Trump Hates the Troops. The Troops Are Taking Notice.
https://newrepublic.com/post/214562/trump-hates-troops-war-iran
Trump Hates the Troops. The Troops Are Taking Notice.
The administration is desperately trying to spin the hopeless war in Iran as a success, but our service members and their families are telling a different story.
If you want to get the unfiltered skinny on how the never-ending war with Iran is going, it’s written in the dust. Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi reported this week that U.S. service members marooned in the Persian Gulf have been expressing themselves in messages fingered onto a dusty aircraft flap. The anonymous graffiti, which calls to mind the helmet scrawls of disgruntled soldiers in Vietnam, include “Operation Epstein Fury,” “Peace deal #64 incoming … ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” and “Bibi’s cucks.” Sounds like things aren’t going so well! “I have no frame of reference, I can’t compare it to the sentiments of U.S. soldiers in previous conflicts,” Parsi wrote. “But I suspect these are new sentiments, or at least a new willingness to express them this openly and directly.”
Whether these sentiments are new is indeed unclear, but it’s not without a frame of reference. Trump has always been fairly explicit in his disrespect for the grunts who do most of the work—and all of the dying—in this racket that we call “war.” But only now is a seemingly unwinnable war bringing this all to a head. It’s no longer possible to pretend that the president doesn’t have boundless contempt for U.S. service members. They’re trapped in a war that was essentially kicked off to distract from all the other terrible news the Trump administration generates—or at least to turn attention away from the Epstein files. (Though if these dust etchings are any guide, Trump failed in this attempt to wag the dog.)
In recent weeks, this dynamic has been playing out on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been on a nine-month deployment to support Trump’s war with Iran. Conditions on board the carrier have deteriorated to the point where some seamen have jumped overboard in an attempt to escape the misery. The crew has, for several weeks, been dealing with food shortages and grotesque sanitation issues. As TNR’s Hafiz Rashid reported, “In recent town hall meetings with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, things have gotten heated, with family members expressing fear and worry over mental health and the risk of self-harm for the ship’s personnel.”
As it happens, this trouble is not confined to the USS Lincoln: Crews on the USS Benfold, Carl Vinson, and Tripoli have also reported miserable conditions in recent weeks. Pete Hegseth, our self-styled “secretary of war,” has gone to great lengths to downplay and even deny these accounts, characterizing them as misrepresentations while covering up the reason the Lincoln, which is now finally coming home, wasn’t resupplied. The dust scribbles surfaced by Parsi tell a different story.
If anything, the story is an old one. There has always been good reason to question Trump’s respect for U.S. service members. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported in September of 2020, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in Paris, questioning his senior aides as to why he should go to a cemetery full of “losers.” Per Goldberg, “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.” All of this came about because he didn’t want to get his hair mussed in the rainy conditions. (Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, would later confirm Goldberg’s reporting.)
Trump’s disparagement of the military is pretty consistent. He’s slagged off the armed forces’ top officers as “dopes and babies” and compared them unfavorably to the military leaders he, for whatever reason, holds in high esteem: Adolf Hitler’s generals. He’s complained about having to see disabled veterans at military events, and has advocated for the exclusion of wounded soldiers at official functions because, “Nobody wants to see that.” These kinds of insults were a staple of his first run for office, during which time he mocked Gold Star families and, famously, Vietnam POW survivor John McCain.
But Trump’s disregard is hardly limited to mere aesthetics. As The Huffington Post’s David Wood reported in 2017, Trump’s gigantic military buildup shoveled billions of dollars to the Pentagon, but not much of that kitty ended up benefiting the working grunts who risk their lives on our nation’s behalf.
Only the outlines of Trump’s proposal to lavish money on the military have been drawn up. There’s a request for Congress to add $30 billion to this year’s defense budget and a vague plan to add $54 billion to next year’s spending. Not included in those plans: money for the best infantry weapons, the safest troop-lift helicopters, the most protective lightweight body armor. Instead, grunts will have to settle for budget leftovers with antiquated rifles, helicopters built for their grandfathers during the Vietnam War, and communications gear that is overweight and unreliable.
The least surprising observation you can make about Trump is that he is an asshole and a cheapskate. Still, the president’s Iranian misadventure has fully exposed both his ineptitude as commander in chief and the consequences of this lack of care for military members and their families. As conditions on U.S. ships erode, the administration is finding itself in a media war with the concerned families of troops deployed to the region. Stockpiles of vital munitions are being burned through at an alarming rate. And for some reason, Trump has picked this moment to order a bizarre retrofitting of U.S. aircraft carriers, demanding that they be kitted out with obsolete steam catapults. (TNR contributor Brynn Tannehill has the lore drop you need if you’ve been confused by this story.)
Public opinion about the war in Iran has been consistently awful for Trump, whose overall approval hit a low of 33 percent this week. As Parsi reports, those who are stuck on the front lines of this folly are not likely to disabuse their fellow Americans of this being anything but FUBAR. As one service member told him: “What people in the media don’t understand when they compare past conflicts to this one, is this operation has no morale behind it. That makes a world of difference to service members deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.” Parsi thinks that the only thing left to do now is to “simply end” the war. But Trump is knee-deep in this big muddy, and there truly is no end in sight.
Third Way Doesn’t Care About the Democratic Party
The centrist organization is spending millions of dollars of corporate money on a campaign to manufacture right-wing talking points to flood the media.
While the media has been agog and aghast at the occasional successes of 2026 candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, I haven’t been feeling the hype. A canny read of the electorate reveals that establishment Democrats, like Xavier Becerra and Amy Klobuchar, are doing just fine. Many primary winners are getting lumped in with the DSA despite not being members, or even socialists, like Brad Lander and Abdul El-Sayed. And as Lander would attest, the electorate isn’t looking for leftist bona fides from their candidates; they simply want fighters, not fakers.
But no one is more choleric over the occasional success of progressive politicians than the dismal corporate dullards at Third Way. After the aforementioned El-Sayed won his Senate primary in Michigan, the centrist organization announced that it was going to “war” with a $15 million campaign against democratic socialist candidates between now and 2028. Both the sense of aggrievement and the paltry amount of money being dispensed makes this extremely sad.
The opening salvo in this supposed “war” is also pretty sad: a wan op-ed by the organization’s top dogs, Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, in the pages of The Washington Post. The two combine for a few hundred words of grievance, in which they argue that the Democratic Party’s recent woes can be attributed to its extreme politics, which is a very strange thing to say about a party whose recent standard-bearers were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Cowan and Bennett, in fact, fault Harris for not doing enough to pivot from the leftier positions she espoused on the 2020 stump. This makes me wonder if they were in a coma during the 2024 election, because I distinctly remember Harris both veering wildly toward the center, abandoning previous positions with something approaching a frenzy, and even campaigning with Liz Cheney.
The op-ed is, nevertheless, revealing. Third Way’s politics seem frozen in amber. There’s scant evidence that Cowan and Bennett have spent any time ruminating on the political shifts we’ve undergone since the 2024 election. There’s no mention of the hot-button issues that are fueling the fires of the Democratic electorate, such as the high costs of early childhood, opposition to data centers, the war in Iran, or the GOP’s corruption. The only thing they point to that could be called “recent” is a New York Times poll showing that 62 percent of the Democratic electorate identifies as either somewhat or very liberal, and that most voters want “a fighter for working people who gets things done and is authentic in his or her beliefs.”
That doesn’t describe the kind of candidate that Third Way would support. As Robert Reich wrote this week, “If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way ... you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.” Third Way’s donor base is a “Trojan horse” packed to the gills with scoundrels: Wall Street cretins and private equity goons; “members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council,” best known for producing cookie-cutter right-wing legislation that is diametrically at odds with just about every Democratic Party policy priority; and supporters of the Republican Attorneys General Association, “which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations.” In addition, Reich points out that two of the organization’s former honorary co-chairs are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said! (Sludge’s David Moore also reported this week that Third Way has received donations from health insurance interests that undoubtedly oppose Medicare for All, which was the centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign.)
Third Way’s limitations as a political organization stem from the fact that its leaders have an umbilical connection to Republican money and probably haven’t talked to a human outside of a cable news green room in years. In fact, the last time anyone from the organization sought to learn what life is like for normal Americans, it was chronicled by Molly Ball in The Atlantic, who trailed the researchers the organization dispatched to Wisconsin after Donald Trump’s first election to find the mythical 70 percent of the population that they believed occupied a position of non-partisan purity.
As Ball’s piece described, things didn’t go the way Third Way expected. Instead of finding a centrist majority out there in the hinterlands, it found a population that was extremely partisan—and fairly skeptical of the organization’s donors. But Third Way’s superpower, it turns out, is the ability to perform vertiginous mental hijinks when its priors are challenged. As Ball reported, the study that Third Way published after its tour of flyover country neatly omitted any of the doubts that she watched the researchers wrestle with on the road. “The report surprised me when I read it,” Ball wrote. “Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way.”
This is the biggest irony: The successful politicians who so terrify Third Way are actually really good at listening to the concerns of voters and then organizing those voters around campaigns to address those needs. A recent New York Times report on the insurgent left reveals that these candidates aren’t really reinventing the wheel, they’ve just—well, mastered politics: “The campaigns themselves say the secret is in the basics. They have built old-fashioned ground games, harnessing the anger and energy on the left to recruit armies of volunteers, who in turn have greeted the moment’s protest movement with open arms.”
In fact, if there’s one thing that the smattering of successful DSA-aligned candidates have done in recent campaigns, it’s been the thing Third Way refuses to do: show a willingness to abandon preconceived dogma when it doesn’t survive an encounter with reality. As Nathan Newman recently wrote, the local DSA-aligned politicians who are winning elections have learned something that the national DSA is still struggling to accept: “To win local office, you not only have to activate the maximum number of DSA members possible, you need to reach out to a wide range of other progressive individuals and organizations to win election.” There’s something nifty going on here: It turns out that the successful socialists, through their mastery of retail politics, are showing that they’re capable of a little moderation.
Third Way could really stand to learn a thing or two from the politicians it disdains. But that’s not what the Republican funny money backing its every move wants. Instead, you are going to get $15 million worth of Red Scare fulmination. And that rhetoric will be used by the right to disparage every single Democratic candidate—not just the ones who want to enact Medicare for All. Third Way will be arming both the conservative media machine and the slop merchants at CNN and The New York Times with talking points, and using its phony-baloney identity as a liberal organization to color these attacks as coming from the illusory center.
Update: After this article was published, Bennett emailed TNR to say Third Way funds and partners with groups “to help Democratic legislators win and govern, offering them both policy and political insights and ideas.” He also noted that he’s spoken at Democratic Attorneys General Association meetings, and said his group has “worked closely” with Democratic attorneys general “to fight election interference from Republican AGs.”
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Hang Elon Musk Around Susan Collins’s Neck
The billionaire wants to invest in the Maine incumbent’s Senate campaign. Democrats should be eager to drag her for the toxic association.
At the start of 2025, Elon Musk looked as if he was going to become a permanent fixture in American politics. Strutting across the stage, giving the Sieg heil!, the far-right mogul set up shop in the Trump administration’s DOGE dojo and started chaotically pulling the load-bearing beams out of the civil service and heisting the private data of an untold number of taxpayers. In June of this year, however, Musk expressed regret over getting so caught up in the political scene. Ahh, but the ketamine has since hit: In recent weeks, Musk has said that he’s going back to being a GOP bankroller, to the tune of $120 million. And the first beneficiary of his dirty money is slated to be endangered Maine Republican Susan Collins. She should suffer for it.
Part of me wonders if Elon’s willingness to spend his cash is any great concern. His investments seem to often make things more janky than they were before. He turned Twitter into a hellsite dominated by like-minded thugs that is essentially a GOP super PAC. He’s soiled the legacy of Tesla’s founders by creating a “giant rusting dumpster swasticar” that’s recently been compared to the Edsel. He just crashed a rocket into the moon. His most recent foray into political kingmaking—the $25 million he injected into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race—was a Cybertruck-level flop. And he may end up catching a criminal charge for election bribery to boot.
If Collins actually needs Musk’s money, maybe that’s a sign she’s worried that her new Democratic opponent, former state Senate President Troy Jackson, won’t be the same type of cakewalk as Graham Platner, whose Nazi tattoo put his campaign into a permanent “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” doom loop that ended last month with sexual assault charges. Still, Musk’s close-up involvement with Susan Collins should come at a high cost to the incumbent senator.
Here’s one big reason why. The guy who’s pitching himself as the GOP’s next big megafunder has spent much of his time “out of politics” becoming a pioneer in the field of manufacturing nonconsensual pornographic images of minors. Perhaps the one thing that differentiates Musk’s Grok from other AI products is that it’s become regarded as a one-stop shop for the production of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. This has already spawned a class-action suit against Musk’s firm, xAI. He seems very concerned that his company may be further restricted from promulgating deepfake pornography: xAI attorneys are suing the state of Minnesota over a state law banning apps from generating nonconsensual deepfake nudes of people.
My thoughts on this are pretty straightforward: In a normal country, it is scandalous for a politician to fund their campaign on the proceeds of CSAM and the like. Courtesy of DailyKos writer Oliver Willis, here is a succinct and correct English-language sentence on the matter: “Susan Collins is financed by a man who wants to make it easier to create nude pictures of children.”
Musk is hardly some lone-wolf pervert skulking around Republican politics. These days, the whole party seems more or less bent on proving “pedocon theory” correct. The anti-trans panic promulgated by the right has been slowly transforming into the drive to pass laws that would put the state’s hand down the pants of women and girls all across the country. As reporter Jessica Valenti recently put it, Republicans have lately adopted what could rightly be called an agenda of “upskirt politics”:
If Democrats want a message for the midterms and 2028, that’s it right there. The GOP is the party of Peeping Toms, obsessively watching what women do with our bodies and inventing ever more ways to get a closer look—from Republican AGs fighting court battles just to catch a peek at women’s abortion records to a prosecutor so desperate to see inside a miscarriage patient’s toilet that he had it ripped off the wall.
None of this is new. As TNR contributor Graham Gallagher wrote back in 2022, prominent Republicans were hard-veering into the wilds of antisocial strangeness. “Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites,” he wrote, “there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.” Two years later, “Republicans are weirdos” became a clarion call among Democrats. Kamala Harris is often accused of abandoning this line of attack, which is not exactly true. Still, there was some internal debate over its efficacy.
To my mind, it’s worth reviving. The GOP has only gotten stranger since 2024. Just this week, Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan wrote at length about the GOP’s widening weirdo problems as the youngest in the party veer in the direction of off-putting, far-right grotesqueries. One anonymous Republican staffer put it like so: “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.” Sounds like an assembly line of Elon Musks.
There is perhaps no Republican lawmaker who has been treated with more undeserving gentleness than Susan Collins. Beltway reporters tend to fall for her prevarications with incredible ease; it was one of my first lessons in how many intellectual lightweights are out here cosplaying as my industry peers. Even Democrats tend to treat her with kid gloves. As TNR contributor Meredith Shiner noted back in 2020, when the party had the opportunity to showcase Collins’s then opponent, Sara Gideon, at the Democratic National Convention, Gideon was instead assigned to introduce musical guest Maggie Rogers. “The words ‘Susan Collins,’ ‘Supreme Court,’ ‘Brett Kavanaugh,’ and ‘Mitch McConnell’ were never uttered,” wrote Shiner.
Elon Musk is a weird, unpopular scoundrel with perverted tastes who’s had a direct hand in what can only be described as crimes against humanity. That he’s decided to tether himself to Collins gives Democrats a chance to make up for the shortfalls of the past and hammer Collins for what she is now: the candidate in the race with the Totenkopf tattoo (metaphorically speaking). Musk is the ripest of targets, Collins is one of the most deserving people to catch some strays. But these two won’t take themselves down—Democrats will need to take their shots, early and often.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
How the Democrats Can Benefit From Missing Mitch
Amid the former Senate majority leader’s mysterious hospitalization, some are placing unreasonable demands on Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. Let’s sort this out.
My family group chat has been consumed by one particular question of late: “Do you think Mitch McConnell is still alive?” I’m an editor, not a clairvoyant. But for the record: I think he is alive, albeit probably in a bad way. Those close to McConnell have, in recent days, disclosed a pair of “proof of life” photos, which, in the age of AI and deepfakes, have only fueled conspiratorial scrutiny. Meanwhile, the former Senate majority leader lies in Schrödinger’s hospital suite, in a state of being and unbeing. And all over social media, some have urged Democrats—especially Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear—to either do more to get to the bottom of McConnell’s condition or do something more radical, like unilaterally declare him deceased and call a special election.
Such calls are, I believe, ill advised. But there is probably an avenue here for Democrats to use this to their advantage.
I understand why McConnell and the state of his health have become such an idée fixe, here at what looks to be his final act. First of all, McConnell is basically the Final Boss of a couple recent trends: the spate of disappearing lawmakers who have made news over the last year or so, and the country’s growing negative feelings toward the gerontocracy and the perception that too many aging and infirm lawmakers are clinging to power long past their sell-by date.
But there are deeper layers of anger and resentment on display among those looking to shove McConnell out the door. He achieved mythic villain status during the Obama era, when his strategy of total obstruction, and the belief that the GOP must never give the president a win, was so total that it abrogated Washington norms. The parallels you can draw at this moment between McConnell shielding his health status from public view and his refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing and insistence on leaving a Supreme Court seat empty are extremely obvious. Moreover, as Democratic voters search for “fighters” in their party to replace lawmakers deemed to be too accommodating to Trump, they are essentially beseeching their own to adopt the tactics that McConnell deployed to maintain and increase his party’s power.
The passions of the public, driven in equal measure by vindictiveness and projection, have lately become Beshear’s problem, as calls mount for him to do some undefined thing to force the issue itself. And this isn’t just coming from the social media randos (though it is coming from them): Former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger recently took to Threads (which is still a website, apparently) to say, “I think the Governor of Kentucky has every right and responsibility to either see Mitch or declare the seat vacant.”
Folks, just some friendly advice here. Before I make demands of a Democratic governor of a red state to do something that’s likely to put state Republican lawmakers in a hysterical fury, I like to check on whether or not it’s likely that the governor will end up impeached. In this case, Republicans occupy 80 of the 100 seats in the state House (where you need 51 to impeach) and 32 of the 38 seats of the state Senate (where you need 26 to convict). So this maybe isn’t the best time for Beshear to bully his way into McConnell’s hospital wing like some righteous commando. Unless, that is, you want us to be down one blue-state governor (and one promising Democratic presidential candidate).
Beshear seems to know what he’s doing, in any case. In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, he shot down the idea of his calling a special election, saying that those who “are really pushing I think are under the impression that a Democrat in Kentucky might be able to win that election. It’s been since 1992 that we had a Democratic senator in Kentucky.” He also noted that McConnell missing votes while the seat goes unoccupied “might not be a bad thing.”
“McConnell hasn’t been there to vote on the SAVE Act, which would tear voting rights away,” said Beshear. “He hasn’t been there to vote to support this war on Iran that this president started and shouldn’t be continuing ... not having Mitch McConnell show up isn’t necessarily a bad thing because he certainly doesn’t show up to help the American people.” In the meantime, the governor has called on McConnell to either disclose his health status or resign. That, I think, covers all the bases as far as what Beshear can and should be doing. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for other elected Democrats to play in harnessing the passions of their base and channeling them to a larger purpose.
The McConnell affair is emblematic of many pernicious aspects of Trumpism: The lack of transparency is part and parcel of a party that centers lies and obfuscations in its politics; the clinging to power by corrupt means reflects the party’s larger desire to suppress the vote and dodge the Constitution. Echoing Beshear’s commentary on how good it is for the country to have McConnell out of commission, and thus unable to cast destructive votes, would be a great way for Democrats to highlight how important it is to evict other GOP senators from their perches. And this is maybe the best time for Democrats to talk about McConnell’s toxic legacy—we all know that when he does pass, those who’ve had a front-row seat to his vicious power-mongering will feel the urge to not speak ill of the dead.
Most of all, this is a moment when Democrats should respect and make use of what seems to be a deep vein of anger toward McConnell among their base. I think this whole episode is stirring a lot of recollections: the memory of Democrats fruitlessly trying to entreat Republicans into the policymaking process even as McConnell urged gridlock; the remembrances of McConnell controlling the makeup of the Supreme Court even as it becomes more apparent that Democrats will need to be similarly radical. I think it’s possible that the weird way McConnell’s camp opted to go into hiding may contribute to the GOP’s destruction in the midterms. But it will only work if Democrats make it clear that the obsolete politics of bipartisan comity, which McConnell took it upon himself to destroy in order to bring rack and ruin to the Democrats, will die with him.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Some New New Republic Newsletter News:
The Seven Trump News Cycles We’re All Stuck In
This administration is monomaniacally focused on constantly making headlines. Too bad it’s all the same bad news.
It’s almost hard to believe now, but in the not too distant past, there have been presidents who actually labored quite intensely to not be in the news any more than was necessary. President Barack Obama, in fact, seemed to actually want his presidency ensconced in relative calm. If you wanted to know what happened at the presidential briefing, you had to either go to it, wait for those who went to it to report on it, or chill out until the White House published a transcript. It was only after Trump came to power in 2016 that the briefings became must-see TV on cable news—and even then, only because the White House had turned them into a daily train wreck.
Times have changed. Whereas TNR’s Matt Ford once famously compared Trump’s first term to the episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes, its second iteration has become a dull monotony. Just about everything this White House does is rooted in the president’s desire to get revenge on his perceived enemies, his quest for self-aggrandizement, and the extreme limitations that arise when your best days—from a pure cognition standpoint—are well behind you. Nowadays, there are only really seven types of Trump story, and they’re all bad.
Tariffs: Of all the kindnesses that the Supreme Court has bestowed on Trump, its February decision to strike down the president’s retaliatory tariffs stands out as advice that should have been heeded: “Hey, don’t do this, you are screwing up the economy.” Trump forsook this wise counsel and continues to wake up on random mornings with the yen for imposing tariffs willy-nilly. This week he imposed 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods because our neighbors to the north had the temerity to fight back in the trade war Trump started. He followed that up with an announcement that he was going to put a ten percent tariff on 80 other nations. It’s always impossible to gauge whether Trump intends to stick with a tariff fight. After all, it’s in this arena that “Trump Always Chickens Out” was born. But behind the trade war pyrotechnics, the government has handed back approximately $50 billion in refunds to firms buffeted by the president’s tariff regime. Have you seen any of that money yet?
The War in Iran: As I’ve explained at length, Trump’s decision to wade into an unwinnable foreign war after limply cosplaying as The One Guy Smart Enough to Do That was born from the fact that he’s a dumb asshole who needed a distraction from a cratering economy and the daily effluvia of the Epstein news cycle. But even I thought that the backslappery that arose from the memorandum of understanding that briefly put an end to hostilities might be a sign that the administration understood it had a much-needed off-ramp. Color me naïve: We’re now back in the big muddy, talking about war crimes and taking over Kharg Island, as the president recoils from public inquiry and his congressional allies fret about their political futures. The only question left is the one asked by TNR contributor Joe Cirincione: Can Trump lose the same war twice?
ICE Violence: Too many members of the media treated the exile of Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem as a credible sign that the administration had overreached in its violent assault on American cities. But the White House’s bloodthirsty deportation machine suffered little if any lull, and ICE is back to its wanton ways, with new high-profile killings at the hand of Trump’s goons in Texas, Florida, and Maine—the latter of which may prove to regalvanize support for Senator Susan Collins’s future Democratic opponent. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant reminds us, the violence is a feature, not a bug. And now, Trump’s FBI has decided to turn a blind eye to investigating those responsible. Far from a drawdown, this looks like the administration is giving carte blanche to the agency to kill at will.
Self-enrichment: Trump spent last year becoming a world-class kleptocrat, on the back of self-dealing exploits too numerous to recount (though I did offer readers what I thought were the worst of the bunch). Estimates as to how much his bread got buttered by all the grift and graft are nearly as varied. The New York Times totaled up about $1.4 billion in takings, but this is the low end—financial disclosures released at the end of June put the total at $2.2 billion, while Democratic researchers on the House Oversight Committee estimate that this figure rises to “$9.7 billion when the value of Trump’s digital assets is factored in” to the equation. Regardless, Trump is still lining his pockets, with new schemes including Kazakh tungsten, Pentagon baksheesh, and what appears to be a pay-to-pardon scheme.
Voter Suppression: When Trump isn’t trying to steal your money, he’s well-nigh obsessed with stealing your vote, a subject that was supposed to serve as the (very) loose framework for his recent prime-time ramble. The president’s monomaniacal desire to see the SAVE Act—his signature voter suppression bill—pass muster has peppered the headlines with updates on the latest weird scheme to somehow enact it over the objections of all the Democratic lawmakers and not a few of their GOP colleagues. Not long ago, Trump was trying to sneak it through the reconciliation process; now Republicans have backdoored voter ID restrictions into a congressional stock-trading-ban bill. It’s clear that Trump would love to rig the upcoming midterms, though it’s not clear how he will accomplish this. It’s a bad sign for the GOP that many of the networks opted to not broadcast his prime-time rant. Perhaps the media is finally coming around to the reality that Republican claims of mass voter fraud are an obvious fiction.
Bad Renovations: Millions now living may not recall that it was once possible to go several years without thinking about the Reflecting Pool. Thanks to Trump, we’re now getting daily updates about algal blooms, phantasmal vandalism, and dubious criminal cases that only show how the administration’s Stasi-like authoritarianism can be extended almost everywhere. The real vandal, as TNR’s Michael Tomasky wrote, is Trump, whose desperate efforts to leave a mark in D.C. have led to a demolished East Wing, a hollowed-out Kennedy Center, and an Oval Office decorated with Temu gold wall appliqués. Still, as Tim Noah points out, it all does serve a grand purpose: funneling taxpayer dollars to Trump’s cronies.
Everyone’s Getting Sicker: Trump’s second term isn’t without its success stories—if you are the measles virus, anyway. As Axios reported this week, the “U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295—a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker that compiles state and local health data.” This news comes hard on the heels of another public health crisis that also serves as a metaphor for the Trump presidency: the record number of cyclospora infection cases that have turned this into Explosive Diarrhea Summer. This is part and parcel of the long tail of DOGE’s effort to denude the government of its public health capabilities; we see this manifesting in our struggle to contain New World screwworm at home and Ebola abroad. And let’s remember: In the event of a Covid-style pandemic, the adults who were in the room during Trump’s first term have been replaced by quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who make the titular character from “Storm”—Tim Minchin’s seminal song about pseudoscience—look like C. Everett Koop.
There are, of course, two and a half more years of this presidency. Is it possible that an eighth Trump story emerges? For once, I’m rooting against variety—we need Trump to discover a new thing to fail at like we need a hole in the head. Let us instead work in our own ways to bring a future of relative calm and solemnity back to these lands. We all would rather be getting different push alerts from the ones we’re getting now. I know there’s one in particular that I’m really looking forward to, and it’s definitely not whatever my readers at the FBI think it is.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Some New New Republic Newsletter News:
SCOTUS’s Anti-Constitutional Crusade to Create Second-Class Citizens
The conservative legal movement lost its bid to eradicate birthright citizenship, but its war on the Reconstruction Amendments is going to continue.
Another Supreme Court term has come and gone, and civil society is once again licking its wounds. President Donald Trump has obtained new power, the lives of trans people have gotten worse, and the high court is basically winging it when it comes to its ill-fated new “history and tradition” test on guns. At the same time, things could have gone worse—at least for all of you who work at the Federal Reserve.
The biggest bullet dodged was this week’s decision in Trump v. Barbara, in which the court ruled against Trump’s executive order attempting to nullify the birthright citizenship rights explicitly granted by the Constitution. One of the grand plans of this administration has been to ethnically cleanse the United States, and had the court gone along with Trump and his aide-de-camp, Stephen Miller, millions of Americans might now be facing the end of their citizenship—including the U.S. World Cup team’s current leading scorer, Folarin Balogun. Despite this rare victory of reason over right-wing nuttery, I think we should be concerned that the conservative legal movement still has its eye on waging war on the so-called Reconstruction Amendments—especially the one that grants birthright citizenship in the first place: the Fourteenth Amendment.
I raised an alarm last year about the far right’s desire to delete the Fourteenth. The amendment is a substantial target for the MAGA movement because of the unique way it enables and extols the promise of a multiracial democracy, something that Trump and his minions have sworn to destroy. And the way the Supreme Court overrode the disqualification clause, granting Trump the right to run for office again without any concern for the Constitution’s explicit admonitions against insurrectionists holding high office, gave abundant hope to those who’d like to see the Fourteenth Amendment dismantled.
Do the court’s conservatives disdain the Reconstruction Amendments? “They definitely do, to a certain extent,” says TNR’s Matt Ford. “They’ve largely read the Fifteenth Amendment out of the Constitution, in Brnovich and Callais, by making it impossible to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act, and they more or less nullified the disqualification clause in Trump v. Anderson. There are parts they’re fine with, like the equal protection clause in some circumstances, but they’ll never interpret it as broadly as the liberals.”
Ford says that the most charitable read is along the lines of what Justice Clarence Thomas said in his dissent in Trump v. Barbara. “They generally think the Reconstruction Amendments were designed to address the specific circumstances and exigencies of the post–Civil War era,” he says, “and that while they can have plenty of applications beyond that, they aren’t meant to be used to (in their view) fundamentally restructure American society anymore or provide special treatment for anyone.”
Here’s where the biggest conflict lies, as the liberal position is generally that the Reconstruction Amendments were a second founding, not a postbellum clean-up. “In this view,” says Ford, “Congress has broad powers to ensure that there is no American underclass or subaltern population, which Jim Crow nonetheless managed to create for about 90 years.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson got at this in her concurring opinion, in which she took issue with Thomas’s dissent on these lines. Thomas’s “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification,” she wrote, adding that his take on the matter “elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”
Thomas didn’t win the argument this week. But the fact that these matters are being argued in the first place is cause for serious alarm, according to former Massachusetts Senate candidate Alex Rikleen. “By even considering the legitimacy of birthright citizenship, the Roberts Court, stacked with jurists ready and willing to make anti-constitutional rulings time and again, has helped transform a fringe white supremacist attack on the 14th Amendment into a question that millions of people now understand as up for debate.”
This is hardly a new or novel fear. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson—in which they essentially deleted the disqualification clause from the Constitution—was enabled by the fact that too many were willing to countenance the idea that the plain English language of the Fourteenth Amendment was, in fact, open to interpretation. I am still angry that The New York Times in 2023 referred to the disqualification clause as “an obscure clause of a constitutional amendment enacted after the Civil War,” thus injecting a derogatory bit of editorializing into what purported to be a straight news piece.
In light of the tête-à -tête between Thomas and Jackson, I’m disturbed anew by the way the Times casually denigrated the amendments “enacted after the Civil War,” as if they were some stitched-on appendage and not language that carries the same force and lawfulness as the founding-era amendments. If the paper of record is skeptical that the Reconstruction Amendments are legitimate (and they, like the court’s conservatives, do seem interested in creating a subaltern class beyond the Constitution’s protections, for what it’s worth), this will only further the right-wing project to tear those amendments out of the Constitution and undo the nation’s second founding. So be glad that the worst didn’t happen, but stay on guard—we are not out of danger yet.
America’s 250th Celebration Is Donald Trump’s Lost Cause
Trump’s desperation to leave his mark on the country is consuming our nation’s semiquincentennial.
We’re closing in on July Fourth and the nation’s 250th birthday, and right on time, the all-knowing digital algorithm deposited a memory from 2015 on my screen: That year, burning the Confederate flag on Independence Day was in vogue, sparked by the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My fondness for desecrating rebel iconography is not restricted to either a national holiday or a national tragedy—we should have fully conquered the Confederacy when we had the chance, instead of allowing them to commemorate their traitorousness. Maybe those nine parishioners would be alive today if we’d done a better job discrediting that toxic ideology.
That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth. When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration. At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his “Great American State Fair,” Trump announced that “America is back.” Where had it gone? The president proclaimed that “a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”
As a thin crowd made for the exits, he also touched on the matter of state that’s consumed most of his time lately: “The Reflecting Pool that you’ve heard so much about, which is so incredible, it’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people, but soon will be looking as beautiful as it looked just two weeks ago,” Trump said. “In fact, I looked at it just a little while ago. It looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” As it happens, the Reflecting Pool is still green, still peeling, and half-assedly stashed behind some chain-link fence. It may be a federal crime for me to report this, it’s not really clear.
All of this is definitely a product of ego, but it’s also highly reminiscent of Confederate kitsch. Trump’s drive to commemorate himself, which has even run afoul of some of his fellow Republicans, is animated by the same idea as the Lost Cause: to lend legitimacy to a period of betrayal and to ensure this malevolent force lives on. Allowing the Confederacy to commemorate itself was a profound failure on our part, and it seeded the earth for the weakening of our democracy. As Trump plans to sully the District of Columbia’s skyline with his triumphal arch (now with more fist!), I can see history repeating: Trumpism as the new Lost Cause.
I am hardly the first to evoke this comparison. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote back in 2020, Trump spent his Independence Day marinating in a variety of Lost Cause grievances: the decision to remove the Confederate iconography from the Mississippi state flag and NASCAR events, the renaming of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, along with the usual suspects (“the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing”).
As Graham noted at the time, Trump’s Lost Cause fetish was his campaign schtick, the red meat he used to rally his base. In 2020, that playbook failed, in no small part because the Covid-19 pandemic was foremost on the minds of voters. But Trump played the same game in 2024 and won back the White House. And as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Rivka Maizlish wrote last year, the “unrelenting propaganda of the Lost Cause” returned with a vengeance. The names of Confederacy luminaries stricken from U.S. military bases were restored, there was a renewed push to whitewash the sins of slavery, and the Civil War era’s insurrectionists were conflated with the nations’ Founders. It’s no accident that Trump believes our latter-day insurrectionists should be the ones to get government reparations.
As Maizlish noted, ’twas ever thus:
Lost Cause mythology is central to Trump’s movement. He romanticizes the gender and racial hierarchies of the Old South, valorizes Confederate leaders and symbols, and demonizes those who would remove Confederate memorials as “angry mobs” trying to “wipe out our history.” The Confederate anthem “Dixie” played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27, 2024, an event filled with racist harangues and ridicule.
Trump is now deep into his dotage (and perhaps his inexorable decline). He has no campaigns left to run and no further need to worry about uniting the American people to build some kind of sustainable electoral coalition. These days, the president is motivated entirely by thoughts of his legacy. But the Lost Cause schtick remains the same—only now it’s manifesting itself in his relentless pursuit of various vanity projects and alterations to Washington, D.C.
The possibility that he might not be remembered seems to vex Trump, whose administration moved with the same sort of alacrity to forestall the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center as it did in fighting its inane war with Iran. As Brian Beutler reported in his Off Message newsletter, Trump’s name only came off the building because Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty, as an ex-officio member of the center’s board, had the standing to sue over the matter and she took the opportunity. Some other Democrats who had standing for the same reason decided to pass, including House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and outgoing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Beutler hails Beatty as a model for other Democrats to follow, given what can happen to a country when a traitor to the Constitution is allowed to remain commemorated. Every lasting monument to Trump is really a monument to accommodating his misrule, celebrating his corruption, and a signal to the public that it’s OK to forget his criminal legacy and accept the Trump era as legitimate. “It will be much easier to arrest the normal process of forgetting,” writes Beutler, “if Democrats embrace the goal of Trump humiliation now. If peeling Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center is just a taste of what’s to come.”
Tearing Trump’s various architectural vanities down isn’t what I’d call a top priority. Like TNR’s editor, Michael Tomasky, I think Democrats need to commit themselves to freeing us from the iron grip of oligarchy and radically reshaping the Supreme Court. Still, as Tomasky wrote earlier this week, we should look to future Democratic presidential candidates to follow in the footsteps of Beatty and commit to a cosmetic de-Trumpification. It would send a strong signal that the party will brook no attempts to commemorate a discredited president—and that it has the stomach for the civic deworming this nation needs to kick off its next century.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Trump Is a Hot Mess—and He’s Cooking His Party
Republicans are rotting from the top, following the president down the path of crashing out and complaining instead of governing.
Did you land here looking for an account of the Republican Party’s latest angry crashouts and epic meltdowns? Well, you’ve come to the right place. From Truth Social to Capitol Hill, Donald Trump and his merry band of hangers-on are in incredible disarray. Led by a corrupt idiot, they are mired in a dumb war they can’t win, overseeing an economy that’s eating the livelihoods of ordinary Americans, and even facing some internal blowback as Trump’s demands for an increasingly varied array of vanity projects and a slush fund to reward his criminal goons are getting spiked by his GOP allies.
Trump isn’t capable of sorting out any of the nation’s myriad problems—dilemmas mostly spawned by his relentless pressing of the “cause another problem” button. So he’s up late, whining to anyone who will listen that this is all everyone else’s fault. This week, he spent the wee hours angry at the Michael Smerconish podcast for hosting Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, who claimed he was “coerced into testifying against Trump.” The president made one of his trademark staggered-caps replies: “Michael Cohen has come out and unequivocally stated that the Radical Left Prosecutors, Tish James and Alvin Bragg, pressured and coerced him to testify against your favorite President, ME, when they made him the key player in their Political Witch Hunts.”
Trump has also been monomaniacally preoccupied with the crashing and burning of the concert he’d planned for America’s semiquincentennial, a word that I’m looking forward to forgetting how to spell. Some weeks ago, it was announced that an array of aggressively tertiary-to-pop-culture performers had been lined up to play for the president’s pleasure. That bill has since dwindled to Vanilla Ice, who says that he would be willing to perform for Vladimir Putin and the Iranian mullahs, and Flo Rida, whose absolute commitment to getting that bag—any bag—would have a Saudi royal exclaiming, “Have some shame, habibi!”
We know that this was a humiliating moment for Trump because he once again went on Truth Social to tell everyone about it. “We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” he wrote.
That’s all pretty rich coming from someone whose every online utterance is a tantrum laced with either petty complaints or high-test AI slop. Past targets of his ire include “Dumocrats and RINOs” (with Thomas Massie, Thom Tillis, and Bill Cassidy coming in for specific scorn), the Supreme Court (this time spurning Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett), critics of his Iran war blundering, the judge who ordered his name be stricken from the Kennedy Center facade, and, of course, the Iranian people, against whom he routinely threatens war crimes. Pope Leo, in particular, seems to be living rent-free in Trump’s head at all times.
The fact that Trump has chosen a midterm election year to become ungovernable is piling increasing pressure on those few Republicans who want to appear to be capable of governing. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who like Mitch McConnell before him seems to be hyperaware that allowing his GOP colleagues to go as feral as they’d like to would hurt their reelection chances—has reached a “breaking point” with Trump over several matters, including the nomination of Bill Pulte to be the director of national intelligence and the proposed “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—which seems to have been shoved back into some sort of procedural limbo after Democrats successfully raised a hue and cry over it.
Republicans like Thune have a hard row to hoe right now. I’ve spent no small amount of time trying to figure out if there is any problem the GOP can solve in timely enough fashion to save their bacon for the midterms, and the conclusion I keep reaching is that this is simply a physiological impossibility for a party that seems to only have whining and trolling in its locker. This week, we saw some excellent examples of what Republicans are capable of doing: In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee, in an effort to stick it to the LGBTQ community, declared it “Nuclear Family Month” (with no evident concern for the affordability crisis affecting those families). Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the state Republican Party made news for holding a moment of silence for the corrupt cop who killed George Floyd.
Sorry to throw the thesaurus at this, but this is all stupid, puerile, insipid pissbaby nonsense. But it’s also the ne plus ultra of Republican ideas—right now and for the foreseeable future. Trump may still hold sway over his party, but the main evidence of his influence increasingly just seems like rot. The only real question now, as Trump mashes “send” on another hundred inscrutable Truth Social posts, is how much of that rot creeps into our lives—and how quickly we can evict these crashout kings from power.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Trump Is Now a World-Class Kleptocrat
The president’s demand for a slush fund to pay billions of dollars to his cronies places him among the planet’s most infamous political criminals.
Donald Trump last year amassed one big beautiful rap sheet of scandal and criminality, with multiple instances of corruption that made Teapot Dome look quaint. But the president’s bogus new “settlement” with his own administration’s IRS, which he had sued in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns in 2020, hits scorching new heights of depravity. The deal’s contours were bad enough when it looked like Trump was simply going to take a small fortune of taxpayer money and line his own pockets. But that was last week: The new plan is for $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to be set aside as a slush fund, which Trump will effectively control, to pay out to January 6 insurrectionists and political cronies that he believes were wronged back when the Department of Justice wasn’t his mobbed-up plaything. Some of the worst people in America are already lining up for payouts.
There are plenty of ways to describe this arrangement. Call it cartoon villainy. Call it criminal. For certain, call this an utterly impeachable offense. Also call this very worrisome: There is a non-zero chance that Trump will simply get away with it, now that corrupt elites dominate American life with absolute impunity. For those with any vested interest in restoring democracy and clearing out the Augean stables of Trumpism, how we respond to this is very important.
The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”
There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)
But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media malady. The initial coverage from The New York Times suggested that the scheme merely “could funnel money to Trump allies,” even though this was its expressed purpose. The news department also couldn’t bring itself to call it a slush fund, instead drafting “critics” to say what is plainly and objectively true (the paper’s editorial board at least named it appropriately). Elsewhere, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal found a useful euphemism, referring to the settlement’s arrangement as merely “unusual” instead of nakedly criminal. (TNR’s headline, if you’re keeping score, nailed it: “Trump Just Launched a Taxpayer-Funded $1.8 Billion MAGA Slush Fund.”)
So I’m concerned that when Democrats return to power, the media will either be an impediment or an enemy to any effort to put things right. But at least that effort is kicking off right away. Representative Jamie Raskin told TNR’s Greg Sargent he is planning to “introduce a bill that would block the fund and other future efforts like it.” He’ll be doing so with the full support of party leadership, who will seek to bring the vote to the House floor over the Republican majority’s objections via a discharge petition. While such a maneuver will require some GOP support, Republicans in the House have in recent weeks broken ranks on the disclosure of the Epstein files—and a few have defected from the party line on funding Trump’s grifty ballroom, as well, likely killing the $1 billion that Republicans had planned to allocate to it in their ICE-funding reconciliation bill.
Meanwhile, HuffPost’s Jen Bendery reports that Senator Chris Van Hollen will be launching a similar effort in the Senate, amending the reconciliation bill to prevent January 6ers—some of whom assaulted the Capitol Police officers who protect these politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike—from obtaining money through this slush fund.
Taken as a whole, these efforts tick a lot of boxes for those, like me, who bemoan Democrats’ institutional timidity. If successful, this will force Republicans to take a hard vote and sign their name to this calumny. And regardless of success, it provides fodder for a massive media campaign to wreck the GOP in a midterm election year, creating a savage contrast between the president’s inattention to ordinary Americans’ financial struggles and his desire to enrich criminals with those Americans’ tax dollars.
As Sargent noted, “Independents famously react badly to corruption.” According to a 2025 battleground survey conducted by End Citizens United, “Democrats’ journey to the majority begins with showing voters the consequences of Republican Corruption” because the topic was extremely animating for both independent voters and turnout voters. “Democrats should focus on telling the story of how honest Americans are losing their shot at the American Dream because of the corruption wealthy insiders have unleashed,” the study affirms, reaching the same conclusion that most of the political media had after the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
What can I say? It turns out that accountability really matters. Trump and his inner circle have been like the raptors testing the bars at Jurassic Park: They’ve found weaknesses in the system, exploited them for criminal ends, and when they skate, they only redouble their efforts to find more flamboyant crimes to commit. That we’re now living with the prospect of a corrupt president cutting checks to his favorite thugs and miscreants is a humbling low for this nation.
Anyone out there treating this as normal or permissible business—or who believes that once this president is ousted from power we should overlook his sins in the name of “looking forward”—is just as guilty as anyone else interconnected with this web of sleaze.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
The Democrats Just Laid Down Their Arms. Again.
Abigail Spanberger’s response to the court decision that overthrew the will of voters on redistricting is a worrying sign of surrender.
Last week, I wrote about how the far right’s capture of governing institutions like the Supreme Court has put Democrats in the jackpot, forcing them to make some hard choices. Indeed, the decision laid before Democrats is one of the most famous choices ever laid out in the English language: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles—and by opposing, end them. In a troubling sign for Democrats, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has chosen the former.
At issue is the Virginia state Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the amended congressional district maps that voters just approved—in a referendum that cost the Democrats some $70 million, as they painstakingly played by all the rules to get it over the line. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Spanberger offered a limp proclamation, saying that she was “disappointed” by it but that her “focus as Governor will be on ensuring that all voters have the information necessary to make their voices heard this November.”
But it turns out that Spanberger was missing some vital information of her own: a lawful solution that could save the day and uphold the will of Virginia voters. As Quinn Yeargain at The Downballot reported, the state constitution includes a provision that allows lawmakers to change the mandatory retirement age of state Supreme Court justices. The idea Yeargain poses would be to lower the official retirement age to 54 by placing a modification in the annual budget bill that’s due by June 30, pass the legislation, and replace the hack justices—all of whom are older than 54—with seven new ones picked by Spanberger.
“Democrats might prefer other solutions,” Yeargain concluded, “but if they want to see the will of the voters respected in time for the November elections, there are virtually no other options—and none with as good a chance of success as this one.”
Spanberger isn’t going for it. In fairness, as Greg Sargent reported this week, Virginia Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell have cited some logistical impediments to the plan, namely a May 12 deadline to finalize the maps in time for early voting.
Yet, wherever the GOP holds the whip hand in the redistricting wars, they are sallying forth without either seeking the assent of voters or showing much concern for procedural deadlines—in some cases, like Louisiana, Republicans are changing the maps right in the middle of ongoing elections. Which makes Surovell’s diffident attitude especially risible: “Wiping out the entire Supreme Court is an incredibly extreme step to take over a decision you don’t like.” This is a hard thing to hear when Republicans are engineering—at warp speed—the wholesale extermination of Black political power in the South.
It’s unsustainable for our democracy to have one party that’s terrified of hypothetical blowback they might receive for violating a norm and one party vandalizing the Constitution with freedom and glee, knowing their political opponents will never force them to incur a similar cost. Democrats spend so much effort on mitigating the hypothetical radical step the right might take in the future that they’re failing to respond to the radical things they’re doing at this moment—to say nothing of the things they’re already speeding to do next. One of those things, by the way, is using the Callais decision to potentially eliminate majority-minority districts in blue states like California—or to potentially create a postelection coup in Congress.
Regardless of whether retiring the current Virginia Supreme Court would result in the electoral maps that voters approved, there are a number of good reasons why state Democrats should do it anyway. Do it because replacing the Supreme Court with one more aligned with Virginia voters will be a gift that keeps on giving. Do it because it will raise the salience of the GOP’s rush to undo civil rights gains. Do it because if the shoe were on the GOP’s foot, they would not hesitate to forcibly retire a Democratic-majority court. Do it because, as Brian Beutler writes, you cannot simply not “respond to an element of a Republican coup d’etat.”
But the biggest reason is that Democrats need to develop an appetite for the kind of hardball politics that the GOP plays. The enormity of the tasks in front of them—reversing a slew of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, rebuilding the federal government, putting Trump and his inner circle in jail—requires leaders who understand the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
For all the grim news about the redistricting wars, the grimmer failures of Trumpism keep the prospects of winning elections in reach. We should remember that the GOP’s race to create new districts is a product of their failures and unpopularity. And who knows? For all their cracking and packing, Republicans may pay a price for making their own red districts more vulnerable should Trump’s daily misdeeds and the worsening economy touch off a wave election. But those voters—who include suburban moms at No Kings rallies calling for Nuremberg 2.0 and neighborhoods full of ordinary people who’ve put their lives on the line protecting each other from Trump’s ICE goons—will expect their elected officials to take up arms (figuratively!) against this sea of troubles the GOP has unleashed, and bring it to a swift end.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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