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And in the wake of the Callais decision handed down from SCOTUS this past spring gutting the Voting Rights Act, folks in Mississippi have every right to be concerned.

Donna Ladd, CEO and Executive Editor with the Mississippi Free Press, joined Edwin Eisendrath on It’s The Democracy, Stupid to discuss the issue of voter access and how some Republicans have moved polling locations to prevent more people from voting.

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Max Burns welcomes Michelangelo Signorile, SiriusXM Progress host and writer of The Signorile Report on Substack, to It’s the End! … of the Week to pick apart the Hegseth hearing, as well as our new forever war with Iran.

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And does JD Vance have a chance in 2028? Check out It’s the End! … of the Week to find out what Max and Michelangelo think, right here on Lincoln Square.

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Donald Trump spent Friday night at a party in his own honor, in a ballroom he built, thrown by the very press corps he’s spent over a decade trying to destroy.

The rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner — postponed since a gunman opened fire at the original April event — finally happened Friday at the Waldorf Astoria, the hotel Trump used to own and still can’t stop bragging about. “It’s great to be back at a place that I know very well,” he told the room, “because I built it.”

He then spent the next hour doing what he always does: insulting reporters by name (he berated Kaitlin Collins again for “never smiling” and comparing her to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney) and recycling old nicknames against his political enemies (he weirdly recounted a supposed debate whether he could call J.B. Pritzker a “fat pig.”) The Daily Beast reported he appeared to doze off (again), while CNN’s own panel declared he “objectively bombed.”

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But Trump made sure to give shoutouts to friendly media executives, namely Larry and David Ellison, the father-son duo who now run Paramount and are circling Warner Bros. Discovery next.

That’s the split screen of Trump’s second term: contempt for the press as an institution, and special treatment for the owners he’s helped install.

It’s worth remembering that in his first term, Trump wouldn’t even show up to the event, filled with an audience of people he’d already decided were his adversaries.

This time he came, he saw, he conquered (albeit by cracking tired jokes at the media’s expense before nodding off). Something has shifted, and it isn’t that Trump has softened.

A few months before the shooting canceled the original dinner, Trump made a startling admission. At a black-tie dinner in February, he told a room full of reporters he wouldn’t call them “fake news” that night, adding: “The press has been relatively fair to me over the last year — meaning they’ve been bad, but not horrible.”

That’s not a compliment. It’s a stinging assessment of the beltway press’s performance as a watchdog, and Trump is telling us he’s satisfied with their fealty. That’s not an olive branch. That’s an indictment.

Notably, the WHCA dinner was held less than 24 hours after the public learned just how far his administration had gone to attack press freedom. On Thursday, outlets reported that Trump’s Justice Department had subpoenaed phone records belonging to New York Times reporters (as well as their spouses and one reporter’s mother) in a hunt for the sources behind reporting on security flaws in the Qatari-gifted jet Trump is using as Air Force One.

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Prosecutors hand-delivered grand jury subpoenas to reporters’ phone carriers a day after the story ran, seeking records for family members who had nothing to do with the reporting. A federal judge tore into the government and the DOJ backed off — but only after a First Amendment advocate noted that “even the Mafia says families are off limits.” And no, it’s not reassuring that the subpoenas got dropped. They never should have been issued in the first place.

This is the actual story of Trump’s second term, and it’s significantly different than his first. Trump has called the press the enemy of the people since at least 2017 and his supporters have long been fond of the Nazi term “Lugenpresse” (German for “lying press.”)

What’s new is that the rhetoric now comes with government machinery ready to act. There’s now a coordinated effort by the Trump administration to change who owns the microphone rather than just yelling at the people holding it.

Let’s start with the Federal Communications Commission. Chairman Brendan Carr has made a habit of threatening broadcasters’ licenses whenever someone displeases the White House, warning networks over Iran war coverage. More recently, Carr suggested ABC’s decision not to air Trump’s election lie speech live this month would factor into the FCC’s review of Disney’s station licenses.

The FCC’s own rules say it can’t censor broadcast content — that’s supposed to be the point of the First Amendment — but Carr keeps finding a broadcast license renewal to dangle anyway. He also cleared the $6.2 billion Nexstar-Tegna merger, which Trump personally endorsed by posting that “we need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks.” In one stroke, Carr approved a local-news conglomerate reaching 80 percent of American households.

Then there’s the Federal Trade Commission, which under Chairman Andrew Ferguson has turned its subpoena power on the press’ fact-checkers. The agency went after Media Matters over its reporting on advertiser boycotts of X, and it’s suing to unwind NewsGuard, the ratings service the FTC accuses of suppressing conservative speech simply for rating the reliability of news sites. Media Matters fought back and won; NewsGuard is still in court.

Regardless of the outcome of these actions, the fact that two agencies have spent most of Trump’s second term functioning as his media enforcement arm is a page straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

And then there’s the machinery of ownership itself. Self-declared Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth ridiculed a CNN story about the Iran war and said the quiet part out loud: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” Ellison’s Skydance has acquired Warner Bros. Discovery — which is the parent company of CNN (although a federal judge has blocked the deal, so far).

But Skydance had already taken over CBS, installing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, a reshuffle that came with the firings of veteran 60 Minutes journalists, including Scott Pelley and Bill Owens (which NPR called part of “the fight for media control in the age of Trump.”) So CBS’s MAGA makeover gives us a pretty good preview of what’s likely to come at CNN if the merger is ultimately approved.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon press pool got a makeover this year, with the administration carving out space for friendlier outlets — OAN, Real America’s Voice, the Epoch Times, Lindell TV — while veteran wire services lost their regular spots. That came after the department announced restrictions requiring journalists to submit stories to the press office before publication, prompting most reporters to turn in their badges in protest.

None of this is subtle. Hegseth demands “patriotic” headlines instead of accurate ones. Carr wants broadcasters to self-censor ahead of license renewal. Trump rewards a pliant press with warmed-over insults at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

What all this underscores is the fact that MAGA has been losing the argument in the actual marketplace of ideas. So the strategy has shifted from winning over voters to cramming right-wing media down our throats. And using subpoenas, license reviews, antitrust waivers, and merger approvals to shrink the space where fact-based reporting competes at all.

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It doesn’t always work. The DOJ dropped the Times subpoenas. The FTC backed off Media Matters. A judge has, for now, stopped the Warner Bros. Discovery deal. But that doesn’t change the fact that press freedom is under an unprecedented assault.

And an administration willing to subpoena a reporter’s mother to find a source doesn’t need to win every round. It just needs corporate boards to keep calculating that capitulation is cheaper than a fight (like CBS and ABC did by settling bogus lawsuits filed by Trump). So far, that bet keeps paying off.

Trump didn’t need a truce with the media this year. He needed the press to stop being able to afford to hold him accountable. After more than a decade of vicious attacks on the First Amendment, hundreds of journalists showed up Friday night to honor him anyway, in a ballroom where his name used to adorn the walls.

Sure, Trump may have bombed his set that night. But the whole event was an incredible self-own for corporate media — so he was always going to come out a winner.

I woke up this morning to an unusually hot San Gabriel Valley, told Alexa to turn on the air conditioner, and put on my grip socks before heading into the living room because the hardwood floor in there is slick enough to turn an ordinary trip to the couch into the Winter Olympics. Once I had secured proper traction, I parked myself in front of the television and let YouTube’s algorithm run its course.

First up was my homegirl Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeever, breaking down how Trump has been hinting at the aggressive moves he plans to make to tilt the 2026 midterms in his favor. Next came a clip of Francesca Fiorentini on The Bitchuation Room—not always my cup of tea, but even when I disagree with her, I can usually see how a rational person got to her conclusion, which is more than I can say for what came next.

Then a clip of Piers Morgan Uncensored popped up featuring Officer Brandon Tatum. Scratch that—just Brandon Tatum. He spent six years patrolling the mean streets of Tucson, which was apparently long enough to keep a badge warm and build an entire media identity around it, but not long enough that anyone at the department had to hold a candlelight vigil when he left. He is not a police officer anymore; he just plays one on camera. The second his face showed up, I knew exactly what kind of segment I was in for, because Piers Morgan Uncensored is easily one of the most disingenuous shows on all of YouTube.

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My first thought was: why is God doing this to me this morning? Then I remembered — a week earlier, I wrote a piece calling Piers Morgan a hack, and I must have accidentally watched it on my main YouTube channel instead of my ghost channel, the one I built specifically to keep conservative charlatans out of my real algorithm. So I have no one to blame but myself. I cursed my own timeline.

What followed was Brandon Tatum Gish-galloping through a solid block of lies so quickly that the only dependable fact-check was whether his mouth was moving. He condemned Candace Owens’s conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s murder as contradicted by evidence from the preliminary hearing, then immediately pivoted to say he knows Owens personally and plans to sit her down himself, as though America had been waiting for Officer Tatum to convene an emergency session of the MAGA Council of Elders.

He pushed back on a fellow panelist for describing Kirk’s death as “MAGA eating itself” and insisted Kirk could not have been racist because the two of them had worked together on initiatives for the Black community. Which initiatives? He never really said. The one concrete example I remember was Kirk helping get more than a hundred Black people invited to the White House to meet Trump. That is nice, I suppose, in the same way a group tour of the Cheesecake Factory is nice. But getting a roomful of Black people close enough to Trump for a photograph is not the same thing as improving Black employment, education, health care, housing, wealth, or anything else that might qualify as helping a community. Unless the initiative was called Black People Get to Stand Near the President for an Afternoon, I am still waiting on the details.

Tatum then argued that the real story of Black life after slavery was Black Wall Street and family structure, not the institution that had spent centuries tearing Black families apart and preventing Black people from accumulating wealth in the first place. This is also where I have to note that Tatum is married to a white woman, which I have absolutely no problem with. Love who you love. But if your own family is interracial, perhaps you are not the ideal spokesman for a lecture about preserving some narrowly defined version of Black family togetherness. You cannot build your household according to the principle that race does not determine family, then show up on television five minutes later sounding like the keynote speaker at the Black Nuclear Family Restoration Summit. Pick a framework.

Along the way, he nodded approvingly at Kirk’s attacks on Martin Luther King Jr., because apparently the new method of defending Black history is minimizing slavery, scolding Black families, insulting the most famous civil-rights leader in American history, and then pointing to a White House field trip as proof that you care deeply about the community.

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That was long before Trump and Stuart left the Republican Party. Listen to his thoughts about Friday’s dinner and the state of the media today.

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And support independent media by subscribing to Lincoln Square.

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And what one word has Joe thinking he’s seen this movie before about the Iran war?

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I’ve been doing Florida politics longer than some of the consultants working this cycle have been alive, and I’ve seen “inevitable” candidates learn that “inevitable” is a word you use right up until it stops being true.

Byron Donalds is about to get that lesson, and the instrument of his education is going to be something nobody drew up on a whiteboard in Naples: data centers.

Let me start with what the money bought, because in Florida politics, the money (whether delivered as a political committee ad spend or in a paper bag) usually buys plenty.

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Donald’s is the usual drop-to-his-knees MAGA ass-kisser. He won Trump’s endorsement, which helps in the primary but is increasingly poisonous in the general election. He’s been endorsed by roughly three-quarters of the Republican caucus in the state House, though not by Ron DeSantis, who still matters a bit in Florida’s GOP machine.

Donald’s has raised $90 million, spent $20 million of it, and importantly, has a super PAC seeded by OpenAI’s founders and the usual tech broligarchs dropping millions to protect him. He’s led every GOP primary poll by margins that look like typos.

On paper, this thing is over.

Except the general election keeps refusing to read the paper.

That $20 million he spent? The man is sitting in dead heats and single-digit races against David Jolly, a guy who left the Republican Party, and he’s running a campaign where Donalds cannot go: affordability, insurance, corruption, and…data centers.

Change Research had them tied at 37. UNF had Donalds up five, with a big margin of error. One poll put Jolly ahead by six. When you’ve spent that kind of money against an underfunded, underexposed opponent and you’re still trading the lead, that’s not a frontrunner’s number. That’s a warning light.

Here’s the thing, the consultant class in Tallahassee doesn’t want to say out loud: the primary that was supposed to coronate Donalds instead put his soft spot on television.

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Paul Renner called for a moratorium. James Fishback wanted an outright ban. They’ve spent months hammering Donalds as the data center guy, the big tech guy, the one whose donors want to pour concrete over the aquifer.

He’s likely to win the primary, sure, but a primary where your opponents spend the whole time branding you as the tech industry’s bitch in Florida is not a clean win.

It’s a wound Donalds will carry into November.

And the data center issue is uniquely poisonous here, in a way that transcends the usual red-blue map. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

I’ve spent thirty years in Florida politics watching issues split predictably along partisan lines. Guns. Abortion. Taxes. Culture war madness. Pregnant pigs. (Look it up.)

The only parallel, ever, is offshore oil drilling. You’ll notice the “Drill Baby Drill” crowd gets really quiet when it comes to Florida. It has always been an 80-20 issue, a third rail as high-voltage as Social Security.

This one doesn’t. Look at where local governments are moving. Wakulla County, deep red, the kind of Panhandle county Republicans win 70-30, banned them outright. So did Walton. So did Jackson. Head up to Pensacola, over to Titusville near the Space Coast, and you hear the same thing from people who’ve voted Republican their whole lives: not here, not in my backyard, not with my water.

Blue Palm Beach banning them wasn’t a surprise. In Leon County and the blue precincts around Tallahassee, you get the identical message. When Wakulla and Leon County agree on something, pay attention: that rarely happens, and when it does, it means an issue has stopped being partisan and become elemental.

The UNF polling made it plain: 68% of Florida voters don’t want one of these things anywhere near them. Sixty-eight. You do not find numbers like that on anything anymore, except Donald Trump’s disapproval numbers on the economy.

Data centers have managed to unite Floridians across every line we normally see dividing them, and they’ve united them against the position Byron Donalds was bought for.

Oh, let’s be clear. He’s been bought. He might as well have a QR code on his forehead.

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Byron is exactly the kind of creature the corruption factory in Tallahassee punches out like a car parts. Venal, transactional, casual, and causally corrupt. Republican control in Florida’s Capitol is cash-and-carry, fuck-you-pay-me mob action.

Byron became this year’s hungry bird, and the Big Tech mamma bird puked nearly $100 million into his eager maw.

Byron’s not clever enough to even nod and wink this thing away. Every special interest in The Process knew to call. They love the system in Tallahassee just as it’s been for decades. Write the check, and you’ll get the regulatory exemption you want. Write the check, and you’ll get your people installed on boards and commissions that regulate your industry. Write the check, and sure, pave that wetland, bro.

For Big Tech, this is simple. They acqui-hired Byron Donalds for pennies on the dollar.

The CAPEX from Big AI has to roll baby, and Florida is a place they’ve identified as a perfect location: cheap land, cheap power, cheap water, cheap taxes (none, to speak of), and of course, cheap public officials who can be bought for rounding error. They won’t let their paid political pony slow them down for a minute.

They can’t, or the whole AI CAPEX jazz hands dance falls apart.

But Florida isn’t just cheap everything. It’s also fragile, precious, and disappearing.

Because Florida isn’t West Virginia, it isn’t Oklahoma, and it isn’t the Arizona desert. We sit on a limestone aquifer that our drinking water, our springs, and our entire way of life depend on. Our power grid, aged and rickety, is controlled by a duopoly that spends lavishly in Tallahassee to avoid improving service, switching from oil and coal-fired power plants, or allowing home solar grid-tie in.

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Even before Donalds allows thousands of data centers to be built, Florida is fighting saltwater intrusion, insane insurance costs, and a water table under pressure from hyperdevelopment. You want to drop a thousand facilities that drink water like a small city onto that? For Florida voters, water is visceral.

And Donalds knows it, which is why you now see him filing a show bill with no chance of passing called the “Protecting Ratepayers Act” and talking about closed-loop systems and on-site water treatment. Given that Byron is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of the aforementioned power oligopolies in Florida, it should be called the “Protecting Byron’s Ass Act.”

And then there’s the clip.

The one his own donors probably wish they could scrub off every server in the state. Donalds, on camera, making the case for using Florida’s land that’s “still pristine, available to use” to “build out that stuff.” Pristine.

He said the quiet part into a microphone. In a state where “pristine” means the Everglades, the springs, the longleaf pine woods, and the vanishing farmlands along the central spur of Florida from Hendry to Lake counties.

He says it in the clip: he’d much rather build a data center “or four” instead of a solar farm.

It means the exact thing every voter across every party line just told pollsters they want protected: Byron Donalds looked at pristine Florida land and saw a place to put a thousand server farms.

That’s the whole campaign in fifteen seconds, and it’s already living rent-free on TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube.

I’ve seen well-funded Florida candidates lose before.

It almost always comes down to one issue they couldn’t finesse because their donors wouldn’t let them. This is the issue. And no amount of AI money is going to explain to a retiree why her quality of life matters less to Data Center Donalds and his plan to let Big Tech build thousands of data centers farming AI slop. No horse farm in Marion wants to hear the screaming of a dozen jet engines all day and all night, forever.

It’s why this ad hits so hard:

I’m a fifth-generation Florida Man; my children are sixth; my grandchildren are seventh. There are a few of us in those categories, perhaps 5% of the state in mine, and 1% in theirs.

Florida, though, for all its insanity, all its corruption, all its mistakes and missteps, still has a magic to it. It still has those sugar-sand Panhandle beaches opening onto the Gulf, the rough power of the Atlantic just offshore on the East Coast, the wild edges barely preserved in the Everglades. It still has the Red Hills country where I live, long-leaf pines, and rolling landscape. It still has cowboys (we were first with cowboy culture, way before the West) working cattle in Central Florida. It still has our deep ties to Cuba and Latin America in Miami and Tampa. We’re the proverbial melting pot when it comes to food, music, families, and culture.

It has retirees coming to spend their last years somewhere without a harsh winter. Most worked their asses off to afford it, and don’t want to see a data center cratering their quality of life and their home values.

People are drawn here by something you can’t market, something you can’t just brand. A man like Byron Donalds, who looks at the pristine parts of Florida left after decades of letting developers pave it over, and knowing the destruction they’ll bring, and still wants thousands of data centers, has no business being its governor.

Reality TV has always produced far more rejects than stars. For every winner, there are thousands of fame-hungry people who never made it to air. Then there’s the rest of the cast who got a few weeks of screen time, maybe said something memorable in a confessional booth, and then watched the cameras move on without them.

What’s different now is where those rejects have found their second act. MAGA has become the great consolation prize for people whose reality TV dreams went nowhere: a place where a camera-ready personality, a talent for conflict, and total loyalty to Donald Trump can buy you a cabinet post, a podcast with a real audience, or a permanent chair on cable news, no matter how thin your actual resume is.

Some of these people never made it onto a show at all. Some did and flamed out anyway. Trump’s Washington doesn’t care which — it just wants people who know how to hold a camera’s attention, and it’s built an entire ecosystem to reward them for it.

Sean Duffy is the exception that proves the rule. Back in 1997, he was a cast member on MTV’s Real World: Boston and parlayed that into a spot on Road Rules: All Stars, where he met Rachel Campos — a Real World: San Francisco alum who’s now a Fox News talking head — and married her the following year.

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Now Duffy is Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, where he’s had to reassure Americans that “of course” it’s safe to fly after a string of deadly crashes. He’s had other things on his mind, though, like trying to get a new reality show off the ground — The Great American Road Trip, starring himself, Rachel, and their nine kids road-tripping the country as a “civic experience” ahead of America’s 250th birthday.

The show has been in limbo for months, and not because of scheduling. A Delaware nonprofit bankrolled the production, and its sponsor list includes Boeing and Toyota — companies USDOT regulates. The watchdog group CREW has asked the department’s inspector general to investigate.

Duffy’s checkered tenure underscores what’s actually going on with this administration. It’s not a government; it’s a casting call for the world’s worst, most destructive reality TV show. And all of us are being forced to watch.

The Apprentice

All of this, of course, goes back to Donald Trump, who failed repeatedly in real life, but built a wildly successful reality TV persona that propelled him into the White House.

It’s worth remembering who Trump actually was before The Apprentice. He was much more of a tabloid fixture than a corporate titan — famous for his divorce from his first wife, Ivana, his affair with Marla Maples, and a trail of bankruptcies. He put his name on steaks, a board game, and gaudy gold buildings. Periodically, Trump floated a presidential run just to stay in the headlines, including a real (if short-lived) Reform Party bid in 2000. He was already dabbling in racial demagoguery back then, too. In 1989, he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, teenagers who were later exonerated by DNA evidence.

Then in 2004, NBC put him behind a boardroom table on The Apprentice, and the myth-making machine did what his financial acumen never could: it rebranded him as America’s businessman, decisive and successful, barking, “You’re fired!” at failed contestants.

The show worked. It remade Trump’s personality into something entertaining, if not entirely likable. He used that platform to jump back into the political arena, becoming one of the most prominent faces of the birther movement against Barack Obama and lending his 2012 primary endorsement to Mitt Romney — who desperately needed the conservative-base credibility Trump had cultivated.

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Young Americans aren’t driven by ideology as much as frustration. From unaffordable housing and healthcare to shrinking job prospects and growing isolation, today’s political divide is being fueled by an economic system that leaves working people behind while rewarding corporate power.

The answer isn’t another political party; it’s building a movement that connects people through shared values and ending corporate control.

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They also examine Trump’s continuing to make 2020 election fraud claims, how they’ve been repeatedly debunked, and the increasing challenges of staying informed with the misinformation this current administration traffics in every day.

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Watch this week’s Tim & April Show for much more. And leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Good neighbors make all the difference. They leave you in peace. They support you in need. They work with you to make the neighborhood better for you both.

Canada is a good neighbor. The United States, under the unitary executive authority of Donald Trump, is not.

When the United States was attacked on 9/11, Canada stepped up. More than 40,000 Canadian soldiers served in Afghanistan and 158 died there.

The border between the United States and Canada is 5,525 miles long. It is the longest border in the world. While many nations spend fortunes defending their borders, this one is an inspiration — peaceful, cooperative, prosperous and beautiful.

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The job of marking and maintaining that border does not fall to the military but to the International Boundary Commission, created by treaty in 1908. Per the Commission website: “the boundary is a model neighbour (sic). Quiet, discreet, but always present.” The website is in French, as well as English.

Together, Canada and the U.S. built an enormous, integrated, bilateral trade relationship. Before Trump’s tariffs, total trade came close to a trillion dollars annually. Important industries, like energy, agriculture, industrial supplies, and automotive, are integrated across our two countries. Seventeen percent of all U.S. goods exports to Canada. Millions of American jobs depend on that trade.

Land border crossing measured at major crossing points are:

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Of course, people and goods also come by boat and plane. There are even spots along this long border where hikers cross back and forth without much notice.

Both nations have large forests, and both have seen increases in the duration and frequency of wildfires due to climate change. According to reporting in the Guardian, 843 active wildfires are currently burning across Canada and 181 of these are “out of control.” That’s bad news. But it’s also just part of the bigger North American picture.

Here’s an image from the U.S. government’s National Interagency Fire Center’s website today:

As you can see, more than 40,000 wildfires burned in the United States this year. Nearly 1.5 million acres destroyed in large fires; that’s a subset of the nearly 4 million acres burned so far this year.

American fires choke Canadians as much as Canadian ones choke us. We used to understand this. Our response was smart and it made things better. By agreement, fire fighters travel between countries to assist during emergencies. According to the National Interagency Fire Center:

“This cross-border support is made possible through a long-standing agreement between the United States and Canada, first established in 1982. This crucial partnership is rooted in shared landscapes, common challenges, and a mutual commitment to protecting lives, property, and natural resources.”

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Americans listening to Donald Trump will never hear any of this. Not the benefits of a long and peaceful border. Not the economic powerhouse our integrated economy has become. Not the free movement of people and goods between our two nations. And certainly not the cooperation that helps limit the damage of wildfires.

Donald Trump and his party will always choose to be angry rather than smart. To them, working with anyone is a sign of weakness, and blaming everyone signifies strength. Instead of fighting all these North American fires together, Mr. Trump accused Canada of poisoning American air and promised new tariffs. GOP lawmakers, as ever, followed their boss’ lead and issued their own threats against our northern neighbor.

None of their rage helps put out the fires. None of it helps address the causes of increased wildfire activity. All of it weakens on of the strongest international partnerships in history — the one that underlies the longest, most peaceful and arguably the most prosperous border on the planet.

The damage caused by the fires is terrible, but measurable. The damage caused by Trump and MAGA is incalculable.

By the way, our southern border is also maintained by a commission. Its website blares: “Our mission is to protect Americans from exposure to Mexican sewage …”

Good grief.

I’ve attended all three No Kings rallies in different cities across the country. And after the last one in March, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time: actual hope. Not the gritted-teeth, we-have-no-choice variety. Something far more inspiring.

Eight million people — the largest single-day demonstrations in American history — showed up in more than 3,300 locations across all 50 states, as well as in other countries, waving signs against ICE, the Iran war, health care cuts, gerrymandering, tax breaks for billionaires, and more. Our message was clear: This is not who we are. Donald Trump may be president, but we don’t do kings in this country. We still have the First Amendment and we’re not afraid to use it.

There were families with kids in strollers. People brought their dogs. There were old union guys, college students, and former Republicans attending their very first protest. There was music. There were booths where you could sign up to canvas.

Four months later, a good chunk of the pro-democracy coalition seems to be screaming at each other online during the last gasps of a heated Democratic primary season.

And I’m worried that we’re losing sight of job one: winning in November so we can stop as much of the damage Trump is inflicting on our country as we can. Before it’s too late.

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The No Kings movement didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was the result of serious organizing — led by groups like Indivisible, 50501, the ACLU and dozens more — responding to the spectacle of Trump staging a military parade for himself on his birthday on June 14, 2025.

The media was skeptical that significant numbers would show. Some of that was the usual corporate media timidity — some of the same outlets whose parent companies were busy seeking merger approvals from a Trump administration that rewards fealty.

But some of it was a genuine misreading of the 2024 election as a ringing endorsement of MAGA, rather than what it actually was: a hangover from the pandemic, rage at inflation, and a desire for change from people who didn’t fully understand what that change would mean.

They found out. And many of them showed up at No Kings.

That first protest drew 5 million people to more than 2,000 events. The October 2025 rally drew 7 million to 2,500 rallies. March 28 was the biggest yet.

The trajectory was unmistakable: each wave brought more people, more cities, and a broader coalition. Mainstream Democrats. DSA members. Independents. People who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but couldn’t stomach Jan. 6. People who watched border agents shoot and kill Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, on Jan. 7 — and then saw them kill Alex Pretti, a VA nurse who stepped in front of an agent to protect a woman being shoved to the ground, two weeks later. People who made the calculation that you don’t have to agree on everything to agree on this: Donald Trump is a disaster who must be stopped.

That’s the coalition that wins in November. And it worries me that we haven’t had a mass unifying event since the spring.

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What we’ve had instead is primaries. And some of those primaries have gotten ugly, particularly on social media.

There is a legitimate argument for contested primaries, of course. That’s how the system works. Right now, many voters are angry at establishment Democrats who took too long to fight Trump, at a gerontocracy that can’t get out of its own way, and at a party that hasn’t always delivered on healthcare, immigration enforcement, or economic fairness.

Those arguments deserve to be made. Debates over whether to abolish or reform ICE, adopt Medicare for All or expand the ACA, or if the Democratic Party’s problem is going too far left or not far enough — these are worth having.

But constructive policy discussions are in short supply these days. And the amount of time Democrats spend savaging each other online versus attacking Trump and Republicans — the people actually in power — is a warning sign. It warps perspective. It hardens positions. It turns potential allies into enemies even though they share 90 to 95 percent of your politics (or more).

Maine is a cautionary tale. It’s a bluish-purple state and Republican Sen. Susan Collins is particularly vulnerable in a year when Trump’s numbers have tanked.

Graham Platner ran as the progressive Senate candidate in the mold that the movement had decided was the future: a Bernie Sanders-endorsed outsider coursing with insurgent energy against the machine. The red flags were there early on — the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit posts, the pattern of behavior toward women that should have given any serious political operation pause.

Too many supporters waved them away. Then one of his former partners went on the record with a rape allegation, and the whole thing collapsed, leaving Maine Democrats scrambling to fight for a Senate seat that should have been theirs — with a destructive primary that divided people who should be working together.

That is what happens when the online ecosystem — with its premium on purity and its allergy to nuance — becomes a substitute for the kind of in-person coalition-building that actually wins races.

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Since the last March rally, the No Kings coalition has been busy. They’ve done trainings to combat ICE and hosted “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment,” counterprogramming to Trump’s 80th birthday featuring Bette Midler, Patti Smith, Joy Reid, and more.

The May Day Strong event was the most ambitious effort, but it wasn’t nearly as successful as the Minneapolis action during the height of the ICE occupation. Most people went to work. Most businesses stayed open. That’s not a failure of will. It’s a structural reality we’re not yet past in America, which doesn’t have the same history of recent general strikes as they do in Europe. And the No Kings movement shouldn’t be measured by that standard.

But what’s been missing is another nationwide protest. Now I don’t want to overstate what mass rallies can do. But one very important function they serve is making it physically harder to write off your neighbors.

When you’re standing with 8 million other people, you are forced to confront that the coalition is broader than your TikTok feed. The DSA member and the suburban mom who voted for Obama twice and Trump once end up at the same booth where they’re handing out water. They discover they’re not enemies, even if they’re voting for different Democrats in Michigan’s U.S. Senate primary. That’s not a small thing.

And we need that reminder more urgently now because the warning signs are real. Yes, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats since Trump’s election, without Republicans winning a single Democratic-held seat — including a special election in the Florida House district where Trump resides at Mar-a-Lago. The trend line has been extraordinary.

But polling analysts like Sarah Longwell are flagging something troubling: despite everything Trump has done, swing voters are not rushing toward Democrats. She argues that association with the socialist left is actively hurting the party with the voters it needs in key states that will determine control of Congress this fall.

Even if you disagree with that analysis, it’s still worth considering that Democrats’ average generic ballot lead has narrowed from 7.4 points in June to 4.7 now. That’s still a lead. But it’s not a wave. And Democrats are not playing on easy terrain.

The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and greenlighted racial gerrymandering — a ruling that could cost Democrats up to 19 House seats when new maps take effect.

Trump is running a sustained campaign to intimidate Americans who vote by mail through executive orders and USPS pressure. And there are credible scenarios for November that go beyond disappointing election results, like Trump dispatching ICE and the military to polling places. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson could refuse to seat Democrats who win. We could have a constitutional crisis that doesn’t resolve on election night (and may not resolve cleanly at all).

If that happens, people need to know what to do. They need to be organized. They need to know their neighbors.

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That is exactly what mass demonstrations are for.

I hope Indivisible and the other groups that have made No Kings possible are planning another mobilization before November. I understand some of these organizations have also taken sides in key Democratic primaries, and that’s been another focus for them this year.

But the election that matters most is the one on Nov. 3, and the coalition that wins it runs from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders. It doesn’t run through any one ideological faction, and it certainly doesn’t run through the part of Bluesky where Democrats spend all day trashing each other as corrupt sellouts for clout.

The No Kings movement is, at its best, joyful. That matters more than it sounds. Movements powered entirely by anger — especially anger at each other — burn out. Movements that give people music, dancing, trainings to sign up for, and a reason to believe they are not alone — those are sustainable. They can get us to November — and the hard fights after.

We have a long road between now and then. Another No Kings protest won’t resolve the Medicare for All debate or heal the wounds from Maine. But it might remind a few million people that the person they’ve been arguing with online is also the person they’ll need standing next to them in November.

We can’t do this alone.

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Steven Beschloss welcomes Miles Taylor, a man who has seen the inner workings of a Trump administration from the inside.

Taylor served as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration and authored the anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed, I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.

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He’s also a bestselling author of books including, A Warning and Blowback and currently runs initiatives opposing Trump policies while working as a security expert and commentator.

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But that’s only the beginning. Gupta connects the outbreak to rising measles cases, weakened vaccine oversight, and even military readiness under the Trump administration.

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It seems abundantly clear that Usha Chilukuri Vance never dreamed of being second lady (sometimes known by the rather unfortunate acronym of “SLOTUS.”)

Her life reads as an aspirational case study of American meritocracy: a daughter of Indian immigrant academics who went on to graduate from Yale summa cum laude, become a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and clerk for not one, but two Supreme Court justices before landing at a top law firm.

When her husband, in a rare moment of humanity on the ‘24 campaign trail, admitted she is “way more accomplished than I am,” that may have been the last honest thing J.D. Vance said.

But he’s long made his love affair with traditional gender roles central to his far-right politics, idealizing marriage — even for those in “unhappy” and “maybe even violent“ unions — and lecturing single women that motherhood is their only “path to happiness and to fulfillment.” It was only a matter of time before Usha would be expected to sacrifice her high-flying career at the altar of his political ambitions.

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And so, when Donald Trump tapped Vance as his running mate, the announcement quickly followed that Usha would be leaving her job at Munger, Tolles & Olson to stay home with their three kids.

Since her husband has become the second most powerful man in the nation, Usha has been called upon for mostly dull assignments, like appearing on Megan McCain’s dreadful podcast last year. At the end, McCain said she had to address “the elephant in the room … that you could be our first lady in a few years.”

At this point, Usha finally perked up a bit and dismissed the question, musing: “In a dream world, eventually I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things.”

But it turns out that she might not be so nostalgic for her old life, after all. On Sunday, Usha gave birth to a baby boy, Alec Neel Vance — the first child born to a sitting vice president in more than 150 years. The announcements rolled in with the warm, soft-focus coverage you’d expect about the busy life of the second family with four kids under 10 — a nice, history-making footnote.

It’s the kind of story that’s supposed to make you feel gooey inside (and perhaps forget about the death of four servicemembers in Trump’s botched Iran war or the slew of recent ICE killings on our streets).

But like everything in Trump World, there’s always an explicitly political subtext. The VP wrote in his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, that the couple decided to expand their family after attending a Turning Point USA event where Erika Kirk confided that she wished she and Charlie had had more time to have more kids.

This is also an administration where, in concert with Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, Stephen Miller and Elon Musk make explicit, ugly arguments about declining native birth rates. And Vance has told Americans that people without children shouldn’t get a full vote.

The personal is explicitly political in MAGA World, something a woman as brilliant as Usha Vance well knows.

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The Melania Model

There’s a durable D.C. press habit of treating the wives of powerful right-wing men as potential dissidents — women who married the ambition, but might privately recoil from the cruelty.

We were treated to years of cloying “free Melania” posts during Trump’s first term, even though she donned a jacket emblazoned with the words, “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” while visiting immigrant kids at a border detention center.

The first lady later admitted she wore it to troll people, especially the “left-wing media who are criticizing me.”

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Scott Ferson joins his fellow veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi and celebrated political author Joe Klein from the Pine Tree State to give us an update, and to discuss his new book, How the Democrats Lost America: Making Sense of the 2024 Election and the Future of American Politics.

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Tune in for this conversation and more, like the Joes discussing the Stat of the Week.

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That perspective starts with the Senate. Garcia dismissed much of the speculation surrounding Mitch McConnell’s prolonged absence and focused instead on the practical reality: every missing senator changes the math. McConnell isn’t just another Republican vote — he chairs the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and has long represented the dwindling wing of the GOP that strongly supports Ukraine and traditional American alliances. His absence leaves Republicans without one of their most influential foreign policy voices at a moment when the party is increasingly skeptical of international engagement in Iran and elsewhere. The political intrigue may dominate cable news, but the real consequence is felt in committee rooms where budgets, nominations, and military policy are decided.

That realism extended to Democratic calls for Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear to challenge state law and appoint a Democratic replacement should McConnell leave office. Garica was clear: there isn’t a winning strategy there. Democrats frustrated by Trump’s aggressive use of power increasingly want their own leaders to “fight fire with fire,” but political hardball has legal limits. Picking unwindable constitutional battles may satisfy an angry base, but it won’t ultimately change anything. The bigger story is that Democratic voters increasingly measure leaders by how aggressively they resist Trump, even when victory isn’t realistically on the table.

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That same frustration is reshaping Democratic politics well beyond Kentucky. Garcia described a party base hungry for confrontation, helping fuel the rise of more progressive candidates across the country. But he also noted the limits of idealogical purity. Looking at Michigan’s Senate primary, Garcia argued the race isn’t simply a battle between moderates and progressives. It’s a collision between different Democratic coalitions. Suburban women, union workers, African Americans, Arab Americans and younger progressives represent key parts of a divided electorate, making Michigan one of the most unpredictable contests in the country. “It’s a jump ball,” said Garica, resisting the temptation to offer easy predictions where none exist.

He also highlighted an uncomfortable reality both parties continue to wrestle with: policing misconduct within their own ranks. From allegations involving Republican members of Congress to Democrats’ eventual push to force Graham Platner out of the Maine Senate race, Garcia argued that political parties have developed a far higher tolerance for scandal than they once had. While Democrats have often been quicker to remove politicians facing credible allegations, he noted that both parties have shown an increasing willingness to excuse behavior that would have ended political careers a generation ago.

Immigration illustrates that broader collapse in public trust as ICE has become one of the defining political flashpoints of the Trump era, with recent enforcement actions dramatically shifting public opinion. Garcia contrasted Susan Collins’ argument that she helped place guardrails around ICE through funding and oversight with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response that funding the agency ultimately means owning its actions. Garcia pointed to polling showing nearly half of Americans now support abolishing ICE. Many increasingly see ICE less as a traditional law enforcement agency and more as an arm of unchecked federal power.

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That changing landscape is especially visible among Latino voters. Garcia pushed back against simplistic narratives about Hispanic political behavior, arguing that economic concerns and immigration fears now exist side by side. Many Latino voters supported Trump because they associated his first term with lower prices and economic stability, while simultaneously worrying that expanded deportation efforts could affect their own families or communities. Democrats have finally begun investing in year-round Spanish-language outreach rather than parachuting in weeks before Election Day, but Republicans still retain advantages in messaging. Winning Latino voters, Garcia argues, requires recognizing that concerns over affordability and immigration are often intertwined rather than competing priorities.

Looking ahead, Garcia believes the biggest stories won't simply revolve around personalities, but around whether Republicans can convince voters they're improving everyday life. With gas prices rising again, inflation squeezing working families, and immigration remaining politically explosive, he argued that cost of living will likely eclipse many of Washington's procedural battles. He also pointed to Georgia (not Michigan) as the state to watch most closely, given the combination of Senate, gubernatorial, and legislative races that could shape national politics for years to come.

Tune in for Susan Demas’ full conversation with Eric Michael Garcia on First Draft, right here on Lincoln Square.

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In this administration, the solutions to nonexistent problems also happen to be the cause of crisis-level problems.

None of this makes sense.

Joe and Stuart talk through the war in Iran, the war in Ukraine, and share their personal experiences with Bibi Netanyahu.

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In fact, he was lying. Or, perhaps, he doesn’t really understand what winning actually entails. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. American troops have been lost in the last few days. Our weapon cache is depleted. As retired Navy Commander says, Iran holds all of the cards, and there are only two options for breaking the current status of this war: An American surrender or an American invasion.

Bobby predicted we’d be here way back in April. Take a look:

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On this episode of Anchor Watch, Bobby welcomed Samuel Ratner, an analyst, writer, and editor focused on civil wars, statebuilding, southern Africa, and progressive U.S. foreign policy. He serves as Policy Director at Win Without War and is a contributing editor at Zitamar News, where he covers southeast African security issues.

Sam’s expertise is global, but Iran is currently front and center in his focus. Watch and let us know what you think is going to happen in this war.

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Pete and Susan also discussed the importance of strong political leadership from Democrats, protecting voting rights, and expanding access to healthcare. And they talked about why journalists have to continue to do fact-based coverage and check conspiracy theories that run rampant on social media.

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Check out this discussion and more from Pete Dominick over at Stand Up! with Pete Dominick.

Stand Up with Pete Dominick Daily

I interview expert guests and recap the news everyday. I host 2 virtual hangouts twice a week for paid subscribers

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