Donald Trump and Republicans have a new villain just in time for the midterms, and it’s not socialism anymore. It’s full-on communism, baby.

In the past few weeks, Trump has warned that the Democratic Party’s ascendant left wants to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”

“I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding,” he declared. “That includes World War I, World War II, September 11, it includes the Pearl Harbor attack.”

Trump’s minions have lined up to amplify the boss’ message. House Speaker Mike Johnson recently decried progressive candidates as “radicals” and “self-described, self-identifying Marxists.” “Communism is no longer a far fetched threat. It is here on our SHORES!” the Speaker warned on X.

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At a June conference the U.S. hosted of 66 nations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said they “can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist, or Marxist,” but he denounced them as “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.”

“The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller proclaimed. “The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and a perfect kid and goes to church every Sunday.”

We’ve heard versions of this before. Trump branded Kamala Harris “Comrade Kamala” in 2024 (which inspired a series of memes in Latino spaces), and warned of a socialist takeover back in the 2020 election.

But this year, the rhetoric has escalated, and there’s an obvious reason why. The Democratic Socialists of America just had their best year in a generation. That started with Zohran Mamdani winning the New York City mayoral primary last year by 12 points over Andrew Cuomo, riding a 50,000-volunteer field operation to victory on a platform of a rent freeze, free buses, and free childcare.

Mamdani’s political power was put to the test in June when his endorsed candidates, Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez (whose district constitutes the “Commie Corridor,” as The American Prospect noted) won congressional primaries alongside significant DSA wins downballot.

Then in Colorado, 29-year-old DSA-endorsed newcomer Melat Kiros unseated ten-term incumbent Diana DeGette (a strong progressive, just apparently not strong enough) in a congressional primary, the biggest win yet for the state’s left flank.

Asked directly about the wave of left-wing primary wins, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “They use the word ‘Social Democrat’ because it sounds so nice, but it’s really communism you’re talking about.”

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Now that enough voters are clearly fine with the DSA that “socialist” doesn’t pack the punch that it used to, Trump has to reach for a scarier word. Notice what he doesn’t do: define it. Some Republicans will tell you it’s shorthand for Medicare for All and abolishing borders and prisons. On Fox News last month with Laura Ingraham, JD Vance took a crack at it:

“I unfortunately fear that’s the direction the Democrats are headed. And it is communism, Laura. This is not — you know, this is not raising taxes a little bit, however much we might disagree with that. This is abolishing the police. This is letting criminals run amok in your cities. This is — flood your country with low-wage, third-world immigrants.”

But the point isn’t precision; it’s about setting up existential stakes for elections. If Democrats represent the communist menace, then no amount of dissatisfaction with Trump can ever add up to a vote against him. (It’s the Flight 93 election, rebranded).

And there’s plenty of dissatisfaction to paper over. Trump’s approval rating clocks in at 33 percent in the latest AP-NORC poll, down from 37 percent the month before, with the sharpest drop coming from his own party over the Iran conflict.

Voters are vexed about the economy and gas prices, angry that he started a “stupid war” in Iran after promising he wouldn’t, and wary of his refusal to release all the Epstein files. They’ve been horrified watching American citizens gunned down by federal immigration agents: Ruben Ray Martinez in a Texas traffic stop, Renee Good during an enforcement operation, and Alex Pretti while helping a fellow protester thrown to the ground.

None of that is supposed to matter once you’ve decided the alternative is “godless communism” and abortion on demand, and the only thing standing between you and that abyss is Donald Trump.

Will it work in November? I doubt it. Trump isn’t on the ballot, his numbers are in the basement, and the generic ballot currently shows Democrats ahead by 8 points to 11 points, depending on the poll. Raw anger at Trump over the economy will outweigh an abstract fear of Marxism for most swing voters this year. But it might peel off just enough soft Republicans who were thinking of sitting out the election to determine a handful of House and Senate races.

Democrats have overperformed in recent off-year elections, in 2018’s blue wave and again in 2022 after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. But presidential elections have proved far less hospitable terrain for the party, especially as Trump has a knack for pulling in irregular voters.

Which is exactly why I think this fight is really about 2028, not 2026. Trump isn’t constitutionally allowed to run again, full stop. But he doesn’t believe in taking no for an answer and keeps insisting he’ll try anyway (He’s told reporters “I would love to do it.”) His advisers have floated “methods” for getting around the 22nd Amendment, with Steve Bannon flatly predicting Trump will get a third term. (Of course, there’s no guarantee the 80-year-old’s health will hold up long enough for him to even attempt to be on the ballot).

Without Trump, Republicans face a genuinely chaotic succession fight for 2028, with Vance, Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, and a host of others all circling.

Holding together Trump’s coalition without Trump is hard. Communism as the unifying supervillain is a two-year investment in making sure it doesn’t fall apart.

I know a lot progressive influencers and commentators think Trump’s communism attack is a punchline. I thought the same thing about the virulent anti-trans ads he ran against Harris two years ago, and I was wrong. Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars on ads with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” running them more than 30,000 times in swing states during football season.

That same message flopped in 2022, when abortion, not gender identity, was what actually moved voters in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. But by 2024, voters had heard it for two solid years. The ground was seeded and it shifted below Democrats. That’s the playbook being run again now with Republicans’ new McCarthyism.

It’s tempting to believe that the red scare messaging won’t resonate anymore because millions of voters weren’t even alive before the Berlin Wall fell.

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But there’s a more than 100-year-old anti-communist tradition to draw from, dating back to the Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, and then decades more of Cold War conditioning. Sure, most Americans don’t know that history in any detail. They don’t need to. They still know communism is bad and it’s left-coded, while Trump and his party are firmly on the right. And the GOP message is aimed squarely at older and Latino voters whose families fled left-wing authoritarian governments.

Stephen Miller has long positioned Trump as the only thing standing between us and “cancerous, communist woke culture.” The Republican bet for 2028 is clear: strong and wrong beats woke and weird.

That’s enough to work with, especially with a well-funded right-wing media machine hammering the message daily, and mainstream outlets increasingly serving as an echo chamber. CBS News has already tilted rightward under Bari Weiss, handpicked by Paramount Skydance’s new owners, the Ellisons. And the Trump allies’ pending deal to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery would put CNN under the same roof (which Trump and his allies are openly salivating over).

The Trump administration also has some powerful tools at its disposal to create communist enemies and criminalize them, like National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, something Miller and Rubio both invoked at the June international conference.

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So when I see progressives treating the anti-communist campaign as a joke that nobody will fall for, I get nervous. I’d like to think we’re past these scare tactics and everyone will understand the stakes of fighting fascism. But being ridiculous has never disqualified a message from working in this country. Being complete bullshit hasn’t, either (just look at who’s president … again).

Zohran Mamdani is popular and getting good national press right now, but the right-wing coverage of him is already vicious (and unrelenting). The beltway press loves nothing more than building someone up to knock them down. By 2028, he (or whoever the next high-profile DSA winner is) could be cast as the sinister face of American communism (regardless if the label bears any resemblance to what they’ve actually done).

None of this means Democrats should panic or abandon their values. But it does mean they should stop assuming a bad-faith argument can’t win. It won it in 2020. It won it in 2024. And Republicans are betting it can carry them through whatever Trump screws up next — a health crisis, recession, another war — all the way to the White House in 2028.

The Financial Times estimates that Venezuelan oil sales have generated more than $13 billion in revenue this year. The Energy Department has separately said that proceeds from those sales first settle in accounts controlled by the United States. But the White House and Energy Department records reviewed for this article, together with a State Department response reported by the Financial Times, do not provide a transaction-level reconciliation of transfers to Venezuela, authorized disbursements, expenses or remaining account balances.

The $13 billion figure is an estimate, not an audited government balance. The Financial Times calculated it using Venezuelan crude-shipment data from Kpler, a freight and analytics company, and price estimates from Argus Media. The newspaper said shipments with direct price estimates were worth about $11.5 billion and that historical price patterns brought the total above $13 billion.

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The estimate excludes mining exports that American officials said were also being collected by the administration, according to the Financial Times. The calculation may therefore not capture all Venezuelan resource revenue entering arrangements controlled by the United States.

The accounting question has become more urgent since two powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 24. The Associated Press reported that the death toll had reached 5,069 by July 18. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction produced a preliminary estimate of $37 billion in direct physical damage, including about $24 billion in damage to buildings and $13 billion in damage to infrastructure.

John Barrett, the United States chargé d’affaires in Caracas, said money from the oil-revenue accounts was being made available for reconstruction, according to the Financial Times. He did not specify how much. The newspaper separately reported that the United States had made $386 million available for disaster relief, without identifying that assistance as part of the oil-account disbursements.

The Energy Department said the United States began marketing Venezuelan oil after President Nicolás Maduro was apprehended in January. Delcy Rodríguez subsequently became Venezuela’s acting president, according to the International Monetary Fund. The Energy Department also said the administration selectively eased sanctions and authorized channels through which Venezuelan crude could return to international markets.

American officials told the Financial Times that control of the oil accounts was being used in part as leverage over Rodríguez’s government.

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Last month, Cecilia Vega, the correspondent CBS fired from 60 Minutes this spring, stood in front of a room of her peers at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference and said something that should terrify anyone who still cares about facts.

She said that under new Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, she was pushed to include claims in her reporting that her own team could never verify: footage of protesters assaulting suspected undercover ICE agents that her producers watched frame by frame and never found and a quote from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey about fighting ICE that he never said. “That never happened,” Vega said. “We could not find any instance of the mayor saying something like that.”

CBS disputes her account and says none of it made air. Of course, Vega isn’t the only journalist who’s recounted how Weiss’ regime tried to push MAGA talking points into stories; Scott Pelley dropped the dime on her after he, too, was fired.

But what does it say that we’ve reached a point where one of America’s biggest newsrooms, staffed by people whose entire job is verifying facts, burned so much time chasing footage that didn’t exist because of misinformation circulating online?

If trained journalists with fact-checkers and lawyers can nearly get rolled by the version of events propagandists manufacture on social media, what chance does the rest of us have, scrolling in bed after midnight, taking most posts at face value?

That’s the question I’ve been grappling with for two years, ever since I mostly got off social media. After years of living online, covering right-wing extremism, the rise of Donald Trump, and mass death during the pandemic, I knew it was time to touch grass.

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I could feel what the feed was doing to me, and I wanted my life back — the version with actual people in it, not usernames. I wanted dinners where nobody checked their phones, arguments that ended in a hug instead of a screenshot, and friendships that didn’t run through an algorithm.

When I’ve dipped back in occasionally to check on people I used to follow religiously, the pattern has been remarkably consistent, and it splits almost perfectly by platform. On X, people I used to consider reasonable have slid into full right-wing conspiracy territory — not gradually, but as if someone flipped a switch.

Fortunately, I don’t have to spend much time in that Nazi hellhole, as most accounts I respect have abandoned it and moved on to Bluesky. And while the vibe there is unmistakably better (how could it not be?), I’ve still noticed a bleak pattern among influential users: most have narrowed down to two modes, dunking on mainstream Democrats as sellouts and traitors, or basically writing fan fiction about whichever progressive candidate is having a moment.

After all, trashing establishment Dems earns you instant clout from three key groups: the mainstream media that turns it into fodder for their “Dems in disarray” bangers, right-wingers who despise progressive policy but revel in any criticism of Democrats (it’s especially useful when the call is coming from inside the house), and leftists who love anything that validates their priors.

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I have never, not once, taken Bill O’Reilly seriously as a journalist. Not now, not during his recent fact-versus-opinion nervous breakdown with Geraldo Rivera, and certainly not going all the way back to his days on Inside Edition, where journalism went to put on a trench coat, lower its voice, and ask whether your neighbor might secretly be a cannibal.

That does not mean O’Reilly is stupid, or that he was never capable of doing real journalism. Quite the opposite. The man is aggressively educated. He has a bachelor’s degree in history from Marist College, a master’s in broadcast journalism from Boston University, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also won two local Emmys, one for reporting on a Denver skyjacking and another for exposing corrupt city marshals in New York. In other words, Bill O’Reilly had every credential necessary to become a serious journalist and somehow used them all to become the loudest man at a televised bar fight.

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Somewhere along the way, he figured out that reporting was harder than performing, facts were less profitable than outrage, and shouting over a guest was much easier than answering one. My introduction to him was Inside Edition, the program that helped turn tabloid television into a national ecosystem alongside A Current Affair and Hard Copy. These were shows where every missing housewife, satanic babysitter, miracle diet, celebrity divorce, and suspicious stain on a motel carpet could be stretched into a four-night investigative event. O’Reilly did not invent that kind of journalism, but he clearly looked at it and thought, “This needs more yelling.”

When O’Reilly left Inside Edition, he did not retreat to a quiet local station to spend a few years laundering the tabloid residue off his résumé. He walked directly into the inaugural lineup of a brand-new cable news network conceived by Roger Ailes, which is a little like leaving a carnival sideshow and immediately being appointed dean of a clown college. His show, originally titled, The O’Reilly Report and renamed The O’Reilly Factor in 1998, debuted on Fox News Channel on October 7, 1996, the same day the network itself went on the air, with Ailes hiring him practically straight out of Harvard. Nothing says “Kennedy School of Government” quite like spending the next two decades shouting, “Shut up!” at a schoolteacher from Vermont.

From the first time I saw him on Fox News Channel, I knew exactly what his show—and eventually the entire network built around it—was going to be. The Factor evolved into an hour of O’Reilly yelling at people, interrupting them, misrepresenting what they had just said, and occasionally having their microphones cut when they committed the unforgivable broadcasting offense of making a point he could not answer. His debating style was basically to invite someone into his house, scream over them, unplug their telephone, and then congratulate himself for winning the conversation. Real cute operation for something called the “No Spin Zone.” Apparently the rule was that nobody was allowed to spin except the host, the producers, the graphics department, and whichever intern was operating the kill switch on the guest’s microphone.

And as obnoxious as it was, I have to admit that in the early days I found the show thoroughly entertaining. It was not journalism so much as professional wrestling for people who kept a pocket Constitution in the glove compartment. You did not tune in expecting to learn anything. You tuned in to see which mild-mannered college professor O’Reilly would accuse of destroying America before abruptly going to commercial for gold coins, reverse mortgages, or a book explaining why children needed more discipline.

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Okay, maybe not everything. But on two of his favorite themes, he couldn’t be more wrong.

• Young men today are in a unique crisis.

• How to brand the Democratic Party.

Scott, I love you, man — you’re brilliant, inquisitive, passionate — but when it comes to these ideas, you are, as they say in your adopted England, totally crackers.

Okay, about this loony notion that somehow 2026 is a tough time to be a young American male.

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Let’s start with the obvious question: when was a better time? For today to be a crisis, there must be great stretches of the past in which young men were far better off. Right? Okay, name the decade.

It’s so blatantly obvious that young men in pre-20th-century America had a far more difficult life — the odds of making it to 30 were only 45% compared to 3% today. So let’s start with the 1900s for comparison.

Say you were a male born in 1900, was that some glorious period to be a young male in America? There was a one-in-ten chance you might go to college. So by the age of 16 to 18, you were likely working and kept working until the last stages of your life.

While your slightly older brothers were being slaughtered in the fields of Flanders, at home the Spanish influenza killed more than the combined total of World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Okay, granted, fewer males were sitting in their mom’s basement vaping, which seems to be a favorite metaphor for the horrors afflicting today’s young men. Instead, they were more likely to be coughing out their lives in a dark basement from mustard gas or influenza. Gee, I wonder which is a worse fate?

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Dr. Anthony Fauci spent three hours this week pleading the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times before a Senate committee run by Rand Paul. It was a sad, destructive spectacle that tells you everything about how badly we’ve botched the lessons of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.

Republicans billed the hearing as an unflinching investigation into COVID-19’s origins. But this was never a search for truth.

It was a show trial, staged to turn a career public servant who spent decades fighting AIDS, Ebola, and a half-dozen other epidemics into a Republican bogeyman for the midterms. It was political theater designed to give a MAGA base that’s furious over Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files (in defiance of the law he signed) a fresh villain to focus on instead.

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The setup alone should have been the story. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bragged to Fox News that he’d spent eight months digging through government servers and handed more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s personal diary over to Paul and equally loony Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.

That’s not oversight. That’s a smear campaign carried out on official Senate letterhead. And yet most of the corporate media coverage treated the hearing as a routine senatorial exercise rather than asking why a private citizen’s diary should become fodder for Republican senators who have spent six years trying to destroy him.

This is the same press corps that regularly refuses to ask Trump basic questions about his health, his corruption, or how many times his name appears in the Epstein files. And yet they have no issue giving credence to Republicans’ absurd grilling of a man who George W. Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The hearing was both tragedy and farce.

Paul, who’s feuded with Fauci since 2020, is now pushing a contempt vote over the doctor’s decision to invoke his constitutional rights. Those are rights every American is entitled to, and rights Fauci arguably needs, given how relentlessly Republicans have telegraphed their intent to prosecute him for the crime of running the government’s pandemic response (while being undermined by Trump every step of the way).

Let’s get the history straight. Fauci served under seven presidents, Trump included, who praised him and put him on stage at the White House podium day after day in 2020. But after years of threats and endless conspiracy theories swirling, Joe Biden made the call to pardon him, precisely because he could see this circus coming after Trump won the White House again.

One of the most disturbing parts of COVID’s aftermath is watching this poison circulate beyond the usual MAGA suspects. Even left-wing journalist Ryan Grim suggested this week that Fauci should be prosecuted. When people who should know better start echoing Rand Paul’s talking points, it’s clear just how many have convinced themselves that those who tried to keep us alive during the worst health catastrophe in a century are the real villains.

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Let’s be clear about what actually got Americans killed. We lost more than a million people to COVID, which is a staggering number we’ve never truly grappled with. The most disturbing part — the part I’m still not over — is that most of those deaths were preventable.

Donald Trump stood at that podium and mused about injecting bleach to cure the virus and promoted ivermectin. He refused to wear a mask and mocked people who did, ignoring the scientific consensus his own administration’s experts were begging him to follow. He picked fights with Michigan, Minnesota, and other blue states trying to save lives with stay-home orders and encouraged the heavily-armed protests against them.

He was, quite literally, a superspreader of misinformation, and the country paid for it in body bags.

Trump (unsurprisingly) had a close call with COVID himself. He was hospitalized at Walter Reed in October 2020 and put on supplemental oxygen, even as his own doctors offered a rosier public picture than what sources described privately. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had spent days in close quarters helping Trump prep for his presidential debate, spent a week in the ICU after getting COVID and nearly died.

Even after Trump got one of the first COVID shots, he kept feeding his base doubts about the vaccine, because that’s what MAGA wanted to hear.

Now in his second term, the man he picked to run the nation’s health apparatus is the most famous anti-vaxxer in America. And we’re all paying the price.

RFK Jr. has spent months insisting a cyclospora outbreak that’s sickened thousands is “under control.” America has logged more measles cases in 2026 than in any year since 1991. We’re facing a double whammy of DOGE cuts to public health funding and Kennedy’s own dismantling of vital health boards.

Meanwhile, the CDC website has been rewritten to falsely suggest vaccines cause autism (overriding the agency’s own scientists). And the fallout isn’t abstract: babies are now dying of preventable bleeding disorders because more parents are refusing the vitamin K shot given at birth, a decision doctors trace directly to the broader climate of medical distrust Kennedy has spent years cultivating. When a member of Congress asked him to simply reassure parents the shot is safe, he wouldn’t do it.

MAHA isn’t a wellness movement. It’s a suicide pact, run by people who are either sociopathically indifferent to the death toll or willfully blind to it. It’s all about control. They get to tell you what’s real, not egghead scientists (and not coincidentally, there’s a lot of money in quackery).

COVID was massively disruptive and traumatizing, and we’ve never really reckoned with what it did to us. We’ve never had a national day of mourning. Few memorials have been erected. Years later, we don’t want to remember the fear, the uncertainty, and everything we sacrificed.

People lost their jobs and their sense of community. Millions of us lost loved ones and couldn’t even say goodbye or attend their funerals. As the months of mass death dragged on, many people retreated online and came out the other side steeped in QAnon and other conspiracies. Paranoia bloomed, and it never fully receded.

The people who tried to save us became targets. Nurses and doctors reported rising violence from patients and their families throughout the pandemic. Fauci is simply the most visible face of that hatred. He’s needed round-the-clock security for years because of death threats, which is exactly why Biden felt he had to pardon him before leaving office. (And, like clockwork, Trump revoked Fauci’s security detail in one of his first official acts in his second term).

I saw a preview of this malignant irrationality years ago, watching jeering protesters outside the Big House where Fauci was giving the keynote address at the University of Michigan’s graduation. What was a fringe grievance movement has since been mainstreamed into the operating ideology of the Republican Party.

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What does it say about a country when millions turn on the very people trying to keep them alive? When officials faced death threats simply for issuing public health orders, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who became the target of an actual kidnapping plot over her COVID restrictions? When so many people have convinced themselves — egged on by right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson who profit handsomely off their fear — that a vaccine that saved millions of lives is more dangerous than the disease it prevents?

None of it holds up to scrutiny. But as I wrote during the pandemic, we’ve spent years coddling ignorance in this country, treating willful anti-intellectualism as just another valid lifestyle choice rather than a public danger.

In my 25 years in journalism, I’ve learned one durable rule: you are never, ever supposed to make people who loudly reject expertise, who knowingly spread lies and congratulate themselves for it, feel stupid. That’s the unforgivable sin of elitism. Even stating plain scientific facts gets recast as looking down on people who insist their internet research deserves equal footing with epidemiologists’ life work.

That’s how millions of people can reject reality today. Because there’s never been any real consequence for doing so. Hell, you can be handsomely rewarded for it now — and become the nation’s top health official or commander-in-chief.

This week’s hearing wasn’t an aberration. It was the logical endpoint of a decades-long slide into idiocy, where millions of Americans believe expertise is the enemy. How far will our country sink to avoid admitting we got the lesson backward? Right now, it looks like there is no bottom.

Teddy Roosevelt. Harry Truman. Dwight Eisenhower. They were not always popular. They certainly never wielded “unitary executive” authority. But they all tried to lead our big, complicated nation and faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress.

Lyndon Johnson. Chester Arthur. Ulysses Grant. They were flawed men, made better by the awesome weight and responsibility of office. Sometimes selfish, sometimes conniving, sometimes corrupt, they nonetheless inched us forward.

Abraham Lincoln, while still fighting rebels who sought to destroy the nation rather than accept the self-evident truths of our founding, taught us what a president is. At Gettysburg, he urged us to be dedicated to the unfinished work of assuring that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. That’s the president’s job, and for 250 years, presidents have done it.

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The presidency still exists. The Office of the Presidency exists. But the officeholder is not doing the job — he is, instead, using the powers invested in the office for some other purpose. America has no president.

In place of upholding that government of the people, as Lincoln described it, the occupier of that revered office leads an aggressive effort to roll back voting rights, civil rights, and even our freedom to choose what to read. He has ordered signs to be placed outside the Smithsonian to denounce the very idea that American history is somehow about our dedication to the task of finishing the work.

John Kennedy talked about the perils of fast-moving technological change. He knew that such change created new problems, even as it solved old ones. Yet, when he argued that we should press ahead, it was for the progress of all people, not for the enrichment of a few. That is what a president does.

We do not have that now. Instead of feeling the weight and responsibilities of leading our magnificent country, the man who redecorates the Oval Office with gold leaf sees only the tools of coercive power and the opportunities those create for personal enrichment. And enrich himself he has, in violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution. A mob boss does that. A president, by constitutional definition, does not.

Lincoln did not simply tell us what the job of a president is, he also told us how to do it. He was the first president to be reelected in 32 years and in his first term he successfully led us through a brutal civil war, yet his second inaugural address is not about him or his accomplishments. He talks instead about all of us. He urges us to strive on to finish the work with firmness, and yet with malice toward none.

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It is counsel he received from George Washington who cautioned us about the dangers a big democracy like ours must guard against. Washington warned, “One of the expedients of party to acquire influence is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other[s].” In his farewell address, he said, “You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart burnings which spring from these misrepresentations.”

Yet from mocking individuals, to disparaging our cities, to lying about vote totals, no-one has done more to misrepresent one part of our nation to another than the man who now holds the office but does not do the job of a president.

The ever-expanding targets of his malice are, next to himself, his favorite subject. This week, his lawyers admitted in court that he withheld more than $7 billion from states only because those states did not vote for him. It is a declaration from the Oval Office that, at least for those of us in those states, the man at the Resolute Desk is not our leader but our adversary.

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A president must be for us all. If he is not, then he is not a president. Washington warned us about this. Lincoln accepted war to prove that point.

For 250 years, Americans have died for our freedom. At Gettysburg, Lincoln made clear that assuring that freedom was why our honored dead gave the last full measure of devotion.

That is not why American soldiers are dying today. The man occupying the office has sent our young men and women to war in Venezuela for oil, and in Iran to open a Strait that sending those troops closed. He says that soldiers died on his watch to prevent Iran from having a nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, he is negotiating a path for the Saudis to build one. No soldier should die for this folly.

A real president knows that every time a soldier makes that terrible sacrifice it is to keep us free. I long for America to have a real president again.

The congregation attending Calvary Chapel church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Sunday, July 19, heard a different kind of sermon. According to experts, it was the illegal kind.

Church leaders invited several Republican candidates running in midterm elections and “explicitly encouraged attendees to support them.” As the GOP candidates took the stage, the church’s civics and cultural ministry leader, Adam Calabrese assured his faithful flock, “We can vouch for them.” Unless Calvary Chapel is rebuked by a higher power – like the IRS, all signs point to much more of this in the lead up to November and the great beyond.

If this political blessing of one party’s candidates seems wrong to you, that’s because it is. According to federal income tax specialist Samuel D. Brunson, associate dean of Loyola University Chicago, Calvary Chapel appears to have crossed the unholy line into a tax code violation. Churches are tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations forbidden from directly endorsing political parties or candidates in this manner:

“I’ve seen a lot of sermons that endorse, that try to endorse, that try to endorse without endorsing. This one’s pretty blatant. This is as explicit a violation as you could design. They have done literally everything they could possibly do to violate the Johnson Amendment part of Section 501(c)(3) – like they couldn’t have done a better job violating it if they had tried, and maybe they did try.”

It’s Brunson’s comment, “… and maybe they did try” that’s worth our attention. Calvary Chapel is an evangelical Christian association of 1,800 fellowships around the world. It started in California in 1965 and was the subject of the movie Jesus Revolution starring actor Kelsey Grammer as founding Pastor Chuck Smith. It has regional leadership councils domestically and abroad.

While its local churches are afforded certain autonomy, Calvary Chapel is not some primitive, loose-cannon organization. The Chattanooga fellowship has thousands attend its weekly services and has been listed as one of the fastest growing churches in America. While we don’t know for sure if the Chattanooga event was purposely designed to challenge the IRS’s Johnson Amendment, it wouldn’t surprise me based on recent history. The church has not yet responded to media questions.

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Bill Maher has developed an extraordinary talent for spotting a five-alarm fire, acknowledging that it is in fact burning, and then spending the rest of the conversation complaining about whoever pulled the smoke alarm. Jon Karl’s interview with him on ABC’s This Week offered a nearly perfect demonstration. Maher recognized that Republicans are afraid to state basic facts because Donald Trump might be watching. He acknowledged that Trump is using the federal government like an extension of his business portfolio.

And then, having identified the people currently exercising power and the damage they are already doing with it, Maher explained that the real reason he might vote for JD Vance in 2028 is some unnamed person he keeps reading about in Wisconsin.

The interview opens with a joke, although not necessarily the one either man intended. Jon Karl congratulates Bill Maher on winning the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and Maher receives the compliment with the serene satisfaction of a man who has spent thirty years wondering what was taking everyone so long. He smiles, Karl smiles, and the whole exchange proceeds as though there is nothing remotely strange about a network news anchor solemnly celebrating a comedian for accepting an award from a cultural institution Donald Trump spent the previous year stuffing with loyalists and slapping his own name across. The administration had made criticizing the president increasingly hazardous for working comedians, the building had only recently finished prying Trump’s name back off its facade, and now everyone was gathered to honor Maher’s bravery. That is the opening joke. Nobody tells it, nobody laughs at it, and the interview rolls forward as though the punchline is not sitting directly between them.

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Maher then recounts having JD Vance on his show and challenging the “I won or you cheated” logic that now passes for an election policy inside the Republican Party. Fair enough. But Maher cannot simply describe the exchange and move on. He has to turn it into another installment of his favorite long-running television drama, Why Won’t Democrats Appreciate Bill Maher Enough? Republicans, he tells Karl, are at least willing to come onto his show and “take their beating,” while Democrats stay away. In Maher’s telling, this is evidence of Republican courage and Democratic cowardice. A less self-enamored person might consider the possibility that Republicans keep appearing because his show has become one of the safest places in mainstream television for them to launder deranged ideas through a host who will challenge them for six minutes, praise himself for doing it, and then spend the remaining fifty-four explaining why the left made him sympathize with them.

That is the trick Maher keeps performing. He briefly pokes a Republican in the chest, waits for the applause, and then uses the credibility from that exchange to spend the rest of the segment prosecuting Democrats for crimes committed largely inside his own imagination. The interview takes a hard left turn — pun entirely intended — away from the people currently exercising power and into Maher’s preferred political habitat: a haunted house filled with unnamed socialists, college students and state legislators who become more powerful every time he needs an excuse to vote Republican.

Karl asks about the Democratic Party, and Maher immediately reaches for the same emergency glass he has been breaking for a decade. He says he lost fans because he refused to go along with some of the “crazy stuff” on the left, then volunteers people cheering for the Intifada as though he has been patiently waiting all morning to wedge that into the conversation. Karl tries to drag him back toward an actual person with actual power: DNI nominee Jay Clayton, who just had a confirmation hearing and could not bring himself to say whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election. This is the prospective head of American intelligence, unable to state a fact that a child could confirm before a YouTube ad finished playing. Maher understands exactly why. Republicans cannot say it, he explains, because Trump is watching. And he delivers this observation like he has spotted an amusing workplace quirk rather than a governing party operating under the emotional supervision of a seventy-nine-year-old man who treats factual accuracy as insubordination.

Maher can identify the authoritarian loyalty test perfectly. He just finds it considerably less alarming than whatever a sociology major yelled through a megaphone in 2021.

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Donald Trump is trying to make himself immortal — and that appears to be his top priority during his second term. He’s grown bored of the war he started in Iran and doesn’t care about the inflation he vowed to end on day one, but he never gets tired of slapping his name and face on everything he can.

The corruption is massive and ongoing. Palm Beach Inte…

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Going to the grocery store these days is a nightmare. Almost everything costs more than it did the week before, and now you also have to worry about whether explosive diarrhea-causing parasites are infecting the fr…

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New York Times journalist Zachary Small recently wrote an article with the headline, The Artist and Filmmaker Helping Trump Reshape Washington. The subject was Matthew Taylor, a conceptual artist and filmmaker who worked for my political media firm for over a decade. Back then, we knew him as “Yoshi.”

Now Taylor serves as a senior adviser at the Nationa…

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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 …

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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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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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Good neighbors make all the difference. They leave you in peace. They support you in need. They work with you to make the neighborhood bet…

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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 t…

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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.

Give to Lincoln Square

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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Now we have another question to ask when an ICE agent shoots someone in the streets, which has happened at least 23 times since last year. We already question whether the shooting was a valid use of deadly force. We also routinely ponder if the agents had a legitimate reason to even approach the individual. And now we must ask whether the ICE agent involved should have ever been hired.

The fatal shooting in Biddeford, Maine, last Monday morning of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national and father of a 3-year-old girl, has us demanding answers not only about what these agents do, but about who these agents really are.

When the rookie ICE agent who killed Guerrero told his ex-wife late last year that he was joining the agency, she thought he was having another mental health episode. She told reporters that her ex-husband was plagued by a history of psychiatric concerns that caused her to think that his claim about becoming a federal agent couldn’t be real. Only when videos of the shooting appeared on social media did she realize her ex wasn’t kidding. They were high school sweethearts, married in 2007 but divorced two years later when he was physically violent toward her while she was pregnant. Later, she claims, he threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child. Even after they broke up he was still abusive.

A second ex-wife recounted her own allegations of years of abuse against her and their daughters in hundreds of family court files obtained by the Associated Press. There were requests for temporary protection orders after the now ICE agent tackled his teenage daughter, smashed food in her hair, and in a separate incident dragged her around the house as she sobbed. In 2021, a judge granted a protection order on behalf of a teenage daughter. The agent’s oldest daughter said she came home from school one day and her dad told her he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head.

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The victims of Jeffrey Epstein have released a letter to the U.S. Senators who will cast the deciding votes on Todd Blanche’s nomination to serve as Donald Trump’s Attorney General.

I have excoriated Todd Blanche as unethical and downright evil for his leadership of the Trump-Epstein cover-up, and I stand by every word. But the letter these women have wr…

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