This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Hi readers, happy Friday! What a week, right? 

My colleague Caitlin Dewey has spent the last two days unpacking some of the midterm results and their implications for you, and there will be lots more of that to come. But before we head into the weekend, I’m going to take a quick second to look ahead — to 2028. 

Specifically, to the future of the Republican Party, which just found itself on the wrong end of what may be the biggest electoral landslide since 1976. It’s a comprehensive, crushing repudiation — and one that has already cast the future of MAGA’s heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance, into doubt. 

Vance has long looked like the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2028, with the clearest claim to President Donald Trump’s legacy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also considered a potential 2028 candidate, has previously said he would defer to Vance were Vance to run. 

But that may be changing. The downside to being so closely linked to the president, after all, is that it’s hard to run very far when the president gets hit with Electoral Ragnarok. Vance didn’t help his case on Wednesday, with a strange and lengthy post on the social media site X blaming the Iran war for his party’s electoral woes. 

Also implicated in questions about Vance and the 2028 primary is a bigger question about the future of the MAGA movement. Specifically: Is MAGA dead?

No more MAGA? No, more MAGA! 

If you ask conservative writer and Vance ally Rod Dreher — and we did! — the answer is easy: Yes, after a historic electoral thrashing, MAGA as a political movement is dead. And it is possible that, as a vote-getting enterprise, MAGA is at the end of the road. But the Trump White House has no plans to let up on the MAGA agenda. 

We got our clearest post-midterms sign of that fact on Friday afternoon, in the form of one Stephen Miller. Trump, in a post to Truth Social, announced that Miller would take over as White House chief of staff starting Monday, replacing current chief of staff Susie Wiles. 

Miller’s ascension is a foreboding sign: Through one and a half Trump terms, he’s been the driving force behind many of Trump’s cruelest and least popular policies — some of the same policies, particularly around immigration, that helped Republicans lose the midterms in a blowout. 

Trump’s decision to promote Miller, with just a little over two years left in the White House, means that we can expect the administration to double down on those same policies, with predictably unpopular results. 

That all spells more bad news for Vance, already limping out of the midterms after tying himself tightly to failed Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was behind one of the ugliest attack ads in recent political memory. 

And it may embolden other potential contenders, like Rubio (who is reportedly eyeing an exit from the administration in an attempt to save face) and even outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who Dreher described to Vox as “the only national Republican politician not tainted by Trumpism.” (Mostly because he got flattened by Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, but never mind that now.)

One link for later

➨ Here’s how to protect your family from convincing AI scams. “As AI gets better and cheaper,” my colleague Adam Clark Estes writes, “we’re all becoming easier targets” — even if you think of yourself as skeptical, tech-savvy, and hard to fool. But there are some straightforward steps you can take to keep yourself and your family safe, including setting up a verification system to confirm when you’re actually talking to a family member and not an eerily accurate AI replica of their voice.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Sweden is really, really good at assembling modular homes out of prebuilt components? (Think Ikea, but for the whole house and not just a bed frame.) Unfortunately, Marina Bolotnikova reports, US building and zoning codes stand in the way of doing the same thing here.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the title of Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Ricky Martin’s biggest hit? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you which planet takes about 165 Earth years to orbit around the sun. That would be Neptune, where one year is a little more than 60,000 days. 

As various factions try to make the case about what won the midterms — moderation or progressivism, populism or the establishment — perhaps the easiest and most universal way to describe 2026 was as a contest between decency and cruelty.

For nearly a decade, bullying, scape-goating, and just plain meanness have been the dominant tone of Republican politics. From Donald Trump relentlessly picking on minority groups in the 2016 campaign, through family separations in 2018 — all while demeaning political rivals and journalists and anyone who criticized him — a generation of Republican politicians have seen the president reach new levels of nastiness in politics and be rewarded for it. Other candidates picked up on it, often attempting their own imitations: Vice President JD Vance mocked “childless cat ladies” in 2021, while other Republicans joked about political violence against Democrats or critics, their physical appearances, or their ethnicities.

And yet somehow, in the 2026 midterm campaigns, the MAGA right went even harder on cruelty up and down the ballot. Pivotal campaign moments, particularly in the closing weeks of the cycle, weren’t just about bare-knuckle politics and nasty campaigning, but actually punching down at the weak and vulnerable. Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy trotted out his opponent’s estranged mother to suggest the candidate was lying about childhood abuse. Trump and GOP Sen. Tim Scott used a transphobic slur to to mock a candidate while campaigning for Darline Graham. Michigan GOP senatorial candidate Mike Rogers fanned the flames of Islamophobia, accusing his opponent of “pledging” his support to Islamist extremism, something other Republicans echoed. And in Texas, a statewide candidate doubled down on racist anti-Indian-American tweets. 

In 2018, the writer Adam Serwer coined the phrase, and concept, that “the cruelty is the point” — that the easiest way to understand the MAGA movement was as a desire to inflict pain and suffering on marginalized people, specific minorities, and political opponents through political power. Cruelty wasn’t incidental; it was intentional. 

For Republican candidates and campaigners this cycle, cruelty became almost a central campaign tactic. Many of them struggled to mount a serious policy case, and found themselves stuck with a historically unpopular president as party leader, so they fell back on the tried-and-true maneuver of beating up on the weak, hoping it would work as well as it seemed to throughout the Trump era.

Yet on Tuesday night, voters delivered a verdict: They were fed up with that cruelty in both the administration and Republican campaigns. Instead, decency — or, at least, voters’ impression of it — won.

Even some conservatives, as they try to sort through the wreckage and blame game post-Election Day, made that case. The Christian broadcaster Erick Erickson noted that in addition to the Iran war and affordability crisis, Republicans lost because of “the impression of cruelty. The overly aggressive deportations. The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic. The arrogance.”

And, of course, many Democrats agreed, too. 

“The American people were loud and clear [Tuesday] night that they want to like their neighbor, that their neighbor is not the enemy from within, and even if they disagree politically with their neighbor, they want them to do well and they want their kids to do very well,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who led the party’s efforts to elect Democratic governors around the country, told me. “People [Tuesday] night showed us that they want decency in the White House and they want decency in Congress.”

All the Republicans above lost their races. The set of people who won — and especially those who flipped seats from red to blue – noticeably embraced a more compassionate tone of politics.

Republicans centered cruelty; Democratic candidates chose decency and won

It’s hard to summarize just how nasty the 2026 GOP campaign strategy was. Hate, racism, and xenophobia were the go-to tools used on the right this cycle — on top of a year of hardline immigration policies and spending cuts pushed by the Trump administration. And it all came up short, Joe Walsh, the former GOP member of Congress and current anti-Trump activist, told me.

“Republicans tried to win again this year by being as cruel and fearful and divisive as they could. That’s generally worked in the past, but there were extenuating circumstances this year,” Walsh said. “People [on the trail] would tell me, ‘This is not the kind of country we are. This is not who we are.’” They were referring, he said, to masked ICE agents, the targeting of Black and brown people, and talk of white Christian nationalism. 

“There was something more profound at stake here,” Walsh continued. “And I think it was the American people recoiling against the cruelty they’ve seen.”

It was all a sharp contrast to the way Democrats talked and the policies they supported on the trail. Take Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico’s words in his Tuesday night victory speech:

We didn’t win by alienating our neighbors, or by shaming our neighbors, or by ridiculing our neighbors. We embodied a new kind of politics. A politics rooted in a deep love — for our state, for our country, and for all of our neighbors. My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe…love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied. Love requires that we look evil in the eye and not blink.

Beshear told me that beyond concerns about gas prices, the Iran war, and tariffs, voters’ frustrations reflected a rejection of the fear and divisiveness that Trump embodies. He said he saw this rejection of cruelty while stumping for candidates in red states, and he saw the opposite coming from the Democratic candidates who won.

“Everywhere I traveled, our gubernatorial candidates were talking about being a good neighbor,” he said. “[Iowa Gov.-elect] Rob Sand talked about it at every one of his town halls, and you could see people nodding about it. [Ohio Gov.-elect] Amy Acton talked about it in each of her speeches. People are craving decency, especially given the cruelty that this president governs with.”

This contrast was apparent in some data and focus group research, too. In polling conducted by The Argument before the election, Democrats had a 20-point advantage when voters were asked which party they thought was more “compassionate,” a 12-point lead when they were asked which party “cared” for voters, and a 10-point lead when they were asked which party was more moderate.

“The party of compassion won,” the writer Jerusalem Demsas wrote for The Argument. Republicans just couldn’t shake the association, their polling showed, with “words like ‘bold,’ “strong,’ and ‘extreme.’”

And in Ohio, perhaps the most obvious example of cruelty becoming the closing message of a Republican campaign, focus groups conducted by the political strategist Sarah Longwell for The Bulwark before the election showed how quickly the infamous ad became associated with the Republican brand. Longwell wrote about the session:

The first thing to note is that everyone in the group had heard about Ramaswamy’s ad already. The second thing to note is that several of the Ramaswamy-curious voters in the group said it was pushing them toward either supporting a third-party candidate or sitting out the election altogether. The fact that everyone had heard of or seen the ad and the universal revulsion to it suggest that this could be an all-time backfire for Ramaswamy — and it raises the possibility that Trump and Vance will also suffer politically for rushing to defend it.

In follow-up focus group conversations on Wednesday, the day after the election, voters told Longwell they wanted a hard break from this era of politics.

This rejection of cruelty was also most evident in backlash to the Trump administration’s immigration policies — in places that saw ICE raids or which saw stricter enforcement in heavily Hispanic areas of Florida, Kansas, and Texas, voters swung hard against the GOP.

“These are voters who were very supportive of securing the border, very supportive of Border Patrol, which is a huge employer down there,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told me. “But the cruelty of what ICE was doing, tearing apart families and communities was just a bridge too far. That’s in part why you saw a big backlash in the Hispanic community because there’s a huge element of racial profiling with it.”

In contrast, the most successful candidates this week were not the ones that tried to match Republicans by being more combative or extreme. They were those who embraced themes of decency and compassion. They seemed to offer an antidote, Smith said.

“There’s sometimes this idea, a theory in the Democratic Party, that to beat Trump, you need to be Trump,” Smith said. “And so you see Democrats going out on Twitter and calling Republicans cucks and engaging in the same sort of race to the bottom of name-calling that Trump and the Republicans do. But if you look at the top Democratic over-performers, people like [Sen.-elect] Adam Hamilton in Kansas, like Rob Sand in Iowa, like James Talarico in Texas, these were people who were going out and preaching love.” Smith pointed to a Talarico interview where he called his opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a “child of God.”

“Yes, Americans were fed up with corruption, et cetera, but you can’t watch those candidates and say the defining feature of these campaigns was anger.”

Michael Wear, Center for Christianity and Public Life who once advised the Obama administration on faith outreach

A kind of broad-based compassion was specifically a hallmark of some more explicitly religious campaigns, said Michael Wear, the head of the Center for Christianity and Public Life who once advised the Obama administration on faith outreach. He pointed to Talarico in Texas, and Hamilton, a megachurch pastor poised to become Kansas’s first Democratic senator in nearly a century.

To Wear, that should offer some lessons for other Democrats as they think about preserving and expanding the new national coalition they built as they move into the 2028 election cycle.

“Yes, Americans were fed up with corruption, et cetera, but you can’t watch those candidates and say the defining feature of these campaigns was anger,” Wear said. 

And that’s also how they talked about voters themselves, Smith said: trying to expand the tent by welcoming Republicans or even former Trump supporters who were fed up with this style of politics.

“They explicitly asked for their vote and said that, ‘We don’t judge you. I’m not going to judge you for how you voted in the past. And you’re welcome in my tent, you’re welcome in my coalition,’” Smith said. “That’s a different tone than you hear from a lot of Democrats.”

Smith said it was a risk — the most liberal of the Democratic base might enjoy “the sick warfare,” she said, “but most other people are really exhausted by it. … They’re really exhausted by just seeing neighbors turn against neighbors and find this approach of turning the temperature down refreshing.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: It’s a whole new world for President Donald Trump. 

What’s happening? So far, surprisingly little: As we wrote yesterday, Trump has largely stayed quiet since his shellacking in Tuesday’s midterms (ballroom tour aside), and that continued on Thursday. 

With the days counting down until Democrats take control of Congress, though, there are signs that things could begin to shift in his administration. 

What could happen? A Cabinet shakeup, whether that means firings, resignations, or something in between. It’s not unusual after any midterm, and especially not after a loss this seismic (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stepped down the day after the 2006 midterms amid voter anger about Iraq). 

Whatever happens, though, might need to happen fairly soon: It’s always possible that Trump could skate by with acting secretaries (he’s previously said he’s a fan), but if he wants to get replacements confirmed, he’ll likely need to do it in the final two months of the current Republican Senate majority. 

Who’s eyeing the exits? Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, potentially — but for very different reasons. 

In Rubio’s case, it would give him a chance to distance himself from a radioactively unpopular presidency ahead of a potential 2028 presidential run — particularly as Vice President JD Vance is stuck writing social media posts about why the Iran war was maybe a bad idea. 

Hegseth, meanwhile, is one of the public faces of the war. Trump has — for now — denied any designs on replacing Hegseth, but the secretary faces the prospect of impeachment as soon as next week. He’s also reportedly interested in being appointed to a soon-to-be-vacant US Senate seat for Tennessee, which would provide him a convenient escape (though based on Tuesday’s results, he might be an underdog to win an election anywhere in America). 

What’s the big picture? We don’t yet know anything for sure about what’s next, but the chatter is reflective of the new world Trump and his administration are facing: dismally unpopular, deprived of easy confirmation hearings and cover from Republicans in Congress, and facing an aggressive oversight agenda.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, here’s a very cool story about an atmospheric phenomenon I’d never heard of before — transient luminous events, a type of lightning occurring in the upper atmosphere. You can read all about them — and see them! — here with a gift link. 

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

As Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, voting experts are watching to see how the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to assert more federal control over elections will play out.

Since President Donald Trump retook the White House, his administration has tried to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls and to restrict mail-in voting. The Department of Homeland Security has used its resources to identify and prosecute noncitizen voters, an effort that has unfolded alongside the agency’s massive crackdown on immigrants.

The president has justified these steps by claiming, without evidence, that American elections are beset by fraud and that illegal voting is tipping the scales in favor of Democrats.

Courts have thwarted most of the administration’s plans to date, but Trump and his top deputies have kept up the pressure. Most recently, they’ve threatened to prosecute election officials who don’t reject ballots from people that the federal government has identified as likely noncitizens.

The administration hasn’t explicitly ruled out sending federal agents to the polls or seizing ballots or voting machines.

Election experts say the cumulative effect has been to ramp up anxiety about the midterms and to erode voters’ trust in the system.

“The administration has been creating a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, a lot of doubt,” said Ben Hovland, whom Trump fired as a commissioner for the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission earlier this year. He said he worries that this will make voters “sit it out” and “throw their hands up.”

In an emailed response to questions, a DHS spokesperson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” adding that the agency would only arrest people at the polls to address a safety threat as part of “intelligence-driven targeted enforcement.”

The DHS and the Justice Department “are laser focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens,” the spokesperson added. “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”

Before and on Election Day, it’s typical for the major political parties to mount poll-watching operations, but both Democrats and Republicans say they’ve expanded these activities in this pressurized midterm.

Republicans will focus on issues such as voter eligibility and voter-roll accuracy, according to Ally Triolo, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity communications director. Democrats will concentrate on voter intimidation and other hurdles to voting, Angelo Fernández Hernández, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson, said.

Here are five issues that voting rights experts say they’re watching as this year’s election unfolds:

1. Will There Be Federal Interference?

An incident in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle, illustrates the widespread anxiety about law enforcement at the polls.

Mark Earley, the county’s supervisor of elections, told ProPublica he was “furious” when two marked U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicles parked outside the county’s busiest early voting location last month, after he’d been repeatedly reassured by the administration that agents would not do this.

He reported the sighting to the FBI, then learned that the agents, who were headed out of state, had just stopped by to try to vote themselves. The episode generated a flurry of news coverage.

“Given the negative media coverage regarding federal agents at the polls, it shows pretty bad judgment that they showed up in their official vehicles,” Earley said.

It’s against the law for federal law enforcement to be near polling places.

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Nick Brown, Washington’s attorney general, leads a group of Democratic state officials and voting rights advocates who have been planning how to respond if, indeed, there is real federal interference. The group has “war-gamed” how to react if government agents attempt to commandeer voting equipment or ballots.

“We’ve seen the tension and chaos that’s in the air,” Brown said. He called the federal government “the biggest challenge to smooth elections right now, which is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

A DOJ spokesperson said “the best preparation for any election official is following federal law.”

It’s routine for DOJ monitors to watch over polling places, and the agency has assured states that, in the midterms, its observers will follow the law and not interfere with voting or election administration. Still, state officials remain concerned. During Wyoming’s primary election, poll workers said they felt uneasy when DOJ monitors asked about their training and to inspect voting systems. The state’s governor criticized these actions as “a bit aggressive” and “irregular.”

2. What Effect Will Noncitizen Voter Challenges Have?

The Trump administration’s multipronged effort targeting alleged noncitizen voters has already led to eligible voters being improperly removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups fear this will block some U.S. citizens from being able to vote when they show up on Tuesday.

Federal officials have made clear they plan to go after anyone they think is committing voter fraud.

On the first day of early voting in Texas, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, posted a YouTube video announcing his intentions. “If you violate federal election law,” he warned, “I will hunt you down and prosecute you.”

This threat came days after the DOJ sued California, seeking to block the state from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters it claims are “likely” noncitizens. The administration had obtained the state’s public voter rolls, which the DHS had blended with its own immigration information and third-party data.

In a court filing, California called the claim that there are 20,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls “specious.” Los Angeles County analyzed a sampling of the likely noncitizen voters that the federal government claimed were registered there. Many weren’t registered in the county or had never voted, the analysis showed. Some said on their voter registration forms that they were born in the United States.

Asked about the case, the DOJ told ProPublica, “Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and the Department has a duty to enforce it.”

A federal judge has rejected the DOJ’s motion for an emergency order that would have barred California from counting the 20,000 voters’ ballots. (A federal appeals panel later backed that decision.) On Thursday, the administration sent grand jury subpoenas to California officials demanding records about their response to allegations of noncitizens on the state’s rolls. Late Friday, a federal judge issued a restraining order blocking the DOJ’s demands, calling them an “intimidation plan” that would interfere with legal voting.

Last week, the DOJ wrote a letter threatening to sue Washington state if officials there refused to review a list of 400 voters it believes to be noncitizens within 24 hours. U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters late last month that the department was considering additional actions, saying there were “a number of states that we’re looking at.”

In a letter responding to the DOJ, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the government list of 400 names “not reliable,” saying it included U.S. citizens, people who aren’t registered to vote and duplicate entries. “Time and time again,” Hobbs wrote, “DHS claims about noncitizen voter registration turn out to be greatly exaggerated or false.”

Sam Trepel is Rule of Law program director at States United Democracy Center and a former attorney for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. She said the agency’s actions involving California and Washington were a “disturbing use of prosecutorial authority.”

Trepel worries that the DOJ may try to seize ballots cast by voters identified as likely noncitizens, before or after the election, which would “put their votes at risk and undermine trust more broadly.”

Voting rights advocates also worry that the government’s efforts to target noncitizen voters could frighten eligible voters to the point that they won’t show up.

A federal judge recently put limits on a multistate effort by the DHS to go door-to-door in search of suspected noncitizen voters, at least through Election Day, saying it was illegally intimidating legal voters.

“A voter could say, ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to put myself on the target list here, maybe I won’t register, or maybe I won’t vote,’” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

3. Will There Be Problems at the Polls?

States often change laws and rules related to voting.

Since 2024, Republican-led states have taken a number of steps that experts say will make it more difficult for some of their residents to cast ballots and have them count.

A North Carolina law, for example, requires voters to provide proof of identification when sending mail-in ballots. Under new rules, ballots now come with two envelopes, both of which must be sealed. Ballot rejections have skyrocketed, Democracy Docket reported, because voters aren’t sealing the inner envelope.

Texas and other states have cut back on the number and location of polling places, especially in areas favoring Democrats. In hotly contested Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, the number of polling sites was slashed by almost a third. This could increase the risk of long lines and voter confusion on Election Day.

Voting rights groups such as the Texas Civil Rights Project are tracking two issues involving the state’s voter registration systems. A software error at the Texas Department of Public Safety stopped several hundred thousand new voter registrations from being forwarded to local election officials, preventing them from being added to the rolls. A separate state system for updating registration information wasn’t processing changes for several weeks, leading to more backlogs. Counties say they’ve been able to address these problems.

Every election features some issues with voting equipment.

So far, there have been isolated complaints involving touch-screen voting machines — including one from Dolly Parton’s sister in Tennessee — spawning fears that machines have been “rigged” to switch votes.

ES&S, the company that makes the machines garnering the complaints, told ProPublica that the company hadn’t received widespread reports. Election experts say occasional problems with touch-screen machines don’t signify tampering or manipulation. Any attempt to tamper with programming would surface during testing by election officials and be corrected, they said.

4. How Secure Will the Election Be?

Incidents in the run-up to the midterms have ratcheted up election officials’ concerns about the potential for both cyber and physical attacks.

Last month, officials in several states, including Arizona, received envelopes with an unknown white powder. Arizona eventually deemed the material nontoxic, but Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said “the fear it caused was real.”

In 2024, false bomb threats, thought to be from foreign actors, caused widespread evacuations of vote-counting sites across the country. The disruptions were brief, however, in part because a message board funded by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, alerted election officials that the FBI had deemed the threats not credible.

Trump, however, has dismantled CISA since retaking the presidency, leaving states and local election officials to grapple with both physical and cyber threats on their own. Election nonprofits have stepped up to try to fill the gap, and states, with CISA’s help, have enhanced their own cyber defenses.

Derek Tisler, counsel and manager for the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the federal government’s absence has weakened the defenses.

“States acting on their own just do not have the same power,” he said.

5. Where Will Postelection Challenges Come From?

Election lawyers fear that actions by the Trump administration in the run-up to the midterms suggest the government will aggressively pursue postelection challenges if the results are not to the president’s liking.

Late last month, the DOJ sued Alaska, seeking to block the state from certifying the result of its Senate race if the Republican incumbent doesn’t win. A federal judge threw out that lawsuit on Sunday, but the administration is expected to appeal.

Trump has said he personally ordered the lawsuit to be filed. It claims the system is unfairly rigged against Sen. Dan Sullivan, because another Alaska man named Dan Sullivan also qualified for the general election ballot. The New York Times reported last week that campaign aides to Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola orchestrated the candidacy of the second Dan Sullivan after a monthslong, statewide search to recruit someone with the same name.

Nonetheless, the DOJ’s case is unusual, both because federal law prohibits the government from interfering with an active election and because challenges typically come after voting is complete. Postelection challenges are most often brought by losing candidates in state courts.

“This is using the federal government to interfere with our election process in a way that I think is pretty troubling on multiple levels,” said Brown, the Washington attorney general.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the DOJ pointed to Blanche’s statement about the lawsuit on social media, which said the agency “does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.” (The lawsuit calls it “vital” that the state not certify “any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion” and asks the judge to prevent Alaska from doing this.)

Some election lawyers have suggested that if the GOP suffers significant losses, Trump could try to pressure Republicans in Congress to block new members from being seated. Several lawyers, including Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, say that the incoming Democratic majority would be able to fend off such an effort; courts, too, are likely to stymie it, though it might cause a short delay, according to Muller.

Brown said he and other attorneys general are also planning how to respond if local election officials or boards refuse to certify election results, based on their own claims of fraud or claims by the administration.

“I worry tremendously about what they might do,” Brown said.

The post “Chaos” in the air: Five ways voting could be disrupted on Election Day appeared first on Salon.com.

In the last month or so, President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again relationship with Ukraine — which has ranged from kicking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House in early 2025 to promising new air defense missiles this summer — has once again run cold. Trump has excoriated Zelenskyy for successful Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure, called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and gifted Russia a sanctions reprieve.

Trump also hasn’t had much success brokering a ceasefire, much less an end to the war (an announced “energy ceasefire” fell apart-near instantly earlier in October). First Lady Melania Trump, however, has.

She reportedly played a (limited) role in arranging a partial ceasefire for the frontline Ukrainian city of Oleshky, which has been hit especially hard by the war and is currently occupied by Russia. 

The pause, which is scheduled to run through the weekend, allows food and aid to get in and for a civilian evacuation. While limited, it also shows that both Ukraine and Russia are potentially willing to come to the negotiating table. 

After the Trump-Vladimir Putin rapprochement, though, some critics worry that the US is more likely to take Russia’s side — or at least step away from Ukraine’s — both in the war and in any possible peace talks. 

To break down what the Trumps are up to, how serious the concerns of Trump abandoning Ukraine for Putin actually are, and what could come next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Alex Ward, a national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Ward, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Let’s start with the most unexpected news out of this war in recent days: that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire.

It’s possible she had a role. I’m going to personally, without too much reporting, say that it was probably more Pope Leo.

Melania stole Pope Leo’s ceasefire?

I think a little bit. Look, this ceasefire is not a small thing. It is a humanitarian ceasefire in the southern Ukrainian city of Oleshky. It allows humanitarian aid to get in. The critics would say this allows the Russians to re-arm and regroup, and I guess at the same time also the Ukrainians. 

The question is, does it actually have that much influence over the war? No, it’s a very, very small targeted ceasefire. But it is a potential signal that deals can be made. 

The Russians are very much saying, look at Melania Trump, look at how important she was to all this. And if I’m the Russians, I would love to be saying things like that because then President Trump feels like the Russians are being very generous towards my wife and to my family, and therefore I side with them. 

It feels very convenient that the Russians are pumping that up and that even the White House is pumping up Melania Trump’s influence. I don’t want to discredit her. I’m sure she did work on this.

When did she become a negotiator in this war?

From the beginning, she has been trying to get children kidnapped by Russia back to Ukraine.  That has been a major focus of hers in this war. 

Is she the driving force behind this ceasefire? Is she the number one reason it happened? It’s totally possible. There’s just a lot of skepticism out there about whether Kyiv and Moscow were brought to the table and browbeaten by the First Lady. Again, very possible, but both sides, being Ukraine and Russia, have an incentive to play up her role.

The ceasefire is just relegated to one city. How come?

That’s all they could agree to. If we’re looking at this war at a bigger scale, there’s been a massive discussion about how to get an end to the Ukraine-Russia war. 

The US last week was able to broker a commitment to have trilateral talks between the Ukrainians, Russians, and the Americans with the goal toward ending the war. And you’ve heard President Zelenskyy of Ukraine say, “We can call it ceasefire. We can call stop the killings. We can call freeze the conflict.” 

Putin goes, ‘No, thank you. I would like basically a handover of the territory that I want, even though I’ve been unable to conquer it after nearly five years.’ It’s unclear if they’re even going to get into the room for those trilateral negotiations. Even if they do, it’ll probably be at a lower technical level. 

So are we ever going to get to the point that Putin and Zelenskyy and Trump get in a room, all hold hands and say ‘war over’? I highly doubt it, but that is the goal they’re after. You see the Trump administration, the Kremlin, and Kyiv all point to this Oleshky ceasefire as, like, ‘Hey, this could be a model for the much bigger deal.’

I want to be clear that this Oleshky thing is important. It really is aimed at a humanitarian ceasefire since there’s a lot of food that isn’t getting in, a lot of people are suffering and this potentially leads to some relief. But there are a lot of people around Ukraine and many bombed-out cities that are going, “Hey, what about us? We are hungry too. We don’t have certain services.” 

Winter is coming, and the Russians have bombed out a lot of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which is going to make this winter potentially very brutal, as a lot of folks will not have heating or the necessities they need to survive really cold temperatures.

Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a humanitarian, which had a lot of people shook because, famously, Vladimir Putin also started this war.

Yeah, it’s like calling Freddy Krueger a nails enthusiast. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

Has Vladimir Putin released Americans that he took hostage? Yes. Has he returned some children that his government, his forces have taken? Yes. I don’t know if that makes a humanitarian. That’s kind of like praising the arsonist for throwing a bucket of water on the house fire.

It’s not just calling him a humanitarian; it’s getting rid of the Lindsey Graham sanctions on Russia, which is essentially like handing Russia billions of dollars, right?

There’s a lot of weirdness here. First of all, on the Graham bill, it’s a weird bill, and frankly it’s a pretty bad bill despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans love it. 

What it basically calls for is tariffs on countries that purchase Russian energy. The way that Trump explains it is he waived the economic punishments, because otherwise the Russians would not have returned Stephen Hubbard and there might not have been this Oleshky ceasefire and there might not have been a bunch of other benefits.

Another argument President Trump was making for removing these tariff sanctions on Russia was that it would lower diesel costs here in the United States. Has that actually happened?

The Russians agreed to a diesel deal where they would basically export diesel to the United States. And in President Trump’s mind, that will lower costs because President Trump and political allies of his like Elon Musk of SpaceX say that is the reason diesel prices have skyrocketed across the US. 

However, when you talk to analysts and look at the data, it is the Iran war that has had a greater effect on diesel prices. Not to say that the Russia-Ukraine war hasn’t had any, but it’s much less because there is just very little Russian diesel in the American market, but also in the global market. 

What the US is receiving from Russia is not nothing, but effectively nothing because it’s just not enough to alleviate the diesel concerns across the country and to lower prices to a meaningful amount. And we can see President Trump is effectively scrambling to make good on his promises of lowering prices as the midterms approach, to the point that he’s willing to make a deal with the invading country in the war he’s trying to end in order to lower gas prices at home.

A lot of people see these developments and think that the United States’ allegiances have shifted, that we’ve maybe abandoned Ukraine at the moment. Is that fair?

I don’t think we can say that with any sense of certainty. President Trump has actually been on Ukraine’s side in certain cases, even rhetorically during a UN meeting, I believe it was last year. President Trump was presented with intelligence about how the Russians have been struggling to invade Ukraine. And then he released a statement saying basically, ‘Go Ukraine, go. Russia, you’re kind of losing here.’ And that made people go, ‘Oh, he’s on Ukraine’s side.’ 

And of course, after that whole Oval Office blowup with Zelenskyy, that relationship improved. But everyone’s always been kind of like, ‘Well, we know where Trump’s feelings are here. He wants a big deal with Russia. He wants an economic deal with Russia. He wants to improve relations with Vladimir Putin, and so he always returns to the mean, even if he flirts with Ukraine.’ 

But below President Trump’s unique style of dealmaking, the US intelligence community is helping Ukraine to defend against Russia. The US is selling weapons to Europeans for the Europeans to deliver to Ukraine. It is nowhere near the level of weapons support during the Biden administration, but that intelligence support seems to be at a higher level than during the Biden years. 

And it’s not like President Trump has purposefully hampered Ukraine’s defenses a lot. There are some questions about sudden intelligence shutoffs and delays of important weapons. I am not saying President Trump has been a staunch defender and a staunch supporter of Ukraine here. But if you look at the grand totality, Ukraine is still being defended by the United States. 

It almost seems like President Trump has an inability to pick a side. He’s playing both. In his mind, he thinks that’s the best way to get them both to the table and get a deal. But this is also the man that said he could do it in 24 hours and we’re nearly two years into his presidency. And right now the best we can get is, ‘Hey, maybe we can get the Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans to meet in a room for technical talks.’ 

It’s not nothing. And also, hey, we got a ceasefire in a town in Ukraine. It’s not nothing, but it’s nowhere near the big, potentially Nobel Peace Prize-winning deal that he’s searching for.

Constellation Energy will get $5 billion in government loans to modernize nuclear reactors. Most of the new capacity is already committed to Google, Amazon, and Meta.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is out of a job after only five days. 

What happened? Zacharia was fired on Friday after less than a week in her new role, after a rocky start that included a halting performance in the briefing room, a scandal over her legal credentials, and a round of less-than-successful cleanup interviews. 

The firing makes her the shortest-tenured White House press secretary in history, outstripping even first-term Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who made it 10 or 11 days (figures vary) before getting the boot. 

“Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci posted on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.” (No word yet on whether the “Zacharia” will emerge as a unit of time, as the “Scaramucci” has.) 

What’s the context? Zacharia’s remarkably short stint behind the podium unfolded as the White House is engaged in an unprecedented attack on press freedom: The administration is still trying to ban three media outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House, though as of earlier this week, a judge is still blocking the ban from taking effect.

The diminished nature of the press secretary job was on full display in Zacharia’s sole briefing on Tuesday, when she took questions from just three outlets: Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail. 

Why does this matter? Zacharia’s no good, very bad week is not likely to leave much of a lasting mark in its own right — other than, perhaps, as pub trivia — but as NBC’s Garrett Haake points out, it’s a very tangible manifestation of a White House that seems to have no idea how to spin itself out of crisis with just weeks until the midterm elections. 

Most recently, Trump has landed on flat-out lying about the state of the economy — but like Zacharia’s time as press secretary, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go all that well.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The underlying trend — municipal inaction — may be infuriating, but I loved this story about “tactical urbanism” from my colleague Sara Herschander. 

As she writes, vigilante activists have taken to painting their own crosswalks, building benches, and even installing makeshift bike lanes in their neighborhoods — and every time they do, “they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live.” 

You can read Sara’s full piece here, no gift link needed. Enjoy, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump wants to deport a member of Congress. 

What’s happening? On Monday, Homeland Security officers raided the Washington, DC, home of US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in an investigation reportedly tied to immigration paperwork filled out by her father when she was a minor.

That was, at the time, more than enough cause for alarm. Trump’s animosity toward Omar, who is Somali-American and an outspoken critic of the administration, is well-known, and the raid is an extraordinary violation of the Justice Department’s usual rule to avoid taking visible action around politically sensitive cases within 60 days of an election. 

On Wednesday evening, however, we learned more about the raid from the Wall Street Journal. The Omar investigation, the Journal reported, is explicitly aimed at stripping Omar of her citizenship — and thus her ability to hold office — and deporting her. 

How would they do that? Omar came to the US as a refugee when she was 12 and became a US citizen when she was 17. The Trump administration’s investigation is said to focus on whether she or her family misrecorded her age in order to more easily gain citizenship. 

The government cannot unilaterally denaturalize a citizen, however; it would have to ask a court to do so.

What’s the context? Historically, it’s rare for the US to strip citizenship from naturalized US citizens. But doing so at volume has been a major, if less visible, priority for the second Trump administration. 

As of earlier this year, NBC News reported, DOJ was targeting hundreds of people for possible denaturalization, and has reportedly hoped to put forward hundreds of new cases per month (though successfully stripping them of citizenship is another matter).

Why does this matter? Trump’s campaign to bend the traditionally nonpartisan DOJ into a tool to punish and harass his enemies has been one of the major stories of his second term. 

Even if it never advances beyond Monday’s raid, an investigation targeting Omar’s citizenship with the eventual goal of deporting her from the US represents a new and even more dangerous evolution of that effort — and it threatens to move the US to a far darker place, where citizenship and the rights it guarantees are predicated on the president’s goodwill.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — if you’ll allow me to depart a little from my normal approach to this section, I have a story about politics to share. It’s not, however, about the politics we’re currently dealing with, but about what could be: Democrats’ plan for a quietly ambitious “Project 2029” should they win the White House in 2028. You can read it with a gift link here.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to just log off, here’s an adorable snow leopard cub with massive paws. Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

“We should look for love!” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy bellowed while flanked by his nine children at the Great American State Fair in June: “Get married, and have lots of kids!”

In a brazen attempt to make Duffy’s ethos a matter of policy, the Trump administration announced a strange new plan earlier this month tying a huge tranche of federal funding for public transit to high fertility and marriage rates. 

If the plan goes into effect, then communities with a high number of traditional nuclear families could get a 10 percent funding boost to build new trains, bus routes, and ferry lines. “If you want federal funding,” Duffy’s Transportation Department said in a statement, then “your project needs to align with where communities and families are actually growing.”

Trump, who has dubbed himself the “fertilization president,” and his bevvy of neopatriarchal trad–pilled deputies have long nursed a fixation with the country’s declining birth rate. But dubious as this new policy may be, it stumbles upon a genuine pain point in the nation’s public transit systems: They are not nearly as family friendly as they should be. And regardless of whether these discomfitingly pronatalist guidelines ever go into effect as written — and they probably will — they raise important questions about how American families use our transit systems now, and the policies could actually make their lives easier in the long run.

The same woes that affect all riders — long wait times, inaccessible stations, inadequate reach, and crowded rush hours — often doubly affect families. That’s one reason why so many of them have fled the nation’s densest, most transit-oriented cities in search of suburbs where they need not lug a stroller up yet another broken escalator to reach a subway platform.

Families who can’t afford to trade in their MetroCards and bus passes for minivans may find themselves priced into housing served by especially substandard transit options, funneling them into brutal, hours-long commutes. According to one landmark study, the single strongest factor in predicting social mobility in the US is neither crime nor test scores nor the presence of “traditional” two-parent households, but access to adequate transportation. With every extra minute a child spends commuting to school, they become less likely to move out poverty as an adult.

And for that reason alone, American families with kids do deserve special attention when it comes to how and where and why we build public transit. On this, the Trump administration got something right, even if they got there for all the wrong reasons — ones that I, a childless woman of childbearing age, find vaguely ethnonationalist, and above all, personally creepy. 

But families often need public transportation most in the places where it’s otherwise hardest to raise kids — which is to say in dense cities rather than in already car-centric suburbs. In that sense, especially, In fact, it might make circumstances even worse for the families that really rely on public transit every day.

What family-friendly public transit actually looks like

Marriage and birth rates might sound like a reasonable proxy for where families live, but in reality, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, the places with the most “traditional” nuclear families tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and are much more likely to get around by car, not trains or buses. 

We are talking about the suburbs here, which, while certainly deserving of their own transit infrastructure, rarely rely on trains or buses the way that a carless family living on the outer edges of a major city might. And yet the Trump administration has typically treated those very communities — some of which do, in fact, have high birth rates — with contempt or even outright antipathy. 

Consider Chicago’s Red Line, the busiest corridor of the city’s L rail system, which serves some 138 million people per year. The line has long been in need of expansion, and a $5.7 billion extension close to 60 years in the making finally broke ground earlier this year. It will add 5.5 more miles of track with four new stations in the city’s southernmost neighborhoods.

For over half a century, families in the far South Side of Chicago have cobbled together grueling commutes that force them to transfer from buses and trains to reach downtown Chicago, which helps explain why unemployment and poverty rates in the area remain so stubbornly high. Communities like Roseland, where many of the new stations will be built, are considered to be among the most challenging places in the nation to raise a child, but thousands of local families still find ways to do so.

Roseland has a much higher birth rate than the national average, meaning that in theory, Duffy’s transportation department should be itching to send extra funds to transit projects there. But first they have to be willing to fund it at all, and if past policies hold, they may be reluctant to do just that. Just last year, the Trump administration opted to freeze federal funds already allocated to the Red Line extension, plunging the long-awaited project into yet another prolonged period of infrastructural purgatory. 

That move plays into a broader pattern: The Trump administration has hampered dozens of transit projects like the Red Line, seemingly in its broader push to starve Democratic-led cities of federal infrastructure dollars. While a federal judge eventually intervened to allow the Red Line extension to proceed, if the Trump administration’s new guidelines go into effect after public comments close in November, then more projects like it in other urban communities will likely be deprioritized. 

Ultimately, it is the suburbanites who are most poised to benefit from the Trump administration’s proposed policy.

An example is FrontRunner 2X in Utah, a commuter rail project that will slash travel time for Utahns traveling across the state, and will also help Salt Lake City shoulder an influx of tourists when it hosts the Olympics in 2034. It received federal support through the same tranche of funding as Chicago’s Red Line extension. In stark contrast with that more urban initiative, FrontRunner 2X has been the rare public transit project to receive continued support under the Trump administration.

Utah has some of the highest birth and marriage rates in the country, so it’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that if the Trump administration has its way, then the United States will see more projects like FrontRunner 2X get funded, while others like the Red Line extension face bureaucratic bottlenecks and funding freezes. Roseland’s high birth rate notwithstanding, the neighborhood has some of the lowest marriage rates in the country, meaning that even if a project there did manage to eke out federal support, then according to this new calculus, it would still receive significantly less funding from the federal government than a place like the suburbs of Salt Lake City where married families with children are more common.   

Trump’s new pronatalist transit agenda is, at the very least, an indication that after two years spent twiddling their thumbs, firing Amtrak executives, and venerating cars big and small, he may finally be building a semi-coherent transit strategy. And his Transportation Department has allowed a few genuinely family-friendly upgrades for the country’s transit infrastructure to proceed, including grants to add space for strollers on trains and buses.

But you can’t claim to support American families while siphoning federal dollars away from the projects that could actually be transformational to their lives. I am not one to decry a commuter rail renaissance, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of places where American families — the ones Duffy says he’s so keen on having more babies — don’t have any other choice but to wait an hour for the bus to get to work. 

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is out of a job after serious corruption allegations. 

What happened? Guilfoyle resigned on Tuesday after being shown the door earlier in the day by Trump’s brand-new White House press secretary, who announced at a briefing that Guilfoyle had been asked to resign. 

Her departure comes just six days after a bombshell Wall Street Journal story, which described Guilfoyle’s efforts to solicit money from a Trump donor, including $100,000 to pay down a credit card bill, in exchange for access to Trump officials and conservative media figures. 

Guilfoyle also attempted to conceal those efforts: In one text to the donor, Eric Deters, she wrote, “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Who is Guilfoyle? Fallen MAGA royalty. Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality, is also the ex-fiancée of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. (and, more distantly, the ex-wife of current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat).

There appears to be little love lost between Guilfoyle and Trump, however. On Tuesday, he told reporters that Guilfoyle “wasn’t a member of my family. She I guess dated my son a long time ago.” (The Don Jr.-Guilfoyle relationship is thought to have ended in 2024.)

Why was she forced out? Corruption allegations are not, generally speaking, dealbreakers in Trumpworld; the president and his children are all innovators when it comes to profiting off the presidency, and there’s plenty of self-dealing going on around them.

That being said, Guilfoyle may have crossed the line in two specific ways: one, her alleged corruption benefited her and not the Trump family. And two, the allegations are embarrassingly unsubtle even by the standards of the second Trump administration. The combination appears to have been too much.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

This New York Times story, about what a potential superhabitable world elsewhere in the cosmos could look like, was a very cool, very sci-fi read — and we may find out more about the existence of such planets soon, with new space telescopes planned for next year and beyond. 

You can read the full story here with a gift link. Enjoy, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow! 

On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” More than a year and a half later, his administration is instead busy using government power to go after speech it dislikes. 

Last year, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr urged broadcasters to take action against Jimmy Kimmel over his comments following Charlie Kirk’s killing, and in September, Kimmel said the FCC again intervened to stop Kimmel’s late-night show from airing an interview with James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate for Texas.

Also last month, Trump barred three news outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House over their coverage. That ban was quickly blocked by a federal judge, but both CNN and Politico have since been banned from traveling with the press pool on Trump trips.

Outside of the White House, the fight over free speech is also raging on college campuses. In states like Texas, Republican lawmakers have restricted when students can protest and given governor-appointed university boards more say over what gets taught. In 2025, 15 states passed laws that restrict what can be taught or weaken protections for free expression on college campuses.

To break down what all of this means for the state of free speech in the US — and the future of our First Amendment rights — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

How would you describe the kind of status of free speech on campus these days?

The status of free speech is in great peril, both on and off campus. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and it’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen it. 

When it comes to the Charlie Kirk backlash cases, we saw about 90 of them. It’s a remarkably high number. We saw an ex-cop go to jail for 37 days just for forwarding a Trump meme in response to a request to go to a candlelight vigil for Charlie Kirk. It’s not good.

If you look at the last two years, we’ve done so many episodes about free speech concerns. There was Jimmy Kimmel; there’s CNN being banned from the White House. 

There’s student protesters who are protesting what’s going on in Gaza. 

It really does seem like we’re at a moment where so many different types of people claim that their speech is being restricted in so many different types of ways. What is happening in the country?

My worry is I’m very much a small-L liberal. I come from an old ACLU background. That’s where I interned in law school. I went to law school to do First Amendment law. I hyper-specialize in it. This is my passion. 

For most of my 25-year career, you could rely on a civil libertarian aspect of the left and a libertarian aspect of the right that would often agree on almost nothing except for things like freedom of speech. And right now, I think we’ve become all culture war all the time, and we have more of a progressive left and more of a populist right. 

The only way that you show you believe in freedom of speech is by saying, “I hate that guy, but I think you should have freedom of speech.” If you’re saying, “I think my side should have freedom of speech,” that’s just self-interest. That doesn’t even count. 

All the worst people in history wanted free speech for their side. So I’m afraid we’re losing — or maybe even, I hate to say this dramatically, but maybe even have lost it as a shared value as a society.

Well, that’s quite grim.

Yeah. I’m feeling a little grim. 

The Trump administration came into office with a promise. And I remember it sounding something like this: “The woke left went too far. They canceled people. They restricted speech. They got out of control. President Trump is going to come back in, and we are going to restore sanity to the country. And as part of sanity, that will include your right to freely express yourself.” 

How do you square the promise versus what we’ve seen?

I think Trump is constantly frustrating everyone around him by being Trump. I think there probably were people in the administration who were like, “Yeah, we’re going to be pro-free speech.” And then Trump decides to declare — I mean, I think the recent White House press pool case is hysterical in a lot of ways because he had to get his team to give a sort of constitutional justification for why he was kicking out the press pool. But on Truth Social, he’s like, “It’s because of their viewpoint,” which is, by the way, something you can’t do under the Constitution. 

“I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.”

His instincts are very authoritarian. They’re very top-down. So maybe there were people in the administration who, in their heart of hearts, are good on free speech, but Trump isn’t. And it’s the reason why when it came to the new administration, there were a lot of people on the right, but also people on the sort of heterodox left who were like, “Oh, this is going to be good for free speech.”

I was like, “Don’t kid yourself, guys. This is going to be bad.” Although I will say, it’s even worse than I was expecting.

President Trump at some point will be out of office. And what happens then? What do you think? Is there an optimistic scenario where we’re like, “Okay, we’re kind of tired of this crap. Let’s just go back to the way it was in the ’90s”?

It has been cyclical, to a degree. American society gets out of whack, and usually one of the things that does bring us together is that we were lucky enough to have…I’ll just say it, we have a brilliant Constitution. It is unusually clever about human nature, and the Constitution itself — you can have whatever opinion you want about the founders, but it is something to be proud of. And a lot of times those values kind of bring us back together. 

That’s my hope. But another thing I will say about Trump: He has played havoc with my ability to predict anything. So what it’s going to look like over the event horizon of 2028, I hope it will be better, and we will fight like hell to make sure it’s better here at FIRE, but will it be better? I’m not sure, and it definitely won’t be better if we think of free speech as something that belongs to my side, not yours.

One of the reasons why I do have hope for free speech in the long term is that free speech works really well. It’s how you know what your fellow citizens think. It’s how you get ideas out there. It’s how you actually be your authentic self. 

Societies that actually have freedom of speech are always going to have advantages, real and serious advantages, over ones that don’t. So I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.