Next week, a diminished, retreating President Trump will meet President Xi of China for a scheduled summit that could prove pivotal to the demise of American power and the emboldening of an adversary poised to take Taiwan.

On Sunday, aboard Air Force One, Trump was asked about a Wall Street Journal report that China helped provide Iran satellite images of a base in Jordan prior to a July attack that killed three U.S. troops. Trump dismissed the startling intelligence by nonsensically equating China’s alleged responsibility for U.S. service member deaths with his irrelevant observation that America spies on China. He either purposely downplayed what should be an outrage, or his mental capacity precludes him from understanding the gravity of this moment.

“They basically do what we do,” he ​told reporters. “You know, when they say that China spies on us, I say you’re right, and we spy on them, too.” Trump added, as he almost always does, that he has a good ​relationship with Xi. “I think he’s behaved reasonably well, and we behave reasonably well.”

One thing China is most assuredly not doing right now, is behaving well. Whether it’s because of his unrequited love for world dictators or a nefarious strategy to destroy America’s global standing, Trump is not behaving well either. He’s acting like an American president hellbent on a hands-off policy toward an established adversary.

With Trump there is no bedrock principle to stand on when it comes to defending American values and free people who rely on us to stay that way. Rather, everything is transactional, including whether we care more about potential profit from weapons sales to Taiwan, or about hosting a White House summit with Xi. This week, Xi threatened to not show up at Trump’s summit if the U.S. went through with munitions sales to Taiwan.

Trump said he’s not worried about Xi cancelling the summit. But everything Trump does indicates he cares very much about the embarrassment factor of Xi skipping out on him. The Trump administration already paused a $14 billion weapons package earlier this year, ostensibly to preserve a trade truce and focus resources elsewhere. This dynamic reveals a dangerous asymmetry: China uses the summit as a threat to dictate American security policy, while Trump treats the meeting as an indispensable photo-op to showcase a diplomatic achievement ahead of the November midterm elections.

Trump’s comments were consistent with the administration’s recent efforts to downplay wide-ranging tensions between Washington and Beijing, despite U.S. frustration over Beijing’s close ties to Tehran. But Trump’s approach to Xi on this and many other issues reflects his ignorance of how China generally, and Xi specifically, interpret Trump’s apparent inability to give a damn about the deaths – 18 so far, of our troops. To put it plainly, the Chinese see Trump’s sleepwalking into a summit as submission, weakness, and pathetic performance begging to be exploited.

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Last week was probably among the most significant weeks in the history of AI. It began with a tweet.

You should read the entire thread. The gist is that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are building intelligence that could end humanity within the decade, and the men and women who lead those companies are not doing anything about it.

The tweet kicked off days of debate, doom posts, caveats, arguments, trolling, hot takes, and even more predictions. Some said it was a marketing ploy

Ian Bremmer replied to the thread with some skepticism over Coxon’s level of expertise:

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But then Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, chimed in.

The conversation broadened to experts, philosophers, mathematicians, and politicians. And then, at 10 a.m. on Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay titled, We Must Pace the Frontier.

Within a couple of hours, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, publicly agreed.

The events that led up to this week were wild and involved a swarm of over a thousand rogue AI agents coordinating attacks on private companies and doing things they knew were against the rules. It’s really an unbelievable story, and you should check it out.

No matter how we got here, so much of the digital ink spilled over the last week has been spent fine-tuning the odds of human extinction. Is it 10%? Or maybe it’s more like 3%. Some put it at a coin toss.

Ted Cruz said Coxon’s words were “scary as hell,” but that pausing progress on AI development was "an impossible endeavor, because you know who's not pausing? China … if there are going to be killer robots, I'd rather they be American killer robots."

In other words, if anybody is going to destroy the world, it ought to be America.

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There was a time when Pennsylvania extended John Fetterman the kind of extraordinary electoral grace no politician has a right to expect.

When he suffered a debilitating stroke on the campaign trail, voters did not penalize him for his mortality; they waited. They watched him navigate debates with a real-time closed-captioning screen and halting, laboriously pieced-together sentences, and they offered him an indulgence rarely seen in modern politics—because he insisted his cognitive capacity remained intact, and the electorate genuinely wanted to believe him. When, just two months into his Senate term, he checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for clinical depression, voters didn’t process his six-week inpatient stay as a political liability. They treated it as an act of courageous vulnerability, extending him a measure of human empathy that reflected far more on the decency of the public than on the man holding the seat.

Of course, that grace was heavily subsidized by the sheer absurdity of his opponent. Fetterman was running against Dr. Mehmet Oz—a daytime TV huckster who spent a decade leveraging the residual authority of Oprah’s brand to peddle raspberry ketones, garcinia cambogia, and miracle detox teas to vulnerable audiences. Oz was a carpetbagging infomercial salesman who possessed such a profound, almost sociological disconnect from the state he sought to represent that he famously wandered into a local supermarket, struggled to assemble a basic vegetable platter, and called it a “crudité.” Given the choice between a stroke-recovering, hoodie-clad former mayor from Braddock and a multi-millionaire celebrity doctor whose entire political persona was a poorly acted infomercial, Pennsylvania’s decision was less a blind endorsement of Fetterman and more a rational exercise in risk mitigation. Under those conditions, the vote made complete sense.

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Now, whether Fetterman should have cleared the Democratic primary in the first place is a structural grievance for a different essay. But once he was framed as the sole bulwark against a daytime television snake-oil salesman, voters did what the binary mechanics of American politics demanded. No one should second-guess that defensive ballot.

What makes Fetterman’s subsequent pivot so infuriating, however, is the complete bad faith with which he has repaid that public patience. Rather than governing with the humility of a man saved by the grace of his constituents, Fetterman has spent his tenure systematically alienating the base that sustained him. He has repeatedly crossed the aisle to vote with Senate Republicans on high-stakes legislation, made regular appearances on Fox News—even going so far as to suggest Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize—and, most recently, allowed the GOP to parade a video appearance of him at their midterm convention. Make no mistake: this is not pragmatic, big-tent bipartisanship. By lending his image to that convention stage, John Fetterman actively deployed his political capital to aid Republicans who are trying to maintain control of Congress.

The Wall Street Journal investigation shifted the conversation entirely—from legislative voting records to basic professional competence. Citing over a dozen former staffers and internal texts, the Journal exposed a routine of breathtaking neglect. Three paralyzed military veterans traveled all the way from rural Pennsylvania to Washington to advocate for basic healthcare legislation. Fetterman canceled, claimed he had a stomach bug, and then miraculously resurrected less than an hour later to amble into his office and do a live hit on Fox News.

Seriously—of all the reasons on planet Earth to ghost three disabled veterans who just spent hours traveling in wheelchairs to see you, he blew them off for Fox News? I mean, come on. If you tell me you canceled a constituent meeting because you got stuck in an elevator, or because your dog ate your pants, or because you had a sudden, overwhelming urge to binge-watch three consecutive seasons of The Great British Baking Show, fine. I’d at least respect the honesty of a weird personal crisis. But claiming you were too sick to stand in front of paralyzed veterans, only to be miraculously healed by the studio lights of a cable news green room sixty minutes later, is a level of cynical laziness that defies satire.

It didn’t stop there.

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David Ellison and Bari Weiss are desperately hoping that you and millions of others will tune into their controversial version of 60 Minutes when it returns this month.

Don’t do it.

A lot is riding on their “revamp” of 60 Minutes, especially the debut show on Sunday, September 13. It’s been a raucous year of unprecedented upheaval at CBS with only one clear winner so far: Donald Trump. But keeping Trump happy with questionable personnel moves and a right-coded content shift has chased the CBS audience away in record numbers.

Neither Ellison or Weiss can afford for that to happen with their version of 60 Minutes. Both need a narrative shift and most importantly, a ratings win.

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The Magic Number

Ellison and Weiss need 10 million viewers for the 60 Minutes debut episode to be considered a success, reports Oliver Darcy of Status. That’s the benchmark for success because it’s the number the fall 2025 60 Minutes debut show hit.

Darcy quoted one TV executive as saying, “It’s 10.03M or bust. If they fall short, they’re cooked.” Without those viewers, plus the social media clicks and web page views, it will be harder to justify their politically-motivated destruction of the legendary news magazine program.

Change the Channel

As a longtime broadcast journalist, I’m not in the habit of suggesting that people don’t watch (or read) the news. But I am doing that now.

I don’t want to play any part in boosting Weiss’s 60 Minutes scheme and I hope you don’t either. 60 Minutes, that long-respected pinnacle of broadcast journalism is dead, murdered because Trump hated the show. So even if the new version looks and sounds like the old show, remember that it’s now being run by people with a Trump-friendly political agenda and no respect for fact-based journalism.

This Sunday, when the late afternoon the Vikings and Packers NFL game ends, change the channel when 60 Minutes comes on. The episode will likely include a story of the L.A. Rams to hook football fans, but don’t fall for it. The New York Times reports there is also an interview with a pilot shot down over Iran. As interesting as that could be, don’t watch the show on streaming or YouTube and avoid viewing or clicking on the 60 Minutes segments or excerpts on TikTok, Instagram and beyond.

Don’t Hate Watch

It’s also important not to hate watch the broadcast to look for signs of Weiss’ editorial meddling or that it, like the rest of CBS News, is falling hard. Here’s the thing about audience ratings: they don’t measure your feelings about the show, they only help estimate the number of viewers who tuned in. Eyeballs are eyeballs and they all count towards the audience ratings that will get trumpeted by CBS if they are significant, and explained away if they fall below expectations.

Listen, I get that you might be curious about the role of Ross Douthat, the right-wing former NYT opinion guy with zero TV news experience, but turn it off. No one needs primetime Ross Douthat. I talked to long time TV news executive Willie Chriesman about that head-scratching 60 Minutes hire.

He said:

“It’s unclear to me at this point what his role will be. Is he expected to be the next Scott Pelley or the next Andy Rooney? Or something else entirely? Perhaps the desire is to bring more ideological balance—or at least the appearance of it—to the program. But, up until now, there have been no blatantly political opinion writers placed in the role of 60 Minutes correspondent.”

But don’t take the bait. Like me, I’m betting you don’t want to do anything that throws a lifeline to Weiss and Ellison’s project to replace journalism with a political narrative.

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The Trust Question

Much of this comes down to trust … or the lack of it, especially when you recall Weiss’ well established meddling in 60 Minutes content. How can you trust anything on the show now that you know about her prior efforts to change the content of news stories to include unverified information or to make them align with Trump talking points?

Three of the program’s top investigative reporters — Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Sharyn Alfonsi — have all made credible claims about Weiss trying to alter the content of their 60 Minutes pieces to make them more Trump-friendly. Of course, she ultimately fired all three, along with the top editors at 60 Minutes. And by all accounts, Weiss is now acting as the 60 Minutes boss. It’s not hard to imagine that Weiss’ editorial interference has only increased now that there are fewer journalists around to push back.

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The Ellison Factor

There’s also the Ellison factor. David Ellison is in the middle of a nasty legal fight over the $110 billion mega-merger with Warner Brothers Discovery that includes its marquee news network — CNN. (I’ve written about that here.)

Independent journalism on cable TV becomes a lot harder to do if Ellison succeeds. 60 Minutes’ September premier falls just two weeks before Ellison and his father, Larry, will have to pay a $7 million per day penalty for not closing that deal. They literally cannot afford for the new 60 Minutes to fail, adding yet another PR disaster to the ledger.

If we’ve learned anything from this past year, it’s that David Ellison and Bari Weiss can’t be trusted with mainstream journalism. Except for the successful courtship of Trump, Ellison’s ownership of CBS is a disaster. As for Weiss, her CBS news track record is also littered with examples of political ideology taking precedence over objective news coverage.

Recently, my social media feed included a lot of angry posts from Canadians saying, “Stop saying you are on our side and do something about it.” Well, turning off 60 Minutes and fighting for America’s longstanding and democracy-serving habit of fact-based journalism is something we all can do. It’s as easy as spending Sunday night reading a book, going for a walk, or taking the grandkids to dinner.

There are two Republican Parties right now, and only one of them is telling the truth.

The first is Mike Johnson’s Republican Party.

Johnson is traveling the country insisting that Republicans won’t just keep their hold on the House in November; they will, in fact, increase their majority. He is “absolutely convinced” they will defy history.

Sure, Mike.

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He says this with the confidence of a man insisting he’s fine while the paramedics drag him from the wreck with massive chest trauma and load him into the ambulance.

The other Republican Party is in the West Wing.

It is lawyering up, and despite its public contempt for the law, the Constitution, and the Democrats, it’s scared.

Washington is about to see a legal hiring frenzy.

Not campaign lawyers. Criminal defense attorneys. Impeachment lawyers. Executive-privilege lawyers, and the specialty legal-PR types you hire when the political radar looks like someone kicked over a bucket of paint and the storm alerts have moved from watch to warning to “Fly, you fools!”

The White House Counsel’s Office is now preparing political appointees for investigations. Ethics filings and financial disclosures are being scrubbed. Veterans of the first impeachment are reappearing in Trump’s orbit. The Trump-Blanche DOJ is constructing ludicrously broad theories of executive privilege. Trump just installed Will Scharf, one of his personal legal loyalists, as White House counsel.

The public message is victory.

The private behavior is rising fear. They know the Democratic House majority is coming, and they’re hearing one word in the wind: discovery.

And discovery scares the hell out of Donald Trump.

Not impeachment. Trump understands impeachment. He can turn impeachment into television: WITCH HUNT, HOAX, DERANGED DEMOCRATS, SEND MONEY.

Discovery is different.

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Editor’s Note: We initially shared this post with a select group of loyal donors and subscribers. However, following the remarkable reaction to our Campaign for an Informed America, we’re dropping the paywall. We want everyone to have the chance to support Lincoln Square’s mission to defend democracy.

I know your inbox is overflowing right now. Every morning, you open your phone to a barrage of frantic emails and texts from candidates, national committees, and political action committees, all asking for the same thing. It is overwhelming, exhausting, and often feels like throwing money into a void without ever knowing if it makes a difference.

Lincoln Square is different. And YOU are making a difference. When you support Lincoln Square, your donation isn’t lost in administrative overhead or paying expensive political consultants —it is a direct investment in defending democracy. Within hours, your support is put into immediate action, powering targeted, high-impact, highly-effective social media digital ad campaigns that reach and inform the exact voters in the exact districts and swing states who will decide the future of this country, on the platforms where they spend their time and form their opinions.

You make an immediate and verifiable difference. You see, Democracy depends on informed voters. When you give to Lincoln Square, you are taking an active role in informing and mobilizing voters.

There is no better investment than that.

Right now, we are just 54 days away from what is indisputably the most important election of our lifetimes. The very pillars of our democracy are under direct threat from an administration and a political system that stand to lose everything if Democrats win.

Why are they fighting so hard, and why are they using every weapon in their arsenal? Because Donald Trump and the Republican establishment know they will finally be held accountable. They face accountability for systematically dismantling democratic institutions, for rampant corruption and self-dealing, and for unconstitutional, illegal actions across the globe.

Invest $10: Immediately Make an Impact

To avoid that accountability, they have launched an all-out assault on the truth itself.

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and dark money megadonors are pouring tens of millions of dollars into a massive disinformation and voter suppression machine designed to censor, intimidate, suppress, and amplify outright lies:

• Censorship at the Highest Levels: Just today, we learned that Trump’s FCC is actively interfering in the upcoming election, censoring free speech by blocking popular Texas Senate candidate James Talarico from appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

• Digital Voter Suppression: Elon Musk is running a deceptive voter registration site designed not to empower citizens, but to trick voters, harvest their sensitive personal data, and sell or manipulate it.

• Voting Rights Under Attack: From Texas closing 73 polling places to national guard deployment threats at polling locations, to stricter voter ID mandates, restrictions on mail-in ballots, and aggressive voter roll purges—they are doing everything they can to make voting harder.

• Vicious Hate Campaigns: Dark money groups and the RNC are spending tens of millions on targeted ads and influencers to spread Islamophobic propaganda, using bigotry to prop up Republican neo-con Mike Rogers against popular progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

We cannot rely solely on the traditional Democratic Party machine to push the right messaging to the right people in time. The dark MAGA media apparatus has outperformed mainstream channels in the battle for American public opinion online for years.

But Lincoln Square has turned the tables.

Where MAGA used repetition, high-velocity graphics, and targeted amplification to shape narrative, we are using their own tactics against them—with one major difference: We bring the truth to counter their lies.

Donate to Directly Defend Democracy

When MAGA spends millions trying to paint popular progressives like Abdul El-Sayed as “too radical”, we counter immediately. We have created a library of over 50 eye-catching, viral graphics reminding Americans who the real radicals are by exposing the extreme policies and corruption of the Republican party. We are running aggressive counters exposing Elon Musk’s fake voter site, and we are directing voters straight to official, trusted state resources—such as the election portals in North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa—so citizens can verify their voter status safely.

Every single night, our award-winning digital team reviews the metrics. We optimize budgets on the fly, shifting funds directly into our highest-performing ads. Because our content is engineered to catch eyes and drive engagement, our ads achieve 10 times the average Click-Through Rate (CTR) of standard political campaigns.

Every $10 you invest allows us to place high-impact, fact-based graphics in front of 1,000 targeted voters in key battleground House districts. To date, our content has generated over 300 million impressions and reached over 120 million Americans.

To retake the House majority and defend our democracy, we are focusing all our power on critical swing districts where the election will be won or lost:

• North Carolina (e.g., NC-13 & NC-01): Delivering hyper-targeted messaging on protecting reproductive rights, preserving public education, and exposing local extremist agendas to suburban and rural swing voters.

• Texas (e.g., TX-15 & TX-34 & Senate Race): Exposing state-level polling place closures, combating digital voter suppression, and rallying Latino voters around economic accountability and decency, with graphics that contrast Talarico with the corrupt Paxton

• Ohio (e.g., OH-01 & OH-13 & Senate Race): Highlighting broken economic promises, corporate self-dealing, and the direct impact of Sherrod Brown’s policies on working-class families in contrast to how Republican policies have hurt Ohioans

• Iowa (e.g., IA-01 & IA-03 & Senate Race): Reaching agricultural and suburban communities with factual breakdowns of Republican voting records on healthcare and rural infrastructure.

• Maine (Senate Race): Reaching independent and rural voters with direct messaging on protecting democracy, healthcare access, corporate accountability, and tying Susan Collins to Trump and enabling the MAGA movement.

• Michigan (Senate Race): Reaching Republican counties in Michigan that have been bombarded with ads and influencers painting Democrat Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s as a “radical” with content that reminds them who the REAL radicals are, and how Republican Mike Rogers will continue the radical MAGA policies if elected

Thanks to dedicated supporters like you, we recently hired a full-time rapid response graphics producer. But to fully saturate social feeds over these next 54 days, we urgently need to bring on a rapid response video editor. Video content is crucial to reaching younger voters on TikTok and Instagram, while our graphics continue to dominate feeds across Facebook, Threads, and YouTube for older demographics.

We have set a clear, focused goal: We need to raise $175,000 between now and Election Day.

100% of your donation goes directly toward paid ad amplification in the districts that matter most. In the grand scheme of political spending, $175,000 is a modest sum—but in the hands of Lincoln Square’s digital advertisers, it is enough to completely saturate the feeds in flippable districts and shift the tide.

Donate $10 to Reach 1000 Voters

Democracy depends on informed voters. When everyday Americans know the facts—when they see the broken promises, the blatant corruption, and the real reasons behind their rising cost of living—they show up in record numbers. They reject fascism. They elect the next generation of democracy defenders who will hold power accountable and restore our nation.

You do not have to watch this election unfold from the sidelines, feeling helpless against dark money and media manipulation. You can take direct, measurable action right now.

If you have already given to us recently—thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Your early support built the foundation for everything we have accomplished so far. But defending democracy is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing effort that we must fight for, sustain, and defend forever. We cannot afford to slow down now when the opposition is pouring millions in every single hour.

We need you to keep giving and stand with us through these final weeks. Even a gift of $10 will help us reach 1,000 more voters in the districts that will decide control of our democracy.

Please, make an investment in Lincoln Square today. Help us flood the feed with the truth when America needs it most.

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With hope, gratitude, and determination,

Yes! I want to make an Impact right now

The Lincoln Square Team

How many of you have heard someone say, “Donald Trump is doing __________ (fill in the blank) and no one cares.” Or someone asks, “Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”

I’ve heard a thousand variations of these complaints. And it isn’t just from Americans. My wife responded to a post on Bluesky saying that we stand with our Canadian friends. What she heard back was, “That’s not good enough. Do something about it.”

It is hard to witness our country torn down, our treasury pillaged, our military purged and abused, our legal structures undermined, our economy sapped, neighbors pitted against neighbors, our scientific leadership squandered, our shrinking status in the world.

Many of us saw this coming when Donald Trump was returned to power by voters longing for change and by the money of corrupt oligarchs. Nearly two years later, the bitter complaints that he has not been stopped are understandable.

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But they are also unfair. We live in a democracy, flawed as it is. Ours is not to overthrow the government by force of arms but to oust its leaders at the ballot box. Meanwhile, with discipline and in accordance with our laws, millions of Americans have resisted the worst. We have protested. We have organized. We have signed up to run for office. We have litigated. We have built entirely new media organizations to sound the alarm. We have stood up to protect our neighbors.

And now, our time of choosing has come. Now, all eyes are on us.

Unlike the millions of Americans I just described, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have given up all pretense of fealty to democratic norms. They are engaged in massive and historic election manipulation. They launched and carried out an unprecedented midterm redistricting process across red states. In GOP-controlled states, they also executed massive voter roll purges. Texas closed nearly 100 polling places in Tarrant County, which they’re afraid they’re about to lose.

Trump instructed the United States Postal Service not to deliver mailed ballots unless the sender is on a list he controls. He’s threatened to send troops to polling places. He said he might order the military to seize ballots.

This is the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

And the world wants to know, are Americans up to the challenge. Are we still a people who will do what it takes to preserve our freedom.

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The Whole World Is Watching

China sees a sinking America and hope we fail to right our ship. Russia is watching, too. With his guy in our White House, Putin’s unprovoked military assault on Ukraine earned him a red-carpet summit and a trip back to the G20 Summit. Meanwhile, Trump tells Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy that he doesn’t have the cards and shouldn’t count on American military support.

Russia and China are both allied with Iran, sharing intelligence and arms with the nation we’ve been at war with for over six months. All three countries see America’s government as unable to stand up for itself and wonder whether that’s now true of Americans, as well.

Europe is watching. Allied nations that sent their soldiers to die for us after 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq want to know whether America has now become their adversary. They wonder what the American people will do when their President threatens to take Greenland by force, threatens their economies with punishing tariffs, and threatens their values, as Trump and J.D. Vance did when they essentially argued the continent was not white enough.

Africa wants to know if Americans are okay with their President calling them “shithole countries,” ending life-saving foreign aid, and making commercial ties contingent upon whether they will accept our shackled deportees.

Latin America wants to know if we will use our military to launch a new colonial era, where our army goes to war to enable American companies to take their natural resources, as Trump did in Venezuela.

Canada, our great neighbor for centuries, now finds the house next door sold to a mob boss and wonders whether Americans will do anything about it or just watch like it’s The Sopranos.

For 250 years, people yearning for freedom anywhere in the world looked to America. Now the whole world is watching to see if that light is extinguished.

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The Midterms Final Push

But here at home, there is no time to watch. There is no room for bystanders who say, “What can we do, they’re cheating?” Our democracy is not a spectator sport. It is not a social media meme. It is, as it ever was, a struggle for freedom.

We face a determined and powerful adversary. One cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government. One that will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections.

Ordinary Americans look at all the power arrayed against us and we say: is that all you’ve got?

That’s what we said in Chicago and Minneapolis last year when over-armed and under-trained ICE agents tried to intimidate us. Americans poured out of their houses and into the path of peril. We were willing to die for our freedom. Renee Good and Alex Pretti did.

This year, tens of millions of us will check our voter registrations and overcome their purges. We will cast our votes in ways to be sure they get counted. We will guard the counting process, and we will demand the winners be seated.

They have power. They have money. We have only ourselves. Bring it on.

I have to admit, I did not think Trumpapalooza could get any funnier after writing about it the first time.

The price of admission originally climbed as high as $20,000 before dropping all the way down to free. Not $20,000 to $10,000. Not $10,000 to 50 bucks and a complimentary Trump steak. All the way to zero. The Republican National Committee eventually started distributing general-admission tickets through a public lottery, turning its inaugural midterm convention into the political equivalent of a mattress store claiming it had been ordered by the court to liquidate everything before midnight. House members were originally expected to pay $25,000 for convention packages, but the party quietly waived the fee for its most vulnerable incumbents. Apparently nothing communicates overwhelming demand quite like removing the price tag and begging the people who work there to please come inside.

And I am not even claiming Trump suddenly lost all his supporters and nobody wanted to see him. Plenty of those people still love that man. But seriously, how many times can you listen to him complain that the 2020 election was stolen before the experience starts feeling less like a political rally and more like getting cornered by the same uncle at every family reunion? You know the uncle. He has been telling one story since 1987, still adds fifteen minutes to it every year, and somehow the fish gets bigger even though nobody was fishing. At this point, Trump’s supporters could deliver the speech themselves. The election was stolen, everyone is treating him unfairly, the polls are fake unless he likes them, and a large man approached him with tears in his eyes and called him “Sir.” Even people who enjoy the song eventually stop paying concert prices to hear the artist perform the same verse for the nine-hundredth time.

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As the program began in Dallas on September 9, the arena floor filled while large portions of the lower bowl remained vacant and the upper sections sat nearly empty, despite Trump’s declaration that the event was sold out. Then the “L” fell off the word “Dallas” on the podium. The podium still worked; the spelling simply resigned midway through the convention. It was the most honest departure of the evening. None of this prevented organizers from selling the gathering as a historic triumph, because modern Republican spectacle no longer requires demonstrable success. It requires a camera angle narrow enough to conceal the evidence and a press corps willing to debate whether the empty seats were expressing enthusiasm differently.

Speaking of expensive objects whose advertised value exceeds their demonstrated usefulness: the plane. I wrote in July about the four-hundred-million-dollar “palace in the sky” that Qatar handed Trump and that Trump handed straight back to American taxpayers in the form of a nine-figure retrofit bill. Trump argued that rejecting it would have been an act of stupidity. “I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane,’” he told reporters, treating the word free as though national-security retrofits, communications systems, maintenance, and taxpayer-funded modifications were being performed by three volunteers from Habitat for Humanity.

The comedy acquired another layer when security concerns during Trump’s trip to Turkey reportedly prompted officials to move him secretly from the Qatari aircraft onto another military plane. Trump had spent months presenting the jet as the bargain of the century, only for the government to use it as an airborne decoy when the threat became serious. It was the presidential equivalent of buying a gold-plated panic room and hiding in the neighbor’s garage. Talk about the magnificent free plane was cheap. Entrusting the president’s safety to it during an active threat apparently required a second opinion.

Then came September 9.

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On the evening of A…

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The incessant tide of outrages from team Trump makes it easy to forget how damaging each has been. So, between now and the midterms, I’m g…

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Another friend and colleague involved in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks died recently. He passed on July 4, 2026, while our nation marked its 250^th year of freedom.

My friend is free now, too. Free from the specific ailments that qualified him for monitoring and treatment in the World Trade Center Health Program because of his protracted and painstaking evidence recovery work. He’s not the first colleague of mine to perish from their patriotism on 9/11, and likely won’t be the last. Twenty-five years after nearly 3,000 people were killed across the three crash sites in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., the death toll climbs. More people have now died of 9/11 illnesses than were lost on the day of the attacks.

On September 11, 2001, over 400 first responders, including police, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs, ran into the twin towers of the WTC to rescue others, but didn’t save themselves.

In the 25 years since, almost ten times that number have died from 9/11-related illnesses including rare cancers and respiratory ailments linked to the toxic mix of jet fuel, metals and debris that poisoned not only those working the WTC site, but law enforcement investigators assigned to evidence analysis locations where debris was transported. The same holds true for first responders at each of the other crash sites.

I’ve written about this phenomenon on past 9/11 anniversaries, and I’m sharing it again because an entire generation born after the attacks needs to know that the sacrifice of patriots continues well beyond that Tuesday morning a quarter-century ago.

The most common cancer found in responders and civilians exposed to Ground Zero toxins is non-Melanoma skin cancer with 18,380 cases. Then comes prostate (13,170 cases), female breast (4,830), melanoma (3,860 cases) and lymphoma (2,560), according to Centers for Disease Control data released this summer. The cancer numbers are far from average — the rates have surged among the group compared to the general population, according to the World Trade Center Health Program.

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Last week, the U.N. admitted that global temperatures will climb at least 1.8º C above pre-industrial temperatures, even in the best-case scenario. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the target had been set at 1.5º. The Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme that issued the report said, “There are no good outcomes above 1.5C.”

I began this three-part climate series a few weeks ago, teeing off on the massive El Niño taking shape in the Pacific. Since the first piece, this El Niño has grown even more powerful.

Last week, when I was planning on writing about the increased likelihood of isolated but supersized climate-fueled catastrophes, an enormous glacier failed, causing a catastrophic avalanche and flash flood, as well as some of the most devastating videos and images of the year.

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I’d planned this week to talk about the bigger picture, how we’re walking through a gateway into a world no one has ever seen, and what that might mean for our politics, our societies, our civilizations. The U.N.’s report is yet another headline that slots right in.

I didn’t anticipate this series being able to draw from breaking news. That’s kinda the thing about climate change: no one really knows what to expect. But that’s a much bigger deal than just shrugging our shoulders and saying … I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Because knowing what to expect is the foundation of our civilization and all civilizations that have existed on Earth. It is how we plan our cities. Knowing what to expect is where architecture came from, and engineering, and science, and agriculture, and cities, and so on.

We don’t know what to expect is a fine thing to say if you’re going to a movie or trying a new restaurant. But if you’re trying to build a stable and productive society, that sentence is game over.

Let’s take a journey, and I’ll show you what I mean.

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If you know me, you know I do not like Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, or any of the other women orbiting Donald Trump like malfunctioning satellites waiting for him to glance upward and validate their existence. Half the time, I cannot tell them apart—not because they look or sound alike, but because each has spent years developing her own proprietary strain of awfulness until the strains merged into one toxic MAGA smoothie nobody should drink without first calling Poison Control. There is the puppy killer, the bimbo, the overt racist, and whichever one is currently on television auditioning to become Trump’s next discarded woman. Keeping track requires flash cards.

This week belongs to the overt racist: Laura Loomer, a woman who has somehow turned being banned, humiliated, rejected, and publicly disposable into a full-time profession. Most people eat dog food once and reconsider their life choices. Loomer ate it on camera and apparently thought, You know what this career needs? More racism.

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Loomer spent the better part of a weekend calling Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon—the Democratic Senate nominee who just knocked off Alex Vindman despite being outspent by roughly sixteen to one—a “ghetto black communist bitch.” Not once, because even Loomer knows one racist post will not keep the attention-economy feeding dish full all weekend. Across at least five posts on X, she recycled variations of the same slur, complained that Black women in Congress had “gotten away with way too much,” said Nixon “speaks Ebonics,” and threatened to “bark at you and tug your leash” before Nixon would understand her. She also dragged Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson into the tantrum, turning what began as an attack on one accomplished Black woman into a racist group project for which nobody had asked. Loomer was spraying slurs across the internet like a woman whose smoke detector had been chirping for six months and who had finally decided the battery was not the problem.

Nixon handled her exactly as she deserved to be handled: without fear, confusion, or a single ounce of deference. This is a woman who had just defeated a nationally known opponent with sixteen times her money, so an unemployed racist internet goblin with a ring light was not about to ruin her weekend. Nixon reminded Loomer that it is “Representative Angie Nixon,” reminded everyone that Loomer once ate dog food on camera, and then reached for Queen Latifah: “Who you calling a bitch?” It was disciplined, funny, and devastating—the rhetorical equivalent of swatting a mosquito without interrupting the conversation. Nixon looked like a United States Senate nominee. Loomer looked like someone furiously refreshing her notifications because racial abuse is the only product she has ever successfully brought to market.

Loomer’s defense, to the extent that the word defense applies to a racist digging faster, was that she does not call every Black woman a slur—only the “ghetto” ones who supposedly earn it. What a relief. Apparently Loomer operates a rigorous racial-insult review board consisting of Laura Loomer, Laura Loomer’s phone, and whatever demon has been assigned to keep her trending. This is where Candace Owens enters the story to explain exactly how much Loomer’s distinction is worth. In April, Loomer called Owens—Republican royalty and a woman who built an entire career assuring white conservatives that she was one of the acceptable ones—a “nappy-headed Black bitch” and a “resentful ghetto Black bitch,” all while insisting she was not racist. Owens spent years trying to purchase immunity from this kind of attack and discovered that the MAGA warranty does not cover Blackness.

Trust me, I am no fan of Candace Owens, and I am not particularly impressed that she finally started backing away from MAGA after spending years helping build the machinery that eventually turned on her. But my opinion of Owens has nothing to do with whether I defend her against a racist attack. Black women do not have to be politically agreeable, personally likable, or ideologically redeemed before racism against them counts as racism. And Loomer does not get to divide Black women into the respectable ones she will tolerate and the “ghetto” ones she believes she has permission to degrade.

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About 30 years ago, I saw Gloria Steinem speak to a standing-only crowd at the University of Iowa. Afterward, she stayed to talk with a long line of students.

I told her — with the total sincerity of someone who hadn’t lived very much at that point — that she’d been a huge inspiration to my life. She smiled and said something to the effect that this is how we make change in the world: by passing lessons to the next generation, who carry them forward as they keep fighting to make things better. Then she signed my copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. I still have it in my bedroom.

I’ve been thinking about that evening a lot since Steinem died last week at 92, and about where we actually stand on basic rights for women in this country. Steinem founded Ms. Magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She spent decades in political organizing that resulted in important wins for women — about what we were legally and culturally allowed to be. She liked to say “trees grow from the bottom,” meaning real change comes from communities, not from waiting on leaders to hand it down. That’s exactly what she was doing on my campus that day, whether she thought of it that way or not: watering a tree.

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But Steinem lived long enough to see a furious backlash to everything she helped build. Gen Z women like my daughter now have fewer constitutional rights than I had at their age, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. And we’ve watched a violent strain of misogyny seep from the internet’s fringes into the mainstream.

Nothing about that backlash should diminish what second-wave feminists won. Women today still have far more rights than we did before the 1960s. But the misogyny surging right now is genuinely different from what came before it. The old arguments against women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries were steeped in the idea that women were too pure and delicate to be sullied by politics. Women were put on a pedestal.

The online-incubated misogyny gaining ground today argues the opposite: women are inferior and that’s why they’re not fully entitled to the rights men have. Some influencers, like white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, have declared that women aren’t even entitled to consent over what happens to our own bodies. After Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to Donald Trump, Fuentes posted on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” That post alone netted more than 35 million views.

Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented this shift in real time after the 2024 election, when mentions of “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” spiked more than 4,600% on X within 24 hours of Harris’ loss. Posts calling to repeal the 19th Amendment jumped 663% in a week.

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On Wajahat Ali’s The Left Hook podcast, Rula Jebreal spent several minutes building toward Hakeem Jeffries’ name. “Hakeem” is Arabic for “healer,” she explained, before announcing, “He’s not a healer, he’s a divider.” Then came the real indictment: “He is a bought-and-paid-by-AIPAC monkey,” followed by the prophylactic phrase people deploy when they know the next words require an attorney: “With all due respect—and I don’t mean it in a racist way.”

Unfortunately, “with all due respect” is not linguistic Clorox. It cannot bleach the racism out of what follows. Ali sat beside her nodding, never interrupting or performing the most basic duty of a host whose guest had just called the Black leader of the House Democratic caucus both a monkey and an errand boy. Within hours, the Congressional Black Caucus dispensed with the euphemisms: “To be clear, there isn’t a non-racist way to call Leader Jeffries—a Black man—a ‘monkey’ or ‘errand boy.’” Rep. Ritchie Torres was more concise: “Calling a Black man a ‘monkey’ is racist. Full stop.”

To her credit, Jebreal later apologized “with her full chest,” appearing on Joy Reid’s show to accept “full responsibility for a big mistake” and concede that there was “no excuse or justification” for using the word “monkey.” I believe that apology was sincere. It was also incomplete. She apologized for “monkey,” but unless I missed an entirely different mea culpa, she never apologized for calling Jeffries an “errand boy.”

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That omission matters because the second insult was not merely debris scattered by the first. It carried its own racial meaning. Jebreal described growing up in occupied East Jerusalem with portraits of American civil-rights leaders displayed throughout her community, invoking the genuine historical solidarity between Afro-Palestinian and African American struggles. That history matters, but solidarity does not confer cultural omniscience. Proximity to the Black American experience is not the same as inhabiting it, and shared struggle does not erase the distinct vocabulary through which Black Americans—particularly Black men exercising authority—have been infantilized, subordinated, and denied agency. That is why this should be treated as a teachable moment, not merely another ritual of outrage, apology, and internet amnesia.

Calling a Black man a monkey is a racial slur regardless of the speaker’s race, ethnicity, nationality, or politics. Identity does not function as a semantic permission slip. But “errand boy” bothered me even more precisely because it is less spectacular. “Monkey” announces its racism with a marching band; “errand boy” slips through the side entrance wearing business casual. It reduces a Black man who leads one chamber’s entire Democratic caucus to a servant carrying instructions for more powerful people. That is racialized infantilization: the denial that a Black leader possesses independent judgment, political agency, or authority earned in his own right. Jeffries did not become House minority leader because AIPAC sent him out to pick up the dry cleaning. Criticize his donors, his votes, his strategy, or his leadership—every one of those subjects is fair game. But calling him an “errand boy” resurrects an old American hierarchy in which Black men may occupy impressive offices while still being described as somebody else’s help. Jebreal apologized for the word everyone immediately recognized as racist. She still owes an apology for the one too many people were willing to pretend was merely political criticism.

None of this happened in a vacuum. It had already been a revolting week for anti-Black political rhetoric before Jebreal opened her mouth, beginning with Laura Loomer’s attacks on Black women and the familiar Republican chorus suddenly developing a nationwide hearing problem. My disagreements with Hakeem Jeffries are no secret, but they are irrelevant to whether he should be discussed as a human being. He is a grown man and a powerful politician; he can withstand criticism of his record, donors, strategy, and leadership. He is also a Binghamton graduate with honors, holds a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown, graduated magna cum laude from NYU Law, served on its Law Review, clerked for a federal judge, practiced law, served six years in the New York State Assembly, and was unanimously elected to lead House Democrats. Educational credentials do not place anyone beyond criticism, but that résumé does make “errand boy” an especially ridiculous description. Jeffries did not leave NYU Law, wander into AIPAC headquarters looking for the mailroom, and accidentally emerge as the first Black congressional party leader in American history.

What should not be normalized is the use of political disagreement as a permission slip for racial degradation. Too many socialists have treated their hostility toward Jeffries as moral licensing—the social-psychological process through which allegiance to a supposedly righteous cause becomes an excuse to stop scrutinizing one’s own conduct. Once that exemption is granted, language that would be condemned instantly coming from MAGA gets laundered as “criticism” when it comes from the left. Racism, apparently, is supposed to stop being racism once it acquires universal health care and a tote bag.

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We’ll never need to wonder whether the Declaration of Independence – or Project 2025, for that matter – had impact. But what about Occupy Wall Street, the Free Staters, Anonymous, and countle…

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Throughout history, physicians have played a lesser-known but unique role in confronting authoritarianism. Our profession asks us to observe carefully, follow evidence, protect vulnerable people, and speak the truth even when doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular. Those responsibilities do not disappear when political power …

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We have officially entered a new era of stupid in this country. To be fair, we’ve been lurching in this direction for a while. But watching Donald Trump giddily name one of our five Great Lakes last week felt like an escalation even by his standards.

Lake Ontario is now “Lake America,” according to an executive order Trump signed on Aug. 27 (and it’s now emblazoned on Trump Store hats that will cost you a cool $55). Kids across the nation used to remember “HOMES” as the pneumonic device for the lakes — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. As Edwin Eisendrath pointed out on our show this week, now they’ll have to remember “SHAME” (something our current president lacks). Trump’s stunt also isn’t even popular, with Americans opposing the name change by a 4-to-1 margin (it even loses by 10 points with Republicans).

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This isn’t Trump’s first foray into imbecilic geography. Everyone remembers the Sharpie from his first term, when he doctored a hurricane map because he couldn’t admit he’d gotten the storm’s path wrong. That was embarrassing. But in his second term, he’s unilaterally renaming bodies of water we’ve shared with our allies for centuries. Last year, he rechristened the Gulf of Mexico because he’s mad at our neighbors to the south over immigration. Now he’s deluded himself that his “Lake America” E.O. will stick it to Canada over his failed trade war (which also is extremely unpopular in polling).

And Trump expects the rest of us to just go along with it.

And here’s the thing — we are going along with it. Or at least our billionaire corporate masters are. Google Maps complied within days, switching the label to “Lake America” for U.S. users, the same capitulation it made last year when Trump ordered the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America. Apple Maps held out for longer, but wilted in the face of intense lobbying from the administration, even though a source told Status that “not a soul” agrees with the decision.

Meanwhile, MapQuest (there’s a blast from the past) put out perhaps the most dignified corporate statement of the year: “We’re not changing the name of Lake Ontario. Name it whatever you want at your leisure.”

But the fact that the most powerful tech companies on Earth continue to indulge Trump’s temper tantrum shows that corporate America has decided that autocratic appeasement is just the cost of doing business now.

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I’ve described this mechanism in pieces for years without branding it properly.

Let me fix that. It’s the Ratchet, and it is one of the most reliable ways to understand how Trump has broken American politics. It is running right now on his plan to steal the 2026 election, and we are not early in the process.

We are at or near the last click.

You know the pattern by now:

Trump says something monstrous, racist, blisteringly stupid, authoritarian, corrupt, or simply deranged. Normal Americans react with shock, because they are normal.

Then the machinery engages first with either explicit or quiet White House talking points, then escalates to social media, then to Fox and the rest of the MAGA Mediaverse.

Click. Haha, libs. He triggered you again. It was a joke.

Click. That’s just Trump being Trump. Delivered fondly, the way you’d describe an uncle who pockets the silverware or fondles the maid.

Click. Fine, he was joking, but the underlying issue is deadly serious.

Click. Surely we can at least talk about it. Why won’t you talk about it? Why won’t the Democrats address this? What are they hiding?

Click. It becomes real when a bill from some hairsprayed MAGA backbencher named Ed Bob Billy Joe Jackhole from Crotchitch, Alabama looks up from his Grindr app and puts it on the floor for a vote. Trump tweets his approval and delight. If it’s too blatantly illegal and unconstitutional even for the Stephen Miller types, or moving too slowly for Trump’s taste, we get an executive order from the Resolute Desk, and the punchline becomes federal policy.

One day it’s a joke, the next day it’s the SAVE Act. (Which is still a joke in itself.)

Every click of the Trump ratchet is small, and individually deniable, but the pawl never lets it slip backward. It’s also a psychological trick for Trump’s shrinking base; nobody ever has to defend the finished product because they’re having such transgressive fun with the process.

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Ever since the corporate owners of CBS first entertained the shocking idea of paying off Donald Trump to make his flimsy “news distortion” 60 Minutes lawsuit go away, we’ve been watching the once great broadcast ne…

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