Last week, House Democrats voted on an amendment that would have cut $3.3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel from a State Department funding bill. The amendment was brought to the floor by Rep. Thomas Massie, an outgoing Republican from Kentucky. It failed 314-104, but 103 Democrats — nearly half of the House Democratic caucus — supported it, signaling a significant shift in the party’s longstanding support for aid to Israel.

In 2024, a similar vote came up in the House to cut military aid to Israel. Then, just 37 House Democrats voted for the measure. Now, two years later, 103 House Democrats voted to cut funding. That shift in support was accelerated after the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, which has killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians. The debate is also playing out in Democratic primaries across the country. In New York and Colorado, Democratic socialist candidates who have sharply criticized Israel and opposed continued US military aid recently won House primaries.

Historically, Jewish Americans have overwhelmingly identified with and voted for the Democratic Party, while Democratic lawmakers have generally supported Israel and US military assistance to the country. In 2016, the Obama administration signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Israel, committing the US to seek $38 billion in military assistance for fiscal years 2019 through 2028. Congress must vote to approve this funding, so the shift in Democratic support of Israel could have real consequences.

There is still a very strong support for Israel among many House Democrats, but the shifting views are notable. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposed the Massie amendment, arguing that it was overly broad and could jeopardize humanitarian assistance. But in a letter addressed to his House colleagues he also called for a “major reset” in US policy toward what he described as Israel’s “far-right Netanyahu government.”

Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents Illinois’s 10th Congressional District, and remains a strong supporter of Israel.

Below is an excerpt of the 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. 

Can you walk us through last week’s vote? You voted against the measure to cut aid to Israel, and a lot of your colleagues obviously did not. How did that play out for you?

Growing up in the ’60s, ’70s, and for the last 65 years, I fundamentally believe that the US-Israel relationship is important. I also believe that the aspiration for peace in the Middle East, not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but broadly throughout the region, is something that is in the United States’s interest and the interest of the people in the region. So this is not a new issue to me, and it’s something I thought long and hard about. 

Tom Massie doesn’t believe any of that. His intentions with this amendment were anything but pure. It was hastily crafted and poorly written. And one of the biggest issues with it is not only does it [not] address this 10-year memorandum of understanding, something negotiated by President Obama eight years ago, but there are also two years left on the MOU. 

It was a messaging bill and nothing more, and it was a negative message. I voted no because I think if we’re going to move toward peace, we need to do so in a constructive way. A lot of my colleagues were saying we need to send a message to the Netanyahu government.

“I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark.”

I’ve been extremely critical of this government, their failure to address the settler violence in the West Bank, the failure to plan for a day-after in Gaza following what was a horrific war. If we’re going to move towards peace, if we’re going to find a path where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side and the region can have the peace they deserve. Because we’re not just talking about Israelis and Palestinians; there’s progress being made between Lebanon and Israel in giving Lebanon, the people of Lebanon, the liberty and freedom they all deserve. 

Can I ask you if you still take money from AIPAC? And if so, how much?

I appreciate the support I get from people who care about the issues that I advocate for. So people who are pro-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship are likely to support me because I’m pro-US-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship. I’m also pro-addressing gun safety and reducing gun violence in this country. So I get the support of those groups. The support I get doesn’t determine my positions. I think my positions determine who supports me. 

Has your position on Israel shifted at all since October 7th, or at any point in your political career? And if so, can you tell us how?

So my position hasn’t changed because I’ve always been committed to promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and finding a path where both can live together, which I believe ultimately is two states: a Jewish democratic state of Israel, and a Palestinian state living side by side. My frustration with the current Israeli government has grown and continues to grow. Every conversation I have with them, whether it’s the US ambassador to Israel, whom I’ve had the privilege of working with many times, or my meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I’ve had an engagement with the prime minister going back now for almost 30 years. But in the last several years, every single conversation I have with them talks about the need to address settler violence, the need to get humanitarian aid.

One of the things that I am proud of and will say loudly and proudly is that immediately after October 7th, as the war began, my team and I worked hard to push for humanitarian aid into Gaza to do everything we could to make sure that the civilians who were always caught in the middle of any war wouldn’t suffer more than they did. And the suffering was horrific. And I did challenge Israel when they made what I’ll call ill-conceived, ill-advised, in some cases illegal decisions to deprive humanitarian relief from entering Gaza. We pushed hard, and we worked with the Egyptians to get the Rafah crossing open. We pushed the Israelis to open the Karam Shalom crossing. And to not just get aid to those crossings, but get aid into and across the territories within Gaza.

Why are you so optimistic about the situation? 

I am always going to be optimistic. I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark. And let’s separate the issue for folks living in the region and the folks living here. And for the Israelis and Palestinians, these are two peoples who are totally traumatized — traumatized not just over the last couple of years, but for decades. So I recognize the trauma that Israelis have and are experiencing, and I recognize the trauma that the Palestinians have and are experiencing. And that’s part of what I feel is my obligation: to hold onto that optimism and speak to a better future and work to try to find ways to bring the parties on both sides of the issue together to make the hard choices and take the risk to get to a path to peace.

So the reason I’m holding onto optimism — and it’s not 24/7; I have my moments when I am down and where I feel like the hill we’re climbing is just too steep — is you take a deep breath and you dig deep, and you say, I can’t give up on hoping and working towards peace because otherwise peace is never going to happen. And I want to find people who are like-minded.

And that is not just on the Israeli side of the equation. We have to find people on the Palestinian side, and for those on the Palestinian side, we have to find Israelis. And I meet, and I spend time with them on a regular basis. They come to my office. When I’m in the region, I talk to them. We have to strengthen and empower those voices who believe that peace will only come when the Israelis see the Palestinians as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and the Palestinians see the Israeli as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and recognize that until they get there, there’s no future for either side. We’ve got to have a path where both are pointing in the same direction.

Fermented food is the hottest new trend in the halls of the White House. Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are reportedly walking about with jars of sauerkraut in the hopes that it will give them glowing skin and tiny waists. 

Wall Street Journal’s Liz Essley Whyte told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance are all on this eat-a-lot-of-steak-and-sauerkraut diet.”

So, should we all be eating jars of sauerkraut? Or are ferments just the new Florsheims?

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 your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there a name for this diet?

Kennedy calls it the carnivore diet. I think people mean different things when they say that, but for him, it includes a lot of yogurt, a lot of kimchi or sauerkraut, a lot of steak, a lot of eggs. Kennedy now travels with sauerkraut. His wife has said that he has asked her to carry it in her purse for him, and she has said, “I actually cannot,” which is an amazing phrase. It seems they all think their skin is glowing, and people online have commented that JD Vance is looking good.

Are we sure it’s not Wegovy?

We don’t have any public knowledge of that, but we do know that he is eating eggs, sauerkraut, pickles, blackberries, and raspberries for lunch pretty often — and beef and lamb with sauerkraut for dinner. Then, when he’s on Air Force Two, he snacks on beef jerky and maybe eats a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.

Now that you’re mentioning the full spectrum of JD Vance’s diet, it’s kind of reminding me of their new food pyramid. Is this part of that?

Earlier this year, Kennedy and the other health officials like to say they flipped the food pyramid. They recommended a lot more fruits and vegetables, red meat — which was controversial — and whole grains, and whole milk, that kind of thing. They also, and for the first time in the nation’s dietary guidelines, recommended fermented foods, which was something that was actually agreed upon by a lot of people, and they thought that was a good part of this, even if they had qualms about the red meat recommendations, because those can introduce more cardiac risk and risk of bad cholesterol.

How widespread is this in the White House? Does it go up all the way to the top, to the president?

Given what we have seen of his recent public dieting, I don’t think so. At the Knicks game, he was eating pizza and french fries, and, you know, he still has his Diet Coke button on his desk where he just pushes it and a Diet Coke comes. Kennedy said, once said on a podcast about him, “I don’t know how he’s alive.” 

Does the science back this up, or is this some kind of quackery that ferments can make your skin healthier and help you lose weight?

I don’t think there are a lot of good studies that show exactly that sauerkraut can help you lose weight, but there have been a number of studies that have shown health benefits. Researchers have generally agreed that sauerkraut and other fermented foods can help with digestion and inflammation. There was a 2025 study from UC Davis that suggested fermented cabbage could protect your gut and protect against illness. Basically, they found that the intestinal cells do better with sauerkraut. They help maintain the integrity of those intestinal cells. And, in general, that has a lot of other good health effects. Mainstream scientists, dieticians, are pro-fermented veggies. This is not something that is hotly debated.

Most people in the scientific community are realizing there’s a lot of good fresh science out there about how important your gut really is in your overall health. The part of the diet that is a little more controversial is the focus on red meat. Obviously, that comes with some cardiac risk and some cholesterol risk. That is why when the new dietary guidelines came out and recommended more of that for Americans, that part, in particular, made some dietitians a little upset.

Do you think fermented foods could help people with this parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea?

I personally have not seen any studies on whether fermented foods help with explosive diarrhea, but let me know if you find one.

On  a recent episode of Today, Explained, I explored Donald Trump’s ongoing succession wars, and whether the president that’s upended the Republican Party is taking an active role in deciding who might replace him. 

The short version: The race to inherit MAGA, already underway, runs through Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump has every incentive to keep everyone guessing about how it ends. 

As a guest host of Today, Explained, I talked to my former colleague, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for years, and recently released a new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with Times reporter Jonathan Swan. 

Here are three things that stuck out: 

1. It’s Vance’s to lose — but it’s not a given

“Vance is the presumptive frontrunner right now, and it’s hard for me to see who else that could be,” Haberman said. Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., and the Turning Point network have all signaled they’re lining up behind the vice president as Trump’s heir. Rubio has gone as far as telling Vanity Fair that if Vance runs, “he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.” 

But being the frontrunner isn’t the same as having been anointed. Regime Change lays out real fault lines between Trump and his vice president; over the Iran strikes and the Epstein files, Vance repeatedly landed on the opposite side of the president. On the decision to go to war, Haberman reported, Vance “was the only one who really argued forcefully with the president,” and “it cost him with Trump.” 

That offense could be remembered when the next Republican primary arrives. 

2. Trump plans to stick around

The biggest obstacle to a clean handoff may be that Trump doesn’t want one. “Trump doesn’t want to cede the stage to anybody,” Haberman said. “The second that he anoints somebody or backs somebody or whatever, the clock starts ticking on his own relevance.”

And there’s nothing in his history, she added, to suggest he’ll ride quietly into retirement: “There is nothing in his history that suggests that he’s just going to go off and do paintings like George W. Bush.” Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 2028 should expect Trump to still be standing next to them — and still expecting credit.

3. Trump still dangles Rubio over Vance

Even with the field seemingly settled, Trump keeps reminding Vance that it isn’t. The most vivid scene in Regime Change comes from an October dinner in the White House Blue Room, with Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. executives at the table alongside the Vances and Rubio. Trump turned to Murdoch and asked what he thought of JD. “JD has the potential to be great,” Murdoch offered — a pointed answer from a man who had tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance in the first place. “Thanks a lot, Rupert,” Vance said.

Then Trump asked, “Well, what about Marco?” Murdoch’s reply, according to Haberman: “Marco is brilliant.” After that, Haberman says, the table got “uncomfortable.”

There’s no evidence Rubio is actually running — “quite the opposite,” Haberman said. But Trump has always pitted rivals against each other, and by Haberman’s account, he simply has better personal chemistry with Rubio than with Vance — a striking turn given the “Little Marco” cruelty of 2016.

So will Vance get the endorsement he needs? “I think anybody who is counting on Donald Trump’s anything often ends up pretty disappointed,” she said. 

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In 2024 the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, won back the prime minister’s office after more than a decade out of power.

He told a jubilant crowd: “Change begins right here!”

Starmer was right that British voters wanted change; unfortunately for him, they pretty quickly wanted him out too. Starmer is stepping down on Monday — making him Britain’s sixth prime minister in less than a decade. 

“We’re just not used to this,” Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman magazine, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world…and now we have become Italy only with bad weather and worse food.”

McTague talked to Rameswaram about why Starmer flamed out so fast, the far-right candidate angling to take the top job, and why the incoming prime minister, nicknamed “the King of the North,” might be Labour’s best shot at turning things around.

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.

Why is Britain on its way to a seventh prime minister in a decade?

We are living through very, very weird times here in Britain. We’re just not used to this. We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world — we could smugly look out on countries like Italy or Australia as they churned through their prime ministers, and we just held steady with Margaret Thatcher for 10 years or Tony Blair for 10 years. Now we have become Italy, only with bad weather and worse food.

I think, big picture, we’re actually not that different to the rest of the Western world in this regard, in that all of the same reasons that cause disquiet in the United States or in France or in Germany are the same kind of reasons that are causing political disquiet here. Immigration, poor economic growth, living standards not improving as quickly as we’re used to, inflation post-pandemic — all of that comes together and it creates similar forces that you see in the US. So we have electoral coalitions, the rise of people who can communicate super well on social media in the new age who grab hold of attention.

It’s just that what is happening here is happening in our parliamentary context rather than a presidential context, where you elect a president and they are there for a full term whether they’re unpopular or not. Here, if you lose the confidence of the public or the confidence of members of parliament, then suddenly you can be out on your ear within weeks or months.

Let’s talk about the last time there was a major shift. It was in 2024 when voters had become wary of the Conservative Party in the UK, and that’s when they elected the Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer into office?

They elected them with a landslide — an astonishing majority in the House of Commons, enough to basically do whatever they wanted. But I think once he’d got into power, he didn’t really know how he wanted to change the country. He stood on a manifesto of “change,” in quotes — it was a kind of hopey-changey thing, without much substance to it.

In one sense, he was quite a small-c conservative man. He wanted to just get this thing working again, and he thought you could do that through sensible, incremental, rational, technocratic change. And I think that analysis has proven fundamentally flawed.

What follows Keir Starmer? Does the Labour Party retain control of parliament?

Yes. So the Labour Party fundamentally has kicked out its own prime minister. It’s based on the fact that he was deeply, deeply unpopular in the country, and they thought if they hung around with this guy any longer that they were all screwed, basically, and that they would all lose their jobs. That’s the reason why he’s been removed from power. He lost the support of his members of parliament and his cabinet, who eventually turned on him and looked to the man who’s going to replace him — a guy called Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Greater Manchester.

Tell us a bit about him. I mean, they call him the King of the North?

Yeah, like the Game of Thrones stuff — he’s going to sort of come down with his, I don’t even know what they’re called, White Walkers, is it, or something?

The North of England is, I guess, the equivalent of the Rust Belt Midwest kind of vibe. It’s seen as a place that is a bit more down to earth, a bit more post-industrial. It’s got more economic problems — it’s a place which used to be rock-solid Labour but has moved to the right. And so I think there is an opportunity here for Andy Burnham to win the next election and stick around for a bit longer.

You talk about leaders in the UK thus far having lacked a mandate or perhaps a broad vision for the country. I wonder if the person who has those things right now is Nigel Farage. Could you tell our audience a bit about him?

Nigel Farage was the man that was introduced to America by Donald Trump as “Mr. Brexit.” He is the figure on the populist right of British politics who has stood outside of the Conservative Party — the traditional party of the right here — and challenged it for not being conservative enough, for not being patriotic enough, for not being tough enough on borders and immigration.

All of the things that happened to the Republican Party from the Tea Party or from Donald Trump — it’s just that he did that from outside of the Conservative Party. And he is a kind of charismatic figure, a very good public speaker, very hard to pin down, speaks kind of fluently and off the cuff.

He was finally elected to the House of Commons at the last election for his insurgent populist party called Reform UK. And from that position, he has taken the party into the lead in the polls. But something else is going on now, where because he is a prospective future prime minister, he is facing a level of scrutiny that he hasn’t faced before.

So all sorts of stuff is going on in British politics, which sounds completely wild.

People are looking at this situation — this run of prime ministers, this ascendancy of Nigel Farage — and they say the UK has become ungovernable. What would you argue the situation is, Tom?

Look, I would argue that it’s parliamentary democracy at its messy kind of fundamentals. Britain is a country, like many countries in Western Europe, which is struggling to work out how it’s going to make its way in the world in the 21st century, in a world where so many of the assumptions which we have come to take for granted no longer appear to be holding.

A United States that is a trusted ally — that is changing. Free market economics, global free trade appears to be ending. And you add into that social media, the AI revolution, all of this. It feels like the turmoil in British politics is just a reflection of a kind of turmoil in the world and in the global economy. You can see the same sorts of questions going on in Canada and in Australia and France and Germany. And I don’t think anyone really has the answers yet, and Britain certainly doesn’t.

Pope Leo XIV is dealing with his first schism. 

A small, conservative sect of Catholics were excommunicated from the church earlier this month after it ordained a group of bishops without the pope’s approval. The drastic move from the first American Pope is the latest way he’s cementing his tenure at the helm of the church, just months after his call to “disarm AI.”

But David Gibson thinks the Pope’s strategy of dealing with this radical group of followers tells us something bigger about how we deal with our stateside politics. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Gibson about the Catholic drama, what this schism represents, and why it might be a losing battle to go up against the pope. 

Below is an excerpt of the 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.

Pope Leo XIV did something dramatic. Tell us what happened. 

Well, basically the pope excommunicated a bunch of traditionalist, super right-wing, Latin mass, types. Actually he would say they excommunicated themselves. It’s this group called The Society of Saint Pius the X (SSPX). They ordained four bishops. 

The Catholic church is an apostolic church. It’s all about chain of custody. You can’t break the chain. You need bishops to ordain priests. You need to keep bishops going. The pope is the one who ordains bishops. He says you can ordain a bishop. You can’t go ordain a bishop on your own. That’s like starting your own church. That’s a total red line.

They said, “No, we need this,” July 1st in Écône, Switzerland. They gathered SSPX and they ordained these four bishops. That was a schism.

It’s really a tiny, tiny group. They’re located in the West. It’s all about restoring christendom, restoring the glories of old European, white Catholicism. Basically, this group wants a special carve out, a special bubble where the Pope says, “It’s okay and I’ll give you your own bishops.” The Pope is saying, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t go off and have your own special little church.” So essentially they’re saying, “Okay, we are more Catholic than the pope.”

You mentioned that this group, the Society of St. Peter the X that has now at least partly been excommunicated by Pope Leo wanted to keep the church to some degree European. This is in the wake of what people thought could have been the first Asian Pope, the first African Pope. Is this group a little kind of white racist?

They’re certainly culturally chauvinistic to put it mildly. I’ve traveled around the world with popes. I’ve seen popes celebrate mass in a dusty refugee camp in Africa. I’ve seen mass celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica with the incense and the whole deal. It’s beautiful. It’s the mass wherever you are. It’s diversity. These folks don’t like that. 

It’s very much this kind of cultural, ethnic, and some would say racial chauvinism that our culture, our people, is the same dynamic in the church. It makes no sense from a Catholic perspective. You’re baptized Catholic, you’re raised Catholic, you are Catholic. Anybody is Catholic, whether you’re in Indonesia or Indiana. But these folks don’t see it that way. That’s what they’re about.

They have influence and they have money. So that’s really why it’s a big story. They also have an amen corner.

An amen corner?

So to speak. The Vatican for decades has bent over backwards to try to accommodate these folks. Because it’s kind of a “no enemies to the right” dynamic within the Catholic Church. Here are these folks who’ve been given everything and they still went and split. They would never have given to people on the left wing, on the progressive wing, but they’re giving them to people on the right wing, on the far right wing and that they still thumb their nose at the Pope is what makes this so important.

So this small but powerful sect of the Catholic church thumbs its nose at Pope Leo. Why pick a fight with the pope?

Well, there are two reasons. One is to go down the liturgical rabbit hole of all this arcana about the mass and the Latin mass and can you change it and can you not?

They want to revisit the Vatican II council where the Church modernized like 60 years ago?

Yes, exactly. In the 1960s, they did things like lifting the anathemas of Protestantism, engaging in endorsing religious freedom, accepting a division between church and state, and lifting the teachings of contempt against Jews. 

It also gets to what is really going on. It’s not about the Latin mass. They love to argue about that stuff. The bigger dynamics that I wanted to get to in a New York Times op-ed I wrote about this are that these really channel the same dynamics we’re seeing in the secular world, where it’s this sort of civilizational fight to retain the privilege and position mainly of white European folks who see America, “the glories of empire,” of the past, being “taken away what is rightfully ours.” That kind of resentment is what they are using as a wedge issue. That’s really their platform of grievance against what they perceive as a loss of status.

Is it a losing battle?

If you’re looking at the global church, these folks are already outliers. They’ve already lost. When Pope Leo was elected, they lost in a global sense. In the smaller kind of Western sense, the jury is still out because they are much larger. This kind of conservative oppositional mentality is much wider in the United States. And will that triumph? Will they try to make peace with Leo, the first American pope? Will they recognize that he could be around for 20 years and we better take a step back? Or will they just persist here in the United States as kind of right-wing Catholicism? 

JD Vance, who wouldn’t know a Latin mass from anything, he’s the guy who tells the pope to stay in his lane on theology. It’s that kind of mentality that we’re really talking about, which is why the stakes really are high. The issue is whether this conservative Catholicism remains ascendant and essentially isolates the American church even further in the global church. That would be a tragedy.