningful shift in the broader American culture toward having bigger families. Despite all the right-wing media hype around these pregnancies, the response of the general public has cut against their hopes that this would lead to a Great Fertility Awakening among young women, who suddenly realize they need to quit their jobs to spend the next 20 years of their life staying constantly pregnant. Usha Vance’s pregnancy was mostly met with jokes about how she’s trying to steal her husband back from Erika Kirk. The Millers were greeted with speculation that the real father of the their child is Elon Musk. Leavitt’s announcement inspired cracks about how pregnant women aren’t supposed to use fillers, along with jokes about the 32-year age gap that exists between her and her 60-year-old husband: “Closer in age to the baby than her husband btw,” one Instagram user noted.

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Tellingly, the reception to the trio’s pregnancy announcements wasn’t a whole lot better with MAGA true believers. Despite relentless hysteria from right-wing media about low birth rates, conservative social media users didn’t seem to feel that these women’s pregnancies matter very much. There were some generic congratulatory responses from elderly Republicans with white Jesus pictures in their bios, but right-wing audiences mostly just didn’t care. Even diehard MAGA types don’t seem to think that the news will inspire other women to have more babies. The only true passion came from some MAGA types who are mad at Usha Vance for having another baby who will not be white.

All of this matters because the prescription from the right to raise the birth rate has, for years, come down to social signaling. Liberals point out that it’s hard to have kids in a country where employment is uncertain, health care is expensive, public schools are being gutted and maintaining a healthy work-life balance is a pipe dream. Republicans scoff at this, saying it’s only that women aren’t being encouraged and/or shamed enough into childbearing. A typical example of this came this week from Seth Kaplan at Fox News, who argued that all that’s necessary is for women to see other women having babies, because “having babies is contagious.”

And yet even conservative audiences can’t muster excitement about these alleged role models having babies. Perhaps that is less of a surprise when one recognizes that these three women have no intention of retreating from public life to become full-time stay-at-home mothers. Leavitt talks frequently about how she balances motherhood with “building my success in my career,” often with the unsubtle implication that women who struggle just don’t try hard enough. Katie Miller is still plugging away at her job as the world’s least-charming podcast host. Usha Vance has been forced out of her career into the role of second lady, but even she can’t convince people that she stays at home washing dishes all day — or that she won’t jump right back into high-paid work the second her husband is out of office.

The world has over eight billion people in it. A century ago, it was fewer than two billion. The notion that the “world is running out of children,” as Seth Kaplan’s headline claims, is preposterous, no matter how many centrists at the Atlantic or the New York Times buy into the conservative freakout over fertility rates. Panic over “birth rates” is a pretext, often a laughably thin one, for other right-wing grievances: social change, racial diversity and women’s equality. That’s why even MAGA doesn’t get too excited about prominent women getting pregnant — unless there’s a hope that it will prove the end of her career.

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The so-called “joyful warriors” have led harassment campaigns in school districts across the country, demanding action against curricula on systemic racism and gender identity. They’ve worked to ban recent books like Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” as well as classics like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” among others. But beyond lobbying for safeguards surrounding what is taught, Moms for Liberty activists have also spread harmful misinformation about those who teach it. They accuse teachers who cover systemic racism of engaging in “Marxist indoctrination” under the guise of Critical Race Theory — and those who emphasize LGBTQ+ inclusion are allegedly “grooming” and “sexualizing” children. 

But while the organization’s rhetoric can be laughably hyperbolic, a quick peek under the hood reveals a record that cannot be laughed away. Even amid its mounting local election losses, humiliating public scandals and designation as an “extremist anti-government” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Moms for Liberty remains a growing force in American politics.

That’s because in a Republican Party fueled by culture wars — where feelings often prevail over facts — Moms for Liberty has become a “political powerhouse” for its unique ability to energize conservative women by stoking rage over issues of race, identity and wokeness in schools. Rather than shunning the group as purveyors of misinformation when they were founded in 2021, the Republican Party was quick to celebrate its effective messaging and position it as a new GOP kingmaker. By 2023, five Republican presidential candidates spoke at the annual Moms for Liberty conference, each emphasizing their overlap with the group’s platform, including opposition to teacher unions and woke ideology, as well as support for school choice and book bans.

Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, challenged the organization’s designation as an “extremist” group, telling the audience, “When they mentioned this was a terrorist organization, I said, ‘well then, count me as a Mom for Liberty.’” Donald Trump also dismissed the accusation before telling the crowd that they “are the best thing that ever happened to America.” And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has worked closely with the group, issued his steadfast support: “We will pull the levers that we have available to us to be able to defend the rights of parents.”

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why pundits have pegged this conference as the high water mark for Moms for Liberty’s influence. Since then, the group has been plagued by scandal, embarrassment and election losses. The group’s co-founder, Bridget Ziegler — who also helped author Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law banning LGBTQ+ curriculum from early grades — has been mired in controversy after she and her husband Christian, the chair of the Florida Republican Party, were caught in a scandal involving a threesome and an investigation into her husband’s alleged sexual assault of their partner. (He resigned his position after DeSantis called on him to step aside.)

Moms for Liberty’s other co-founders, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, have not escaped embarrassment. In a 2024 interview with “60 Minutes,” the pair were unable to mount a coherent explanation as CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley challenged them with simple questions, including one about why they accuse teachers of “grooming” kids. But Descovich and Justice often avoided questions and resorted to stock one-liners. Pelley even noted their evasiveness before suggesting that their organization intentionally misrepresents outliers — such as when books intended for high school students accidentally land on elementary school shelves — to produce skewed narratives of public schools.

Perhaps most glaring among its struggles, Moms for Liberty has failed to match its early success in school board elections. Back in 2022, on the heels of the pandemic, nearly half of the candidates endorsed by the organization won their elections. But in 2023, only a third of their candidates won. There are more recent signs that Moms for Liberty’s win rate is continuing its decline. In last November’s elections, Democratic candidates in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a political bellwether, enjoyed a sweeping defeat of conservatives who championed the group’s policies, as did others across the country.

These defeats were part of a nationwide trend for candidates endorsed by or aligned with Moms for Liberty. After the election, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “Last night, we saw voters support their local schools in towns, counties and cities across America, including important school board wins in Albuquerque; Wichita; Nashua, NH; Douglas County, CO; Cy-Fair, Texas; and Bucks County, PA.” 

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Major media outlets have been quick to present the organization’s recent struggles as a sign of declining influence. And while they might be right, it seems that what is happening is a shift in the group’s emphasis, one that compliments its early bottom-up approach that sent thousands of moms into school board meetings with a top-down approach that works from government down to schools.

Despite its grassroots origin story, Moms for Liberty has always been closely connected to the Republican establishment. But in recent years, the group’s efforts have expanded, aiming not only to win school board elections but to orchestrate legislative change and drive voter turnout in state and national elections.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, in which Moms for Liberty experienced diminishing returns on investments in school board elections, the group pumped three million dollars into swing state advertising and voter mobilization. Although the organization does not endorse presidential candidates, Moms for Liberty ran scathing anti-Biden ads in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. (As a 501(c)(4), the group is not required to disclose its funding sources, but records show ties to one of the most influential conservative super PACs, Richard Uihlein’s Restoration PAC.)

At the state level, Moms for Liberty lobbyists have worked with elected officials to craft “anti-woke” legislation, like Florida’s “Parents Bill of Rights” and “Don’t Say Gay” law, which, among other things, require teachers to notify parents when a child requests to change pronouns and bans “instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity” in K-12 schools. Moms for Liberty has helped pass similar legislation across the country, including in Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana and in the Dakotas. They’ve worked on bills limiting “obscene materials” and banning minors from attending drag shows.

And with the Trump administration back in the White House, Moms for Liberty has achieved new national influence. Going beyond New Hampshire’s “divisive concepts” law, the Department of Education recently announced an “End DEI” portal, where the public can report teachers who “commit illegal discriminatory practices.” In the official Department of Education announcement, only one person was quoted —  co-founder Tiffany Justice, who later encouraged parents to use the new portal to “share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.”

Although the group’s top-down focus has grown, Moms for Liberty hasn’t forgotten that it caught fire by waging local school board battles. In fact, the organization is redoubling efforts to win school board elections with its recent launch of Moms for Liberty University, an online training program for political organizing — not a degree-granting university — where parents can master the group’s positions on race and gender while also exploring a Make America Healthy Again tool kit for those curious about food choices or vaccine requirements in schools. If the program works as planned, parents across the country will have the tools to organize their own battles in local public schools.

To be sure, Moms for Liberty has endured a rough stretch. The combination of salacious scandals and heavily publicized election losses have undercut the group’s image. Yet as the group develops its state and national work — shaping legislation, mobilizing voters in swing states and working directly with the Department of Education — its role in American public education is still growing, and so might its chilling effect on American teachers. After all, the group recently announced that “thousands of parents” have already reported teachers to the government’s new “End DEI” portal. While Mom’s for Liberty’s recent embarrassments might merit a good laugh, their critics should know it might not be the last one.

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