The structure of the deal is simple, and that is part of the problem. The United States agrees to stop military operations, ease pressure, and help reopen key trade routes right away. Iran agrees to stop fighting too and to make general commitments about its nuclear program and future talks. The U.S. steps are immediate and clear. Iran’s steps are slower, less specific, and often pushed into the future. In practice, that means Washington acts first, and Tehran gets time and space to decide how much it will actually do.

As for sanctions and money, the memorandum is particularly generous to Iran. It opens the door for oil sanctions to be relaxed and for frozen funds to be released during the life of the agreement. That money will help stabilize Iran’s economy and government after months of war and pressure. But those financial benefits start to flow before a comprehensive nuclear and regional agreement is finished. The main pressure tool the U.S. had—restricting Iran’s oil sales and access to global money—is weakened up front. Once oil is moving and the money is made available, it becomes much harder to restore pressure without causing new shocks to global markets and admitting that the deal is failing.

The section of the memorandum that addresses nuclear capability sounds serious at first glance, but most of the difficult issues are pushed into later negotiations. Iran repeats that it will not build or obtain a nuclear weapon and that it will keep its program at its current level, for now.

What the memorandum fails to do in concrete terms is spell out exactly what that current level means. How much uranium Iran is allowed to enrich, what happens to existing stockpiles, what kind of equipment it can keep running, and how inspectors can verify all of this. Those details are supposed to be sorted out later, in a follow-up process. That leaves a gap between the political headline (“Iran pledges not to build a bomb”) and the real technical work needed to actually lock in and verify that outcome.

The 60-day window is a good example of how this deal is shaped more for politics and headlines than for real solutions. The memorandum creates a 60-day period to work out a more detailed, final agreement on nuclear issues and sanctions relief. Sixty days sounds strong and decisive. It gives leaders a talking

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point: we have a tight timetable, we are keeping up the pressure, we are not kicking the can down the road.

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I hope you’ll consider subscribing. This will help me deliver a more robust experience for subscribers. There will be Q and A, short videos and one-on-one Zoom calls to discuss anything you would like.

I hope you’ll choose to subscribe. The subscription amounts to $5 a month, $50 a year or 42 cents a post, not counting the other benefits. I think this newsletter is worth that, and I hope you’ll agree.

Best regards and as always, thank you for your support,

Mark

We can help fix this in November. Vote to turn off his spigot. Vote to reclaim our democracy. Vote to lay down a marker for 2028. And if he dares to bring out ICE to harass voters in blue areas and tries to seize voting machines, get out into the streets, form a human chain and make ICE’s life miserable.

But it cannot stop with a single Election Day or a single march. Between now and November, we have to slam every door he might try to pry open. That means pushing our state legislators, secretaries of state, and local election boards to do the boring, essential work of tightening certification rules, forcing any dispute into the courts on an expedited basis, and making it illegal for a rogue county board to simply sit on results because they do not like who won.

It means demanding serious legal protections for election workers, bans on armed intimidation at polling places and drop boxes, and clear limits on how law enforcement can be deployed around the vote. If they are not willing to put these safeguards into statute and policy now, they are telling you exactly how seriously they take the threat.

We have to reclaim the debate in advance, the early‑warning system we never had in 2016 or 2020. Local networks that can spot intimidation, irregular pressures on officials, or sudden “fraud” scares, and get them immediately to lawyers, reporters, and national watchdogs.

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Ranked choice voting is simple. Voters are no longer forced into the artificial constraint of choosing a single candidate in a crowded field. Instead, they rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate secures a majority, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and those ballots are redistributed according to voters’ next choices. This process continues until a candidate crosses the majority threshold. What emerges is not just a winner, but a winner who has demonstrated an ability to build consensus across factions rather than merely exploit division.

That distinction matters more than our current system admits. In a plurality system, candidates can—and often do—prevail with a narrow, intensely motivated base while the majority of voters coalesce around alternatives that are split among multiple candidates. Ranked-choice voting eliminates that perverse incentive. It discourages scorched-earth campaigning, and elevates candidates who can appeal beyond their most fervent supporters.

The real-world evidence bears this out. Maine, the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting for federal and state elections, has demonstrated that the system is not only viable but effective at producing broadly acceptable winners. Alaska has followed suit, pairing ranked-choice voting with a nonpartisan primary system that further loosens the grip of party orthodoxy. In New York City, ranked-choice voting has transformed crowded primaries into more representative contests, allowing voters to express nuanced preferences without fear of “wasting” their vote. Across dozens of municipalities, similar patterns have emerged: campaigns become less toxic, voter engagement increases, and outcomes better align with the electorate’s overall will.

Critically, ranked-choice voting also alters who runs—and who can win. Under the current system, candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as reform-minded challengers, face steep structural barriers. The fear of vote-splitting suppresses candidacies and narrows the field before voters even have a say. Ranked-choice voting disrupts that dynamic. It allows voters to support candidates they genuinely prefer without inadvertently aiding their least preferred option. The result is a more diverse slate of candidates and a more open, competitive political arena.

This is not a theoretical benefit. Jurisdictions that have adopted ranked-choice voting have seen increased success for women, candidates of color, and those running outside traditional party structures. When voters are freed from strategic voting constraints, they are more willing to take chances on candidates who better reflect their values and communities.

A broader shift toward ranked-choice voting would meaningfully improve our political life. It would move us closer to something resembling actual majority rule—something we too often lack despite our democratic pretensions. Too many of our current officeholders are elected not because they are widely supported, but because they are the least objectionable option in a fractured field. Ranked-choice voting changes that. It ensures that winners must earn not just a plurality, but a mandate.

Just as important, it reduces the dominance of the two-party system without requiring its immediate dismantling. It creates space for new voices and new coalitions to emerge organically. It diminishes the power of negative partisanship—the constant drumbeat of “vote against” rather than “vote for”—and replaces it with a system that rewards broader appeal and constructive engagement.

At a moment when public trust in elections is dangerously low, this matters enormously. Cynicism thrives in systems that appear unresponsive or rigged. Ranked-choice voting offers a tangible, understandable reform that can help restore faith in democratic outcomes. When voters see that their preferences are fully counted, that their voices are not artificially constrained, and that winners reflect a genuine majority, confidence in the system grows.

This is not some untested academic proposal. It is a functioning system, already in use across the country, delivering measurable improvements. The argument now is not whether it can work—it already does—but whether we have the political will to expand it

We should be moving aggressively to adopt ranked-choice voting at the state and local level, building momentum toward broader national acceptance. There is little to lose in expanding its use and a great deal to gain. Democracies are not static; they require maintenance, adaptation, and, when necessary, reform. This is one of those moments.

Consider the political implications in concrete terms. Candidates who rely on narrow, grievance-driven bases—those who thrive on polarization and exclusion—would find it far more difficult to prevail. A candidate who cannot attract second- or third-choice support is a candidate who cannot build a governing coalition. That is precisely as it should be. Under ranked-choice voting, extremism becomes a liability rather than a pathway to power.

Meanwhile, candidates who are capable of speaking across divides—who can appeal to multiple constituencies without abandoning their principles—are rewarded. This creates opportunities for thoughtful progressives who can articulate a compelling vision and build broad-based support. The kind of coalition politics that figures like Zohran Mamdani have begun to model becomes not the exception, but a viable and repeatable strategy.

This is how you begin to change the electoral landscape—not through rhetoric alone, but through rules that align incentives with democratic values.

The path forward is clear, even if it is not easy. Advocate for ranked-choice voting in your state legislatures. Support ballot initiatives where available. Press candidates to take positions on electoral reform. Most importantly, make the case—clearly and persistently—that our current system is not inevitable, and that better alternatives already exist.

We are not condemned to a democracy defined by narrow pluralities, strategic voting, and chronic dissatisfaction. We have the tools to build something better. Ranked-choice voting is one of them, and it is long past time we used it.

According to recent accounts, U.S. defense intelligence has now raised Israel’s espionage threat level against the United States to its highest category, “critical.” That step doesn’t happen because of one rogue operation. It reflects a pattern: Israeli services intensifying efforts to monitor American diplomats and Pentagon officials working on Iran, Gaza, and the broader regional war, in order to get inside information about U.S. negotiating positions and internal debates. In ordinary language, that is a close partner running aggressive intelligence operations against the core of the U.S. national security apparatus.

This is not a one‑off situation. For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have quietly ranked Israeli spying as among the most active on American soil, alongside much larger powers. Periodically, pieces of that picture bubble into public view—Jonathan Pollard, alleged surveillance devices discovered near the White House, now reported eavesdropping on senior officials—and each time the pattern is the same. Israel denies it. American political leaders downplay it. The security relationship continues to deepen, untouched by what would be scandalous behavior if any other state were involved.

Into this context emerges Section 224 of the current defense bill. On paper, it is framed as a “United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The branding is deliberately anodyne. Supporters insist it’s just about better coordination, no new money, more reporting to Congress, and nothing that would hand Israeli actors direct access to U.S. classified systems.

But if you read past the talking points, the intent is obvious: to build a permanent, institutionalized framework for joint research, development, testing, and integration of Israeli technology into U.S. defense programs, particularly in high‑end areas like drones, missile defense, AI, and cyber.

In other words, at the same moment career professionals are quietly saying “this ally now belongs in our highest threat tier for espionage,” Congress is moving to insert that same ally into the future of the U.S. military‑industrial apparatus. That is not prudence. It is insanity.

The risk is not just that Israel might “steal secrets” in some narrow sense. Once you create a circumstance of joint ventures, shared R&D, and supply‑chain integration, you are opening long‑term opportunities for influence that don’t depend on any single operation.

Code, components, and design decisions start to cross borders as a matter of routine. Oversight becomes more diffused. It gets harder to draw bright lines between what is “ours” and what is “theirs,” and far easier for sensitive know‑how or data to move in ways that are difficult to track, let alone reverse.

There is a democratic problem, too. Section 224 is designed to shift key decisions about the U.S.–Israel security relationship onto a semi‑autonomous bureaucracy.

Members of Congress who want to slow that down will not just be arguing against a particular arms sale; they’ll be told they are obstructing efficiency and undermining security. The structure itself becomes a shield against future political reconsideration.

You can see how warped the incentives are by flipping the scenario. If the same intelligence community that just raised Israel’s threat level to “critical” had instead delivered that assessment about, say, Turkey or even a NATO ally like France, do we really think Congress would respond by drafting a bill to more thoroughly embed that country into our most sensitive defense programs? There would at least be hearings and visible pushback. The fact that the answer is obvious tells you that this is not about a strategic judgment. It is about a special‑case political relationship overriding warnings that, in any other context, would be treated as red lights.

The result is a kind of learned helplessness inside American politics. Lawmakers declare in the abstract that they care about national security, safeguarding U.S. technology, and protecting the integrity of American decision‑making. Then, when confronted with evidence that a favored partner is treating the U.S. government itself as a legitimate intelligence target, they default to denial and escalation: deny that there is a problem, and escalate the very forms of integration that make the problem harder to contain.

You do not have to support cutting off Israel, or dismantling the alliance, to see how reckless this is. A minimally serious response would look very different. It would start with a public pause on Section 224. It would include open, on‑the‑record testimony from counterintelligence officials about the scope of allied espionage in the U.S., and specific risk assessments tied to any deeper defense‑industrial integration. It would draw clear, enforceable lines: if you are designated a top‑tier espionage threat, you do not get automatic, privileged access to the future of America’s weapons systems.

That basic logic should not be controversial. That it is controversial in this case says less about Israel than it does about Washington. A political class that cannot bring itself to set even elementary conditions on a partner currently under a “critical” threat designation is not safeguarding American interests. It is undermining them with its eyes open.

The bottom line is that any American-Israeli defense relationship of this variety in the midst of this spying scandal makes us not only useful idiots, but renders us complicit with Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and his efforts to do the same in Lebanon. I’d like to think a new Congress would bring this horrible idea to a screeching halt, but I am not naive.

But I have had concerns about the future of the forum for some months. When the main way to grow is through short notes rather than full posts, the nature of the platform changes. Instead of asking, “What substantive thing am I publishing this week?”, writers end up asking, “What can I throw into the feed today that will get a spike?” The work becomes secondary to the stream.

That shift pulls Substack closer to X and Instagram. The mechanics start to look the same: a fast-moving feed, real‑time reactions, and an environment where the algorithm prefers whatever grabs quick attention.

Short, punchy reactions travel farther and faster than careful arguments, so writers have an obvious incentive to produce more of those and fewer slower, more demanding pieces.

For longer-form creators, this is structurally bad. Deep essays, reported stories, and carefully constructed podcast episodes are highly time and energy intensive.

Notes are cheap and easy. When the cheap and easy content does the growth work and the expensive content does not, you are pushed into a model where you must constantly maintain a presence in the feed just to earn a chance for your best work to be seen.

Over time, that erodes the space for sustained thinking because attention and effort are constantly diverted to feeding the stream. Any given post of mine gets 40 likes and 30 restacks. My notes often get thousands of likes and hundreds of restacks. That is frustrating, especially because I don’t know what to do to change it.

Readers feel the consequences, too. Their experience becomes more fragmented. Instead of seeing a clear progression of ideas through posts, they see scattered hooks, teasers, and half‑formed takes in Notes. It gets harder to tell what a writer actually stands for beyond the vibe they project in the stream. The trust that comes from consistent, in‑depth work is replaced by a more shallow kind of familiarity: you recognize the voice, but you don’t necessarily get the full argument.

Politically and intellectually, the notes‑first pattern encourages shallow engagement with complex topics. Anything that needs context and structure is at a disadvantage compared to quick outrage or snark. That means more heat and less light, especially on contentious issues. Over time, the platform’s discourse starts to mirror the worst tendencies of other social feeds: fast, reactive and polarized.

In the end, making notes the primary engine of attention turns a writing platform into yet another attention platform that happens to host writing. It becomes harder for longer‑form work to set the tone, and easier for the feed to drag everything down to its level.

As I said earlier, I don’t know the solution. What I do know is that it concerns me. In these times, we need more thoughtful analysis and increasingly that gets shorter shrift. In the end, that is bad for Substack and bad for readers.

For my regular readers, a heartfelt thank you. You make it all worthwhile.

Here’s what the data actually shows, and it’s messier than anybody wants to acknowledge.

The “centrist” (read conservative) Third Way released a poll of Nevada Democratic primary voters in May 2026 that is unpalatable. Fifty-four percent of those primary voters identify as moderate or liberal — that’s the centrist lane — versus just 27% who call themselves progressive or socialist. Sixty-nine percent said they’d rather vote for someone who can win the general election than someone who stands by progressive values. Seventy-six percent prefer a candidate who compromises to get things done over one who holds the ideological line. That’s not a fringe result. That’s a supermajority of Democratic primary voters in a swing state telling you exactly what they want. This of course depends on whether their methodology is sound, but it regrettably rings true.

And it’s not just Nevada. Third Way’s broader “60% Moderate Imperative” analysis argues Democrats need to win 60% of moderate voters to take the House and the White House, and 64% to win the Senate. The overall ideological breakdown of the American electorate has barely moved: 35% conservative, 42% moderate, 23% liberal in 2024. That middle 42% isn’t going anywhere, and whoever wins it wins the election.

Democratic leaning polls tell the same story. A Gallup survey found that 45% of Democrats want their party to become more moderate, compared to only 29% who want it to become more liberal and 22% who prefer it to stay the same.

A national survey by the New York Times/Sienna showed that 52% likely Democratic voters believe the party’s next presidential nominee must move back to the ideological center to win, specifically favoring moderation on issues like crime and immigration.

Polling of Democratic voters by the Manhattan Institute indicated that a plurality of 38% wants the party to move toward the center, compared to 22% who want to shift further to the left. This study found that self-identified moderates are the largest faction within the Democratic coalition.

So case closed, right? Moderates win, progressives lose?

The answer is, not so fast.

In a New Jersey special election this cycle, Analilia Mejia — a former Bernie Sanders staffer running on Medicare for All and abolish ICE — won a seat that party insiders had written off as going to a centrist. She won the general by 20 points, double Kamala Harris’s 2024 margin in the same district. AOC-endorsed Chris Rabb won a Democratic primary in Philadelphia for a deep-blue seat. In Maine, progressive Graham Platner is polling ahead of Susan Collins after the more establishment-friendly Governor Mills bowed out of the race. These aren’t anomalies you can wave away.

So what’s actually going on?

The pattern, if you look carefully, is geography. Mejia won in a deep-blue New Jersey district. Rabb won in Philadelphia. Platner is running in Maine, where Collins’s vulnerabilities are real and the Democratic base is energized enough to carry an outsider. Progressive candidates are winning where the map allows them to win — where the general election is a formality and the real contest is the primary. In those seats, running hard left isn’t a liability; it’s a signal to a base that’s been told to wait its turn for decades.

But flip the map to swing districts and the calculus inverts entirely. Governors Sherrill and Spanberger won in 2025 precisely because they positioned themselves as combative centrists — willing to throw punches at Republicans without alienating the moderate voters who decide purple-state races. Younger voters have been genuinely mobilized by housing costs, student debt, and the war in Gaza, but that energy hasn’t translated into national majority support for the full progressive policy menu. Sanders’ endorsees have a mixed record this cycle: wins in New Jersey and Ohio, losses in Illinois, North Carolina, and Utah.

There’s a deeper tension here worth exploring. The Democratic base has been moving left, particularly among younger and more educated voters. But the House Democratic caucus has actually moved right since 2018. A majority of House Democrats now belong to the New Democrat Coalition, the “centrist” (right) caucus.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has shrunk post-2024. So you have a base increasingly sending one message and congressional representatives increasingly moving in the opposite direction. That’s not sustainable, and it helps explain why the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with AOC and Sanders is drawing massive crowds even as the party establishment bets on a different strategy.

California’s primary made this visible in real time. The governor’s race turned into a three-way between moderate Xavier Becerra, progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, and Republican Steve Hilton — and the divide between establishment Democrats and the insurgent progressive wing is a defining characteristic of the whole primary cycle. That’s not a California-specific quirk. It’s the national party’s identity crisis playing out in the state where Democrats are most free to have it out among themselves.

Here’s my take. The false binary — “Democrats are ready for progressives” versus “Democrats want moderates” — obscures more than it reveals. A progressive running on Medicare for All in a Brooklyn-equivalent seat isn’t taking a risk; she’s reading her district correctly. A progressive running the same campaign in a suburban Pennsylvania swing district is probably going to scare away some people. The question isn’t ideological. It’s tactical.

The mistake both sides make is wanting a universal answer to a question that only has local answers. As lamentable as it is, there are seats where only moderates can win. It is true that progressives win seats where progressives are in tune with their constituency. The candidates who understand the geography of their own races tend to win. The zip code always votes before the ideology does.

I don’t like this any more than many of you do. But time and circumstances change beliefs and I think that things will evolve as more voters become increasingly disillusioned. Unfortunately, many of them are not there yet. Progressives need to continue to espouse common-sense solutions in language that can appeal to these other voters. It will take time, but I believe progressives can win the battle of ideas as more and more candidates articulate the vision of people like AOC and Bernie Sanders. As more legislators and leaders join them, the greater the opportunity for real change.

One thing that would help create a safe space for legislators to take chances would be to ban all corporate and special interest contributions. If they are freed of dependence on this dirty money, they may begin to lead rather than follow. In 2029, a new president and Congress should pass legislation that would nullify these practices and dare the Supreme Court to overrule them.

The sooner the better.

What is being extinguished in Lebanon is not Hezbollah’s military capacity alone. It is the political viability of the Lebanese state — the very institution that, over the preceding fifteen months, had been doing exactly what Israel and the United States demanded.

To understand what is happening now, it is necessary to understand what happened between November 2024 and March 2026. After the ceasefire brokered by the United States and France, Lebanon’s government approved a phased plan for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to disarm Hezbollah and assert sovereign control south of the Litani River.

By January 2026, Lebanese authorities declared Phase 1 complete — a significant milestone representing the first time in forty years that the LAF had gained operational control south of the Litani, with over 9,000 soldiers deployed and nearly 10,000 rockets and 400 missiles removed.

This was not nothing. This was a weak state doing something structurally very difficult.

Israel’s response to this progress was to keep bombing. UNIFIL documented over 10,000 ceasefire violations by Israeli forces between the November 2024 agreement and the onset of the current escalation — 7,500 airspace violations and approximately 2,500 ground violations. More than 370 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli fire during the ceasefire period. Israel conducted 855 strikes between the ceasefire’s start and the March 2026 re-escalation.

The logic of continuous bombardment is clear enough from a narrow military perspective: keep pressure on Hezbollah, prevent rearmament, deter reconstitution. But the political effect was the opposite of what a durable settlement requires.

Every Israeli strike during the ceasefire period undermined the LAF’s domestic credibility. It handed Hezbollah a ready-made argument: the Lebanese state’s cooperation with disarmament was earning its citizens bombs, not security. This is not an incidental side effect. It is a strategic contradiction at the heart of Israel’s approach.

On the night of March 2, 2026, Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel — its stated response to the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Israel’s renewed full-scale invasion followed within hours, declaring as combat zones all territory south of the Zahrani River, sections of Beirut’s southern suburbs, and the Bekaa Valley — areas covering roughly 14% of Lebanon’s territory.

The LAF, which had spent over a year trying to extend state authority southward, withdrew from multiple border villages as IDF forces advanced. This was not cowardice. It was the predictable outcome when a severely underfunded, under-equipped army is faced with the full weight of one of the region’s most capable militaries. The LAF was never capable of forcibly disarming Hezbollah through military confrontation any more than the Iraqi state could have eradicated Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army by decree.

Hezbollah is not a gang that can be cleared from a neighborhood. It is a movement with deep social, economic, and political roots in Lebanon’s Shia communities, built over four decades and embedded in the country’s confessional political structure.

By May 2026, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health more than 2,700 people had been killed since March 2, and over 1.3 million people — more than 20% of Lebanon’s entire population — had been displaced. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees described the pace of displacement as faster than during the 2024 escalation. The total Lebanese death toll since October 2023 now exceeds 4,000. Israel struck every major bridge crossing the Litani River, severing southern Lebanon from the rest of the country.

Amnesty International documented Israel’s use of white phosphorus in Lebanon, alongside indiscriminate strikes on residential neighborhoods, health facilities, and ambulances. This is not targeted counterterrorism. This is collective punishment of a sovereign country’s civilian population.

Here is where the incoherence becomes impossible to paper over. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran. By early April, a fragile ceasefire had emerged. JD Vance acknowledged the agreement was “fragile.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated plainly that a resolution to the conflict in Lebanon was included in the ceasefire terms. Both Netanyahu and Trump insisted that Lebanon was a separate matter and that the campaign there would continue.

Then, within hours of the ceasefire announcement, came Operation Eternal Darkness. Iran’s response was to close the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most critical chokepoints for global oil transport — in direct retaliation for Israel’s Lebanon strikes. Pakistan, which had served as a mediator in the U.S.-Iran negotiations, publicly criticized Israel’s Lebanon strikes as destabilizing to the ceasefire. Araghchi made the stakes explicit: the U.S. must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both.

As of late May and into this month, Araghchi was still stating the ceasefire explicitly covered all fronts, including Lebanon, and that any Israeli violation constituted a violation of the broader agreement. The U.S. and Iran ultimately reached a deal to re-open the Strait, but Lebanon remains in active conflict, and the status of Iran’s nuclear program — the stated primary justification for the entire U.S.-Israel operation against Iran — remains unresolved.

Direct U.S.-facilitated talks between Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington addressed ending the fighting, but the fundamental contradiction — Israel insisting on Hezbollah’s disarmament while actively preventing the Lebanese state from having the political credibility to achieve it — remained unresolved.

Lebanon is being made to pay for a war it did not start and cannot stop. This needs to be stated plainly, because the framing that has dominated much of Western commentary — that Lebanon “must control Hezbollah” — implicitly accepts a standard that no state in Lebanon’s position could realistically meet.

The Lebanese state had, by January 2026, done more to assert control over the south than at any point in the previous four decades. It was doing so under enormous internal political pressure, with an underfunded military, against a movement with a parallel economic and social infrastructure woven into a significant portion of the country’s population. And it was doing so while being bombed nearly every day.

What Israel’s approach has produced instead is over a million people permanently displaced, infrastructure dismantled to a degree that will require a generation to repair, and a Lebanese state whose domestic legitimacy has been destroyed by the very process of cooperating with international demands. The irony is merciless — the more Lebanon’s government tried to satisfy Israeli and American demands, the more Israeli strikes made that government look powerless to its own people, and the more it strengthened Hezbollah’s argument that Lebanese sovereignty was a fiction.

A durable resolution to the Iran nuclear question — if one is genuinely the goal — requires a Lebanon where the state has legitimate authority. That requires a state that has not been bombed into rubble. It requires a population that has not been collectively punished for the actions of an armed group it cannot unilaterally disarm. And it requires an Israeli policy that does not systematically destroy the political conditions for the very outcome it claims to want.

The United States has the leverage to demand a halt. It has, at various points, demonstrated awareness that the Lebanon campaign is threatening the Iran ceasefire it is simultaneously trying to construct. That awareness has not translated into constraint.

The question that will define what comes after is simple: does the United States want a diplomatic architecture in the Middle East, or does it want to give Israel unlimited license to dismantle one while the other is being built? So far, it has chosen the latter. The cost of that choice is being paid, overwhelmingly, by Lebanon.

Axios reported that Trump several days ago had a noisy argument with Benjamin Netanyahu where he allegedly called Netanyahu crazy and said that Netanyahu would be in jail were it not for Trump. Anything this regime says must be taken with a grain of salt, but this report makes sense.

Trump wants a deal to extract himself from Iran and Israel’s actions are making it is impossible. So anything Trump actually does to stop the bombardment and invasion of Lebanon should be welcomed, even if Trump’s motives are directly related to his own convenience.

As for Bibi Netanyahu, he wants forever wars to keep himself in office and out of prison. The question is how much more will be left of Lebanon before this horror ends.

The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since Trump initiated the war with Iran, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the Strait will remain largely closed for several more months, with crude shortages set to become more acute and oil prices likely to hit new highs as early as this summer.

This was not supposed to happen. On the campaign trail, Trump promised repeatedly to lower gas prices and end inflation. The White House still maintains a page called “Unleash American Energy” that touts lower utility bills and energy dominance. That page is still live. Nobody has taken it down.

In recent polls, between sixty and seventy percent of all voters disapprove of Trump’s economic management. Two-thirds of voters think the Iran war was a mistake. Among independents, that number climbs to nearly three-quarters. His overall approval has hit thirty-four percent— historic lows for a sitting president in his second term. The political wreckage is real and measurable. Among Republicans, though, seventy-one percent still approve. The base is eroding slowly, but it is holding because as we all know, MAGA is an incorrigible cult.

The easy explanation is that Trump lied and his supporters are too loyal to notice or care. The voters absorbing these costs are operating inside a political identity that has fundamentally redefined what accountability looks like, and the redefinition has been so complete that most of them aren’t even aware it’s happened.

Here is what authoritarian politics does, at the structural level. It trains supporters to interpret the costs of a leader’s agenda not as evidence of failure, but as evidence of necessity. The harder things get, the more the mission is validated — because only something important would require this kind of sacrifice. Paying $5.50 for gas is not proof that the president failed you. It is proof that the enemy was real, that the stakes are high, and that you are tough enough to handle what is coming. Absorbing the cost becomes an act of solidarity. Complaining about it becomes an act of disloyalty.

This is not a new phenomenon. It is, in fact, one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook. You bind people to the project by making them pay for it.

What makes this moment different — and genuinely dangerous for democracy — is how seamlessly the administration has given supporters the language to sustain the fraud. When a Trump adviser goes on camera and says he cannot get too excited about a “temporary gasoline pump,” he is doing a very specific thing. He is signaling to the base that the people who are upset about gas prices are people who cannot see the bigger picture. The true believers hear that and feel reassured.

Democratic accountability depends on a feedback loop. Voters feel pain. They connect the pain to policy. They hold the responsible party accountable at the ballot box. The whole system assumes that pain is real — that when something costs too much, people know it, and they know who to blame.

It is worth noting that even the regime’s most defensible talking point is built on a false foundation. They point to record domestic oil production. And it is true — the United States is producing historic amounts of oil. But oil is a global commodity priced by global markets. What gets pulled out of the ground in West Texas does not stay in West Texas.

It goes into the global supply, where it gets priced against everything else, including the chaos in the Persian Gulf. “Drill, baby, drill” was always a promise that could only be kept by someone who either did not understand how commodity markets work, or understood perfectly well and was counting on the audience not to. The slogan was a lie. Not a complicated lie. A simple one, told to people who had no particular reason to interrogate it.

None of this is going to resolve neatly before the midterms. The dynamics that protect Trump from accountability inside his coalition are the same dynamics that make the coalition feel immovable — even as the broader electorate has moved sharply. The question the midterms will answer is not whether Trump has damaged himself. He has. The question is whether the feedback loop outside the Republican base is intact enough, and whether the voters who have already moved — the independents, the soft partisans, the people absorbing real costs with growing impatience — will convert their frustration into votes at a sufficient scale to shift power in Congress.

That is not a question about feelings. It is a question about turnout and whether the Democratic Party can stay focused on the specific costs being absorbed by specific people without retreating into abstraction.

The pump does not lie. The question is whether enough voters are still listening to it.

The betting here is that they are and that redistricting will not be sufficient to stop the upcoming landslide. Trump has control of most of his original base, but that base will take the Republicans only so far. People are furious and they are pointing their fingers directly at Trump and his captured Republican Congress.

That sentence deserves a moment. Not because it’s outlandish — though it is — but because of what came next in the reporting: Treasury officials have already made preparations. Two Trump political appointees have been advocating for the note. The infrastructure is ready. All that stands between Donald Trump and a denomination bearing his likeness is a 160-year-old law and a Republican Congress that has shown no appetite for saying no to this president.

The law in question dates back to 1866. It was passed for a reason. Congress, in the aftermath of the Civil War, decided that living Americans would not appear on the nation’s currency. The principle was simple: the money belongs to the country, not to whoever happens to be running it at the moment.

That principle is now formally under negotiation. Meanwhile — and this part is not pending any Congressional vote — Trump’s signature will appear on all newly printed U.S. currency beginning in June 2026. The $100 bill. This is the first time in American history that a sitting president’s name has been printed on the nation’s banknotes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it not “untoward” given the nation’s 250th anniversary. I’d call it a preview.

I don’t think it’s complicated, and I’m tired of watching the corporate media treat each piece of it as a curiosity rather than a pattern. What Trump is executing — methodically, across every sector of the federal government — is a project of political personalization. The systematic replacement of institutional identity with personal identity. The state’s face becomes his face. The party’s loyalty becomes loyalty to him. The civil service’s independence becomes his to trash. The geography of the country gets his preferred names. One by one, the institutions that are supposed to exist independently of whoever holds power now revolve around a single person.

The Gulf of Mexico is now, by executive order, the “Gulf of America” — signed on his first day back in office. Republicans are now moving to codify this legislatively, specifically so a future president cannot reverse it. This is not a renaming. It is an attempt to make a political act permanent by embedding it in law.

The currency story follows the same logic. Trump’s signature on the $100 bill is already done. The $250 bill with his portrait is the next ask — and notice how Bessent framed it: “We have made preparations ahead of time… but we will adhere to the law.” The law he knows Congress will enact and his corrupt boss will sign. In other words, the will is there. The preparation is done. The law is the inconvenience to be resolved.

On his first day back, Trump signed an executive order stripping legal protections from thousands of federal employees. By March 2026, DOGE had eliminated approximately 9 percent of the federal workforce — more than 200,000 workers. In May 2026, the administration proposed requiring all current and future federal employees to sign non-disclosure agreements. RFK Jr.’s HHS reclassified career civil servants as at-will employees under a new “Schedule Policy/Career” designation, gutting the job protections that make an independent civil service possible in the first place.

The theory of the American civil service — the reason it exists as it does — is that the government should be capable of functioning regardless of who wins elections. Career officials serve administrations of both parties. They carry institutional knowledge. They provide continuity. They are, deliberately and by design, not loyal to the person who currently holds the presidency. They are loyal to the office, to the law, to the function.

That is precisely what’s being dismantled.

A government staffed by personal loyalists, subject to dismissal for insufficient loyalty, is a government that has been personalized — that now runs on personal rather than institutional authority.

This matters enormously, and not just in the abstract. It matters because the regulatory agencies, the enforcement offices, the agencies that administer benefits and collect taxes and oversee elections — all of them are being converted from independent institutions into instruments that exist to implement one man’s dictates.

Then there is the Republican Party, which at this point can be described as a vehicle for the enforcement of personal loyalty. Trump is claiming a primary endorsement record of 37 wins and 0 losses as of May 20th. White House communications director Steven Cheung posted the summary on X: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. Fuck around, find out.” That is not spin. That is a warning, and it is being issued by a White House official on behalf of the sitting president of the United States.

The warning is credible. Texas Senator John Cornyn was ousted by the execrable Ken Paxton after Trump endorsed the latter. Senator Bill Cassidy was ousted in Louisiana for voting to impeach Trump in 2021. Representative Thomas Massie was defeated by nearly 10 points in Kentucky after Trump posted 11 attacks on Truth Social calling him a “fool,” “weak,” “pathetic,” an “obstructionist” and “an insult to our nation.” That primary cost nearly $33 million — one of the most expensive in American history, spent not against a Democrat, but against a Republican who voted wrong. Brad Raffensperger and Chris Carr fell in Georgia. Five Indiana state legislators who resisted Trump’s redistricting demands were ousted.

A political party that punishes deviation from the leader’s personal preferences is not a political party in any sense. It is a loyalty cult. And a loyalty cult embedded in one of two major American parties — one that controls the Congress — means that the check the legislature is supposed to provide on executive power is now conditional on legislators’ personal fealty to the executive. That is not a republic.

All of this is happening before the 2026 midterms, not after them. These actions are not the actions of an administration that feels constrained by an upcoming election. They are the actions of an administration that believes it has enough institutional and political control to move without significant consequences. And so far, that is happening.

The question establishment Democrats need to answer — and have not yet answered—is how to make the pattern clear to the voters who will decide the midterms. Individual pieces of this story poll badly: most Americans do not want a president’s face on the currency. Most Americans support civil service protections. But the pieces are being treated as pieces, not as a pattern.

A man who puts his name on government checks, his face on the money, his loyalists in the agencies, and his political vengeance into the primary calendar is not running a government. He is building a monument to himself out of the materials of the republic.

The 1866 law against living faces on currency wasn’t passed out of modesty. It was passed because the founders’ generation understood something we are being forced to relearn: that in a democracy, the institutions must be larger than the person who runs them. The moment the person becomes the institution, the institution is gone.

The $250 bill is waiting. The infrastructure is ready. All it needs is the law to change. The betting is that the Republicans will do it.

People must come out to vote en masse in November. We cannot take 2 1/2 more years of this. I wrote several days ago of my optimism. I am very optimistic. People are turning on Trump in droves. He is ripe for the picking. We need to win back both houses of Congress and begin the process of reversing these travesties and establishing accountability.

Vote.

Here is Sulzberger:

“There are the media leaders who have settled winnable cases to appease the administration or advance their business interests,” Sulzberger said. “Those who have transformed their editorial pages to placate the president. Those who have let the president rewrite their styleguides, telling themselves it’s harmless to swap out the Gulf of Mexico for the Gulf of America to avoid something worse. Such capitulation, even seemingly small instances of it, serves only to embolden the administration to keep attacking the press.”

He’s right, but where rhe hell was he during the 2024 campaign? He deserves opprobrium for his paper’s failure to cover Trump properly and its eagerness to hammer Biden.

The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos has narrowed its opinion pages to “personal liberties and free markets,” a directive that triggered mass resignations: opinion editor David Shipley, columnist Ruth Marcus, veteran writer Jonathan Capehart, Jennifer Rubin, Catherine Rampell and associate editor David Maraniss, who said he would never write for the paper again under Bezos’s ownership.

The paper has lost more than 375,000 digital subscribers. It laid off roughly a third of its staff. Its Ukraine correspondent learned she’d been fired from a war zone. Meanwhile, Bezos went on CNBC to describe Trump as “a more mature, more disciplined” version of himself. Former executive editor Marty Baron called this what it was: “cravenly yielding.”

Meta is in a category of its own. After Trump reportedly threatened Mark Zuckerberg with prosecution, Zuckerberg dismantled Facebook’s fact-checking program, dropped content restrictions on immigration and gender, and handed board seats to Trump allies. He then flew to Mar-a-Lago. The transaction could not have been more explicit, craven or repulsive.

Google and Apple quietly changed their maps to read “Gulf of America.” No lawsuit required. Just anticipatory compliance — which may be the most corrosive form of capitulation of all, because it cannot even be traced to a specific threat.

And then there are the nameless, faceless “many” that Sulzberger described: organizations that told him directly they were afraid that suing to defend their rights would “invite retaliation.” News organizations choosing silence over standing, not because they were forced to, but because they did the math and decided the fight wasn’t worth it.

Stephen Colbert didn’t just lose his show; he became a lesson to everyone watching. The mechanism is not censorship in the crude, obvious sense. Nobody is padlocking newsrooms. The mechanism is the slow recalibration of what journalists and editors believe is safe to say and safe to pursue. It is the self-censorship that follows when a colleague gets fired for criticizing the parent company’s deal with the president. It is the story that doesn’t get assigned, the lawsuit that doesn’t get filed, the editorial that doesn’t run.

Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States among the nations experiencing the sharpest declines in press freedom in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Three-quarters of the 180 countries surveyed were rated “problematic” or worse. The U.S. is contributing to that trend, not merely observing it from the outside.

There is a long and uncomfortable history of the press making peace with power when the cost of confrontation feels too high. The German press didn’t vanish overnight in the 1930s. It adjusted. It found new framings. It told itself that some coverage was still possible, that maintaining access was better than losing it, that institutional survival was the precondition for doing any good at all.

Sulzberger is right about the core dynamic: every capitulation is read as an invitation. Every settlement that didn’t need to be settled tells the administration that the next lawsuit might work too. Every editor who spiked a column tells the next editor that spiking columns is acceptable.

The outlets that have held the line —the Guardian, AP and NPR to name several— deserve credit for doing so under real pressure. The AP sued to restore its White House access. NPR challenged its defunding in court and the Guardian covers stories nobody else will touch. To its credit the Times fought the Pentagon’s loyalty oath policy all the way to a federal judge, and won. But these outlets are now the minority. And the majority’s choices have consequences for everyone — including readers of the outlets that didn’t capitulate, because a weakened press environment degrades the entire information environment, not just the brands that chose compliance.

There is one more failure worth naming, and it belongs to the opposition party. Democrats have been largely silent about this. There are no floor speeches every week naming the outlets that settled and asking what was surrendered. There is no sustained messaging campaign connecting media consolidation, regulatory capture of the FCC, and the silencing of press critics. There are few Democratic politicians making the case.

This is a failure of political imagination. The Republican Party understood, long before Trump, that the media environment is a political battlefield. Democrats still largely treat it as someone else’s problem — the press’s problem, a civil liberties concern rather than a democracy concern. It is a democracy concern. When the president can extract favorable coverage through the threat of litigation and the promise of regulatory approval, he is not just attacking the press. He is corrupting the information environment that democratic self-governance requires to function.

Sulzberger said it plainly: rights are just ink on paper unless they’re exercised. He was talking about news organizations. He could just as easily have been talking about an opposition party that seems to believe that if it doesn’t make noise, maybe things won’t get worse.

Things are already worse and worse is yet to come unless these institutions finally stand up en masse. We shouldn’t hold our breath though.

We are going to survive Donald Trump.

Not because the danger is overrated, because it is not. And it is not because our institutions are strong, because as it turns out they are not. And it is not because history always works out in the end, because it does not.

America will survive Trump because millions of Americans have not surrendered themselves to his efforts toward domination. That is a reality he can never overcome.

Trump’s entire political agenda depends on making people feel diminished: judges, journalists, immigrants, prosecutors, teachers, civil servants, election workers, dissenters, voters. The cruelty and the chaos are not accidental. The daily spectacle is designed to exhaust the country into submission. But exhaustion is not the same thing as defeat.

A tired people can still be a free people, and frightened people can still become a brave people. A country under assault can still remember that for which it stands.

That is what is happening now.

The people who want us to believe democracy is already dead are trying to sell us despair. But Trump is not the end of the American story. He is the appalling truth. He is what happens when corruption goes unpunished, when propaganda becomes normalized, when racism is made to be patriotism, when cowardice dresses itself up as loyalty. But he is not the future unless we decide he is.

That decision still belongs to us.

For all his noise, Trump has never understood the deepest source of American strength. It is not the presidency. It is not the cheap and tacky showmanship. It is not the flags or the soldiers or the arches or the billionaire donors cheering him on.

The strength of America is the stubborn refusal of ordinary people to be ruled like subjects. It is the election worker who stays at her post after threats. It is the judge who signs the order. It is the teacher who tells the truth. It is the journalist who keeps digging. It is the protester who shows up. It is the neighbor who helps the family being targeted. It is the voter who stands in line after being told the line is too long, the process is too hard, or the outcome is already decided.

That is America too. In fact, that is the America that has saved itself every time. This will be painful and much damage has already been done. People have been harmed. Norms have been shattered. Lies have been normalized. Institutions have been bent and some have broken. The world has watched the United States, the country that once lectured others about democracy, seemingly accept authoritarian rule.

But nations, like people, can survive shattering experiences and become stronger because they finally stop lying to themselves. The America that emerges from Trump will not be innocent. And that is fine. Innocence was often just another word for denial. We do not need an innocent America. We need a wiser one.

A country less naive about authoritarianism, about white nationalism, about disinformation, about the cowardice of elites, about how quickly people who call themselves patriots will gladly sell out the Constitution for power.

Trump has taught America what it took for granted. He has taught us that democracy does not defend itself. We defend it. He has taught us that laws are only as strong as the officials willing to enforce them, the judges willing to uphold them, and the citizens willing to demand them. He has taught us that norms are not guardrails if nobody is punished for crashing through them. He has taught us that voting rights, reproductive rights, civil rights, press freedom, academic freedom, and the peaceful transfer of power are not to be taken for granted.

That knowledge is painful. It is also powerful. Because a democracy that understands its own vulnerability can become harder to subdue. That is the opportunity that emanates from this crisis. Not a return to “normal.” Normal failed. Normal produced the conditions that made Trump possible. Normal ignored corruption and extremism, rewarded spectacle, and treated democracy as if it was a sin.

We need something better than normal. We need a democracy with stronger guardrails, broader participation, real accountability, and citizens who understand that freedom is not inherited. It is practiced. This is where the hope comes from. Not from fantasy. Not from blind optimism. Not from pretending everything is fine.

Trump has power, but he does not have inevitability. He has followers, but he does not have the whole country. He has intimidation, but he does not have moral authority. He has the machinery of government, but he does not own the American people.

That distinction is everything. Every authoritarian movement wants people to believe resistance is useless. Every strongman wants citizens to feel isolated. Every bully wants the room to think no one else will stand up.

But we will stand up. That is how democratic resilience begins. Not all at once. It begins when they stop asking whether the fight is comfortable and start asking whether the fight is necessary, and this fight is necessary.

We survive Trump by refusing numbness. We survive him by protecting elections, defending the vulnerable, telling the truth, building local power, supporting independent journalism, serving as poll workers, joining organizations, funding lawsuits, voting in every race, and refusing to let exhaustion become obedience.

This country has endured civil war, violent segregation, fascist sympathizers, corrupt presidents, political terror, assassinations, constitutional crises, and movements that tried to narrow the meaning of we the people to apply only to themselves. Again and again, the worst people in American life have mistaken cruelty for destiny. And again and again, they have been wrong.

Not because the arc of history bends by itself. That takes human effort. Trump wants an America that kneels. Our answer must be an America that stands. Trump wants citizens to become spectators. Our answer must be citizens who act. Trump wants the future to belong to fear. Our answer must be that the future belongs to those with enough courage to build it.

America will survive Trump because the American idea is older than him, larger than him, and stronger than the frightened men who mistake his rage for strength.

It will survive because millions of people still know the difference between a president and a king.

It will survive because the Constitution, battered as it is, still gives us tools. The courts, imperfect as they are, still matter. Elections, threatened as they are, still matter. Speech, protest, organizing, solidarity, and courage still matter.

Most of all, it will survive because people who love democracy are beginning to understand that love is not a feeling. It is a responsibility.

If we do the work, if we learn the lesson, if we refuse to look away, America will not merely survive Trump.

It will come out of this harder to fool, harder to silence, harder to break, and far more determined to become at last what it has always claimed to be.

But this past week, that entire performance was rendered bankrupt by something much more cynical: a party trying to pour tens of billions of dollars into immigration enforcement while fighting over whether taxpayer money should be used to compensate Trump allies who claim they were politically persecuted.

Senate Republicans left Washington without voting on a roughly $70 billion bill to fund ICE and Border Patrol, delaying action until after the Memorial Day recess.

That alone would be a major political story. But the reason for the delay is the real scandal. Republicans were not just arguing about border policy. They were dealing with backlash over a proposed $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” settlement fund tied to Trump’s lawsuit over the leak of his tax returns.

The party that wants to make the immigration state bigger, harsher, and more expensive is also debating whether the public should help bankroll a victimhood fund for Trump-world. That is not a contradiction. It is the organizing principle of the modern Republican Party.

The proposed fund is reportedly intended to compensate Trump allies who say they were politically persecuted, and Democrats are trying to block or restrict it, especially to prevent payments to Trump supporters who injured law enforcement officers on January 6th. The same movement that spent years screaming “Back the Blue” is now trapped in a fight over whether people connected to an attack on police could benefit from taxpayer money.

Even some Republicans seem to understand how indefensible this is. Mitch McConnell reportedly called the settlement “completely foolish and ethically wrong” and questioned the idea of compensating people who assaulted law enforcement officers. When Mitch McConnell raises ethical issues, you know the world has turned upside down.

The immigration bill itself is massive. Republicans are trying to use reconciliation to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s presidency without Democratic support. Lucky for all of us that the Senate parliamentarian stopped that effort. Democrats have been demanding reforms to the agencies, while Republican leaders are trying to hold their own members together long enough to get the bill through the Senate. But the larger story is not procedure. It is priorities.

There is never enough money, we are told, for ordinary people. Never enough for healthcare. Never enough for housing. Never enough for schools. Never enough for childcare. Never enough to make life less brutal for working families.

But somehow, there is always money for ICE and the Border Patrol. There was even, until Republicans backed away from it, money connected to White House security enhancements and Trump’s ballroom, a provision that helped trigger internal backlash. And now there is a fight over nearly $1.8 billion that could become a compensation pipeline for Trump-aligned grievance politics.

This is the clearest possible picture of what the right means by government. Government is bad when it helps people. Government is tyranny when it regulates corporations. Government is socialism when it provides healthcare. But government is necessary and urgent when it detains immigrants, builds monuments to presidential vanity, or compensates loyalists who claim that accountability was persecution.

The line Democrats should use is simple: Republicans want austerity for everyone else and reparations for MAGA thugs.

It is perfectly accurate as a description of the moral structure propounded by the Republicans. If you are poor, undocumented, uninsured, indebted, displaced, or simply trying to survive, Republicans tell you the state owes you nothing. If you are part of the Trump coalition, suddenly the state owes you a check.

The modern GOP’s actual position is that government should discipline outsiders and reward insiders. It should be merciless toward the vulnerable and forgiving toward the powerful.

That is why this fight matters. It is not just a budget dispute. It is a preview of a government built around loyalty.

In a functioning democracy, public money serves public purposes. It funds roads, schools, disaster relief, healthcare, defense, courts, and basic administration. Citizens may argue about the size and scope of those commitments, but the underlying premise is that the state belongs to the public.

In a patronage state, the premise is different. Public money becomes a tool of reward for the worst. Enforcement becomes selective.

That is the danger hiding inside this legislative brawl.

The immigration bill is the vehicle. The slush fund and the ballroom are the realities. But the real story is the transformation of government into an instrument of punitive politics and self-dealing.

Republicans will keep saying this is about law and order. But law and order cannot mean one thing at the border, another thing at the Capitol, and a third thing when Trump’s allies are asking taxpayers to cover their grievances.

If a migrant breaks the law, Republicans demand the full force of the state. If a Trump supporter breaks through police lines, suddenly we need context. If a family needs help, there is no money. If a political loyalist claims persecution, there may be a fund.

The Democrats need to tell the public what they intend to deliver, but there is no sin in pointing out the corruption because it is the impediment to adopting programs that help people. Tell those stories and you win elections.

The way to combat the dishonesty is not to check out, but to care about politics, and to be willing to take action. Learn about the issues and solutions and advocate for those you support. This requires nothing more than being able to read. Despite the unpardonable illiteracy that characterizes the America left behind, most Americans can read. It is no longer acceptable to claim lack of time or lack of interest. We must make the time and exhibit genuine interest.

The Affordable Care Act is another example of political ignorance disrupting real political change. Even after the law was passed, many members of Congress did not know what was in the law. Very few voters had any idea what the law said and meant to their daily lives. But a large portion of the citizenry nevertheless said that they disapproved of it. And yet when confronted with specific provisions of the law, a majority said they supported those sections of it.

In Suzanne Mettler’s The Submerged State, we learn that most Americans know little about the many benefits they enjoy as American citizens. Mettler cites a 2008 survey in which respondents were asked whether they had ever used a government social program. A whopping 56.5% said never. That is stunning in light of the fact that more than 90% of the population uses government services.

All of this comes back inevitably to ignorance. That is not the same as poor education. There may come a day when somebody even worse than Donald Trump rides the wave of resentment borne of the lack of understanding by so many citizens of how our system works, and how it should work. Ignorance also fosters apathy and resignation, which feed our chronically poor election turnout.

It is vital that we find a way to restore civic literacy. Robert Pondiscio observed that, “The founding purpose of public education in America was not to advance the private end of college and career preparation, but the public purpose of ensuring that the nation’s children would be able to participate fully and knowledgeably in civic life as adults.”

Central to understanding our civic responsibilities is an understanding of history. Part of civics education is knowing American history, which provides us perspective. It is worth noting that a better perspective of hardships such as the Great Depression and the 1918 influenza outbreak might have better prepared the nation for the ravages of the COVID19 pandemic. A better understanding of history is critical for the development of a national identity. Civic education today is a shadow of what it was in generations past. Only twenty-five percent of Americans can name the three branches of government. Critical thinking is becoming more and more rare. All of this constitutes a recipe for a weak, fragmented civic society.

By now, the scope of the challenge will be obvious. Many laudable solutions have been circulating for years. The problem is the absence of an educated populace to appreciate the threat to our democracy and to demand that these proposals receive rigorous examination, and where appropriate, be implemented.

To come to a thoughtful judgment about political affairs, citizens need a solid grounding in history, economics, and statistics. They will hear candidates make conflicting claims about what history proves and what the economy needs. Citizens need to understand the great issues in American and world history. They should know about Jim Crow, the Progressive movement, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the McCarthy era, the Brown decision, the Cold War, and the other events and issues that shaped our world today. They need to understand the measures that have helped or harmed the economy. They need to recognize how conflicts have started and ended. They need to know and understand enough to reach their own judgments about candidates and issues and proposed legislation.

The lack of understanding of our history has been made acutely worse by such governors as Ron de Santis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas. Both (as well as other state leaders) have ravaged school curricula, eliminating all teaching about slavery and segregation. They and others have initiated a book banning orgy that has limited students’ access to many classics. Layoffs are overwhelming the system at all levels. The University of Texas laid off dozens of employees to comply with the state’s diversity, equity and inclusion ban. Faculty in other departments around the country are bracing for further layoffs. This is going on in public institutions around the country.

The public will not demand change because too many don’t know what they don’t know and don’t care. This has to come from the top, through a relentless campaign by a Democratic president and for starters, blue state governors. To achieve this, Democrats must turn out to vote. That brings us back around the circle. How do you get them to vote without proper civics grounding?

Our best hope is that Trump’s corruption and incompetence will restore Democratic control. If and when that happens, we must make civic education a high priority. There are some intriguing ideas out there. Tax benefits and penalties for voting or not voting. A basic civics test before one is allowed to vote (that one is probably unconstitutional). The point is, we need a new plan. This one isn’t working.

If industry and the political regime now entangled with it feel no consequence from our outrage, they will continue, smugly and securely, to bankroll policies that degrade democracy, exploit labor, and hollow out the public good. It is no longer enough to issue statements, hashtags, or votes that are neutralized by gerrymandered legislatures and judicial collusion. It is time for Americans to turn their attention to economic sacrifice—conscious, disciplined withholding of consumption—to force accountability where ballots and appeals have been blunted.

This is not a romantic call for deprivation. It is a recognition of leverage. The Trump-aligned corporate class profits from the very economic habits of the people it manipulates. From fossil fuel conglomerates funding climate denial and nationalist propaganda, to data giants feeding on rage-fueled engagement, to luxury brands bankrolling right-wing politics through dark money networks, every dollar spent by everyday Americans becomes a vote sustaining systems that mock their values. The myth that citizens are powerless is perpetuated precisely to keep wallets open and consciences quiet. In truth, when mass purchasing behavior turns deliberately cold—when millions simply stop feeding the machine—both industry and government listen.

History is clear on this point. The civil rights boycotts of the 1960s, from Montgomery to Birmingham, weakened Jim Crow’s financial infrastructure before courts dared to intervene. Anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s made global corporations reconsider their exposure to moral risk. Each of those movements depended on something more difficult than slogans: the willingness of ordinary people to say, I will do without.

They accepted temporary isolation, inconvenience, and sacrifice to demonstrate the higher cost of injustice. Today’s struggle against the Trump regime’s corrupt intertwining of state and private power demands the same discipline.

This regime thrives on consumer complicity. It counts on citizens so sedated by convenience that even violent affronts to democracy—the undermining of elections, the assaults on climate science, the persecution of migrants—barely slow the flow of consumption. But every comfort we refuse, every purchase we delay, runs counter to that design. The regime cannot endure widespread civic abstention from its economy.

When Americans begin to choose local cooperatives over corporate chains, public transit over gas-fueled excess, and slower, simpler ownership models over disposable consumption, it is not self-denial—it is political strike. It is the assertion that freedom is not compatible with passive dependency.

Economic sacrifice is not a punishment; it is the restoration of conscience. It teaches solidarity and stamina in a culture designed to scatter us into individual consumers. If the Trump regime and its industrial benefactors can condition Americans to accept inflation, environmental poisoning, and political decay without protest, they rely on our submission. Sacrifice breaks that cycle.

There is a quiet strength in saying no more. No more enriching corporations that launder authoritarian propaganda through entertainment. No more buying from entities that siphon tax revenue into private profit while undermining the institutions that hold government accountable. No more acting as if democracy can flourish while every moral stand stops at the checkout line. As the Republic teeters under corruption dressed as patriotism, Americans must remember their greatest economic weapon is not speculation or investment—it is refusal.

Sacrifice has always been the price of renewal. Democracy, if it is to survive, cannot be the cheap luxury item of a populace too comfortable to fight for it. The Trump regime can be resisted through civic courage, legal challenge, and organization. But it can also be starved—one deliberate, withheld dollar at a time.

Trump’s private businesses once again sit at the center of this corrupt regime. His properties are functioning as the center of where political power and personal profit are intentionally fused, with conflicts of interest in his second term already outpacing the thousands cataloged during his first presidency. That means the presidency is once again being used as a mechanism to steer public and political spending into Trump-owned venues, while ordinary Americans face higher prices for food, housing, health care, and basic necessities.

He has returned to the same old racket with even less shame. Trump spends extensive time at his own clubs and resorts, forcing the federal government to pay for security, logistics, lodging, and associated operations at properties he personally owns, so that taxpayer money circles back into his own accounts. In the first term, the Secret Service alone spent nearly two million dollars at Trump properties, and the broader pattern of agencies and political actors routing money into Trump-owned businesses has continued and intensified in this term.

The corruption is no longer even disguised as an unfortunate byproduct of Trump’s complete disregard for boundaries and ethics. This regime is defined by influence-peddling, profiteering, and the open demolition of ethics safeguards, with Trump using public office to boost family financial ventures and dramatically expand personal wealth.

His family’s cryptocurrency schemes, promoted by Trump himself, are one of the clearest examples of how this White House treats the public trust as a monetizable asset.

This is what makes Trumpism so corrosive: it is not only authoritarian and cruel, it is openly predatory. The same man who sold himself as a battler against elite corruption has built a presidency that invites wealthy interests, corporate giants, crypto speculators, and influence merchants to treat the federal government like a private auction house. What the public gets from this arrangement is not proper governance, but a government degraded into a racket.

Trump’s abuse of taxpayer money follows the same familiar pattern. His administration markets itself as the enemy of waste while functioning as a machine for imvanity spending, sweetheart arrangements, and massive transfers of public money to favored private actors. Trump is managing public funds as he managed his private ventures: through recklessness, self-dealing, and corruption, a style of management that produces spectacular headlines and enormous hidden costs for the public.

Even the administration’s claimed war on “waste, fraud, and abuse” has become its own fraud. While touting the Department of Government Efficiency as proof of fiscal seriousness, the administration has combined cuts to public services with policies that effectively hand away hundreds of millions of dollars in public money, including energy and leasing decisions that give around $730 million a year for fossil fuel interests at taxpayer expense.

At the same time, Trump has redirected public priorities toward militarized crackdowns and coercive state power. He protects elites while squeezing the public, with resources diverted away from health and social services and toward projects of intimidation, punishment, and personal presidential theater.

The White House ballroom may be the most perfect symbol of this entire era: a grandiose vanity project to be subsidized by the public. Trump claims the ballroom is paid for by donors rather than taxpayers, but the underlying contracts and litigation indicate something much more corrupt. Lawsuits argue that the administration used public property and public resources without clear congressional authorization, and that the supposed line between donor money and taxpayer obligations collapses the moment one looks at the surrounding infrastructure, staffing, and construction activity.

The donor secrecy alone should set off alarms. Trump’s team embedded donor anonymity and conflict-of-interest workarounds into the ballroom fundraising structure itself, then fought to keep those identities hidden until watchdog pressure and litigation forced more information into public view. What emerged was exactly what any sane observer would have predicted: a donor roster loaded with corporations, crypto interests, media companies, tech giants, and regulated industries with enormous business before the federal government.

When businesses seeking favorable treatment, contracts, pardons, regulatory mercy, or political access pour money into the president’s personal architectural fantasy, nobody should pretend this is a neutral civic beautification project. Democrats have responded by proposing legislation explicitly designed to stop apparent bribery tied to the ballroom, because the smell of pay-to-play is not faint or speculative; it is overwhelming. Yesterday, the Senate parliamentarian nixed the effort to embed a mind-boggling $1 billion into the DHS budget bill to pay for the the ballroom that was supposed to have been paid for via private funding.

The absurd “arch” and the broader monumental landscape around Trump’s second term fit the same pattern. The ballroom fundraising structure indicates that money raised under that umbrella can flow toward related vanity projects, including the arch and the revived “Garden of Heroes,” all designed to transform public space into a stage set for Trump’s self-mythology. These are not harmless aesthetic indulgences. They are a pay-to-play monument complex for a president obsessed with his own glorification.

The ugliest part is how openly the arrangement works. Private actors with enormous stakes in federal regulation and contracting are invited to fund monuments on public land used by the president, and in return they gain proximity, goodwill, and the implicit expectation that their voices will matter more than everyone else’s. Washington is being redecorated as a corruption showroom, where architecture itself becomes another means of influence-buying.

Then there is the stock trading and AI-investment scandal, which may prove even more politically explosive because it goes directly to the question of whether Trump is using nonpublic information and presidential power to enrich himself in the market. Newly disclosed ethics filings show that an account held in Trump’s name executed more than 3,600 trades in the first quarter of 2026, with trades in the $5 million to $25 million range involving Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, companies deeply involved in AI expansion and heavily affected by federal policy.

The timing is impossible to ignore. On February 10, Trump’s account reportedly unloaded massive positions in those same AI-heavy tech firms on the same day his administration leaked a tariff carve-out protecting their core business, and only weeks before he appeared alongside their executives to celebrate data-center projects at the White House. That sequence does not merely look bad. It looks like a president trading around his own policy, turning market-moving government decisions into opportunities for personal gain.

After issuing an executive order preempting state regulation of artificial intelligence, he bought into Nvidia, AMD, KLA, and other AI-linked firms, while his funds also traded major positions in Palantir, a company whose fortunes are bound up with the expansion of the national security state and government tech contracting.

This is corruption in its purest modern forms. It is not the old envelope of cash slipped under a table. It is a president with immense control over regulation, procurement, messaging, enforcement, and geopolitical signaling positioning himself in the very sectors his administration can help or hurt, then trading in those sectors while the public is left to wonder whether national policy is being shaped for the country or for the president’s portfolio.

The crypto angle only makes the whole picture worse. Trump is using the prestige of the presidency to elevate family-linked cryptocurrency ventures and attract the kind of speculative money and opaque dealmaking that already thrives in the gray zones of financial regulation. The result is a White House that appears eager to combine political influence, market hype, and personal branding into one giant extortion scheme aimed at investors, lobbyists, and anyone foolish or cynical enough to believe that buying into Trump’s ventures might buy them standing with his administration.

Worst of all, Trump has stolen nearly $1.8 billion and allocated it for an award of $1 million for each of the 1,600 insurrectionists he pardoned the day he was inaugurated. This is not just blatantly corrupt. It is a violation of a constitutional provision prohibiting the awarding of public funds to insurrectionists. Ninety-three members of Congress have sued Trump on those grounds. The courts will rule in their favor. We will see how many more court orders Todd Blanche is willing to violate.

All of this sits on top of the older pattern Americans already know well. Trump entered this term with a record that included extensive emoluments concerns around foreign and domestic spending at his businesses, and a first impeachment built on leveraging public power for personal political benefit. The second term has not corrected those abuses. It has institutionalized them.

That is the larger moral and political reality Republicans are now trapped inside. They are not merely defending a scandal-prone president. They are defending a governing system built around grift, ego, retaliation, and the conversion of public office into private revenue streams. Every new donor tied to the ballroom, every new hidden contract, every new suspicious trade in AI or defense stocks, and every new conflict involving Trump properties reinforces the same devastating message: the Republican Party is no longer even pretending to be serious about ethics, stewardship, or the public good.

That matters enormously for November 2026. Republican midterm prospects are darkening as Trump’s approval falls and voter dissatisfaction spreads. That turns a midterm into a referendum on presidential misconduct and governing failure.

For swing voters, especially suburban voters, younger voters, and college-educated voters who may be movable in midterm conditions, this style of corruption is not some abstract ethics seminar. It is visceral. It looks like a president building a palace ballroom while people worry about bills, hiding donors while claiming transparency, trading in AI and defense stocks while manipulating policy, and inviting billionaires and corporations to bankroll monuments to his own ego on public land. Even voters who are not ideological progressives can understand the obscenity of a government that seems to work hardest for the man at the top and the rich people flattering him.

Republican candidates will have no clean escape route. If they embrace Trump, they inherit the stink of his corruption and validate every Democratic attack linking the GOP to self-dealing and contempt for taxpayers. If they distance themselves, they risk infuriating the MAGA base that still dominates many Republican primaries and local party structures. Either path is politically costly, because Trump has tied his personal corruption so tightly to the party’s identity that there is no obvious way to separate the man from the brand.

If Democrats retake the House in 2026, the consequences will not be confined to campaign messaging. Trump’s grift, donor networks, hidden contracts, monument financing, crypto ventures, and market trades will become the subject of subpoenas, hearings, investigations, and a sustained public spectacle of oversight. Republicans know this, which is one reason many of them are desperate to talk about anything else. But Trump will not let them. He keeps creating new scandals because corruption is the objective for him.

And that is the final indictment of Trump’s second term so far. This is not a government trying and failing to serve the public. It is a regime shamelessly using the public as raw material for private gain, political intimidation, and presidential vanity. The ballroom is not just a ballroom. The arch is not just an arch. The stock trades are not just stock trades. The AI bets are not just investments. They are all pieces of the same obscene picture: a presidency that treats the United States government as a grift opportunity, and a Republican Party too compromised, too cowardly, or too complicit to stop it.

For this post, I thought it might be helpful to highlight several key races where our party’s time, money, and energy would be best spent. The races that I mention below are not only critical for taking back power, but they are ones that I feel aren’t receiving enough attention. These are races where individual Democrats can make a big difference, whether through donations or volunteering.

I’ll feature two Senate races, two House races, and a governor’s race.

Alaska:

This fall, there are two Senate seats that Democrats are likely to flip: North Carolina and Maine. That would bring the party to 49 seats in early 2027, assuming that Democrats defend all of their own seats (which I expect them to). That’s where Alaska comes in.

Even though Alaska is generally a Republican state, it could very well be seat #50 for Democrats this fall, which would deny the GOP full control of the Senate. The Democratic candidate who is all but certain to be our nominee, Mary Peltola, represented Alaska in the House from 2022 until 2025, and her entry into this Senate race back in January was perhaps the most important moment in our path to retaking the Senate.

Alaska, a state that is too often forgotten, is a great example of a place where party resources could make a real difference. I suspect that many folks might donate to the Democratic Senate candidates in North Carolina or Maine (or even to our candidates playing defense in Georgia or Michigan), but those races are already trending in our direction. In contrast, Alaska is truly a tossup at the moment, and as talented as Peltola is, she still has the difficult task of beating an incumbent Senator. This one race could determine Senate control, and it needs to be treated as such.

Nebraska:

If Alaska represents Senate seat #50 for Democrats, then Nebraska, surprisingly, could be seat #51, which would give Democrats full control of the Senate.

There are two other states, Ohio and Iowa, that are worthy of attention, but I picked Nebraska because I increasingly think that it is a more winnable race for us than Ohio or Iowa (also, as it turns out, Sherrod Brown in Ohio has already raised more money than he could perhaps ever need).

Dan Osborn, an independent who had also run in 2024 and came shockingly close to beating a Republican Senator, will be running again this fall. Nebraska’s Democratic Party is once again supporting Osborn, who will have a good shot at beating Republican Pete Ricketts (recent polling even shows Osborn leading Ricketts).

I suspect that Osborn will struggle somewhat with fundraising as the fall approaches, given that he is not running as a Democrat, but he deserves all the resources he can get. An Osborn victory would mean a loss for one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, and it would demonstrate the possibilities for other candidates running as independents against the GOP.

Ohio’s 7th House District:

One of my favorite things to do as an election analyst is to find seats that could potentially flip from Republicans to Democrats, but that few people are aware of. Ohio’s 7th House district, based in the southern suburbs of Cleveland, fits the bill perfectly. Earlier this month, Democrats nominated Brian Poindexter, who I think is an outstanding candidate with a good shot at beating Republican incumbent Max Miller. This is not the type of seat that Republicans even expect to be competitive, but channeling resources here could produce an upset that will help Democrats as they try to win as many House seats as possible this fall to counteract Republican gerrymandering.

Pennsylvania’s 10th House District:

One of the most reviled Republicans in the House of Representatives is Scott Perry, and for good reason. He has been a key member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, and Perry has been investigated for his role in January 6th. Thankfully, he is probably going to be shown the door this fall by Janelle Stelson, a Democrat who came close to winning this House district in central Pennsylvania two years ago.

Stelson is a rising Democrat, and someone who I think could even someday be a Senator. She was a local news anchor before running for office, and she comes from a part of Pennsylvania that has historically been quite Republican, but that is becoming bluer with each passing year. A victory for Stelson this fall would not only get rid of one of the House’s most noxious members, but it would help give our party a deeper bench in a key swing state.

Wisconsin:

Finally, to round out this list, I wanted to highlight a key governor’s race, along with a couple of legislative races. Wisconsin, as always seems to be the case, will be an especially crucial state this fall, as Democrats have a chance to gain a trifecta (control of all three branches of state government). If Democrats can hold the governorship and flip both legislative chambers, they would be in full control of Wisconsin for the first time in 16 years.

The Democratic primary for governor has been a bit chaotic, though I think as a party, we would put ourselves in a strong position by nominating Mandela Barnes, who served as the state’s lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2023. Barnes also ran for Senate in 2022, and came shockingly close to beating Republican Ron Johnson in what was a rough midterm environment for Democrats.

At the legislative level, Democrats in Wisconsin have a real shot at flipping both chambers, but winning the state senate is of special importance. One senate district in particular, the 5th, stands out as a good target for Democrats. The Democratic candidate, Robyn Vining, is looking to flip a GOP seat based in Milwaukee and Waukesha County. In one other senate district, the 17th, Democrat Jenna Jacobson is challenging a Republican who has held this seat for over a decade. If Democrats win both the 5th and 17th district this fall, that alone would flip the Wisconsin Senate from Republican to Democratic control. Keep in mind, legislative races tend to receive relatively few donations, meaning that every bit can really help out the Democratic candidates in these races.

On a final note, for those of you who prefer helping with races that are closer to where you live, you might want to check out my list of 30 competitive House seats, which I update regularly. I’ve tried to list House races all across the country, and chances are that one of these might be in your area.

If you’re still having trouble finding a race to get involved with, please feel free to reach out to me here on Substack! One of my goals over the coming month is to help folks find competitive Democratic campaigns that they would like to be a part of. I keep track of races all across the country, so if you need help finding one that would suit you, I’m happy to assist.

As always, a sincere thank you to Mark for featuring me, and above all, for everything that he does to help us fight Trump.

—Brad Van Arnum

By now it is not even controversial to say that Republican gerrymandering has built a durable structural edge into the House map. Partisan gerrymandering could give the Republicans the equivalent of roughly 16 extra House seats compared with fair maps in this decade’s cycle. This is a minority veto on democratic choice, engineered with software and shielded by courts.

Republicans controlled line‑drawing for about 191 districts after the 2020 census, while Democrats had full control over just 75, with the rest handed to divided governments, courts, or supposedly independent commissions. In practice, that meant GOP‑run states like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina could push aggressive partisan maps to the legal breaking point, while blue and purple states constrained themselves with bipartisan commissions or self‑imposed norms.

North Carolina is the best example of this structural heist: after a conservative takeover of the state supreme court, Republicans rammed through a grotesquely skewed congressional map that can produce 11 Republicans and just 3 Democrats in a true presidential battleground. That is not representation; it is a structural coup executed with legalese, and Democrats have largely responded by shrugging and promising to organize harder.

Ask a Democratic leader what they’ve done about gerrymandering, and they’ll point you back to 2021 and 2022, to the For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have set national standards and sharply limited partisan map‑rigging. Republicans filibustered even debating those bills, a handful of Democratic senators refused to touch the filibuster, and the package died.

That was a genuine scandal—but it has become a convenient alibi. The party acts as though “we tried once in Congress and Joe Manchin killed it” marks the end of their responsibility, rather than the beginning of an all‑fronts fight: mid‑decade redraws where possible, aggressive litigation under state constitutions, ballot measures to change rules in the states and hardball in blue legislatures.

Instead, Republicans in Texas or Florida push mid‑cycle maps and dare anyone to stop them, while Democrats gain control in places like Pennsylvania, Virginia, or North Carolina and shy away from reopening clearly rigged maps because it might look too “partisan.” After 2020, Republicans used their dominance in southern and midwestern legislatures to create durable, engineered majorities that can withstand bad national environments; even their maps are tilted to translate votes into seats with ruthless efficiency.

Democratic‑drawn maps, by contrast, are often fragile, overstuffed with swing seats and designed to look defensible in court rather than to gain long‑term power. In several blue or bluish states, Democrats voluntarily surrendered the pen to commissions or declined to stretch the geography as far as Republicans would have, resulting in a patchwork where red‑state extremists game the lines and blue‑state reformers go on about their fairness.

This brings us to the commission obsession. Democrats talk about independent redistricting commissions as if they are the final word: carefully balanced bodies in states like Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan, and Washington that forbid politicians from drawing their own maps. In a vacuum, these commissions are admirable; they produce cleaner districts, better compactness, and fewer obscene salamander‑shaped monstrosities.

But we do not live in a vacuum. On the actual terrain of American politics, commissions are mostly a blue‑state phenomenon. They constrain Democratic excess in places where the party could, if it chose, counter‑balance GOP gerrymanders elsewhere, while Republicans in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Midwest keep the process to themselves. The net effect of all this supposed reform is simple: a national House map tilted rightward in the name of one‑sided virtue.

Now place the 2026 election onto this already skewed terrain. What used to be a once‑a‑decade fight over maps has become trench warfare; between‑census redistricting, once rare, is now spreading as an open strategy. Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, California, and other states have passed or are considering mid‑decade redraws that will shape the 2026 House battlefield.

In 2025, Trump publicly demanded that Texas Republicans re‑open their map to add more GOP seats, and they obliged, calling a mid‑decade redistricting that was quickly challenged by the Justice Department as a racial gerrymander. A three‑judge panel waved the challenge away, re‑labeling the scheme as acceptable “partisan” gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court refused to intervene, clearing the new map for use in 2026.

In Missouri, the governor convened a special session with the barely disguised goal of engineering one more Republican seat; lawsuits and a looming referendum may chip away at that, but as of now, that map is set to govern the midterms.

This is what raw power looks like. Republicans are willing to reopen maps mid‑cycle, call special sessions, endure weeks of bad press, and dare the courts to stop them. Democrats, meanwhile, are still acting like it is 2010, treating redistricting as something that happens quietly once per decade in the background while they argue about message discipline and candidate recruitment. The Supreme Court is not a neutral referee in this fight; in early May, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court further constrained how explicitly states can use race to shore up minority representation while leaving wide open the ability to gerrymander on “partisan” grounds that, in the real world, almost always correlate with race.

This “jurisprudence,” combined with mid‑decade map changes, makes it entirely plausible for Republicans to hold the House in 2026 while losing the national popular vote in House races.

At the same time, the Court has allowed Texas’s mid‑cycle gerrymander to stand and stepped in to freeze a New York court’s attempt to force a more equitable redraw of Staten Island’s GOP‑held district until after 2026. In other words, conservative justices are giving Republican states green lights and Democratic‑leaning courts red lights, all while insisting on the fiction of neutral doctrine.

A party that genuinely believed its own rhetoric about an existential threat to democracy would be screaming this from every podium in America; instead, most Democratic leaders have outsourced it to voting‑rights lawyers and occasional think‑tank panels.

Now Hakeem Jeffries declared war this week. There are, to be fair, flickers of Democratic hardball—but they are belated, fragmented, and often sabotaged from within. In California, voters passed Proposition 50, giving the state authority to temporarily gerrymander its congressional map in favor of Democrats, a deliberate attempt to counterbalance Republican entrenchment elsewhere.

Republicans, with the Trump administration in their corner, rushed into federal court, alleging racial gerrymandering and constitutional violations, but early hearings left judges openly skeptical of those claims; given the Court’s willingness to bless partisan gerrymanders in Texas, the odds are that California’s map survives through 2026.

In Maryland, the state House approved an aggressive map designed to add a Democratic seat, only to hit hesitation and delay in the state Senate. In Virginia, Democrats used a rushed special session to push through a constitutional amendment and new maps aimed at correcting previously Republican‑tilted lines, only to have the state Supreme Court overturn the results of the referendum.

Even in New York, where a state court tried to force a redraw that would make Staten Island’s district more representative, national Democrats were caught flat‑footed as the Supreme Court stepped in to preserve the status quo until after 2026.

Meanwhile, Republicans are methodically pursuing permanent redistricting, a strategy of tweaking lines whenever they see an opening—new census data, a favorable court, a statehouse majority—while Democrats cling to the idea that maps should be revisited once a decade at most.

At least eight states now face active map litigation heading into 2026, and a mid‑decade redistricting map for 2025–26 shows a rapidly growing cluster of states where the battlefield is literally being re‑drawn just months before voters head to the polls. Yet when you listen to Democratic leaders talk about 2026, most of what you hear is the familiar chatter about enthusiasm, abortion backlash and Trump fatigue.

You do not hear them say, over and over, the thing that is actually happening: Republicans are changing the rules in the middle of the game to protect their power, and unless those rules are changed back, tens of millions of Democratic votes, many of them African-American votes will be translated into fewer seats than they deserve.

A party that really believed in democracy as more than a slogan would treat every ongoing map case—Texas, Missouri, Virginia, Maryland, New York, Georgia, Tennessee and beyond—as part of a single national campaign, not as isolated instances. It would pour serious money and organizing muscle into ballot measures and veto referendums on bad maps instead of leaving them to exhausted local activists with shoestring budgets.

It would use blue‑state power as aggressively as Republicans use red‑state power—special sessions, maximum use of state constitutions, temporary partisan maps where legal—not to entrench Democrats forever, but to force a national reckoning whose endgame is genuinely neutral rules everywhere.

Instead, Democrats are sliding toward another election under maps skewed by a right‑wing mid‑decade arms race they still refuse to meet in kind. When the dust settles in November 2026, and Republicans perhaps hold the House by a handful of seats despite losing the aggregate vote, you will hear endless autopsies about turnout models, TikTok strategy, and whether one more kitchen table message would have done the trick.

You will hear far less acknowledgement of the obvious: Republicans spent 2025 and 2026 literally changing the lines on the map to lock in their power, while Democrats—armed with the same tools, the same constitutional options, and far more voters—chose to lose politely rather than fight like democracy itself was on the line.

The most immediate concern is Taiwan, where decades of U.S. policy have rested on a fragile but effective balance: deter China from invasion without triggering it. That balance depends on consistency and credibility, two qualities Trump has never demonstrated in foreign affairs.

He has repeatedly treated alliances and security commitments as transactional, subject to renegotiation based on his personal sense of advantage. In that context, the fear is not abstract. A Trump eager to announce a breakthrough with Xi Jinping could signal—subtly or explicitly—that U.S. support for Taiwan is negotiable. It wouldn’t require a formal abandonment to have real consequences.

Even small shifts—slower arms sales, softer rhetoric, reduced military coordination—would be interpreted in Beijing as a weakening of resolve. Deterrence doesn’t fail all at once; it erodes, and Trump’s style of deal-making accelerates that erosion. Just as awful is his praise of Xi, complementing the latter’s ruling of China with “sort of an iron fist,” something to which Trump fervently aspires.

At the same time, the Iran conflict introduces another layer of risk. China is not a neutral party here. It maintains deep ties with Tehran and has positioned itself as a strategic counterweight to U.S. power in the region. If Trump seeks Chinese cooperation on Iran, he does so from a position of fundamental contradiction: asking a rival power to help manage a crisis in which that power benefits from American overextension.

The danger is not just that China refuses to help, but that Trump offers concessions in exchange for the illusion of cooperation—concessions that could extend to trade, regional posture, or even Taiwan itself. This is the recurring issue in what passes for a foreign policy: he overestimates his leverage, underestimates the long-term strategy of authoritarian regimes, and prioritizes the optics of a deal over its substance.

Surrounding all of this is a level of corruption that would be disqualifying in any other administration but has become normalized in Trump’s orbit. The presence of Eric Trump on this trip, reportedly pursuing business opportunities while his father conducts state business, is not a minor ethical lapse. It is a flashing warning sign about how power is being used. The Trump family has consistently treated political influence as a pathway to private enrichment, and there is no reason to believe this moment is any different.

The difference is where it’s happening. China is not just another country where the Trump Organization might seek deals; it is a geopolitical adversary with a sophisticated understanding of leverage and influence. The possibility that Chinese officials or affiliated entities could engage financially with Trump’s family while negotiating with Trump himself is not just ethically problematic—it is a direct national security concern.

The question is no longer theoretical. If U.S. policy decisions—on Taiwan, on Iran, on broader economic or military posture—begin to align with the financial interests of the Trump family, how would anyone distinguish strategy from self-dealing? Even absent a clear quid pro quo, the perception alone damages American credibility and invites foreign governments to test how far influence can be bought. Allies begin to doubt commitments, adversaries begin to probe for advantage, and the entire system of trust that underpins U.S. leadership starts to fray.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is how these risks converge. A president inclined toward personalized, high-stakes deal-making meets a volatile global landscape, all while a parallel family business apparatus operates alongside official diplomacy.

That combination creates a scenario in which decisions about war, deterrence, and global balance are shaped not by coherent strategy but by impulse, image, and personal gain.

This is not simply unconventional foreign policy. It is something more unstable: diplomacy conducted as spectacle, negotiation driven by branding, and statecraft entangled with private profit.

And the consequences will not be contained to politics. They will be measured in weakened alliances, emboldened adversaries, and the slow realization that American foreign policy is no longer anchored in national interest, but in whatever deal the president believes serves him best in the moment.