Early on a Tuesday evening, I arrived at a local dive bar for a show by Dream Syndicate. There’s no opening act (or rather, as Steve Wynn will later joke, the Dream Syndicate are opening for the Dream Syndicate) and a blissfully early 7 p.m. start time. I greeted the door woman, bought a bottle of water, grabbed a bar stool against the far wall, and opened the book in progress on my phone until the show started.
At the end of September, I walked into the Majestic Theatre to see the Michael Shannon/Jason Narducy R.E.M. tribute. It’s a GA venue that holds a little over 1,000. When the doors opened, I headed for the barrier for no other reason than the volume at that proximity helps drown out what jamband fans refer to as “chompers” — people who view concerts as suitable background for their conversations. Delightfully, I found myself standing with four other women. We killed time before the show talking about what other concerts we’d been to recently, and took turns watching each other’s spot when someone needed a bathroom run. (There was no line at the women’s room for that show, a big reason I wanted to be close so I didn’t run the risk of standing near a dude needing to explain R.E.M. to me, like the guy at the bar where I was eating dinner before the show.)
A few weeks earlier, I pulled up at Trinosophes, a coffee shop / artistic consortium that regularly hosts more experimental / less mainstream musicians — Marisa Anderson played a gorgeous show there earlier this year — to see BASIC, an amazing trio that’s a mix of minimalist jazz and experimental rock. I paid the dude at the counter, who was in the middle of pulling a shot of espresso, and then decided to kill some time at People’s Records, the record store attached to the space, along with other show attendees and a couple of musicians in the opening act. I sat in exactly the corner of the room that sounds the best for my damaged hearing and thoroughly enjoyed the sets.
We absolutely need to abolish the concept that going to a concert alone is any kind of abnormal or undesirable behavior.
What all of these concert activities have in common is that I attended them by myself. And this should absolutely not be news of any kind, but recently a leading music magazine posted a news story that announced: “Going to concerts alone is a top-tier human experience.” The story wasn’t actually about that, but was rather a mashup of reporting on how Phoebe Bridgers’ recent phone-free concerts meant that when an attendee spotted a celebrity at the show, they couldn’t report to a gossip publication that this person was supposedly standing alone in the line for the bar (while there are actually many reasons you could be at the bar by yourself despite arriving with an entourage of a dozen people).
But the writer’s reasoning for why it was okay to be going to a show without a date or a friend(s) actually didn’t make a believable case for it. They offered an awkward and overly exaggerated blather about how solo concertgoing means that you can better participate in “the oneness of things,” which made you wonder if the person writing it had actually been to a concert, much less attended one on their own. And I didn’t realize we had to justify or defend this, or that it was anything out of the ordinary.
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What they got wrong is that the “top tier human experience” is simply going to concerts, full stop. (As Neil Young once said, “Live music is better/bumperstickers should be issued.”) The idea that going to see one of the most important concert tours of the year by oneself is “sad” is so idiotic that it should never have been entertained as any kind of news story. And we absolutely need to abolish the concept that going to a concert alone is any kind of abnormal or undesirable behavior.
I’m biased. I’ve been going to concerts alone since I was 14 years old. This wasn’t necessarily by choice, but rather that I wanted to do something important and no one else I knew wanted to do it, and I wasn’t going to let that minor detail stop me. And as I have moved through my life, sometimes I had a friend or companion to go to shows with me, and sometimes — as it happens to normal people in the course of normal life — I did not. If I only attended a concert when I had someone to go with, I would have missed out on far too much. This is a stupid requirement, clearly determined by people for whom live music is just another thing you can do on a given evening, and these are not people anyone who genuinely loves music should be taking direction from.
The first time I went to a concert by myself (which was my second concert), I was dropped off at the venue by my mom (who later would explain that she allowed it because she thought it would “get it out of my system.”) It was not difficult to follow the letters and numbers on my ticket to find my seating location, and when I sat down, the women on one side of me immediately and excitedly introduced themselves, while the two dudes on the other side of me managed to tell me within the first two minutes that they’d be glad to buy me a beer “if you don’t have your ID on you,” wink wink. Everyone was excited to see Bruce Springsteen, even if we were roughly a million miles away from the stage in the upper reaches of the New Haven Coliseum.
Everyone except me had concert stories to tell. Everyone talked about what other concerts they were going to, what radio stations (and which DJ’s specifically) you could count on to be Springsteen-friendly or provide the best info, and everyone swapped information about what other bands were going on tour based on what they had read or heard. I was dropped off when the doors opened, and I thought it would be a long and painful wait until the concert started, but instead I had a dozen new best friends within 15 minutes.
When the concert was over, the girls sitting next to me gave me their phone numbers and told me to call if I was ever going to a show in Hartford. This was an experience that would repeat itself in different formats forever all across the United States, Canada, and multiple European countries, and still happens now if you want that to be your experience. You can also decide you are going to rock up when you feel like it and occupy your time reading a book and not talk to anybody. Or you can limit your socialization to the time-honored tradition of watching someone’s space while they run to the bathroom. This is all incredibly normal, accepted behaviour which anyone who attends a concert regularly already understands.
If I only attended a concert when I had someone to go with, I would have missed out on far too much. This is a stupid requirement, clearly determined by people for whom live music is just another thing you can do on a given evening, and these are not people anyone who genuinely loves music should be taking direction from.
Let’s be honest: while as a teenager I dreamed of the day when I could attend every concert my heart desired with every friend who also loved the band in question, the reality always shook out differently. As an adult, it remains challenging to coordinate schedules and availability, not to mention alignment with other critical details like preferred arrival times and seating/standing location. Sometimes it is far, far easier and more convenient if each person manages their own tickets and concert experience. If you want to hang with your pals, then coordinate a post-show meet-up at the bar or the diner or on the way to the subway. There is absolutely nothing about concert attendance that requires accompaniment!
Admittedly, times have changed, and yes, everyone has a small computer in their pocket and myriad ways to occupy their time before the show starts. And these days, a concert isn’t one of the only ways you’re going to meet people who share similar interests as you. But I hear from younger friends who are going to shows by the likes of Harry Styles or Taylor Swift, and I witnessed myself very recently at a Bikini Kill show locally (where I was one of the older people in the front GA section), the kids are still doing the same thing that I did in 1978: they talk to each other, they swap social handles, they exchange important information. It is all still happening if you are open to the experience, and it should reassure anyone who is hesitant about buying a ticket to a concert if they don’t know anyone else who wants to come with them.
The only way going solo can have a negative impact on you is during the ticket-buying process for reserved seating events. That’s because these days, Ticketmaster will not let you buy one of a pair or will tell you you have to select an adjoining seat (even if there is no adjoining seat at that moment, a thing that has happened to me and countless of my pals). Buying a single ticket used to be the way to game yourself to the best possible seat, as there would always be a leftover hanging around; even if I was going to a show with friends, we still might try for individual tickets as a way to better optimize our chances for a better seat. Thank you, Ticketmaster, for continuing to find ways to make this process painful!
(Caryn Rose) Going solo
The only real downside to solo concert attendance is if you are a single woman and a man in your vicinity has decided it is his solemn responsibility to interrogate anyone who doesn’t look like him to determine their worthiness, e.g., the kind of guys who would talk to whatever man I brought with me to a show and, despite them telling him, “She’s the fan, I just came with because I was interested in checking them out,” there is no way we could possibly be worthy of the space we were occupying. (But that is a completely different essay.)
I’d argue that it is actually an expression of supreme self-love and self-awareness that you’re comfortable enough with yourself to be absolutely content going to a concert as a party of one. Honestly, no one should be waiting for another person to do anything they want to do (except, I dunno, tandem bike riding). But what we absolutely should stop doing is paying attention to other people living their lives the way they want to live them, and that includes making a decision to go to a concert without an entourage. Buy the ticket. Go to the show. I’ll see you there.
Jalen Hurts, the Philadelphia Eagles’ starting quarterback, is out for the season to recover from a deep vein blood clot, found after arriving in London for the game in which Hurts played between the Eagles and the Jacksonville Jaguars.
A Philadelphia sports columnist argued a few years ago that if Brock Purdy, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, were the Eagles quarterback, he “would be a god in Philadelphia,” because of his underdog story. Hurts is an underdog as well. The difference is that Hurts is Black and Purdy is white. But like Michael Jordan’s flu game in the 1997 NBA Finals, where he played sick, playing a football game after being diagnosed with a blood clot and getting little to no rest seems godlike enough to cancel that columnist’s point.
However, questions have largely landed on Hurts. Questions about his leadership, aptitude, and attitude as the Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback, and now about the severity of a blood clot and his commitment to the season amid roster challenges. The most egregious came from Michael Robinson of the NFL Network, who said that, in relation to Hurts’ current injury, Hurts seemed to be saying, “If everybody’s hurt, then I’m hurt too.”
But Hurts has a blood clot. Initially, it was diagnosed as a superficial vein clot, and now it is a series of deep vein clots that have since traveled to Hurts’ lungs. He’ll miss the rest of the season while he receives treatment but is expected to fully recover according to his agent Nicole Lynn. Hurts didn’t make his condition up. It wasn’t a cop-out for a season that seems to have gone down the drain. It’s the truth. Sadly, Hurts hasn’t been given the benefit of the doubt.
Hurts is perhaps one of the most disrespected players in the NFL as, in commissioner Roger Goodell’s words, a “face of the league.” National media pundits, Philadelphia media pundits, and even some Philadelphia Eagles fans disrespect him. Of course, Hurts has a cheering section, but their voices are often drowned out by the chorus and echoes of criticism. The narrative was that the 2026 season was make-or-break for Hurts, after a season when some were all too eager to offer “evidence” of Hurts’ share of the team’s offensive woes.
However, that same make-or-break standard hasn’t been applied to many of Hurts’ peers, even those who have accomplished less than Hurts. And while a contingent of Eagles fans wants Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni fired, it’s not a make-or-break season for him. Even after hiring his friend as offensive coordinator, who was clearly incompetent, or after showing himself to be inept as an offensive mind.
So what about Hurts engenders so much criticism and makes him such a polarizing figure? Last month, ESPN pundit Dan Orlovsky said Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert (compared to Hurts) is “what it should look like.” What about Hurts doesn’t look like how a quarterback is supposed to look? I thought a quarterback should look like a Super Bowl MVP? A better question is: how would any ex-backup quarterback, paid to define what a good, great, or elite quarterback looks like, know what that quarterback actually looks like? I assume because they’re familiar with what it doesn’t look like, but I digress.
It can’t be because he’s not a pocket passer, checked out of plays, or stoic and cryptic. It could be because women find him very attractive, making the manliest of men very insecure. Maybe it’s because some folks believed any part of the AJ Brown nonsense. But I suspect it is deeper than that. You probably won’t like the answer I am about to give, but you know what’s coming: Racism.
Racism has long been a part of the NFL’s history: long before Colin Kaepernick and Brian Flores; long before the league’s history of race-norming to prevent Black retirees from accessing concussion settlement claims. The racism goes as far back as 1933, when the league instituted a ban on Black players. Once allowed back in the league in 1946, a sorting process known as racial stacking was instituted due to the widespread belief that Black athletes weren’t smart enough to play quarterback.
The city of Philadelphia doesn’t get a pass on its racist history simply because more Black quarterbacks have started games than white quarterbacks for the Eagles over the last 40 years. Randall Cunningham, Donovan McNabb, and Michael Vick have all faced their share of racism disguised as criticism at the position. It’s Hurts’ turn to receive some of that same criticism, I suppose, but what fuels it is especially disgusting.
“They play a game, but they aren’t here to play games.”
Hurts isn’t an Allen Iverson-like figure whose tattoos, cornrows, and “posse” make him easily labeled as a “thug.” He isn’t a Joel Embiid-like figure whose struggles on the court and history of missed games make him easily labeled as “lazy.” He’s not a womanizer, he’s not violent, and he’s not unintelligent. He’s none of the easily identifiable tropes placed upon Black people.
Hurts is, however, unapologetically Black.
The unapologetically Black person wears their Blackness every day, regardless of who is offended or discomforted by it. They aren’t fazed by narratives designed to devalue their accolades and their acumen. They embrace themselves and their culture. They’ll speak, behave, relate, and respond in ways unfamiliar to the mainstream, soliciting criticism from a lens filtered by whiteness, labeling anything but white as a failure to meet a standard of posture and decorum. In short, they’re not here to make white people comfortable.
Hurts is proud to be a Black man. He makes crawfish, listens to Frankie Beverly and Maze, and doesn’t ingratiate himself with the sports media machine, largely a white institutional space. He doesn’t yell at officials in a display of passion like Tom Brady, only to be treated like Dez Bryant. He doesn’t respond to media questions the way some journalists believe he should; he doesn’t “scratch where [he doesn’t] itch, and laugh when [he wasn’t] tickled.” He isn’t happy to be in front of the media, like so many more “appreciative” athletes posit themselves to be. As Hurts has said himself, he had a purpose before everyone had an opinion. That goes for white and Black sports media talking-heads alike, whether Emmanuel Acho, Doug Gottlieb, Linda Cohn, or Stephen A. Smith.
The unapologetically Black person may be the most threatening entity to the current social order of the sports industry. They’re threatening because they’re not consumed by the traditional effort to posit themselves as “respectable” in an industry predicated on Black athletes “knowing their place.” They’re not consumed by a desire to appear thankful for the privilege to make money from playing sports. They play a game, but they aren’t here to play games.
However, we live in a culture of hot-take artists who want the immediacy of fame rather than building a record of credibility and significance. The talking heads are all too willing to critique Hurts and others like Kyrie Irving and Angel Reese, only to eat crow each time they accomplish something on the field or on the court. For example, Angel Reese’s critics are eating crow after she became only the 3rd player in WNBA history to post 30 points and at least 15 rebounds in a WNBA Finals game. Reese had 30 points and 16 rebounds.
Nevertheless, racistly-coded commentary disguised as asinine takes will continue, because those takes continue to fuel the careers of formerly respectable journalists while establishing new careers for former athletes whose trajectory mirrors that of their playing days, serviceable at best, but likely missing the mark. That commentary vis-à-vis Hurts is the only reason some of these folks are relevant. But when it comes to Hurts, the only relevant thing is that he played a football game with a condition that became life-threatening, and the only critique worth levying and entertaining is that, against the Philadelphia Eagles, there was negligence in their handling of Hurts’ health. As for Hurts’ haters, his performance against the Jaguars in London under the circumstances we now know will be praised. It has already started.
I guess all it took was almost dying … godlike behavior. But Black people working to death in exchange for white acceptance is a rite of passage imposed on Black folk. It’s the American way.
He might look like something found in the dumpster at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. He might shamelessly plunder the sonics of decades of deep-fried and gravy-smothered hits. But despite everything about his presentation and performance, Kid Rock is not actually southern.
If he were, he might have done the friendly thing and warned Eminem off of collaborating on “Heal My Faith,” a song on his recent Christian album “Halfway 2 Jesus.” He might have stopped his longtime friend and fellow Michigander from irreparable reputational damage. Instead, he let Slim Shady learn a hard lesson that true southerners know: You lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
“Heal My Faith” is genial to the point of being unmemorable, a bit of cringy Christian pablum that encourages loving someone even when you’re outside of the pit. It’s student-athlete core, a mish-mash of choirs, electric guitar noises over pounding drums that all sound like keyboard presets. Kid Rock’s contributions are entirely lifted from inspirational T-shirts, table scraps from rejected Jelly Roll songs. The result is that “Heal My Faith” offers very little to chew on — until Eminem shows up.
The boilerplate praise chug of the song has one upside: It forces the “Rap God” to slow down. Left to his own devices, middle-aged Eminem has been the hip-hop equivalent to masturbatory guitarists, his late-stage work full of technically impressive displays of chops that nonetheless lack the fun and melody of his radio hits. Hearing him enter the song with a flow that’s not indebted to a J.J. Fad outro offered a glimmer of hope. But it was short-lived.
On “Heal My Faith,” the rapper who first gained mainstream attention by lighting the pop chart’s sacred cows afire wonders why we can’t all just get along. It’s shocking stuff from the rapper who famously mused about dropping an “awfully hot coffee pot” on Donald Trump in a freestyle at the BET Hip Hop Awards in 2017. Now, Slim Shady seems to be saying, “We might believe in fundamentally opposed directions for this country. We might differ on the idea of extending dignity to all people, but can’t we put that aside for the sake of a new single you can buy?”
You don’t need to hear it. You’ve already heard it. It’s the realm of purple state campaign ads and Earthbound Trading Co. bumper stickers. It’s junk, and Eminem seems to know it.
How else can you explain a verse that is 90% throat-clearing and preemptive dodges of the backlash he knows is coming? Eminem spends bar after bar defending his decision to even appear on the song, touting his decades-long friendship with Kid Rock and their intertwined history in the music industry.
He talks about their shared roots in Detroit’s music scene, and how their paths crossed again and again. He details an early CD release party at length, where the more established Kid Rock showed up to lend support to the emerging rapper. It isn’t until the closing lines of his verse that Eminem turns to God and the brotherhood of man.
“Liberal and evangelical can agree,” he raps. “It’s God first, home of the free.”
Reputation-wise, the collaboration does far more for Kid Rock than it does for Eminem. The former has long been fully consumed by Trump World, becoming more of a standby entertainer for MAGA events than a rock star. Eminem, on the other hand, once told fans who supported Trump to stop streaming his music.
(Ke.Mazur/WireImage) Kid Rock and Eminem during Experience Music Project Opening Gala at Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington.
Rock told Billboard that he hadn’t planned to “drag [Eminem] into my political world,” but he had to have known that was impossible. The nod from a supposed Trump critic removes a small bit of the stain on Kid Rock, but it also transfers directly to his collaborator.
Eminem might have been hoping to build a bridge with this collaboration, but at least according to his Instagram comments, his fans aren’t ready to get over it. One commenter assured him that it’s okay to cut off a friendship “over moral differences.” Another said Eminem’s line in the sand against Trump must have been “brushed back into the beach.” The rapper’s newfound neutrality, one wrote, still amounted to “choosing a side.”
You can’t feel too bad for Eminem, who’s had plenty of opportunities to see that who you rap with is who you are. After all, more than a year after her breakout single “What I Want,” which she recorded with the controversial country music star Morgan Wallen, the pop singer Tate McRae is still being confronted by fans and interviewers with questions about the pair’s collaboration.
Wallen, who’s been given about as many second chances as gold records, has never explicitly identified himself as a supporter of the MAGA movement. But his history of using slurs on camera, the general nastiness of his dejected young man music and a massive social media tiff with “Saturday Night Live” have solidified him as an anti-woke warrior in the popular conception.
“It’s crazy to think that one song could define a whole person,” McRae told W Magazine earlier this month.“There are many aspects of my personality that three-quarters of my audience has no idea about. You hope one day you figure out a way to show all aspects of it.”
There’s little chance that Eminem will face such questions in the future, if only because his career as a hitmaker is basically over. He was something exciting and fresh when he pantsed the pop culture landscape in the late 1990s, but joking about how much everything sucks is a young man’s game. Coming from an older man, it just sounds bitter and out-of-touch.
Different listeners draw the start of his decline and the end of his relevancy at different points. Most agree that the zeitgeist of rap started to shift away from the stubbornly anachronistic rapper sometime around the end of the aughts. In 2013, he released a well-received album seemingly purpose-built to cap on his career, and then he just kept going. The 23-year-old McRae, on the other hand, will have her past decisions dug up by what remains of the music press after each new chart smash. Eminem may well be staring down a future where his regrettable decision to record contemporary worship dreck with Kid Rock generated his last real headlines.
It’s something the culturally savvy clown of Eminem’s early career would have been smart enough to avoid.
Theories abound as to why JD Vance, once a promising Yale Law graduate with a best-selling memoir, went MAGA. Some argue that it was always a mistake to confuse the vice president’s cosmopolitanism for intellectual sophistication, pointing out that “Hillbilly Elegy” is a bad book that panders to ugly right-wing stereotypes about his working class family of origin. Others suggest he is an empty shell who will become whatever it takes to gain money and power, as evidenced by his constantly shifting attitudes about race and religion. The truth likely falls in the “why not both?” arena. After all, empty and insecure people have often been drawn to far-right ideologies.
But there is one under-appreciated possibility for the MAGA turn of a man who once called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler”: that he finally found an audience willing to laugh at his unfunny jokes.
Vance is clearly embroiled in a lifelong struggle with a common ailment of self-serious men who consider themselves profound geniuses. He longs to be the funniest guy in the room, but he is unable to understand how humor works. But the vice president has discovered what second-rate talents that end up as the “comic” relief on Fox News learned long ago: The right-wing crowd doesn’t care if you’re not funny just as long as you’re cruel.
Vance is taking full advantage of MAGA’s lack of discernment in the last weeks of the midterm campaign. During a stop in Texas supporting the Republican Senate candidate, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, Vance responded to a fan by saying, “I love you, too, sir. And in a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.” The audience roared with laughter, apparently unable to realize that calling Paxton’s Democratic opponent “gay” is less witty than if Vance had made fart noises with his armpit.
The vice president can’t stop with tedious jokes about Talarico, who is leading in statewide polls. On his way to Texas, Vance falsely accused Talarico of having “a weird focus on transgender kids and drag queens,” topics that he and Trump bring up every chance they get. Vance added, “typically people who say stuff like that tend to have some pretty unusual search histories.”
But Vance isn’t content to simply dabble in homophobia and transphobia. Racism is also his forte. During a North Carolina rally on Monday, he called non-white congresswomen “crazies” and mispronounced the name of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. When a protester jumped up to demand that the Trump administration release the Epstein files, Vance suggested, apparently taking note of the young man’s darker skin, that the protester was in the U.S. because of “illegal border crossings.”
At another event, Vance called Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic candidate for Senate, a “little weasel” who should “shut his mouth and show a little gratitude.” This was not out of character; the vice president often demands that people of color bow and scrape before white people for graciously allowing them to exist. But this time he got rebuked by the far funnier El-Sayed, who responded that Vance “had a cute little rally” with the “five people who like him.”
But the vice president’s lack of wit was perhaps best illustrated at an Ohio rally in support of GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, when he suggested that Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee, has a substance abuse problem. “I did promise Amy that I would meet her at a bar later. I understand she’s into that sort of thing,” Vance said, pausing for laughter that even the MAGA audience could barely muster.
Vance’s implication can be traced to a Republican ad that paints Acton as an alcoholic after a 2019 incident in which the police were called during a loud fight with her husband. The call was reported not violent by officers, and her campaign claims the situation is being blown out of proportion. (Acton has also been hit with ads featuring insults from her mother, Donna Arthur, with whom she has been estranged since 1978 after Arthur refused to support her when she accused her stepfather of molesting and raping her between the ages of nine and 12. According to the New York Times, Acton’s stepfather entered a not-guilty plea and was indicted by a grand jury, then went on the run from Ohio before standing trial.)
Vance’s stream of insults ring particularly noxious when considering that he spent the summer portraying himself as a heartfelt Catholic convert whose salvation has imbued him with a newfound sense of Christian grace.
Vance’s stream of insults ring particularly noxious when considering that he spent the summer portraying himself as a heartfelt Catholic convert whose salvation has imbued him with a newfound sense of Christian grace. In an obvious effort to soft-launch a 2028 presidential campaign, the vice president published “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” in June, and strived mightily to convince interviewers they were beholding a humble servant of Jesus Christ.
Vance told USA Today that “my faith tells me to fight against” the blind pursuit of ambition and instead “focus on the good” and “make wise decisions and moral decisions.” In an excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote that he’s learned “to love all parts of our Christian communion,” including those “who voted for me and those who didn’t.” He went on “The View” with this gentle Christian message, claiming regret over “boneheaded” insults in the past, such as when he described childless women as being “miserable,” “sociopathic” and “cat ladies. The hosts weren’t having it, though, pointing out that there is nothing of Christian communion in the administration’s attacks on Black people and immigrants, and leaving a visibly uncomfortable vice president to pretend not to know what they were talking about.
Vance may be able to wriggle around his very un-Christian insults and falsehoods about Democratic politicians by calling politics a “dirty business,” as he did in the Wall Street Journal. But it’s impossible to square his claims of grace and salvation with the utter nastiness he unleashes on immigrants, most of whom are Christians themselves. He has yet to apologize for falsely accusing Haitian immigrants — most of whom are Catholic, like himself — of stealing people’s dogs and cats to eat them. Shortly after publishing “Communion,” Vance accused immigrants of making America “dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” (This is also flat-out false, as immigration has been proven to boost the economy, and the country is objectively cleaner than it was decades ago, when a thick cloud of smog hung over many American cities.)
Through it all, Vance seems to be hoping that the crowd that sees his “Christian charity” face isn’t the same one showing up to hoot at his lame “no homo” jokes about the devout Talarico. This behavior was on display during his recent CBS town hall event, where he tucked away the bad insult comedy and put on his choir boy mask. The dishonesty and hypocrisy reached stratospheric levels when audience members, including a Catholic nun, challenged Vance on his support for mass deportations and his racist lies about immigrants.
“To the extent that my rhetoric has been imperfect here,” Vance said, “that’s on me.” Then he framed the administration’s widespread abuses as reasonable, even compassionate, restrictions on immigration.
His comments came mere hours after he falsely blamed the riots in France on immigrants, posing on X that “liberals imported the third world into France and other countries” while “ignor[ing] fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.” No doubt Vance would deflect and deny if he were confronted on it, but there’s no way to interpret his words except as a claim that people of different backgrounds cannot live together without violence — a frequent insinuation of his that is never slowed by the fact that his own wife and children are Indian-American.
This is ultimately why — despite the undeniable ugliness of Vance’s insults of Democrats, immigrants, queer people and single women — his humor rarely generates the outrage he’s clearly trolling for. Vance tends to come across as more of a pathetic striver than an effective bully. Verbal jabs work a lot better if the would-be roaster has a sense of self- confidence, or at least the ability to fake it. Whether he’s speaking of love or hate, Vance never really seems to be talking with any conviction at all, beyond the hope that whatever he’s saying will win him more power.
On Monday, alongside First Lady Melania Trump, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House Women’s Health Task Force. According to the White House, the aim is to support policy reforms to ensure that women’s research is well-funded and that women have access to “stage-specific prevention, diagnoses, treatment, and care.”
At first glance, the action is in line with what women have long been advocating for. But in reality, the order is a startling setback, reversing an order signed by Joe Biden pushing for women’s research while advancing the Trump administration’s fertility-focused, pronatalist agenda.
Melania Trump is a key part of this effort. In addition to championing the executive order, she also signed it — a purely symbolic act, as the formal role of first ladies is ceremonial. (In an historic first, she also signed an executive order with her husband in 2025 that expanded resources for the foster care system.) But symbolism matters, and Melania Trump is lending her signature and voice to an action masquerading as a boon for women.
In speaking at the signing ceremony, held in the Rose Garden at the White House, the first lady called the event “a transformative moment for women in America. Beginning today, we will change the reality of women’s health.”
That remains to be seen. The White House Women’s Task Force established by Donald Trump promises to work towards creating a federal government that recognizes and works to rectify medical conditions that affect women throughout their lives by enacting “necessary policy and regulatory reforms to ensure timely and state-specific prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care for women.”
For many women who have faced systematic gaslighting from doctors who claim that our real physical symptoms are solely psychological, or a lack of funding and real-life effects of diseases largely affecting women being severely behind in clinical trials or lacking funding, this sounds like a good thing. As the order reads, “despite considerable advances in biomedical science, many diseases and conditions that disproportionately or uniquely affect women have not received the level of research, clinical attention, and treatment that other diseases and conditions have received.”
That is fundamentally true. Medical conditions that solely or disproportionately affect women, such as endometriosis and autoimmune diseases, have for decades been denied funding or excluded from clinical trials. Even conditions that affect men and women have routinely left girls and women out of clinical trials, failing to collect vital information about the different ways that diseases present and progress.This includes cardiovascular disease, in which women may experience different heart attack signs and symptoms compared to men and, consequently, often misattribute heart attack symptoms. The result is significant, often deadly, delays in seeking treatment.
The same disparity exists in medication research, with women experiencing adverse reactions to medications about twice as often as men because girls and women are not included in clinical studies where medication effectiveness and dosage is studied. This all trickles down into mainstream medicine, where women have for decades been denied care, diagnoses and medication. But the solution that Donald Trump is offering is not going to fix it.
While the goals of this task force are legitimate, the president has routinely cut and downscaled women’s healthcare funding and initiatives as Melania Trump has stood idly by.
While the goals of this task force are legitimate, namely to advance and coordinate research on women’s health through all phases of life, to increase inclusion of women and girls in clinical trials, and develop accountability for grant recipients, the president has routinely cut and downscaled women’s healthcare funding and initiatives as Melania Trump has stood idly by.
During his second administration, the president has cut Medicare, which provided vital healthcare for women, and shut down data-collection contracts for the Women’s Health Initiative study. (He reversed this decision days later.) As part of his efforts at targeting scientific grants connected to diversity, equity and inclusion, the president has further defunded women’s healthcare.
But perhaps the most glaring example of the administration’s neglect came in June when Trump cancelled millions of dollars in grants under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. This change affected thousands of universities, community organizations, public health departments and Planned Parenthood clinics that provide vital gynecological care to women in states where abortion is currently illegal — and where Trump and the GOP’s continued fight against abortion access is costing women their lives.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the grants, issued new funding criteria mandating abstinence-only sex education with an increased emphasis on marriage and fertility tracking, which advocates warn will increase the rate of teen pregnancy. But that may be the point.
Since his return to office in January 2025, Trump has worked to reverse the decline in U.S. birth rates, even calling himself the “fertilization president” at a Women’s History Month celebration in March 2025. Many of his allies have claimed that the decline in teen pregnancy rates is a “crisis” rather than a societal success. With this context, women’s healthcare advocates argue that Trump is trying to raise the birthrate by increasing the number of teen pregnancies.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump sign an executive order establishing the Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House Women’s Health Task Force on Oct. 19, 2026.
The president’s latest executive order advances this pronatalist agenda. The White House touts TrumpRx.gov as “delivering massive savings on some of the most commonly used fertility medications in the country to help families grow,” and hails the work of Moms.gov “to support new and expecting mothers, bringing together information intended to help families navigate pregnancy and early parenthood.”
Although Melania Trump has not spoken publicly about the Moms.gov portal, she did publish an op-ed in the Washington Post around the same time Trump launched the platform earlier this year on Mother’s Day, writing that America’s strength is tied to how mothers mold their children’s and family’s moral character. “America can restore the honor of motherhood after years in which feminism often placed career above family, with consequences to our nation,” she wrote.
With these words in mind, it comes as no shock that the order makes no mention of protecting access to abortion or contraception. As scholars and advocates like Dr. Karen Leader responded online to an X post from the official HHS account, writing, “‘Reproductive health’ without access to legal abortion is a death sentence for women.” Another person replied, “You might ask @FLOTUS to address the many preventable deaths of women who are bleeding out in parking lots or have sepsis or ectopic pregnancies due to republican draconian abortion laws.”
Even the people Trump has assigned to the new task force have a proven track record of supporting cuts to women’s healthcare and using medicine as tools to police and restrict women’s bodies. Led by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, it will include HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has in the past supported cuts to Medicaid coverage and maternal health initiatives and medical abortion restrictions, as well as championing vaccine skepticism.
In a move that is especially galling, Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexual assault and reached a financial settlement with the accuser, will also serve on the task force. During his time in office, the defense secretary has led a sustained attack on women’s healthcare and diversity in the military. In September 2026, the Pentagon released (and then temporarily rescinded) guidance as part of Hegseth’s “Health and Human Performance Optimization” initiative, which includes regularly screening female service members for fatigue and irregular menstrual cycles.
Women service members 35 and older who report significant symptoms of perimenopause or menopause are required to undergo testing to determine if these symptoms impact their station or quality of life. In response, advocates and medical professionals voiced concern that this policy could lead to unwanted and unwarranted tracking of women’s menstrual cycles, compromising medical privacy and potentially opening the door to use period tracking as a way to police miscarriages and abortions.
Instead of advancing women’s healthcare, the president’s executive order and task force should be seen for what it is: a cynical ploy for votes ahead of the November midterms. Taken together, the actions represent a last ditch attempt to save the support of women — and especially white women — for Trump’s allies amid growing criticism of the president.
It makes sense that the first lady, who herself defended abortion rights in her 2024 memoir “Melania”and urged Congress to hold public hearings for Epstein survivors, would be Trump’s choice to share the news. Once again, Melania Trump is willingly being used as a political prop to show that Trump values and respects women, despite the fact that he routinely fires the women in his Cabinet and press office, continues making sexist and predatory remarks to reporters, and most importantly, has named hostile men as many members of a task force dedicated to women’s health.
Women have long been medically disenfranchised, and Trump is trying to argue that he and the first lady care about women’s health. But for a president that has fought against abortion rights, opposed the release of the Epstein files and even defended the “Cornell 7,” many American women will remain unconvinced of his motives. Rather than reassured, they will also be rightly skeptical of the first lady who continues to stand by his side.
This column first appeared in The Amendment, a newsletter by Errin Haines, The 19th’s editor-at-large. Subscribe today to get early access to her analysis.
Most people had no idea who Angie Nixon was until a few months ago.
Maybe the three-term Florida state legislator came onto their radar in April, after her one-woman protest in a pink jumpsuit and matching bullhorn on the House floor against the special session to gerrymander the state just hours after the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act went viral.
Perhaps it was Nixon’s stunning and decisive primary win in August that made a progressive Black woman the face of the Democratic Party’s political fortunes in Florida. Or maybe it was another viral moment, courtesy of Vice President JD Vance, who suggested at a rally earlier this month that she should “get the hell out of here” and that she doesn’t belong in America if she calls herself a socialist.
But Nixon, who now seems to be everywhere, did not come out of nowhere. Her improbable rise to become Florida’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate is the result of a decade of preparation meeting political opportunity, challenging notions of electability in a state that’s increasingly moved toward Republicans. In the final weeks of the race, Nixon’s virality and scrappy approach are getting attention and may be paying off, as donors have given the campaign a much-needed boost.
“People are pissed. They’re struggling,” Nixon said in an interview. “They want to feel like they can talk to elected officials and they are listened to. But Donald Trump and Ashley Moody, they’re turning their back on folks. I believe the government should work for people, but right now it’s actively working against them. And so I am running because we need to send someone to Washington, D.C., that’s going to stand up to Donald Trump and make him listen and do right by everyday Floridians and Americans in this country.
If elected, Nixon would become Florida’s first Black senator and could be one of a record four Black women senators serving simultaneously. Her candidacy has expanded the political imagination of her state and country about who can win statewide — and who gets to claim Florida’s future.
There are a lot of variables that create an Angie Nixon moment, said Glynda Carr, president of Higher Heights for America, a political action committee that works to put more Black women in office and has endorsed Nixon.
“What makes her a compelling candidate is when she tells her personal why, and why that has driven her to be an advocate, an organizer and a legislator — that speaks to people,” Carr said. “She may be being outspent — Democrats are being outspent in most places, and Black women are always outspent. What she has said is people can’t outwork her.”
Nixon faces an uphill battle headed into November. Republicans have 1.5 million more registered voters in Florida, and President Donald Trump won the state in 2024 by 13 points. While Nixon remains competitive in the final weeks of the general election, most polls show her still trailing her opponent, Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody, by several points. Only one Black woman, former Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, has ever won office statewide in Florida.
The odds are not lost on Nixon, who campaigned last week in Monticello, on the Georgia-Florida border, about 45 minutes outside of Tallahassee. When she took the stage, Nixon was met with a wave of enthusiasm whose energy she matched. She made her case to the Jefferson County audience of mostly older, White voters in a city with a 43 percent Black population and a county that Trump won by 19 points in 2024.
“We’re working so hard and then they tell us, ‘You’re not working hard enough.’ Meanwhile, they’re working less and less and less and getting richer,” Nixon told the crowd as they nodded in agreement.”
“We have the opportunity to do something different in these next 250 years,” she continued as the audience clapped and cheered. “We have the opportunity to build a new vision for our country, y’all. One where everyone can be healthy, prosperous and safe, and experience rest and joy.”
Afterward, as volunteers broke down the room at the Monticello Opera House around her, Nixon stopped to chat and take pictures with the voters — old and young, moms and children, of different backgrounds and races.
“My coalition needs to be diverse,” Nixon said in an interview. “I can’t just go have conversations with Democrats. I have to have conversations with independents, with Republicans, with members of any other third party. And we have to work hard on talking to them, cutting through the noise, and letting them know we hear them, we care about them, and we’re going to help provide some relief.”
On the stump, she has been focused on affordability, centered on issues that are popular among many voters. Her platform includes paid family and sick leave, a national rent freeze and moratorium on evictions, a universal jobs program and Medicare for All — some of the same policy priorities of the Democratic Socialists of America. Nixon is a member of the progressive group but has said she is not completely aligned with all of the group’s policies.
While Nixon is a progressive candidate, she knows it will take a broad coalition of Floridians — including some who may not have been open to voting for a Democrat, a Black woman or both — to win in November. Her message aims to appeal to voters’ interests and not just their ideology, a rejection of the idea that she’s someone who doesn’t belong in this country.
“Her biggest asset is her ability to be in front of voters,” Carr said. “She’s building a grassroots, final drive that is a blueprint. We’re going to see more candidates that look, talk, and believe in the values that Angie Nixon believes in. She’s not an anomaly.”
Voters may be getting to know Nixon, but she has spent years getting to know them.
For two decades, she has been an organizer in Florida, and she was first elected to the state legislature in 2020. On her campaign website, she touts her record as the former executive director of Florida for All, a statewide coalition of progressive groups that has helped register tens of thousands of voters.
As a sitting state legislator who knows how to run local elections as an organizer and candidate, Nixon has a résumé that has prepared her for Washington, said Carr.
“That is certainly a skill set that should be welcomed in Washington. She’s going to hit the ground running and understand the process. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, here’s this woman who is inspiring, who people are interested in what she has to say, she wears pink, she has a bullhorn.’ She has all of that — and she also has the experience.”
What can look like a surprise candidacy to some is the culmination of years spent building relationships and registering voters. In the decade that Nixon has contemplated her run, the political landscape has also changed.
In 2016, Kamala Harris became only the second Black woman elected to serve in the U.S. Senate. Her election came 20 years after that of the first Black woman senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. A decade after Harris’ election, there are two Black women senators — Democrats Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware — making history as the first Black people elected as senators from their respective states and the first Black women to serve simultaneously in the Senate. In November, Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton is poised to join them, meaning at least three Black women would be serving in the Senate together. Nixon’s path is more challenging, but she could become the fourth.
“In a decade, that’s a lot of movement in the highest chamber,” Carr said. “And that Black women are starting to chip away at this thought that Black women can’t run statewide. She didn’t have permission. For all intents and purposes, she shouldn’t have even filed. It’s Florida; it’s a Black woman.”
For much of the race, Nixon’s campaign was strapped for cash and didn’t have much support from PACs or wealthy donors. She raised $975,000 during the primary, largely from small donors and social media, against an opponent who raised more than $16 million. But the latest campaign finance reports show that Nixon outraised Moody in the third quarter, with the candidates reporting fundraising totals of $7.6 million and $5.8 million, respectively. Moody holds the overall advantage, with a total haul of more than $14 million, and has so far outspent Nixon by 32 to 1.
Nixon is among the increasing number of Black women who are running for statewide office up and down the ballot. They are expanding their ambition beyond what has already been proven — the mayor’s office, seats in Congress — and running difficult races in difficult states, courting voters and challenging the institutional status quo. Slowly, they are normalizing whose candidacies should be considered by claiming their right to contest their place and power in our democracy.
“I love my state, and so I’m going to fight for it, because it’s mine,” Nixon said. “It’s everyone’s here in the state. It’s our Florida.”
In so-called normal times and under business-as-usual administrations the job of White House Press Secretary doesn’t lead to renown or infamy. Those terms — normal, business as usual — don’t apply to Donald Trump’s tenure in the Oval Office, and his press secretaries have become household names mostly for the wrong reasons.
Sean Spicer’s claim to fame is being a terrible liar and an even worse dancer. Sarah Huckabee Sanders distinguished herself by reducing the once-frequent White House press corps briefings to very occasional insult exchanges peppered by lies. Her successor Stephanie Grisham, meanwhile, spends her time appearing on the One America News Network, Sinclair Broadcast Group stations, and Fox News instead of serving as a liaison between the press corps and the Oval Office.
More than 300 days have passed since the White House has held a news conference with reporters. In light of the recent saber-rattling between the U.S. military and Iran, that number is stunning. Times such as these require an official briefings from the White House and the military, who are charged with a duty to convey information to citizens via the press corps with clarity.
Such times also present tremendous opportunities to spin the administration’s actions in a persuasive light, leading citizens to have confidence in its actions. Indeed, Ari Fleischer used his position as George W. Bush’s press secretary to sell a war that has been dragging on now for 17 years.
On Friday, Fleischer appeared in Pasadena to talk about the upcoming “American Experience” profile “George W. Bush,” part of PBS’ day of press conferences at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. This is where Salon sat down with him for an interview that took place before the “American Experience” panel.
Right around the same time, 13 former White House press secretaries, military and foreign service officials published a letter on CNN calling for the restoration of regular press briefings.
“An informed press corps strengthens our ability to govern,” the letter states. “Yes, presidents are now able to communicate directly via the internet, social media and tweets. But most Americans will learn about the work of the White House in the reports they see, read, and hear in what we collectively call ‘the press.'”
The statement then observes that regular White House briefings generally lead to better and more responsible reporting, later adding, “In times of military conflict and international crisis, these briefings take on even more importance. Americans want to know the latest developments and seek the truth. On social media, wild rumors can fly, and our adversaries can manipulate disinformation to their advantage. This is now well documented.”
“For that reason, among many, the country needs trusted sources of information delivered on a timely and regular schedule. That is the fundamental responsibility of people who serve as spokesmen and women for presidents, cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking government officials.”
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley responded to the letter by calling its writers “D.C. establishment swamp creatures.”
Among those who signed are Victoria Clarke, who worked under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Scott McClellan, who worked under Bush as his press secretary.
Missing from that list are McClellan’s fellow Bush-era press secretaries Dana Perino and Fleischer. Perino is now a Fox News anchor, and Fleischer is a contributor at Fox News.
In this one-on-one conversation with Salon, Fleischer talked about his view of the press’ relationship with the White House in the current climate and was asked to reflect on his time as press secretary to the second President Bush, specifically with regard to conveying false information about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction that led us to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Please note that this interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
I don’t know if you read the recent Twitter challenge from authors Don Winslow and Stephen King to Stephanie Grisham.
No, I haven’t.
They stated that if she would hold a press briefing, they’ll give $200,000 to St. Jude’s Charity. This was a serious offer, speaking to the fact that there has not been a White House press briefing for more than 300 days.
Yeah.
You held that job and observed the traditional means of operating as an information bridge between the White House and the press corps. So what do you think about the fact that the last couple of press secretaries have been not only less approachable, but granting less access to official information coming out of the White House?
I’m a traditionalist, so it concerns me a lot and there’s a tremendous value to the briefing. There certainly was during the Bush era, and historically now, the advantage to a president is you have people reinforce his message and buttress what he says. The advantage to the country is it gives reporters a chance to ask more probing, longer follow-up questions.
But everything’s changed now in this era of hostility between President Trump and the press. And I’ve never seen such rancor and hostility in both directions. And so as much as I’m a traditionalist and see the benefits of the briefing, I don’t know that if they brought the briefing back in this current environment, it would serve the press, the public or the press secretary any good cause. I just think it would turn the room into nothing but a TV show that was full of nasty arguments both directions.
I’m not going to disagree with the partisan rancor in this country. That is abundantly clear. But I do not believe that what you’re saying about the animosity in terms of the press, particularly the actual people in that briefing room, is justified.
I say that because there is a habit nowadays, as we’re consuming media, of conflating the people who are on the ground and in that room doing their job as journalists and asking questions, with punditry. You know this. You’re a pundit. So I understand that you’re going to have a viewpoint on this topic that’s going to be a bit skewed. But I just want to say that when you’re blaming both sides, I need to disagree with that.
The questions that are being asked are probing and they’re certainly pressing tough issues with the president. But I would also say that the reaction the president has had, and the press secretaries from Sean Spicer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and now what we seen of Stephanie Grisham, that is where the rancor has showed up. And you can call me biased on the behalf of those journalists, but when I’m watching the news, the rancor is really elevated from the [White House] side.
Just one other factor I’ll mention – and I’ll come back to that. But there’s another big factor here that’s changed things. And that’s the accessibility of the president himself versus President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton. No predecessor has been as open and accessible to the press as the president himself. And that is the primary job of the White House press corps, is to ask the president hard questions. So he’s doing it on virtually a daily basis, whether it’s a good day for him or a bad day —
As he’s getting on a helicopter with very loud rotors where he limits amount of time spent answering questions.
—that matters. I mean, if you’re, if you’re sitting there, they’re getting seven, eight, nine, 10 questions —
They’re getting in a couple of questions repeated seven, eight, nine, 10 times…And he’s not really answering those questions.
I don’t think that’s the case.
I’m just saying that there’s a difference between those formal briefings, which as you know, you have a controlled environment that you, as the press secretary, used to your advantage. Just in terms of being able to distill information accurately and effectively to the press. What you did, and I’m not saying this was right, but you distilled the message to the press, and the press gave it credibility and repeated it. I’ll also say the press should have questioned you even more. I would say that to every press secretary.
But the role that the press secretary plays carries a certain level of respect with the press. By saying Trump is more accessible, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the press is getting a better value in the information he’s sharing.
That’s on the press, not on the president. They have daily access and the press can get out of it whatever they seek. And I don’t think venue matters. They have access to the president, which is an improvement over prior White Houses for the press. So given the fact that the president is so accessible, I still wish as a traditionalist there were the briefing, but I’m realist enough to know that that rancor, that hostility would turn into a nasty red hot TV show where the few grandstanders in the room will spoil it for the lot of them, particularly print reporters who really do just want to get questions answered.
[CNN White House correspondent] Jim Acosta, for example. He acts like a pundit when he should be a correspondent. He states his opinion. He tells the White House what they should be concluding, and I think it’s that type of grandstanding along with the breakdown of the media in the modern era that has led to such polarizing media outlets. We used to have a much more dedicated, neutral fact-finding press corps and now, in both directions, the press takes stands for and against. And I think that’s a reality that’s going to live long after President Trump as well. There’s just been a breakdown on what the media represents that’s changed with this polarization. All of it in the Trump era leads me to think that as traditional as I am, and as constructive as the briefing can be, it makes little to no sense to fiddle with the Trump administration.
At the same time you have to also consider who is that in that room. You’re talking about the breakdown in the media. But there are people in that room who aren’t actually, and I am saying this politely, traditional media. They’re not even really media at all. The White House has invited propaganda machines into that room.
They’ve always been there.
So you’re saying this is normal, that you let in the likes of One America News, conspiracy bloggers ,and newsletter writers, you let those in during the Bush era?
Oh yeah. I mean, my approach during the Bush era was the press secretary should not be the person who decides who was or who was not media. There were people who worked for me who made that decision based on logistics and Secret Service reviews. I don’t think it’s helpful for the press secretary to decide you are acceptable as a journalist. That’s a thin line on thin ice. So I had people in there who were far, far left pundits and then far, far right pundits. That’s the way it goes. I’d spend most of my time taking questions from the front couple of rows, which is where the traditional mainstream outlets sit.
The difference now is that when Trump has appeared and asked questions, he’s gone to the “friendlier” outlets that aren’t actual news organizations. And that’s something as press secretary when you would brief Bush, my guess is, and you can clarify this, but I suspect you encouraged him to take questions from the traditional news outlets that carried the most weight.
He did, regularly. What really changed is the internet and social media has created profound changes in the way the media operates. And then breakdown of the media in terms of the polarization that the rest of the nation is going through as well.
When I was there, there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, it was the dawn of the social media internet era. Toward the end of the Bush years, Twitter existed and Facebook existed, but I remember thinking if we ever wanted to produce a White House video, we would have released it through government channels and I’d have been hammered for creating government propaganda.
Technology changed, and the Obama administration regularly released YouTube videos and it was widely accepted. It was measured then by how many clicks it got as a measure of whether it was popular, whether it was successful. Gone was the notion that this could be propaganda even though the only difference was who carried it: YouTube versus the government channel.
Technology has really changed everything for the media probably in many ways that are positive in many ways that are negative and we’re still flushing that out.
Let’s talk about that. A lot of your tweets and recent interviews have been quoted. You are getting on Fox News and saying a lot of things in the moment, that you’re having thrown back in your face and you’re being asked to defend yourself.
I’m talking about everything that’s happening in Iran, the missile strikes in Iraq, and all the reaction around this new conflict in the Middle East. People have taken issue with your recent initial reaction of “we’ll be greeted as liberators,” which is what you said in 2003. After that, there were marches in the streets of Iran showing that not to be the case.
Looking at this part of a 17-year war – one which you had role in starting – it’s curious to me that now, 17 years later that you wouldn’t look back and observe that maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, maybe we shouldn’t be increasing tensions with Iran.
Yeah, I’d do it the same way I always have. And that’s to say what I believe. It’s not complicated.
Not even in hindsight?
First off, you have to make the distinction between the military operation, the war itself, and then the occupation. The aftermath fact is from March of 2003 till roughly July, August of 2003, we were greeted as liberators. You could go to cafes and downtown Baghdad, sit outside and have meals. It was a peaceful city. People welcomed the Americans. Starting in the fall of 2003 predominantly, that’s when the occupation turned terrible. And that’s when we start to lose many more lives. And that’s when the tide turned.
So two things can be right at the same time. We were greeted as liberators, and then a guerrilla war became a highly successful guerrilla operation. And we didn’t handle the occupation, right? We handled the military invasion. We didn’t handle the occupation.
But I’m talking about the information that was dispensed to the press before the war.
I’ll get back to that. The other big thing was the issue of weapons of mass destruction. This is an entirely legitimate issue. Of course, I faithfully and accurately reported to the American people precisely what the CIA concluded. The CIA concluded the Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, biological or chemical, no if, ands, or buts.
And the UN investigators went in and didn’t find any conclusive evidence of WMDs.
The CIA said that he had them. That was the CIA’s conclusion. And that was what the president relied on when he made the decision to go to war.
Now, tragically, that intelligence turned out to be wrong, and we all acknowledge that that’s what led to the creation of the war. They called the Robb-Silberman Commission, a bipartisan investigation into how and why it went wrong. Their conclusion was it was an intelligence failure. That’s the heart of it.
And to this day, I’m certain that if the CIA had said to President Bush, “We don’t know. We’re not sure if he has weapons of mass destruction or not,” there never would have been [a war].
And the tragedy is the information turned out to be wrong and we went to war based on a wrong conclusion by the CIA.
Famously, you said that you didn’t support Trump in the election. But you do now. At what point do you look at the events that are either connected to Trump or that he’s precipitated in terms of tensions not just between party but also between the people of this country and say to yourself, “Enough is enough”? Or, “You know what? Looking back, I might not have been correct in this initial assessment”? At what point do you maybe reassess and actually say in public, “Maybe I wasn’t correct?”Do you apologize for anything?
In the primary, I voted for somebody else. I wanted to be for him in the general against Hillary Clinton. And as I watched it all unfold, I ultimately left my ballot blank at the presidential level and voted for him all the levels below president. And as I have watched President Trump, there are many times I have criticized him and there are many times that I have praised him. I’m not afraid to be independent and call it as I see it.
I regularly defended [Special Counsel Robert Mueller] because I know Bob Mueller. I know what a man of integrity is. I was one of few, if not the only person, on Fox News from start to finish to defend Bob and Bob Mueller’s honor and integrity and how he conducted that investigation. And I’ve never hesitated to criticize the president on Twitter or on Fox News.
. . . So I don’t hide what I think or say. And I think one of the highest duties you have having once worked at the White House is no longer to be a spokesperson for any one president or cause. That’s what I used to do with tremendous pride. Now the more important thing is to try to shine a light on what’s right, what’s wrong, what worked, what didn’t, and explain it.
And that’s what I’ve tried to do with President Trump. There are things that he’s done that . . . I don’t support his manner. His style is not mine. It’s not like that any of the people that I’ve worked for. It’s too truculent. It’s too offensive.
But I’ll also point out that many of the criticisms against him are too truculent and too offensive. He’s been called Adolf Hitler, he’s been called Mussolini. As soon as he was the president-elect, a movement [arose] that was based on the word “resistance,” which was the word used against the Nazis in France. . . . Talk about going beyond the norms. These are all actions beyond the norms.
But do you believe that he has been a normal president? You’ve worked for a man who I think people would say operated within the social contract of what we expect from a president.
He’s the president that the American people through the electoral college elected. And I see a lot of people who rejected that, who tried to overturn it in the electoral college, if they could have, who are now trying to overturn it through impeachment if they can. And I think that is equally, if not more so, violative of the norms that I believe are important to the traditions that George Bush represented and the people that I used to work for represented. So I think there’s way too much hostility in the system. But it’s on every side. It’s not just President Trump.
Just to clarify, what would you say those norms are?
To treat people you disagree with, with respect. When President Obama was reelected in 2012 I tweeted the next morning, congratulations to President Obama. He’s my president and he’s all our president. I think that’s the way we should all be. That’s how you show respect for the American people and the decisions made within our constitutional system. I didn’t vote for President Obama. I voted for Mitt Romney, but I recognized he’s my president. As soon as President Trump was elected, you had this massive movement on Twitter and social media saying, “not my president.”
That same thing happened with Obama.
But not by me. You’re asking me questions of me. That’s why I said to you, I instantly tweeted, he’s my president. I wanted to strike that civil tone that much more representative of the Bush family’s tone. So if you’re asking about my behavior, I can just tell you what I’ve done. And that’s represented by what I believe about President Bush. and how you treat people, and how you should be civil with people even if you disagree with them.
You’re a contributor to Fox News and a lot of people have pointed out that Fox is one of the less respectful, less civil, less considerate proponents of discourse right now, particularly in politics. So when you’re talking about respect and civility — obviously they employ you, so there’s only so much you can say — but what do you see that they’re contributing to this conversation?
Well, I think you have to make a distinction between opinion shows and news shows.
Viewers don’t make that distinction.
But I think there is a distinction between the opinion shows and the news shows, and the news shows are superb. I think Bret Baier’s show at six o’clock is one of the best, most fair shows in journalism, and their daytime shows as well. I wake up in the morning, I watch CNN in the morning, and I watch Fox in the afternoon because I like the balance. I want to hear what all parties are saying and I think you can make many of the same points you made about Fox, about CNN and certainly about MSNBC.
So that’s part of that polarization, the breakdown in the media that I was talking about. But I also suggest if you see the things that I say on Fox, it is very much an independent voice and a voice that reminds people about the importance of civility.
This is the point I was making to you about Bob Mueller and I could give you dozens of examples where I’ve said things that were critical of the president and said things that are supportive of the president. I don’t have to be polarizing.
The “American Experience” two-part biographical profile “George W. Bush” with Fleischer airs Monday, May 4, and Tuesday, May 5 at 9 p.m., on PBS member stations.
Of all the ludicrous things written about Sofia Coppola’s beguiling “Marie Antoinette” upon its theatrical release 20 years ago (and after being booed at its Cannes premiere, there were so frighteningly many), the most absurd is the hand-wringing over its anachronistic soundtrack. Coppola filled the film tip-to-couture-heeled-toe with songs from ’80s punk and new wave groups, creating a throughline between her own teenage preoccupations and the adolescent Queen of France’s frivolities.
Looking back now, the decision is even more inspired than it was then: a bold, personal choice that helped Coppola’s film stand out from the otherwise stuffy welcome it was bound to receive. This was not, after all, your conventional period piece. Coppola was granted unprecedented access to film in and around the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. But beyond the exclusive entrée, Coppola — only on her third feature, but already known for her affinity for youth culture — would bring Marie Antoinette a jouissance the history books had never afforded her.
One gets the sense that filming the production of “Marie Antoinette” is Eleanor Coppola’s version of a parent at their child’s Christmas pageant, ducking down in the aisles and contorting themselves to ensure they don’t miss a single moment. It’s the perfect example of how movies can make something as intangible as love go on forever.
Critics, of course, didn’t see it that way. Writing about the soundtrack, The Denver Post’s Michael Booth said the music was “not interesting enough to save this bauble,” and that Coppola “doesn’t even have the conviction to remain new wave throughout.” Time Out’s Dave Calhoun professed: “The soundtrack — like the distracting cakes, costumes and production design — does everything to stress youthful decadence and nothing to throw any light on the woman who gives the film its name.” Most curtly, The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle wrote that Coppola’s “reductive approach illuminates nothing about the queen except to suggest that she was an idiot, and portentous shots of her rushing down opulent corridors to a rock soundtrack can’t lend her stature.”
(Sofia Coppola) Jason Schwartzman, Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst on the set of “Marie Antoinette”
What’s funny, especially in retrospect, is how widely these men whiffed the point. Historical stature and new discoveries are irrelevant. (So, too, is mature conviction — though I’d argue Coppola displayed exactly that when she didn’t make the entire soundtrack new wave.) Coppola conveys that the answers about who Marie Antoinette was have been written into history, but overlooked by the men who most often dictate it. She was a teenage girl suddenly saddled with the fate of a country, tasked with making decisions well beyond her purview or experience. Marie Antoinette was out of her depth from the moment she set foot in France from Austria, entrusted with overseeing war and peace, money and poverty. She tried her best, did what she felt was right, and they had her head for it. What better analogy for Coppola and the bitter response to her brilliant, evergreen third film?
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Twenty years on, “Making Marie Antoinette” — which screened at this year’s New York Film Festival and premieres in theaters October 23 before streaming on MUBI November 6 — sheds ravishing new light on Coppola’s masterpiece. Co-directed by Coppola alongside her late mother, Eleanor, and drawn from over 90 hours of behind-the-scenes footage Eleanor shot during production, the documentary is an instant essential for anyone ravished by the original film or the filmmaking process.
Up-close and personal, Eleanor’s camera reveals the massive undertaking of producing a movie at this scale, honing in on small, intricate details to convey her daughter’s meticulousness. Her footage is teeming with maternal pride, observant and heartwarming. One gets the sense that, for a filmmaking dynasty like the Coppolas, filming the production of “Marie Antoinette” is Eleanor’s version of a parent at their child’s Christmas pageant, ducking down in the aisles and contorting themselves to ensure they don’t miss a single moment. If “Marie Antoinette” says as much about its director as it does about its subject, “Making Marie Antoinette” is the perfect companion piece: A film about letting art and life stay in constant conversation, and how that dialogue makes for a rich existence. It’s the perfect example of how movies can make something as intangible as love go on forever.
Sofia and Eleanor Coppola began work on “Making Marie Antoinette” together during the pandemic. Locked away in their quarantine pod, the isolation proved the perfect opportunity to comb through hours of archival footage, stitching a story from B-roll and memories, both of which Eleanor had plenty of. A dedicated archivist of her own life via journals and film, Eleanor spent much of her time trailing her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and children between their movie sets to document the arduous filmmaking process. She eventually broke into her own work beyond documentaries and videography, directing two narrative feature films before the pandemic began. At her daughter’s side, “Making Marie Antoinette” made progress but remained unfinished when Eleanor died in 2024. Sofia decided to finish the film as a tribute to her mother, and both women’s touch can be felt throughout — two hands held together, always.
Even those critics who panned “Marie Antoinette” 20 years ago could find something to adore here. For all the derision heaped upon Sofia’s keen directorial eye and scrupulous vision, a behind-the-scenes look only makes the details all the more impressive. It’s a production with a capital “P”: hundreds of extras, an immense principal cast, throngs of below-the-line team — costumers, production designers, historical advisors, translators — and one giant, very expensive castle that must be handled with the utmost care. One doesn’t have to hear Sofia say “this is a lot” to understand that it’s far more than just a lot. It’s visible in every shot. For a director whose previous two films were microscopic in comparison, shooting “Marie Antoinette” may as well have been going to the moon.
(Sofia Coppola) Kirsten Dunst on the set of “Marie Antoinette”
But that’s also what makes it such a feast. It’s a film unlike any other period piece, as sumptuous as decadent as a French pastry. One can practically taste the butter on their lips as Kirsten Dunst glides through ornate halls and indulges in raspberry-topped sweets. This surplus of opulence is what gives the film its edge, too. Think about who you were at 14. If you were thrust into a world where everything you could ever want is at your fingertips, where love blossomed as freely as the gardens adorning your magnificent estate, wouldn’t you, too, lose yourself inside the pomp and circumstance? Is that not the very feeling of being a teenager, so certain that everything and anything is possible, that when one gets a taste of the world, it’s nothing short of intoxicating?
As the long, 50-some-day production schedule rolls on, the viewer can feel Eleanor’s anxiety ease, allowing pride to take full control. Sofia has this, and Eleanor’s job might be the best one on set: watching the daughter she raised come into her own.
For Sofia, the fantasy is the film. It’s integral to Marie Antoinette’s tragedy, to making the viewer empathize with a girl who had no choice but to get in over her head. In Eleanor’s camera, Sofia has that same impish desire, taking on a film so gargantuan that she can’t possibly understand that her eyes are bigger than her stomach. Eleanor watches dutifully, admiring her daughter as she leads rooms full of men, asserting that her decision is not only the best one, but the right one, because she is the person in charge.
It’s frightening to watch someone you care for so deeply balance all that power. But through journal entries from that time, narrated in the film by Diane Lane, the audience can piece together where the fear and the pride meet. After all, Eleanor understood from decades of experience that filmmaking is, most often, a boy’s club — even when a woman is at the helm. And as the long, 50-some-day production schedule rolls on, the viewer can feel Eleanor’s anxiety ease, allowing pride to take full control. Sofia has this, and Eleanor’s job might be the best one on set: watching the daughter she raised come into her own.
“Maybe making movies is a way of moving back and forth, in and out, of linear time,” Eleanor says in one of her journal entries. It’s a reference not only to the period production, but to her daughter’s thoughtful directorial anachronisms, the very decisions that would make “Marie Antoinette” last for 20 years and beyond. What a glorious, warm and strangely pertinent observation — something Eleanor couldn’t have understood the relevance of at the time. Here we are, two decades on, watching her documentary further cement Sofia’s film as the modern classic it is. More than a meta perspective or conventional behind-the-scenes doc, “Making Marie Antoinette” is a tender portrait of familial love from mother and daughter alike. Now, the pride moves in both directions — with Sofia as reverent of her mother’s work as Eleanor was of hers — meeting in the middle to stretch into the future.
When I was a kid, I used to read “The Joy of Cooking” and imagine the elaborate parties I would someday throw for the friends I was certain adulthood would bring me.
One friend would debut a play, naturally, and everyone would come back to my apartment afterward for cocktails and canapés on the fire escape. Another would become pregnant with twins, necessitating a baby shower brunch in my garden. Someone else would fall in love and decide to marry quietly at the courthouse, after which we’d repair to my kitchen, where I’d produce a layer cake covered in edible flowers and generous plops of whipped cream. We’d eat it with forks, still dressed in our wedding finery.
The friends were hypothetical. Their milestones, however, had menus.
Then, of course, you grow up. And while I was fortunate enough to eventually find many of the wonderful people I’d imagined celebrating, I discovered that building community — and finding the money to entertain said community — could be considerably trickier than my childhood self anticipated.
Fresh out of graduate school, I wanted desperately to have people over, but I was working with a very limited budget. Soup became my solution. For literal dollars, I could put a couple of enormous pots on the stove, buy some good bread and oyster crackers, and feed a roomful of people until they were comfortably full.
The menus began modestly: my mom’s chicken noodle soup alongside store-bought tomato soup from the Whole Foods hot bar; my dad’s white chicken chili and a simple butternut squash soup scattered with chives. Eventually, I graduated to three soups — one favorite menu included vegan potato-leek, lemony chicken and orzo, and Guinness beef stew — with toasted sourdough, cornbread muffins and little ceramic bowls of parsley and lemon wedges.
The seating arrangements were somewhat less sophisticated. At one party, a neighbor of mine, a tattoo artist who had no tattoos of his own, generously lent me four tufted beanbags in a demure oatmeal color. He called them “poofs,” and my guests contentedly sank into them with bowls of chili. Thankfully, no one spilled.
I’d send invitations by email (yes, email!) with “Soup and Movie Night” at the top, then put on something suitably autumnal: “Hocus Pocus,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Practical Magic.” Always something familiar enough that people could talk gently over it without feeling rude. Someone could usually be counted on to bring ice cream from the shop down the street, and I encouraged everyone to bring plastic tubs or thermoses for leftovers. It wasn’t fancy, and the furniture situation left something to be desired. But there was plenty of food, everyone had somewhere to settle in, and people went home with another meal for the next day.
Years later, I’ve become a more confident cook and, I think, a smarter host. I’ve learned which things are worth making myself, which are better left to professionals and how much pleasure a few slightly theatrical details can bring to an otherwise ordinary meal.
But I still think the soup party is one of the finest ways to gather people without spending a fortune or exhausting yourself in the process.
So, let’s throw one.
Start with the three-soup rule
I like to build a soup party menu around different experiences: think something creamy, something vegetable-forward and perhaps something especially hearty. The idea isn’t to make three versions of roughly the same thing, but to offer a little variety in texture, flavor and heft.
If you were coming to my apartment this weekend, here’s what I’d make:
Smoky black bean soup: My thick, deeply savory, pantry-friendly favorite, made with vegetable stock to keep it vegan. It practically demands lime, scallions and something crunchy on top. Try the recipe here.
Chorizo-chicken corn chowder: Rich, cozy and full of sweet corn, chicken and savory chorizo. This would be my creamy offering. Try the recipe here.
Olive Bar tomato soup: A bright, tangy vegetarian tomato soup with sun-dried tomatoes, marinated garlic and feta. A nice contrast to the other two, especially with good sourdough alongside. Try the recipe here.
I always aim to offer at least one vegan soup, and I strongly recommend choosing varieties that reheat beautifully.
For an apartment gathering of six to 10 people, three pots make a lovely spread. Having 20 or 25 over? Add another pot or two, increase the quantities and consider enlisting contributions from friends. I’ve written previously about low-pressure potluck entertaining, and the same principles work beautifully here.
And don’t feel obligated to make three if two — or one — make more sense for your budget, available burners or energy. My original parties were scaled down, and they were wonderful.
Build a toppings cornucopia
Now comes my favorite part.
The soups are the foundation, but the toppings are where the evening can become a little playful. I like to arrange an almost ridiculous assortment of crunchy, creamy, salty, fresh and acidic things, allowing everyone to customize their bowls.
For our imaginary party, I’d put out:
Something crunchy: Ranchy, buttery Saltines; savory Ritz granola; and cacio e pepe oyster crackers — three party-cracker recipes I’ve shared previously, all of which you can find here — alongside tortilla chips, oven-toasted sourdough, cornbread muffins and White Cheddar Cheez-Its.
Yes, White Cheddar Cheez-Its. Trust me.
Something fresh: Little bowls of chopped scallions, cilantro, parsley, basil and chives, plus plenty of lemon and lime wedges.
Something creamy: Sour cream, shredded white cheddar, cotija and feta. I’d also include a good vegan sour cream, (like Kite Hill) or a tangy coconut yogurt (I like the plain variety from Cocojune) clearly labeled.
Something punchy: Small bottles of white balsamic and red wine vinegar, hot sauce, good olive oil and soy sauce. Add salt and pepper grinders and red pepper flakes.
You can see how quickly this becomes a splendid spread without requiring much actual cooking.
Someone might finish the black bean soup with lime, cotija, cilantro and tortilla chips. Someone else might try the tomato soup with basil, olive oil, feta and a handful of savory Ritz granola. Somebody will discover the Cheez-Its and develop a whole new soup personality around them.
And if this sounds like too much, please remember that the full cornucopia is entirely optional. A few thoughtful garnishes are plenty. We’ve also spent the past few weeks of Soup School discussing crunchy toppings, bright sauces and edible confetti, if you’d like a little extra inspiration.
As for dessert, I recommend keeping things almost aggressively simple. A beautiful arrangement of cheeses, fruit, crackers, honey and jam requires very little effort and gives people something to pick at while the evening unfolds; if you want a place to start, my conversation with “Cheese Magic” author Erica Kubick may be helpful! Include something sweet for guests who don’t eat dairy, or let somebody bring the (non-dairy) ice cream.
Let the soup be the centerpiece
I’m increasingly fond of decorating a table with the food itself.
A beautiful Dutch oven on a trivet? Wonderful. A rustic stew pot nestled beside a little clutch of flowers? Also wonderful. A secondhand soup tureen shaped like a cabbage? Possibly one of the finest things I’ve ever seen.
The spread already offers plenty of visual interest: bread piled high, bowls of herbs, cheerful wedges of citrus, golden cornbread, glossy bottles of oil and vinegar. Give these things room to shine.
For this kind of gathering, my decorating instincts tend toward three descriptors: Short, fat and fall-colored. Think squat, unscented candles in autumn shades. Fat mums and hydrangeas, perhaps punctuated with a sunflower or two, arranged in short vases that don’t interrupt conversation. Whatever Trader Joe’s or your local florist has on sale will do nicely.
Lately I’ve also been lining glass vases with cabbage leaves before adding flowers. It’s a surprisingly pretty way to make an ordinary arrangement look seasonal, and just whimsical enough for a soup party.
If moving the soups off the stove isn’t practical, don’t worry! Group the pots neatly, set out some attractive ladles and arrange the garnishes nearby. Guests will happily serve themselves from the stovetop.
And please, feel free to go mismatched. I’ve never thought a table needed 12 identical bowls to be beautiful. If you’re inclined to invest in your entertaining collection, I’d recommend looking for a secondhand tureen with personality, a few bowls in different sizes and more spoons than you think you need. Smaller bowls encourage sampling; larger ones let guests settle in with their favorites.
My favorite trick for making mismatched serving pieces look intentional is to keep them loosely within one color story. Be generous with napkins, too, and pro tip: tuck a bus tub — which you can buy online or from a restaurant supply store — somewhere discreet for used dishes. You’ll thank yourself later.
Soup and sparkles
For drinks, I love serving something cold, dry and bubbly alongside rich soups. Champagne, Cava or Crémant are all excellent choices, their bright acidity making them particularly agreeable partners for creamy chowders and hearty stews. In the realm of THC-infused beverages, I was at a taco joint recently and had a Choom Lite, a sparkling lemon-lime beverage infused with 3 milligrams of THC and CBD, and it was quite lovely paired with big, spice-forward flavors.
And for non-drinkers, I’d make a sparkling citrus “punch” with good sparkling water, fresh juice and oversized ice cubes containing frozen citrus rounds. It’s festive, refreshing and can be mostly prepared ahead. Add the sparkling water just before serving.
Make the rules delightfully clear
I believe that clarity is wonderful hospitality.
This starts with the invitation, which can be mailed, emailed or texted. Snail mail is particularly charming, but absolutely nobody needs to design an engraved invitation to eat chili in somebody’s living room.
Include the date, time, address and menu, noting vegan, vegetarian or nonalcoholic options. You can describe the toppings in magnificent detail or simply promise “lots of toppings!” if you’d prefer not to commit to a particular spread.
And then, most importantly, explain the choreography.
Something like:
Soup & Movie Night
Saturday evening
Soup’s on at 7 p.m. Movie starts at 7:30 p.m. [Address]
On the menu: Smoky black bean soup (vegan), chorizo-chicken corn chowder and Olive Bar tomato soup (vegetarian), plus plenty of bread, crackers and toppings!
Sparkling wine, infused seltzers, non-alcoholic citrus punch and dessert provided.
Come for a cozy evening of soup and fall movies. There will be plenty to sample, top and try. Serve yourself (then serve yourself again!) and settle in for the night.
I can’t wait to see you — and send you home with a jar for the next day.
Little uncertainties have a way of making people uncomfortable. Is it rude to have seconds? Am I supposed to try each soup? Am I allowed to get up during the movie?
A friendly invitation can answer most of these questions before anybody has to ask.
Once guests arrive, keep that same generosity of spirit. Label the soups and any dietary accommodations. Make the bowls and spoons easy to find. Let people know they’re welcome to try everything, then return for more.
And if you’re sending people home with leftovers, keep deli tubs or cute jars ready to fill.
As for the movie, I still favor familiar fall classics like “Hocus Pocus” or “Coraline.” Something with enough seasonal charm to set the atmosphere, but familiar enough that nobody feels obligated to sit in reverent silence. For music before the screening, the “Over the Garden Wall” soundtrack is an excellent place to start.
Your soup party, without the Saturday panic
Of course, an inexpensive spread can still become a fairly ambitious undertaking if you try to prepare everything the afternoon of the party.
Which brings me to perhaps my most important piece of practical advice: Do the cooking before anyone arrives.
Many soups — particularly stews, chilis and deeply simmered vegetable soups — taste even better after a night in the refrigerator. Some creamy or pasta-based varieties need a little extra attention when reheating, but the principle remains the same: The day of the party should involve substantially more arranging than cooking.
Here’s how I’d handle a Saturday gathering.
Wednesday: The big shop. Order or pick up your soup ingredients, toppings, drinks and dessert components. Check your supply of bowls, spoons, napkins and serving utensils.
Thursday: The easy simmerers. Make the black bean and Olive Bar tomato soups. Both involve relatively straightforward assembly and simmering. Cool promptly in shallow containers, label and refrigerate.
Friday: The slightly more involved cooking. Make the chorizo-chicken corn chowder. I’d almost certainly have a bowl for dinner. Prepare any homemade party crackers, too.
Saturday morning: The pleasant errands. Visit a bakery or supermarket for good bread and cornbread muffins. Pick up flowers and anything you’ve forgotten.
Saturday afternoon: The little things. Chop herbs, grate cheese, cut citrus wedges and assemble any salads, keeping the greens and dressing separate. Arrange flowers, prepare a simple dessert spread and refrigerate anything perishable. Check that your chosen movie is still streaming where you thought it was or that you know where the DVD is.
And leave yourself time to shower, get dressed and enjoy a little quiet before everyone arrives.
One hour before: Begin reheating the soups. Set out bowls, spoons, napkins and decorations.
Thirty minutes before: Toast the sourdough, warm the muffins and arrange the shelf-stable crunchy toppings.
Fifteen minutes before: Put out the remaining garnishes, dressed salads and dessert. Get drinks on ice, arrange the soups for serving, light the candles and start the music.
Soup’s on!
One practical note: Cool and refrigerate cooked soups promptly, reheat them thoroughly and keep them safely hot during the party. If your beautiful vintage tureen doesn’t have a heat source, fill it in smaller batches and replenish from soup held hot on the stove.
The party you want to have again
And one final reminder, as much for myself as anybody else: A beautiful party and a photographable party aren’t necessarily the same thing. Soup parties have the potential to be extraordinarily brown affairs. Chili, stew, crackers, bread, beans! A tremendous amount of beige, all of it delicious.
I’m not anti-photo. But I’m increasingly trying to separate how I imagine a gathering will look from how I hope it will feel.
The candles are meant to burn down. The toppings are meant to be eaten. The tureen is meant to be used, not admired from a respectful distance.
When I think back on those original soup parties, I don’t remember how many of the bowls matched, or precisely how the table looked. I remember people curled up on borrowed beanbags, eating second helpings of soup and talking over a movie they’d all seen before.
And I remember that, when the evening was over, there were people carrying leftovers out the door.
Which is a pretty lovely way for a party to end.
This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, entertaining guides and recipes sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.
On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.
Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.
“Shoot all he has to really do is stop by and say ‘yes,’” Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. “That should only take a minute and he’s on his way. We don’t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.”
At the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the “yes” he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek’s way in his native South Carolina, Kao later recounted to the FBI. In exchange, he said, Graham asked Kao to pledge a total of $100,000 to his reelection campaign.
In early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham’s steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.
The scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said — in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state’s top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.
Kao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: “This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.
Kao’s admissions would constitute a vast criminal bribery scheme if they could be proved in court — a challenge, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult to win corruption cases. Kao himself posed another hurdle. He was facing prison for fraud and campaign finance violations and was speaking to the FBI in the hopes of reducing his sentence.
But the FBI agents who took Kao’s confession — two experienced anti-corruption investigators — could see that much of it lined up with a trove of records they had seized from Navatek. They forged ahead. The FBI took the formal step of naming two former Navatek executives who had worked with Kao as subjects of a bribery investigation. The agency did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao. The agents indicated to their superiors that the lawmakers could become subjects in the future, according to records viewed by ProPublica.
The details of this investigation have not previously been reported.
President Donald Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately gutted the specialized FBI and Department of Justice teams dedicated to taking on public corruption — an act of revenge for having previously investigated him. The two experienced agents on the case were swept up in the purge, and the career prosecutor assisting them quit after Trump appointees forbid the DOJ’s anti-corruption section from filing any new cases. Today, there is no one left to look into Kao’s explosive allegations, as the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption. The case is dead.
ProPublica has unearthed the investigation by reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, internal company emails, evidence the FBI used to vet Kao’s claims and dozens of interviews with people who saw how Navatek operated, including an eyewitness to Graham and Kao’s secret steakhouse dinner.
This story is part of a series based on our reporting. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had probed the conduct of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who steered millions in government funding toward Navatek while Kao gave her illegal campaign donations. Collins denied wrongdoing and dismissed Kao as a “convicted liar.”
Kao is indeed the only person involved to serve prison time. He pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign donations and a loan fraud scheme in 2022. In 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months in prison.
Graham died at 71 earlier this year. His sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill his seat, retained most of his senior staff, including those who dealt with Navatek. She even took up some of his committee assignments, including appropriations. Darline Graham is running for a full term in office this November.
Clyburn, 86, is one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. He is widely credited with tipping the scales for Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Wilson remains influential on national defense spending from his senior perch on the Armed Services Committee.
“Whatever a donor may think or say, a donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor’s request,” Jami LaRue, Clyburn’s communications director, wrote in response to detailed questions. “The Congressman has always striven to assist the University of South Carolina and all of the colleges and universities in his district when called upon to further their important missions. The crimes and lies of an imprisoned fraudster will not cause the Congressman to waver in his support for these fine institutions.”
David Snider, Wilson’s communications director, did not address a detailed list of questions sent by ProPublica. “Congressman Wilson does and has always abided by campaign donation regulations set forth by the Federal Election Commission,” Snider said in an email.
In an emailed statement, Taylor Reidy, who was Lindsey Graham’s communications director and now holds the same post for his sister, wrote that “any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior or wrongdoing by the late Senator Lindsey Graham or his staff are simply false.” She said the accusations were the “ravings of a convicted felon” and that her office was never contacted by the FBI about the matter. After Kao’s arrest, they disgorged his donations, she added.
The two executives who were subjects of the FBI investigation, Duke Hartman and Joshua Knight, were never charged. Hartman, the other executive at the dinner meeting with Graham, is now the CEO of a new naval research company called Integer Technologies that he co-founded with Knight after Kao’s arrest. Integer was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing government contractors in the country. It also became the ultimate beneficiary of the Graham dinner meeting, picking up the contract Graham allegedly agreed to facilitate that night.
Hartman and Knight did not respond to detailed requests for comment.
“[It’s] corruption at its best,” Kao wrote to ProPublica from federal detention in South Dakota, before cutting off contact. “But I am the only one rotting in prison.”
Small Company, Big Ambitions
Kao’s dinner with Graham was part of his grandiose plan to make Navatek a major defense contractor.
He had become the CEO at an uncertain moment in the company’s history. Founded in Hawaii in the 1970s, the company originally thrived on a close relationship with the state’s powerful senior senator, Daniel Inouye. When Kao assumed ownership in 2019, it had been several years since Inouye had died, and Navatek was in need of a new patron in Washington.
At times, Kao hardly seemed the person to pull this off. He had started out as the company’s CFO and was openly uninterested in its technology. He told bombastic lies about his personal life. Former employees said he regaled them with tales of selling newspapers for members of the Bloods and Crips street gangs as a youth. In a deposition, Kao later admitted that wasn’t true.
But what he lacked in engineering chops he made up with ambition. Once, Kao held a company town hall using a map of the U.S. dotted with future Navatek offices as his backdrop, a former employee recalled. “He would talk about how we’re a $10 million company, and in the next three years, we’re going to be a billion-dollar company,” said a former engineer. “He was an absolute megalomaniac.”
Kao hatched a plan to expand Navatek’s presence across the country, making new friends in Congress along the way. He courted politicians using something he called “the method,” as ProPublica detailed in September.
Navatek would open an office in the state or district of a powerful member of Congress and partner with a local university to concoct a proposal for federally funded research. Then, aided by a well-connected lobbyist and the sheen of credibility from its association with the university, Navatek would approach the member for federal research funding.
Kao told the FBI he would strike deals in small, face-to-face meetings with the members or their trusted staff. Navatek — through executives, family members and lobbyists — would make generous campaign donations. In exchange, the member would add detailed language to the defense budget to fund the company’s work.
That legislative language would not name the company. But it would describe specific work that Navatek was already planning to do behind the scenes, making it the only logical choice for the eventual government contract. The lawmakers’ staff would also backchannel with the Navy after the bill was passed to make sure contracting offices knew to direct the money to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show — even though the contracts were in theory competitive.
Kao “wanted to build a company as big as he could as fast as he could,” a former executive later testified in court. For a while, he succeeded. Under Kao, Navatek went from having to “rebuild,” as the executive put it, to winning $40.7 million in new government contracts in 2020.
Hartman, the other Navatek executive who went to dinner with Graham, was in charge of maintaining friendly ties in Congress while tracking the millions of dollars the company had requested in research funds. He kept careful tabs on the company’s progress using dozens of color-coded spreadsheets. “If anyone knows the impropriety of the business model, it’s him,” Kao told the FBI, referring to Hartman.
Later, these spreadsheets provided the FBI a detailed picture of which congressional offices worked closest with Navatek. In the tables devoted to South Carolina, Navatek denoted Graham as a “key supporter.”
The company primarily targeted lawmakers from smaller states who sat on appropriations committees, like Collins, Kao explained to the FBI, because they wielded huge power over the budget while having fewer “constituents to ‘feed.’”
The senior senator from South Carolina was another prime target. “You can get access to Lindsey Graham,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, said in an interview.
Kao, Hartman and other Navatek executives approached the offices of Graham, Clyburn and Wilson — all powerful members of the South Carolina delegation — in the beginning of 2019. The company had recruited the University of South Carolina for a joint research project, and together they asked the lawmakers to find $9.5 million to fund the work. If it succeeded, Navatek planned to ask Congress to re-up the funding for two more years as well as green-light two more projects, internal company records show, for a total of up to $90 million in South Carolina alone.
Yet Navatek had “zero people” capable of doing the research it was pitching, said a former executive with direct knowledge of the work.
Its $9.5 million “power and energy” proposal promised cutting-edge research on how to distribute the limited power on board a ship between multiple energy-intense systems, like radars, lasers and rail guns. Graham’s office later boasted that the work would lead to new technology that would “ensure that our fleet is ready for the fights of the future.”
In reality, Navatek’s initial research “looked like a college senior’s graduation project,” the executive said. “Something you go get from RadioShack.” Graham’s office referred questions about the quality of the work to the Navy and the university. The Office of Naval Research, which awarded the contract, did not respond to questions.
But for Congress, that lack of expertise wasn’t a problem. Throughout 2019, the FBI noted, as the ensuing year’s budget came together, both Graham’s and Clyburn’s offices took steps to make sure it included Navatek’s funding.
In May 2019, Willie Lyles III, Clyburn’s legislative director, alerted Navatek that the House Appropriations Committee would endorse new funding for a “modular and scalable integrated power and thermal system capable of powering a directed energy weapon system of 100 or more kilowatts,” according to an email flagged by the FBI. Three days later, that exact language appeared in the House Appropriations Committee report. Lyles did not reply to a request for comment.
In September, the Senate Appropriations Committee — Graham’s committee — released a budget report that set aside $9.5 million in funding for “Talent and Technology for Navy Power and Energy Systems.” Agents noted that Navatek may have ghostwritten the technical description that accompanied this line item because “an almost identical paragraph” appeared in Hartman’s internal spreadsheets two months before the Senate report became public.
After the Senate advanced its version of the budget in the fall, Navatek dropped $4,799 to send bourbon to a handful of lawmakers, including Graham and Collins, the FBI found in company records — a likely violation of Senate gift rules. Both Collins’ and Graham’s offices denied receiving bourbon. Navatek later sent Clyburn a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements for $102.60.
Congress passed the final spending bill containing $9.5 million for Navatek’s pet project on Dec. 19, 2019.
At that point, Kao and other Navatek executives had not made any donations to Clyburn, Wilson or even Graham.
That would change within days of Congress passing the budget, when an executive pledged $750 to Wilson’s campaign at a fundraiser held at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill watering hole for lobbyists and Hill staffers, emails show. In the following weeks, Kao and his lobbyist gave Wilson’s campaign $3,500.
And bigger checks were imminent. Kao kicked off 2020 by making plans to spend $300,000 at a slew of political fundraisers, according to text messages filed in court and a recent deposition. Navatek’s lobbyists at that time were seeking private meetings with Graham, Wilson and Clyburn, where Kao planned to ask for significantly more federal funding. Kao eventually met with all three, and each asked for $100,000, he told the FBI.
During that same period, Kao and Hartman met a top fundraiser for Collins at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. As ProPublica reported, that meeting led Kao to donate $150,000 to the pro-Collins super PAC. Kao told the FBI that the money was a bribe in exchange for the senator’s support for more Navatek funding. The head of the super PAC and Collins have denied Kao’s version of events.
Kao told the FBI it was not unusual for donations to come after the favor: “We became clever in our own right and figured out how to dangle the carrot,” he wrote in a memo seen by ProPublica, “until we saw some assurance that the Ask was in the budget.”
To secure a meeting with Graham, Kao hired Michael Tongour, a veteran South Carolina lobbyist who was old law school friends with the senator and family friends with Clyburn and Wilson. Graham was up for reelection against a well-funded challenger, Jaime Harrison, and had a crowded fundraising schedule, said Tongour, but they eventually found a time.
“The Graham fundraiser says that it [sic] you want to reserve a date for Senator Graham to attend a private dinner, the campaign wants to get $40,000 in contributions,” Tongour wrote to Kao, Hartman and lobbyist Andy Winer, in an undated email seen by ProPublica. Winer, whom Kao described as Navatek’s chief lobbyist, chimed in to say that Graham could stay only 45 minutes, and Kao replied that all they needed to hear was “yes.”
“These discussions are very frank and oddly not at all awkward,” Kao told the FBI. “I suppose once we got that far, everyone knows the deal.”
A Dinner With Graham
Graham showed up late to his March 3, 2020, dinner with Kao, Hartman and Tongour. A fundraiser working for Graham appeared first and accepted an envelope from Kao containing checks made out to Graham’s campaign, Kao said. Kao did not know the fundraiser’s name; in an FBI debrief, he simply referred to the person as the “money man.” After that person departed, Graham entered.
Graham, Kao recalled to the FBI, was “very abrupt” and “straight to the point”: He asked how much Navatek wanted, to which they said $10 million a year for three years. Graham asked Kao to pledge $100,000 in donations in exchange for his support, Kao told the FBI.
Navatek was juggling multiple proposals in South Carolina worth around $10 million, and it’s not clear which one Kao was describing.
Congress had just approved the $9.5 million for the power and energy project, but Navatek still needed the Navy to award the money in the form of a contract. The company was also about to ask Congress to fund the same project for a second year at $10.5 million. On top of that, Navatek was planning to pitch a new research proposal, at $10 million, to study the transport of supplies inland from ships using autonomous vehicles. It was another area where Navatek had “zero past performance,” the former executive said.
The same week of the steakhouse dinner, Graham’s office was working behind the scenes with Navatek and the University of South Carolina to make sure the Navy sent the first $9.5 million to the right company.
A day before the dinner, an official with the Office of Naval Research emailed Graham’s office to ask about the money, which “the Senator may have an interest in.” Craig Abele, Graham’s national security adviser, called her a few days later to confirm that Graham’s office had intended the money to be awarded to the Navatek partnership, emails show. “Spoke to ONR this morning,” Abele wrote March 6. “Should be set.”
The company received the contract, which it split with the university, in July 2020.
Abele became Graham’s deputy chief of staff and still holds the position for Darline. He did not reply to an email requesting comment. A Graham spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that their office had indeed added the $9.5 million to the budget at the request of the university and Navatek. The spokesperson said the research was supported by the Navy and rejected the notion that Graham was motivated by campaign cash.
Graham’s spokesperson said requiring a fundraising minimum for a dinner was normal practice.
“[It’s] corruption at its best. But I am the only one rotting in prison.”
Former Navatek CEO Martin Kao
The checks Kao handed over at the dinner added up to about half of the $40,000 he had agreed to raise for the dinner, according to Tongour. The rest came in May, campaign records show.
“My understanding at the time was that the contributions associated with the event were lawful political contributions,” Winer said. “I never advised Kao to make a political contribution in exchange for official action. I never participated in, witnessed or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution.”
After Kao’s 2020 indictment, the University of South Carolina broke off the partnership. “University officials were not aware of any political contributions from Navatek,” Jeff Stensland, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Our sole objective in partnering with them was to expand our research enterprise.”
One week after the dinner, on March 10, a University of South Carolina lobbyist sent written requests to Graham’s office for $20.5 million in appropriations: $10.5 million to continue Navatek’s power and energy research and $10 million for its new autonomous vehicle research.
Tongour confirmed many elements of Kao’s story. In a recent interview with ProPublica and subsequent emails, he remembered Kao giving the envelope full of checks to Graham’s fundraiser and even agreed that Graham kept the meeting short. “I don’t recall that he stayed more than 30 minutes,” Tongour said in an email. “Certainly not for appetizers, entrée, and dessert.”
But he denied Kao’s most significant claim: that Graham and Navatek struck an explicit, potentially illegal deal for contracts.
“I would remember that forever,” Tongour said. Graham supported Navatek’s requests, he said, because they were good for the state. “If I had seen that kind of quid pro quo, I would have quit earlier.” Tongour fired Navatek as a client later that year, immediately after Kao’s arrest.
Navatek considered Graham its chief patron in South Carolina, internal records show, just as it viewed Collins in Maine. But the company also wanted support in the House.
For that, Navatek turned to Clyburn, a member of Democratic party leadership and one of the most powerful figures in Congress. Agents found Navatek emails setting a meeting with Clyburn for early March. The goal, Kao said, was to make sure that the House draft of the budget “mirrored” whatever Graham inserted in the Senate version.
Over a meal, Clyburn asked Kao how much he was donating to Graham and then asked for the same amount, $100,000, Kao told the FBI.
The FBI tallied $20,000 in contributions that Kao and his family members made to Clyburn a few days after their scheduled meeting. A month later, Hartman arranged for a $10,000 gift to Clyburn’s alma mater, South Carolina State University, according to an email seen by ProPublica. Hartman noted it was “Congressman Clyburn’s favorite school.”
The spokesperson for Clyburn confirmed the dinner occurred but did not respond to questions about what was discussed.
Kao and Hartman struck a similar bargain with Wilson, Kao told the FBI, at a private lunch he secured by donating to his campaign. The FBI pulled records of $3,500 in donations Kao and Tongour made in late 2019 and early 2020.
Wilson has an influential role on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes defense spending. Wilson was “very clear and knew what the ask was,” Kao told the FBI. He wanted however much Clyburn was getting in campaign contributions in exchange for his support, Kao said.
Tongour denied this. “There was no ‘pay to play’ with Joe Wilson or his staff either,” he wrote in an email, adding that he donated because Wilson “is a friend and I want to see him re-elected.”
Kao claimed to the FBI that he paid for meals with all three politicians, but campaign finance records appear to show the lawmakers’ campaigns picked up the check.
By August 2020, Hartman had gotten word that Graham’s and Wilson’s committees would each support part of the company’s requests, internal company records show. Clyburn was not on key committees while he was a party leader. In one of his myriad spreadsheets, Hartman projected that the final budget could include up to $15.5 million of the $20.5 million the company had lobbied for.
Kao told agents he was gearing up to make more significant donations to Graham, Clyburn and Wilson by the end of the year. Instead, on Sept. 30, 2020, he was arrested.
Kao reflected on his time at Navatek in a deposition taken last month inside a federal prison. The company’s founder has sued Kao, saying his stewardship defrauded Navatek of millions.
“It’s nothing more than government contracting done through placating senior appropriation members for contracts,” Kao said. “The whole thing is a grand lie.”
An Arrest, a Lifeboat
Kao’s arrest plunged Navatek into disarray. Federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding a federal loan program; not long after, he was also charged with making illegal donations to the Collins campaign and super PAC. Lobbyists, universities and congressional offices abruptly cut off contact. “Don’t call us,” one congressional office told an executive, he later testified.
The Collins campaign said it disgorged Kao’s contribution. Yet the senator, facing a tight reelection bid, has had to field questions following the ProPublica report about her support for Navatek and why the super PAC supporting her accepted the $150,000 donation from the shell company in the first place.
As Navatek sank, Hartman began building himself a lifeboat. In 2021, he and Knight started a new military research company headquartered in South Carolina called Integer Technologies. Integer’s first project was one that Navatek had brokered with Graham.
Hartman didn’t face any criminal charges at the time and left Navatek largely unscathed. He would later settle a civil lawsuit brought by his former employer, which contended he played a role in Kao’s campaign finance and loan fraud schemes, for $425,000. He admitted no wrongdoing.
In September 2024, FBI agents flew to Hawaii for what would be their final interview with Kao. They pressed him for details about what happened in South Carolina, quizzing him on his dinner with Graham and a second in-person meeting he said he had with Clyburn. Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.
As the year came to a close, FBI agent Michelle Ball felt she had enough material to move forward. The FBI had “uncovered a lengthy history” of a government contractor making donations “in exchange for government contracts,” she wrote in a Dec. 9, 2024, memo viewed by ProPublica.
In federal corruption probes, agents often begin by focusing on lower-level targets with a goal of working their way up to more prominent figures. Ball named Hartman; his business partner, Knight; and their company, Integer, as the formal subjects of the probe, as they prepared to potentially issue subpoenas and gather more evidence. They had Graham, Clyburn and Wilson in their sights. Ball devoted entire sections of the memo to detailing the lawmakers’ conduct. And she flagged the case as a sensitive matter that might implicate politicians in the future.
In the summer of 2024, Kate Fifield, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s anti-corruption section, had been assigned to join the case. Fifield was wrapping up a high-profile prosecution of a retired Navy admiral who traded a government contract for a future job. Turning her attention to Kao, she and the FBI agents weighed their options. They considered getting high-level approval to deploy undercover agents. Proving an exchange of cash for favors often requires the kind of inconvertible evidence that undercover recordings can provide.
But before the investigation took flight, the new Trump administration began to demolish the Justice Department. The president’s handpicked leaders ordered prosecutors to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, triggering a wave of resignations in the Public Integrity Section where Fifield worked, and revoked the section’s authority to bring new cases.
Then Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, began to purge the anti-corruption unit in the Washington D.C., field office, where many agents had investigated Trump.
Ball was fired in October 2025. Kevin Gounaud, another agent who had been working with her on the investigation, was pushed out in early 2026. Through their lawyer, the agents declined to comment.
The corruption investigation, just launched, suddenly went dark.
The White House referred ProPublica’s questions to the FBI and DOJ.
The Department of Justice didn’t respond to detailed questions about the investigation.
“Under President Trump, the Justice Department is rooting out the weaponization, corruption, and institutional rot that ran rampant under Joe Biden’s two-tiered system of justice,” DOJ spokesperson Audrey Cook said.
Kao’s claims are “half baked” and “misleading,” FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said. “Additionally, as we have said repeatedly, personnel are only removed at this FBI if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, Integer has rapidly expanded. Last year, it reported $81 million in contracts and announced that number would climb to $375 million by 2030. The company inked partnership deals with universities in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Mississippi. The University of South Carolina called its partnership with the firm a “model for public-private success.”
The company continues to forge ties with powerful politicians. In late 2024, Hartman posted a photo of himself with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on his LinkedIn. “It was great to visit with the Speaker of the House today,” he wrote. “It’s good to know there are people in positions of power who seem to really care for the people they serve.” Johnson’s office did not reply to an email requesting comment.
The occasion was a new research partnership in Louisiana. Hartman thanked his lobbyist for making it happen.
Remember when billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump were supposedly enemies? At the start of Trump’s second term, the world’s richest man, was busy ripping through nearly every level of the U.S. government with the Trump-approved Department of Government Efficiency. But by June 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported the pair had “torched” their relationship, which amounted to a lot of social media slapfights and accusations about who was in the Epstein files. But the truth is, the two men have a storied on-off relationship that seems to fluctuate based on who’s grabbing the check.
Lately, Musk and Trump are back to acting like close pals. It was hard not to cringe watching the president award Musk the National Medal of Science on Oct. 8, the highest honor the U.S. can bestow on a scientist or engineer. I was probably reading too much into it, but I sensed some awareness on Musk’s part that it was an empty gesture, unless inflating stock prices is a scientific achievement. But maybe the pageantry is meant to distract from how many government grants Musk has been awarded. According to multiple reports, Tesla and SpaceX basically would not exist without the government giving Musk’s companies wads of cash.
At any rate, Musk is now stepping in to try to save Trump’s allies in the midterms, dumping hundreds of millions into races, with Axios reporting he is “single-handedly keeping the Republican Party afloat in some of its most vital races.” So far, he’s spent some $366 million in pro-GOP midterm TV spots and other campaign efforts, with $276 million donated since July alone. No other known donor comes close to dishing out more funding. But for Musk that’s a relatively trivial amount, even though his fluctuating trillionaire status is currently hovering below the threshold for designation.
Some of Musk’s money went to his own super PAC, but a good chunk also to the Senate Leadership Fund and the Lone Star Liberty PAC, both of which are backing Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton’s endangered campaign for the U.S. Senate against state Rep. James Talarico. Right now polling indicates that statewide election results in the Lone Star State are going to be extremely tight, with new data from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project released Wednesday indicating Democrats are statistically tied in key races. It’s not just Talarico, who leads Paxton 50% to 47%, but Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa holds a one-point lead over Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, which is effectively a tie. Trump is reportedly already searching for someone to blame if Democrats pick up their first Senate seat in Texas since 1988.
Across the country, other races indicate a high likelihood that Democrats will retake the House, while the Senate still looking like a tossup. With these numbers, Musk is likely to dump even more cash into the election before Nov. 3, but it increasingly smells like desperation. As Alex Gibney, director of the new documentary “Musk,” recently told Salon’s Melanie McFarland, Musk is “literally paying for political advantage.”
“He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts,” Gibney said. “But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.”
It remains to be seen if this midterm meddling will pay off for Musk. He got what he wanted out of the 2024 presidential election by propping up Trump’s campaign, but his attempts to financially sway results in other races haven’t worked. In 2025, Musk dumped more than $18 million into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to suborn the state’s redistricting efforts and regulations of car manufacturers and dealers. His influence made it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, but that still didn’t get him the outcome he wanted.
Last Thursday, Musk settled a class action lawsuit alleging that his PAC had engaged in fraud in the 2024 presidential election by falsely telling voters they had a chance to randomly win $1 million when the winners were actually predetermined. He also dodged bribery charges in August for trying the same stunt in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
In the end, the results will all come down to voter appetites, and there are increasing indicators that the majority of Americans are fed up with the ultra-rich meddling in government. A recent Fox News poll indicates that corruption is the top concern among both Democratic and Republican voters, with 60% extremely concerned, a figure that outpaces inflation (58%), gas prices (50%), government leadership (49%) and healthcare (48%). Data from a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found roughly two in three Americans believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, with most of the increase over the past year coming from people who lean Republican.
These numbers may indicate that people are starting to see through Musk’s ruse. He could probably pour even more money into politics, and probably will anyway, but there’s a glimmer of hope that it won’t accomplish much.
America’s descent into chaos and depravity was foretold 10 years ago at a press conference. Donald Trump, who had just been nominated for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, issued an invitation for one of America’s foes to hack the emails of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
The call came only days after emails from the Democratic National Committee were released following the hacking of the organization’s computer servers, which was widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Russian agents. As would become the habit over the following decade, many dismissed Trump’s remarks as mere trolling that weren’t intended to be taken seriously.
This was not the first time he had invoked Russia. Throughout the primary season, Trump had gushed in multiple interviews about Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaled his intentions to draw closer to Putin once in office. Trump even defended the dictator’s extra-judicial killings, blithely explaining, “Our country does plenty of killing.” But the press conference did mark the first time he enlisted Russia as his ally.
The overtures continued throughout Trump’s first term, most infamously when he sided with Putin during a bilateral meeting over America’s own intelligence agencies, which had found that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. The president suggested an “election integrity” sharing operation between the two countries, a proposal that made it clear Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger.
Then came Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or of being elected. (His rhetoric often shifted.) He apparently believed that he could get on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and order him to immediately surrender or face his mighty wrath. Needless to say, this did not happen, and since then Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad.
Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad.
In recent days, Trump has signed an executive order temporarily lifting the sanctions on Russian oil. While supposedly done to secure diesel fuel for the United States, which has seen prices skyrocket due to the president’s war of choice with Iran, the act is in practice a sign of goodwill toward Putin, America’s enemy, and will help him fund his war against Ukraine, our erstwhile ally. A few days later, Trump waived several additional sanctions that a bipartisan congressional majority had passed just a few weeks ago at the behest of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed himself to have the president under his control.
Worse yet, in what will go down as one of the most appalling betrayals by a U.S. president in history, Trump and his good friend Elon Musk apparently sabotaged Ukrainian intelligence by slowing the Starlink and Starshield communications systems the country relies on for its defensive and offensive weapons systems. Russia took swift advantage of the favor and unleashed one of the most massive bombardments of the war, killing civilians and hitting Ukraine’s energy sector. Trump also called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and in an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, the Ukrainian president accused Trump of pushing the country to surrender to Russia.
Trump has a number of apparent rationales for these moves. He wants to be seen before the midterms to be doing something about the price of gas and diesel. But that is a crisis of his own making due to his misbegotten war in Iran, for which he has no way out that will solve the problem. His ongoing war has altered the global energy markets in ways that are not easily fixed, which was the reason no president before him was stupid enough to attack Iran. So now Trump is blaming Ukraine because it is bombing Russian oil refineries and demanding they stop so that Russia can sell its diesel — and finance its war, which led to the sanctions in the first place. Not to be overlooked is that Russia is a staunch ally of Iran and is helping them fight us, which Trump has waved off as having “nothing.” Some might argue that could constitute providing “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy.
Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed in multiple directions. Musk said the government is to blame for the Starlink/Starshield gambit. According to sources in the Pentagon, the order came from the White House. Trump claimed he doesn’t know anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shrugged that “it just sort of happened.” Now, lest the Europeans get it in their heads that they should try to step up their own defenses by restricting Starlink in favor of a European-based system, the U.S. government is reportedly threatening them with “devastating” or “destructive” economic retaliation.
As a cherry on top of the administration’s full-on embrace of Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has floated a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s fate. (On Monday, Trump told reporters he was open to a meeting but denied it would focus on Ukraine, saying he wanted to discuss denuclearization.) If Trump knew any history, he would know that such a meeting would prove to be his Yalta, the trilateral conference between President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that carved up Europe in the wake of World War II. The summit became widely seen by the right as “the sell-out at Yalta” because the Soviets ended up with Eastern Europe, but things have changed within the GOP.
The summit is clearly intended to elevate Russia back to superpower status, which it is not in any economic or military sense, and to demonstrate a new order in which Trump, Putin and Xi run the world. In reality, Putin and Xi now have the United States dancing to their tune, handing them power and influence to dominate their respective spheres.
The president’s flagrant betrayal of Ukraine is an outrage that has seemingly awakened some of the slumbering Republicans who know they are facing a drubbing at the polls in the quickly approaching midterm elections. Whether it will arouse the consciences of enough to truly step up and stop this breach of trust is unknown. But the mere fact that Trump has gone this far to salve his ego, defy his critics by embracing Putin even more fervently and drum up a lame excuse for what may be the worst national security decision in American history leaves this country weaker, poorer and more distrusted around the world. It hardly seems possible, but we have reached yet another new low.
When I watched veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl report from the West Bank on a recent Sunday night, my first thought was to wonder how the segment had slipped past the watchful eyes of Bari Weiss. Stahl accompanied a group of Palestinians trying to reach their own land, only to be confronted by Israeli settlers clad in black. The Palestinians had approached the settlers with their hands behind their backs to make plain they posed no threat. One man was headbutted in the face and his nose fractured. An Israeli army captain finally defused the standoff, but the Palestinians never reached their property and the settlers appeared to suffer no consequences. It was a riveting piece of television, framed by the Oct. 27 Israeli elections.
The report did not slip past Weiss, of course. Within a day, Oliver Darcy of the Status newsletter reported that screenings of the segment had grown extraordinarily contentious, with the CBS News editor-in-chief taking a “very, very hands-on” role and Stahl, who has been at the broadcast since 1991, privately floating the idea of quitting. Darcy’s sources said Weiss’ objections were not confined to a single factual assertion but ranged far more broadly, and that some on the team were unsure the report would even air at all.
CBS News, for its part, called the Status account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative” and insisted the piece received far fewer edits than most. Perhaps so. But even the network’s version concedes the larger point: A correspondent of Stahl’s stature had to survive an internal fight over an eyewitness account of violence that she and her crew watched unfold.
The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the Bari Weiss experiment. The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others. As I’ve previouslyargued, the crisis at CBS News is bigger than one controversial editor. It is about what happens when corporate power no longer values a news organization’s independence as a principle to be defended.
Under the watch of Skydance boss David Ellison and Weiss, whom he handpicked, CBS News’ rightward renovation is running into a problem. The internal revolt at the network has become a daily reality for rank-and-file employees who watched the forced departures of foundational figures like Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The journalists who remain have not all agreed to become instruments of Weiss’ apparent worldview; many are leaking their misgivings to media reporters. Nor do the audience numbers establish that replacing an investigative institution’s identity with a slickly packaged right-wing populist brand constitutes a successful business strategy. Now the network is caught struggling to hold on to the credibility it inherited while forging the political project its leadership appears determined to impose.
If you want to hear what passes for rigor in Weiss’ newsroom, the tape is available. After Weiss fired London bureau chief Claire Day in April — her offense was apparently coverage of Israel that displeased the new regime — she installed Shayndi Raice as foreign editor. Last week Raice summoned the foreign staff to a virtual meeting and delivered a 15-minute tirade that Status obtained on audio and later released in full. “This is not your publishing platform,” she told the assembled journalists. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place.” Failure to follow that hierarchy, she explained, “is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.”
When Holly Williams, the veteran correspondent whose report on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks had been edited to remove the Palestinian death toll, respectfully challenged her, Raice informed Williams that she had gotten her own story “wrong.” Williams, Raice said, does not know it as well as she does. As for the figure itself — more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — Raice waved it off as a “magic number.” Including it in the report, she suggested, amounted to “posturing” rather than journalism.
The same partisan thumb has appeared on the scales in CBS’s domestic political coverage. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Weiss has taken a personal interest in Michigan’s Senate race, and she has pushed CBS journalists to pursue story after story about Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and his supposed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, raising the subject on editorial calls and tasking the network’s investigative unit with combing his background for a link to the organization.
The raw material for this enterprise is a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing a conversation with their mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. He has explained that his parents divorced when he was young and that he was raised by his father and stepmother, and the leap from a mother’s politics in another country half a century ago to a candidate’s secret loyalties is the kind American journalism once required evidence to make.
To be fair, El-Sayed is a legitimate story. A Senate candidate’s family history is fair game, and there is nothing inherently scandalous in an editor telling reporters to look into it. The scandal, though, is in the selectivity. The same editor who dispatched investigators after a Democrat on the strength of his mother’s biography also tasked staff with pursuing the theory that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, had secretly checked into a mental health facility during his nine-day absence from the campaign trail, a claim right-wing influencers manufactured out of a bad case of the flu — and one that collapsed on contact with a hospital’s denial and time-stamped security footage. One CBS staffer told Semafor that Weiss’ story ideas “routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets,” and that the resulting reports “usually leave out important context and facts.”
It is worth highlighting what unites the targets: El-Sayed and Talarico are both progressives who have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
What Weiss is building with her other hand is a stage to platform MAGA. Her signature project is Things That Matter, a town-hall series she devised and launched by interviewing Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, in a December broadcast that drew 1.87 million viewers, which was notably down 11% from what CBS ordinarily draws in that hour. Of the series’ single-guest town halls since, exactly one has featured a Democrat, Maryland Governor Wes Moore. The segment’s latest installment on Saturday handed a Michigan stage to Vice President JD Vance a little over two weeks out from the midterm elections, in a state where the administration needs every vote it can find.
Ironically, the format’s one unscripted moment came from the audience. Joey Amor, whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor ,was one of six American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike on an outpost in Kuwait in March, asked the vice president when this administration would hold its own officials accountable for the failures that left those troops exposed. Vance pleaded unfamiliarity, explaining that “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”
The irony was abundant: A town hall designed as a coronation had accidentally produced a news story, and the news was that the vice president of the United States had nothing to say to a man widowed by President Donald Trump’s war of choice.
Now consider what the new CBS has gotten for all this friction. “60 Minutes” recently saw the smallest audience of the season and the smallest for a fourth episode in at least a quarter century. The season premiere in September managed 7.94 million, a 21% drop from 2025 and the weakest opening this century.
This is a broadcast that grew 9% last season. Nobody was asking Weiss to fix it.
With Election Day 2026 just weeks away and control of Congress hanging in the balance, the results will almost certainly hinge on voter turnout, just as they did in 2024.
As a scholar of U.S. politics, I see this as a high-risk strategy for Republican candidates and American democracy. That’s because reduced trust in election integrity can reduce motivation to vote – even if based on flawed information. But it’s not at all clear which Americans are most likely to stay home in November.
Nonetheless, rhetoric from the Trump administration about voter fraud has been pervasive. Consider the recent claim by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls – a number reduced to 185 when state authorities pressed for details, and reduced to zero when the state investigated the names provided.
There is comparable behavior from Congress. My own research on political communication has shown that a substantial number of members of Congress, strongly skewing Republican, make frequent use of rhetoric that undermines democratic norms and delegitimizes political institutions.
How does this uncertain political environment influence voters?
There is clear data showing that voter confidence in elections has fallen across party lines: Only 65% of Republicans, 64% of Democrats and 57% of independent voters are very or somewhat confident that the 2026 vote count will be reliable. Conventional wisdom suggests such discouraging numbers would depress turnout.
Any campaign’s quest to mobilize additional voters, therefore, must find them among citizens without a strong sense of civic duty. But among these people, diminished trust in democratic processes can play out in counterintuitive ways.
Recent research on German voters is relevant to the U.S.: It shows that among more passive voters – those following cues from political elites – reduced trust in elections can depress motivation to vote. That’s because there’s no trustworthy result that voters are seeking to affirm.
Conversely, among voters with greater skepticism about elite messaging, reduced trust can motivate increased turnout as an attempted corrective for a flawed system.
What does this mean for potential voters in the U.S.? Among Republicans, it appears that the party’s strategy carries a strong risk of backlash.
Findings from MIT’s Election Lab confirm that cues from political elites are a powerful factor in voter behavior. Specifically, cues setting expectations of a disappointing or untrustworthy result will reduce motivation. Why vote if you don’t expect it to help achieve the desired result?
The same study finds Republican voters broadly inclined to believe GOP leaders’ cues about voter fraud and to frame their expectations accordingly. And once they’ve made that shift, they cling firmly to the belief, even in the face of contrary empirical evidence or messaging from within the party.
In the current election cycle, 50% of Republicans surveyed distrust mail-in voting, and 51% fear voting by noncitizens. They expect election results to be fraudulent. This likely won’t mobilize them, as there’s no positive result they can expect to affirm. The Republican Party’s messaging has painted its voters into a corner.
Democrats, meanwhile, are less inclined to believe claims of voter fraud. But they are more inclined to be concerned about attempts to undermine the midterms by political elites making such claims. Examples include the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt about voting by mail and about alleged noncitizen voting.
These efforts increase motivation to vote among Democrats. Unlike GOP voters, they see the capacity to correct for the system’s vulnerabilities – the potential and urgency to overwhelm attempts at voter suppression through higher turnout.
An election integrity officer, in red, trains poll watchers at the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana, Calif., on Nov. 1, 2022. Television monitors display what each employee is looking at on their desk for observers to watch. Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Truth and trust
Opponents of Trump and the GOP may find these diverging effects encouraging. No matter the results this November, however, we’re left with a precarious dynamic. Increasing numbers of voters lack trust in elections and make their decisions to vote – or not – based on limited or flawed information.
Fortunately, there are signs of hope.
Although voters in general are poorly informed about how elections are conducted, they can and do respond to clear information familiarizing them with election processes.
I’ve seen this myself over the years, working with nonpartisan efforts to register young adults and train them as poll watchers. And in the current election cycle, there have already been widespread efforts to broaden public awareness about the fact that state officials, not federal ones, have authority over voter rolls and election security.
Looking beyond November, what Americans can hope for is a cycle in which clear election outcomes provide an opportunity to inform voters of how and why the system works. That’s the way to motivate more political engagement and voter turnout in the future.
The Trump administration is ramping up its efforts to flush out noncitizen voters with next month’s midterm elections approximately two weeks away. On Monday, the Department of Justice filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. The 28 defendants are lawful permanent residents with legal status in the country but are not citizens permitted to vote.
Noncitizen voting is incredibly uncommon, according to data on the issue, and has not been shown to influence the results of races. Not only does the practice create a paper trail, it carries steep penalties. “Federal law prohibits non-U.S. citizens from registering and voting in Federal elections; violators are removable and face up to five years in prison,” Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledged in an October 2024 letter. “The evidence is clear that these laws are working as intended — it is extremely uncommon for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections.”
That hasn’t stopped members of the Trump administration from upholding the recent DOJ arrests, dubbed Operation Protect the Vote, as evidence of cheating in the midterms. “This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens,” Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the DOJ, said during a Los Angeles news conference.
The arrests come less than a week after the DOJ sued California and sent officials a list on an USB drive and a handwritten password, demanding to know who on the list was a citizen or not with only a 48-hour window to respond. Dean Logan, the Los Angeles county clerk and recorder, told The Guardian his office refused to review the list, in part because they didn’t consider the USB drive to be secure. “The Department of Justice has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology supporting its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,” Logan said in a statement.
“If the regime truly believed California had an illegal voting problem — no such problem exists — they would have taken this action a long time ago, not as Californians are literally casting votes,” State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, posted on X. “This is all a political stunt to trick people into voting for Prop 39 (which will make it harder for citizens to vote) and to lay groundwork for a coup on January 3 by refusing to seat House Democrats based on bogus “voter fraud” claims.”
Prop 39, also known as the “Voter Identification, Citizenship Verification, and Registered Voter List Administration Initiative,” is basically a voter ID law. If passed, it would, among other things, require voters to present a government-issued ID for in-person voting or provide the last four digits of a government-issued ID designated during voter registration for mail-in voting.
Claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting are not new to the Trump administration. It was a strategy that Donald Trump explored in his 2024 presidential campaign, but it was largely dropped once he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris and it became unnecessary to use. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “You can absolutely bet if Trump loses, he will claim there was widespread noncitizen voting without any evidence whatsoever,” Becker told NPR in September 2024. “And that is going to incite anger and potentially violence.”
Amid a social media era where people often feel more unheard and misunderstood than ever, so much about director David Greaves’ documentary, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” feels like a relic: a snapshot of a time when intellectuals gathered in person for lively, productive debate.
The film, newly restored from Greaves’ father William’s original offering, captures a staggering array of luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance reflecting on the period during a four-hour cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in 1972. That salon included pianist Eubie Blake, artist Romare Bearden, activist Louise Thompson Patterson, playwright Irvin C. Miller, journalist Gerri Major, and librarian Jean Blackwell Hutson grappling with the legacy of the era and the issues it raised that persisted even then.
It’s an intimate, engaging discussion among people with different approaches, styles, and even points of view while, as Brienne Adams, assistant professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University, put it, “still having the goal of Black humanity and liberation at the forefront.”
Among those sources of conflict expressed in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” are the years that comprised the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement as it was often referred to at the time. To hear one person tell it, it was the 1920s. Another suggests that it really found its footing in the ‘30s, while someone else considers its genesis around the 1910s, punctuated by the Silent Protest Parade of 1917.
What is seen in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” is, to borrow writer and journalist George Schuyler’s words in the film, “a mark of a civilized community,” people challenging each other on everything from their art to their politics.
There are also ponderings on the Black journalist agenda; thoughts about the intentions and tactics of political activist Marcus Garvey; concerns that writer and anthropologist Zora Neale, sculptor Augusta Savage, poet and novelist Countee Cullen and others were minimized. There’s a rich conversation about the efficacy of influential figures such as gangster Casper Holstein and writer Carl Van Vechten, who helped finance and support, respectively, members of the Harlem Renaissance and their work. With Van Vechten, author of the controversial 1926 novel, “Ni**er Heaven,” comes the question of how white patronage impacted the cultural output of the era.
Relatedly, writer and journalist George Schuyler cogitates on his prominent 1926 essay in The Nation, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” and poet and activist Langston Hughes’ follow-up, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” as urgent critiques of the white relationship to Black art.
(Neon) “Once Upon A Time In Harlem”
It doesn’t take long in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” for the many voices in Ellington’s home to get louder and start to overlap as boozy drinks are poured and the elder Greaves flits from one side of the room to another to catch each rebuttal and vivid recollection. Decades after the Harlem Renaissance, it had to be remarkable to witness such insight and impassioned thoughts about the era from those who lived it — and in the same year that the National Black Political Convention raised the alarm on some of those same concerns once again.
In 2026, though, at a time when social media too often mangles critical thinking and disagreement, it is downright extraordinary. It’s also nostalgic in a way that finally seems imperative in today’s Hollywood that reeks of hollow, monetized sentimentality about its past.
What is seen in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” is, to borrow Schuyler’s words in the film, “a mark of a civilized community,” people challenging each other on everything from their art to their politics. He recalls that every ethnic group in Harlem had “intellectual centers” for such discussions.
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It’s not that Black critical engagement doesn’t still happen every day, even online. It’s that it’s much more difficult to parse through an algorithmic funnel of opinions and perspectives that can often appear half-formed or entirely outside their context.
“Social media allows for more voices to be heard, but algorithmically situated based upon someone’s interests where they’re entering into the conversation,” Adams said.
Just as Harlem Renaissance figures broached subjects such as the white influence on Black art and questions about what defines Black art or a Black artist, particularly inside a white business establishment, there are still concerns about the representation of Black art and stories. The conversations about Issa Rae’s trajectory from YouTube to HBO and Tyler Perry keeping many Black actors employed, though consistently coming up against criticism over the quality of his work, both come to mind.
But recent pushback and critiques of offerings such as the new “A Different World” series and the “Michael” movie once again raise valid concerns about the state of critical debate on Black art. What it too often comes up against are parasocial responses, antagonism, doxing, or a preciousness around the critique, particularly at a time when Hollywood has rolled back on Black storytelling.
Back then, it was about critiquing Black art for Black art’s sake and its possibilities, when today critical discussions seem to urgently hinge on Black art for the sake of its preservation.
Adams, whose background in digital studies examines interiority in Black cultural productions and fandom expression as an example of Black digital knowledge production and public intimacy, said that the rise of content creators is one component of those responses.
“If they are content creators that are having these conversations because getting eyes on their content can be tied to monetary gain, that can sometimes lead to salaciousness in the approach to the ‘civilized’ society, right?” she explained.
That motivation, Adams added, can lead to a need to demonstrate “the most,” “whether that is the most right, the most devoted (in the case of fandom), the most knowledgeable, the most (insert marginalized identity here). People resort to antagonisms to demonstrate their hierarchy of ‘most.’” That, in turn, results in a collapse of intellectual curiosity and humility that “undergirds critical thinking,” Adams concluded.
There’s also the distinction that, unlike some of the most notable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, social media assembles people from across various classes, education and media literacy levels, professions with sundry access to information and art itself. Additionally, motivation, even beyond the content creation monetization that Adams pointed out, can sometimes be connected exclusively to the idea of supporting and amplifying Black art and artists while deprioritizing inquiries of their merit.
Contrarily, Harlem Renaissance figures such as writer Zora Neale Hurston, Hughes and others were able to gather in more intimate spaces among people they often already knew from the neighborhood with similar interests and scholarship, regardless of whether they agreed. In fact, they often didn’t.
Where writing critiques in news media like The Nation, Fire!, and The Crisis, which ran a Black symposium with questions about how “The Negro” should be portrayed in Black art in 1926, was a way to engage with other intellectuals; social media broadens that audience and more quickly. Plus, like today when many outlets require that their readers pay for subscriptions to access essential journalism, essays from the Harlem Renaissance and even the 1972 gathering in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” restrict engagement based on intellect or economics.
(Neon) William Greaves on the set of “Once Upon A Time In Harlem”
“The artists and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance are still this small, kind of enclaved people that maybe most of them went to Howard who are having very similar types of training and conversation,” Adams said.
Add to that, most patrons across the racial spectrum who engaged with the work and workers of the Harlem Renaissance didn’t have as much access to their personal lives to form parasocial relationships with them as fans have today. Back then, it was also often about critiquing Black art for Black art’s sake and its possibilities, when today critical discussions seem to urgently hinge on Black art for the sake of its preservation. Those distinctions impact the response to critical discussion — from the in-fighting on BookTok to the arguments on Threads.
Still, concern about the increased dearth of Black artists and Black art is legitimate. Filmmaker Nina Lee said that Hollywood gatekeepers preclude greenlighting certain Black films until they determine that others of their ilk make a splash at the box office. But that reality is too often used to establish a tenderness around criticism of the Black art that does manage to come down the pipeline.
However, that delicacy around discussing the flaws of Black art can, as Adams considered, illustrate a propriety to the white for the sake of white acceptance. “The preciousness around critiquing it still centers white gazes to say that we have to be presentable and respectable in ways,” she said.
None of that is conducive to the type of “civilized community” Schuyler reflects upon in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.” While some have managed to successfully carve out their own niche spaces online for critical debate, from podcasts to more curated social media discussions and personal Substacks, the recognition that it serves to help push the art forward is too often lost.
That contemporary disconnect is what makes Greaves’ documentary that more profound. It deepens audiences’ understanding of healthy, effective debate through a reflection of our not-so-distant past at a time when too many are consumed by self-aggrandizement rather than the roadmap those who came before them already laid out. As Major says in the film, “They’re going to lose if they cannot profit from the struggles that we went through.”
A Crunchwrap Supreme and a bag of supermarket salad generally appeal to rather different notions of a good lunch. One offers the architectural pleasure of a crunchy tostada tucked inside a warm tortilla; the other, the satisfaction of having arranged to eat vegetables without chopping any. This summer, however, both came with a less welcome consideration: iceberg lettuce.
A massive cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded iceberg from Taylor Farms de Mexico prompted recalls extending from Taco Bell kitchens to supermarket produce aisles. Shoppers began trying to determine which seemingly unrelated groceries shared a supplier; someone even made a barcode-scanning app for precisely this purpose. (Such was the broader atmosphere of suspicion that an entirely unsupported rumor about the Trump administration’s promised bargain beef being horse meat eventually inspired online guides for distinguishing one animal from the other.)
And according to a Gallup poll published October 8, Americans emerged from it considerably more cautious about what they eat. Nearly three-quarters now say they have avoided buying certain foods because of recalls or government advisories, up from 53% in 2024. This newfound vigilance crosses party lines: 81% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans report having taken such precautions.
What it did not produce was much agreement about the people responsible for keeping the lettuce safe.
In 2024, when Joe Biden occupied the White House, 74% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans expressed confidence in federal food-safety oversight. Two years and one change of administration later, those figures stand at 30% and 70%, respectively.
A 24-point Democratic advantage has become a 40-point Republican one, a remarkable 64-point reversal.
Ahead of the midterms, the findings illustrate a curious feature of American political life: People can encounter the same dangers, take similar precautions and nevertheless arrive at radically different conclusions about the institutions responsible for protecting them. And if there were ever a summer when one might have expected a little consensus about the importance of competent food-safety oversight, surely it was this one.
The outbreak, the largest recorded cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, sickened nearly 13,000 people across 21 states, hospitalizing 570 and killing two. The recall included lettuce served at Taco Bell and Marketside iceberg salad sold at Walmart. Taylor Farms maintained that its own branded salad kits were unaffected, a distinction that mattered scientifically, if not necessarily psychologically, to shoppers eyeing the refrigerated wall of greens.
The trouble with becoming an amateur food-safety inspector is that the job is never quite finished. You can establish that the blueberries in your refrigerator haven’t been recalled, but this tells you remarkably little about the blueberries you’ll purchase next Thursday. You can discover who owns the company that packaged your broccoli, though what to do with that information is another matter. Every new discovery yields a little more knowledge, if not necessarily a corresponding increase in certainty.
There was a policy dimension to this uncertainty, too. In March 2025, the FDA announced plans to delay compliance with its Food Traceability Rule, which requires businesses handling higher-risk foods, including leafy greens, to maintain records that help investigators identify and remove contaminated products more quickly. Originally scheduled for January 2026, the compliance deadline was proposed to be extended to July 2028; Congress subsequently directed the FDA not to enforce the rule before then. The agency said businesses needed additional time to coordinate their systems.
The delay did not cause the summer’s outbreak. Still, there is something peculiar about postponing industry-wide traceability requirements while ordinary shoppers are left scanning their broccoli with smartphones, hoping to learn something useful about where it came from.
During Bad Lettuce Summer, even the official answers required some translation.
In July, the FDA announced that a lettuce sample had tested positive for cyclospora, then corrected the finding as a false positive. Taylor Farms emphasized the correction; federal investigators maintained that their broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still implicated the company’s shredded iceberg. Subsequent environmental testing strengthened that evidence, without conclusively establishing how the contamination occurred.
One could read the competing statements carefully and emerge with some more information, but not much more confidence about dinner.
Then came the political subplot. As the investigation intensified, Taylor Farms representatives met privately with White House officials. The company and its leadership had donated substantial sums to Republican-aligned political groups, including $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently sought answers about whether the company had attempted to influence the investigation. The White House denied compromising public safety, and no evidence established that political access changed the FDA’s findings.
Still, it is an extraordinary distance to travel from wondering whether the lettuce in your taco is safe to wondering who has the ear of the White House.
The Gallup numbers do not establish why Americans’ confidence has diverged so dramatically. Someone may distrust the industrial food system while enthusiastically supporting an administration promising to reform it. Someone else may have specific objections to that administration’s regulatory decisions. But the speed of the partisan reversal suggests that who runs Washington matters enormously to how Americans evaluate its institutions — though there is a certain irony to this in the age of Make America Healthy Again, which has elevated suspicion of the conventional food system into something approaching a civic virtue.
Its influence has extended all the way to the fast-food fryer: Steak ‘n Shake announced that it had “RFK’d” its French fries by replacing vegetable oil with beef tallow, a development Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. celebrated over burgers and fries during a televised appearance with Sean Hannity. The nation’s health secretary had become a verb, and the French fry a political statement.
It is, admittedly, easier to stage a photo opportunity around a basket of fries than a database of food-traceability records. Both involve questions about what Americans eat, but investigating foodborne illness requires a rather different kind of governmental attention.
Of course, Americans did not suddenly begin losing confidence in food-safety oversight under Trump.
Gallup found that overall confidence has fallen from 85% in 2004 to just 47% today. And recalls themselves contain an uncomfortable ambiguity: They reveal that something dangerous entered the food supply, but also that someone detected a problem and warned the public. The same event can look like evidence of a system working or a system failing, depending on which part of the story one chooses to emphasize.
With the midterms approaching, that distinction matters. The lawmakers elected in November will have a say in how federal food-safety agencies are funded, scrutinized and held accountable when the next outbreak arrives. Yet Americans are approaching that election with increasingly different assessments of the institutions charged with protecting them, even as their own precautions suggest a broadly shared sense of vulnerability.
The next outbreak, unfortunately, will not wait for everyone to agree on whom to trust.
Jesse Watters can’t seem to stop admiring Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. The Fox News host loves to talk about how Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the Senate is “in great shape” and how “Abdul . . . beat the machine” — meaning the party establishment’s candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — in a hard-fought primary. During an interview in August, Watters clearly enjoyed El-Sayed’s jokes and blunt speech, which included calling his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, a “beta,” and asking the host if he was circumcised when Watters tried to corner him on gender-affirming surgery for minors. The next day, Watters made no bones about El-Sayed’s appeal. “I like him,” he said. “I don’t want to like him. I like him for some stupid reason.”
But the reason was obvious. The doctor-turned-politician has an aggressive bro style that appeals to someone like Watters. Quick-witted with bulldog energy, El-Sayed never backs down from a fight. But despite Watters’ admiration, Fox News has become obsessed with taking El-Sayed down. It’s not because he’s Muslim, though Republicans are ratcheting up the racism in their efforts to derail his campaign. It’s because he is a model for how Democrats can escape their reputations for being weak and feckless.
El-Sayed has a lot going for him. He spent years running public health services in the Detroit area and speaks eloquently and with authority about people’s struggles to afford healthcare, even writing a book about Medicare for All. Most importantly, he’s an excellent communicator who can boil down complex policy ideas into easily digestible concepts without dumbing them down. A video of him explaining to Trump voters why universal healthcare is cheaper than the insurance system went viral for good reason. One can see that, for these voters, it’s likely the first time someone plainly explained how removing executive salaries and profit incentives from healthcare makes it cheaper.
Other politicians, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are good at explaining progressive policy. But what really seems to scare Republicans about El-Sayed is his political persona as a brawler — and for good reason. Vice President JD Vance learned this last week when he lobbed a strange insult at El-Sayed during a rally in Michigan for Rogers. The Democrat, Vance said, is “a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude.”
This is a common and deeply racist attack from Vance, who portrays non-white progressives as undeserving recipients of white people’s largesse — a caricature that has no relation to reality. El-Sayed left a position as an assistant professor at Columbia University to work in public health, where he won awards for his success in protecting children’s health from environmental pollution. During this same period, Vance worked as a venture capitalist who was close with tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
El-Sayed resisted the temptation to “well, actually” Vance, and instead hit back by calling the vice president and those around him “carnival barkers” who “are small and want to make us small like them.” His response was smooth. “JD Vance called me a little weasel today,” El-Sayed said. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no. What you’re talking about is a Wolverine,'” a reference to the mascot for the University of Michigan, where the Democrat got his undergraduate degree.
As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye recently wrote, El-Sayed has been courting Fox News viewers by appearing on the channel and running endless ads on it, all without softening his left-leaning message. He clearly hopes his bravado will woo some of the network’s audience, just as it won over Watters.
For his part, President Donald Trump is worried that El-Sayed is right. He’s been openly complaining at rallies and on Truth Social about how charming the candidate is in his Fox appearances. In early October, Axios reported that the White House contacted the network to complain about El-Sayed’s coverage. Trump was especially miffed at the Democrat’s interview with Martha McCallum, during which the host’s efforts to bait him into saying something that could be spun as “radical” failed. Instead, MacCallum embarrassed herself by defending billionaires hoarding wealth, to which El-Sayed said that he’d rather pay for schools than be so “focused on allowing a billionaire to make another billion.”
Since then, it seems that Fox producers got the White House’s message that they have to do something to dirty up El-Sayed. But they’ve learned the hard way that it won’t work to come at him directly, because he ends up dominating interviews and beguiling those who, like Watters, love his commanding and clever style. MacCallum later tried to redeem herself by interviewing progressive activist Corbin Trent and pretending he was a stand-in for El-Sayed.
At first glance, Trent performed as Fox producers no doubt hoped he might. He took MacCallum’s bait by defending the Muslim Brotherhood, something that the host could not get El-Sayed to do. The problem, though, is that Trent has no discernible relationship to the candidate. While he has worked for other progressives, including Sanders, I found no evidence that he has even met El-Sayed, much less is qualified to speak for him.
This attempt to hobble El-Sayed was revealing; it’s clearly all Fox News has. If the network tries to bring El-Sayed on again to ask him the same questions, they know from experience that he’ll probably just win over even more of their viewers. This isn’t idle speculation. MS NOW recently conducted a focus group with regretful Trump voters in Michigan and found that five out of the six are voting for El-Sayed. Republicans should be worried about the young male demographic in particular. Trump won male voters under 30 by a narrow margin in 2024, but they are jumping ship and now strongly favor Democrats.
El-Sayed is a compelling model for a new kind of Democrat. Polling by Strength In Numbers/Verasight shows that even Democratic voters take a negative view of the party, but not because they think their leaders are too progressive. “[T]he single most common complaint about their own party is that it is too weak, too cautious, or not fighting hard enough,” writes G. Elliott Morris in an analysis of the poll.
The Democratic base wants the party to take a more aggressive stance toward their GOP opponents, which will be key to building a more lasting coalition — especially one that includes younger and more male voters. El-Sayed is doing just that, and it has the right scared.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he seemed like the leader, or at least the dominant figure, of a globalized version of the MAGA movement, a worldwide network of far-right parties sometimes described as the “nationalist international.” We can make a long list, starting with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the not-quite-neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, along with other previously-fringe parties now creeping toward the mainstream in many different places.
If it strikes you that the term “nationalist international” contains its own contradiction, by the way, you’re miles ahead of JD Vance and Stephen Miller and the rest of the Trumpian pseudo-intellectuals, who still haven’t figured that out.
That vision of a MAGA-centric new world order was always an illusion, although it began with some fragments of plausibility and was enormously amplified by the Trump distortion effect, meaning our president’s uncanny ability to soak up media attention and make himself the main character of every narrative. Now that illusion has melted away like an ice cube in Europe’s catastrophic summer (where I personally experienced a 104℉/40℃ day in Berlin, the highest recorded temperature in that city’s history).
Indeed, the world now faces another apparent contradiction, or at least a historical irony. If Trump still looms over the American landscape like an unkillable ogre in a third-rate AI fairytale, he is all but finished as a political force. He has done more damage to his own country than anyone since Jefferson Davis, his disillusioned supporters are deserting him, he is universally despised around the world and he’s headed for a potentially historic electoral defeat in November.
Europe’s far right, on the other hand, is doing fine without him. It’s about a 50/50 proposition that by the end of this decade the four largest nations in Europe will be governed by right-wing populist parties. All of them at some time sought inspiration and financial support from Trump and his Mar-a-Lago hangers-on, and pretty nearly all of them have now ghosted him entirely, and pretend they never really knew the guy: “Neues Handy, wer bist du?”
Trump’s second term began with a triumphal sense that a hard-right “vibe shift” was transforming not just America but the world (which Americans are always ready to perceive as a picturesque but unreliable subsidiary). Those early months of 2025 were undeniably terrifying and inordinately destructive, but they were also ridiculous. In retrospect, from half a tick into the future, those guys were immeasurably high on their own supply, based on a narrow electoral victory over incompetent and disorganized opposition.
Early in Trump’s second term, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing candidates or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts.
As part of that extended touchdown dance, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing causes and candidates, or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts. That tendency culminated in the now-legendary 2025 National Security Strategy, a document that offers most presidential administrations a chance to deliver boilerplate language about shared values, human rights and democracy.
Not this time. As I wrote last year, the NSS featured a poisonous combination of “Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties” and “unhinged and unconcealed racist panic.” Europe was losing its cultural identity, the document warned, and faced the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” as well as the (entirely imaginary) possibility that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
That was one of many vainglorious MAGA failures to read the room, on an international scale. Right-wing European politicians traffic in similar rhetoric, to be sure. But nobody on that continent, of any dispensation, enjoys receiving arrogant lectures on history and civilization from Americans, and even extremist parties like Reform UK or the AfD prefer to cloak the bigotry in layers of euphemisms and some degree of plausible deniability.
In a long and painful video interview with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes published this past week, for instance, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel professed horror and amazement when asked whether her party contains overtly racist or proto-fascist elements. As Weidel took pains to point out, she is married to a Swiss woman of Sri Lankan ancestry, which presumably cleanses her of any bad intentions when she rejects “gender theory” or insists that all the Syrians and Afghans now living in Germany must leave.
That interview is an instructive experience in other ways. Beddoes repeatedly asks Weidel why she can’t just be a normal budget-cutting conservative, of a variety less frightening to readers of The Economist. Oh, but she absolutely is, Weidel insists, lulling her interlocutor for a while with prodigiously dull business-school chatter before returning to her central theme: Germany’s financial woes will be cured, somehow, by expelling the Muslims.
To return to our main theme, Weidel mentions Trump only twice, with evident distaste, in that hour-long conversation. That’s not exactly news at this point. By the time the above-mentioned NSS was published last December, Europe’s far-right populists had already reached the conclusion that Trump was a loser. Or, in the more delicate phrasing of Armida van Rij in the newsletter Strategic Europe, that “Trump’s repeated threats to invade Greenland, his attacks on the pope and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and his trade war on the EU have made the friendship electorally costly.”
That became obvious to the entire world last April, when MAGA darling Viktor Orbán was routed in Hungary’s election after JD Vance’s campaign visit provided the “political kiss of death,” in the words of Daniel Hegedüs of the Institute for European Policy in Berlin. That was the same month, as it happens, when Meloni publicly broke with Trump over the latter’s criticisms of Pope Leo XIV.
But Marc Bassets of the Spanish newspaper El País identifies the real turning point a full year earlier, in the Canadian elections of April 2025, when Trump’s threats and mockery drove mainstream liberal Mark Carney to an unexpected victory over a MAGA-friendly opponent who seemed to hold the advantage.
That result, coming just three months into Trump’s term, “became an example closely watched in Europe,” Bassets writes, which was replayed in several subsequent elections. Then came Trump’s threatened annexation of Greenland, his raid on Venezuela and his disastrous war with Iran, all of which were blatant violations of national sovereignty, the core principle of Europe’s new right.
Like Trump’s capricious tariff war and his public feuds with Meloni and the pope, this reflected the president’s profound ignorance about the world and a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes or arbitrarily renamed bodies of water.
All of this reflects a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes.
That quotation comes from Robert Benson of the centrist think tank Center for American Progress, who argues that the Trump administration “has mistaken cultural affinity for strategic alignment” in empowering political parties like the AfD that may “share mutual enemies” with MAGA — such as multiculturalism, racial justice, LGBTQ rights and climate policy — but “do not share American interests, or even the interests of this administration.”
As Europe’s far-right leaders draw closer to holding power (or already do, as in Meloni’s case), Trump’s support “appears almost as a liability,” as Dominique Moïsi of the Paris think tank Institut Montaigne tells El País. Trump has long been massively unpopular among European voters across the political spectrum, and his approval ratings cratered to new lows after the Iran war drove energy prices into the stratosphere. Across Europe, the U.S. is now viewed less favorably than either Russia or China, a remarkable accomplishment whose long-term effects are impossible to calculate.
In France, Marine Le Pen is focused on winning next year’s presidential election and has conspicuously avoided saying Trump’s name throughout his second term. She leaves that to her deputy and potential future prime minister, Jordan Bardella, who has repeatedly castigated Trump’s “totally erratic” war with Iran: “No one can say what the ideological backbone of this war is, a war whose end seems nowhere in sight.”
Meloni recently became the longest-serving Italian prime minister since World War II — an extraordinary fact in itself — and over her four years in office has gone from “Trump whisperer” to the evident conclusion that Trump is a “toxic asset,” in Bassets’ phrase. (The “Trump whisperer” label has also been affixed to former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with dire political consequences.)
Even the AfD, despite its aforementioned “cultural affinity” with MAGA and a mutual eagerness to throw Ukraine overboard and make nice with Vladimir Putin, has evidently concluded that glowing endorsements from the likes of Musk, Vance and Rubio are a mixed blessing when the U.S. “has become so unpopular in Europe that being close to Trump is not a source of legitimacy,” in Moïsi’s words. Weidel has reportedly described the Iran war as a “catastrophe” in private meetings, while Björn Höcke, the most inflammatory figure on the AfD’s right flank, has mocked mainstream politicians as “German-speaking Americans” and demanded the withdrawal of U.S. troops from German soil.
All of this points us toward the inescapable conclusion that Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He became a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, but was not the reason for it. As he fades from the scene, the global crisis he came to represent is more urgent than ever.
Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He was a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, not the reason for it.
As Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi recently observed in a New York Times panel discussion, “Mainstream liberal politics, in both its left- and right-wing versions, failed to deliver on its promises, not only in terms of welfare and economic growth but also in the more complex realm of identity and meaning.” What we see around the world today, in the ascendant far right and in a newly radicalized generation of young people from Paris to New York, are “expressions of the same disillusionment with liberalism and its policies.”
It has become almost irresistible to compare this era to the 1930s, when “bourgeois democracy” collapsed in Europe, plunging the world into murderous darkness. If the parallels are clear enough, the world is a very different place in this century and the outcome does not have to be the same. The future remains unwritten, and Donald Trump will not be its author.
This story is part of Gen Z at the Ballot Box, a collaboration betweenStates Newsroom and The 19th.
It was the beginning of her junior year, and 20-year-old Mia Tedesco was setting up a table for the campus open house where more than 200 recognized student organizations were preparing to recruit new students. Tedesco laid out bracelets that read “We are Charlie Kirk” — an homage to the prominent conservative media personality who was fatally shot at an event in Utah last year.
It was her first semester as president of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) at Butler University, a private school in Indiana, and she wanted to make sure her table looked nice.
“We are a more left-leaning college and university; we are a liberal arts school — I knew that signing up and coming and committing to college,” Tedesco said. “I knew I wanted to challenge it a little bit.”
She had civil conversations with many students who approached the table to learn more about TPUSA, the organization founded by Kirk, though some people scoffed or flipped her off. She considered setting up a camera for safety. Tedesco noticed that some people were taking handfuls of bracelets; then a friend told her that there were facetious posts about them on Yik Yak, a hyper-local social media platform for college students that lets users be anonymous. Many of the bracelets ended up in the trash.
It wasn’t the first time the conservative student organization had faced backlash: The previous semester, their chat on the platform GroupMe was hacked. Someone changed the name to “We love socialism,” updated chat names and photos, and kicked out members. The group chat, which was the main point of communication for the group, went from 70 members to 30.
“I know with the Democratic Club and many other clubs, there’s been loud dislike with us,” Tedesco said. “But I also know that if we don’t try, then we’re not using our voice like Charlie would want.”
Founded in 2012, TPUSA has grown to become one of the largest and most prominent conservative youth movements in the country. The September 2025 assassination of Kirk inspired conservative students across the country — many who had not even heard of Charlie Kirk or TPUSA prior — to continue the organization’s mission to champion conservative values. An evangelical Christian, Kirk advocated for gun rights; condemned abortion; held up men as the heads of households; denounced Islam; and called diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives “racist.” Within a year of his death, high school chapters jumped 180 percent and college chapters increased 60 percent — resulting in more than 1,500 college chapters as of September 2026, according to the organization.
That same day, Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action — a sister organization to TPUSA founded in 2019 and designed for direct political action — and a longtime colleague and friend to the Kirks, posted a prediction of sorts on social media: “Charlie Kirk came and converted the young men. Erika Kirk is coming to convert the young women.”
While the number of chapters has exploded and thousands of young women have shown up to events, the organization’s influence and ability to mobilize young voters as it has in the past is uncertain.
The larger Republican base is fracturing, the war in Iran continues and gas prices are still on the rise. Disillusionment with MAGA and the Republican Party is growing among young conservatives. With that backdrop, some TPUSA members describe rising tension on campuses. Some college conservatives — especially Gen Z men — are frustrated with Erika Kirk’s leadership, wondering if she can deliver the same firebrand energy her husband did.
When Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, Tedesco and a friend were in the process of starting a TPUSA chapter on Butler’s campus. For Tedesco, who grew up Catholic in a small town, it was important to create a space on campus for Christian representation, where students like her could incorporate their faith in day-to-day life and community. The assassination was “the final push” that got the paperwork across the finish line.
“Charlie was very outgoing when it came to the youth,” Tedesco said. “There was a lot of clickbaiting in his videos, but a lot of it was eye-opening. This person sees this way, that person sees that way — how can we get to a civil conversation? Charlie was able to have that connection as one human being with another.”
‘I’m not sure I can really trust her’
Andrew Roth, along with three other men, was in the process of filling out the proper documents to start a TPUSA chapter at Taylor University, a private Christian school in Upland, Indiana, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
“Prior to that, we were being very careful with how we were doing the paperwork because we wanted to make sure we got it right,” said Roth, now a junior and president of his TPUSA chapter. “Then Charlie died, and we were like, ‘OK, we just gotta send it.’”
Roth said 120 people showed up to an informal meeting to gauge interest in the new TPUSA chapter. During the club’s first semester as an official chapter in the spring of 2026, Roth said, he was surprised to see more women than men show up to events.
“In general, 20- to 21-year-old guys are just statistically more right-wing than girls are at this age,” said Roth, who is now a junior. “So I just kind of assumed it would be more guys than girls.”
Roth’s analysis bears out: Polling from The 19th and YouGov found that Gen Z women are far more likely than men to identify as liberal (38 percent vs. 28 percent) and as Democrats (37 percent vs. 21 percent).
Roth said some women were probably drawn to Erika Kirk. In June, she spoke at TPUSA’s annual Women’s Leadership Summit and addressed more than 2,000 young women, encouraging them to embrace their Christian faith and biblical womanhood — a theological concept that defines women’s role as homemakers, nurturers and submissive to their husbands — while critiquing modern feminism.
Nearly 20 percent of Gen Z women consider themself to be a “strong feminist” compared with less than 7 percent of Gen Z men, according to The 19th/YouGov poll.
“My husband always believed in this event because he could see young women being sold a vision of life that looked empowering on the surface, but left many of them increasingly dissatisfied underneath,” Erika Kirk said in her opening remarks at the summit. “He wanted to create a place for conservative women to connect with like-minded women and be poured into by female voices that would talk to them about the sanctity of life, about fiscal responsibility, about liberty and family.”
Erika Kirk’s message is less overtly political than that of her late husband. Her speeches tend to have fewer policy talking points. When asked in a Vanity Fair interview about her stance on Israel, for example, she responded that she doesn’t “sit around thinking about what Bibi Netanyahu is doing.”
“My brain bandwidth right now is honoring my husband, loving on my babies and building Turning Point to be everything it could be. I don’t really have the bandwidth to go down the rabbit holes of all of it,” Kirk said.
Erika Kirk did not respond to requests for comment.
By some measures, TPUSA has been wildly successful under Erika Kirk. In the past year, Turning Point PAC, Inc. raised the most political campaign money in its history, raking in around $9 million ahead of the 2026 midterms — compared with the $7 million it raised in the 2024 election cycle, when it became a core part of the Republican Party’s swing state strategy. The group’s nonprofit wing also reported a 30 percent spike in revenue, bringing in $115 million in 2025 on top of its $81 million endowment.
But her message does not appear to be resonating in the same way with many of the young men her husband appealed to: Roth, who is in a group chat with other TPUSA chapter presidents around the country, said people are frustrated and questioning whether Erika Kirk can be trusted. Roth pointed to one example when Erika Kirk praised the U.S. military’s war efforts in Iran under President Donald Trump — while her husband warned in April 2025 a new Middle East war would be “a catastrophic mistake.”
“People are looking at that and they’re wondering whether she’s just trying to toe the line so she doesn’t alienate Trump,” Roth said. “I’m not sure I can really trust her that much.”
Roth also noted that at least one TPUSA chapter disaffiliated from Turning Point in March, citing concerns with the national organization’s new direction.
Roth said he wants to hear more conversations about Israel’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy, the war in Iran, the Epstein files and government corruption — all topics Charlie Kirk was speaking about before his death.
“Charlie Kirk was fine to upset the people in power,” Roth said. “He had a more anti-establishment government stance. I feel like without him, they have fallen in line a little bit more.”
‘The one who was somehow able to hold it all together’
Amy Binder, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, has studied how campuses shape young conservatives for more than a decade. While conducting research in 2008, Binder said the main organization for young conservatives was College Republicans. But things shifted a few years later when Charlie Kirk and TPUSA came to campuses.
“Charlie Kirk was an incredible entrepreneur who had a real faculty with connecting with donors and big money,” said Binder, who has written multiple books about politics on college campuses. “He was very friendly with the Trump family and had a really good sense of what would excite kids on campus.”
He painted College Republicans as old, fusty and not visible enough. Meanwhile, TPUSA became the “far more expressive, fun, energetic, confrontational group,” Binder added.
James Yock, a junior at Butler University, is both the vice president of his school’s TPUSA chapter and president of the College Republicans chapter.
“I think Turning Point resonates more with youth,” Yock said. “It’s easier to relate to someone who is younger like Charlie, more up to date with things compared to someone who our grandparents or parents might resonate with in the College Republicans.”
In the decade after its launch, Binder said she saw TPUSA’s footprint on American campuses grow. The group was able to raise enough money to funnel resources to campus organizations for events, campaigns and media efforts.
Binder said that she thinks some young conservatives, particularly young women, are fans of Erika Kirk. But Charlie Kirk was more than the leader of TPUSA — in many ways, he was the heir apparent for MAGA, she said. Without him, there’s a sense that it’s “all falling apart” as the feuding factions within the Republican Party — including the nationalists, post liberals and populists — battle for dominance.
Binder saw that at the December 2025 AmericaFest, TPUSA’s large annual event. Conservative personalities Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro clashed over Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a far-right commentator known for racist, misogynist and antisemitic views, and Shapiro attacked Candace Owens, a fringe personality, former TPUSA employee and close friend of Charlie Kirk’s, for her conspiracy theories. What united them, she said, was anti-trans and anti-Democrat talking points.
“If Charlie Kirk were still alive, would the base be fracturing in the same way that it is today?” Binder said. “When I listen to conservative opinion, both on the intellectual right and the more populist right, I hear that attributed to him a lot — that he was the one who was somehow able to hold it all together.”
‘No longer with Trump’
Erika Kirk took over TPUSA as young conservatives were growing increasingly frustrated with their party and searching for political leadership.
Polling consistently shows that Gen Z is unhappy with the current political situation, according to Melissa Deckman, political scientist and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute. They are far less confident in major institutions, from the federal government to law enforcement to organized religion and the media.
“A lot of Gen Zers feel as though they play by the rules, but yet they’re unable to get ahead,” said Deckman, who also wrote the book “The Politics of Gen Z.” “The price of housing, the price of living, filling up a gas tank — all these things disproportionately hit them harder.”
And young conservative men tend to support more economically populist and sometimes progressive policies than older generations or Republicans of the past.
“The young men hate cancel culture, but they want healthcare,” Deckman said.
Roth said he and his peers are frustrated with most of the conservatives up for election.
“People my age don’t know if we even want to vote because I don’t feel like the Republican Party even represents me,” Roth said. “They just say the right things to get into power, and then they don’t do anything.”
Roth said a lot of people his age became particularly disenchanted and distrustful of government and politicians after living through the COVID-19 pandemic. He was in the eighth grade when the first shutdowns began.
“We were in favor of the 2024 Trump campaign because it was against all these things, it promised to expose all the secrets and clean up the system,” Roth said, noting Trump’s campaign promise to end forever wars, release the files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and put America first. “So many people my age are no longer with Trump because they didn’t see that happen.”
Gen Z men who voted for Trump are more likely to say they now regret that decision than men Trump supporters in any other generation, according to polling from Navigator Research.
Some of the biggest conservative women’s voices are also turning on Trump. Influencers Savanna Faith Stone and Alex Clark — keynote speakers at TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Summit this year — have given multiple interviews describing their sense of being betrayed by the president they helped elect in 2024.
In a June interview with CBC News, Stone said she’s decided not to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. She said Trump “made it seem like everything was going to become more affordable; now the economy’s worse. He promised no more wars in the Middle East, and we are in a war. So it’s disappointing.”
Clark, the host of a conservative and wellness podcast with more than half a million followers on Instagram, said in an interview with Politico that young women are considering not voting. She told the White House that people want “fight, fight, fight Trump” — not “ballroom Trump.”
“I feel some of the magic and the spark that helped us win 2024 is missing,” Clark added.
‘Where does the Republican Party go after Donald Trump?’
Eli LaGrange said he was in class at Indiana Wesleyan University, a private evangelical Christian school, when Charlie Kirk was killed. He didn’t know much about Kirk or TPUSA at the time.
“I was really curious to learn: Why did they kill this guy?” LaGrange said. “Political violence is always sad. I started watching his videos and talking to people. He was spreading a good message and encouraging conversations, which I thought was great, and it’s so sad to see a voice get silenced.”
LaGrange decided his campus — which he described as not having too many political clubs — could benefit from a TPUSA chapter. Along with a few like-minded friends, he collected more than 300 student signatures in support, drafted a constitution, and presented it to the student government and a board of teachers and faculty. After he addressed some concerns that a new chapter could cause tensions or make people on campus upset, LaGrange said, his proposal was approved.
Event participation has ranged anywhere from 15 people to more than 200. They’ve had a pickleball night to introduce themselves to new students, coffee meet-and-greets, debate tables and game nights. They’ve invited pastors to do a racial reconciliation night and even brought in the lieutenant governor to discuss faith and local politics.
“My elevator pitch to get people to join is focused on the importance of having political conversations,” LaGrange said. “Bad things happen when you don’t talk to the people you see, when you’re getting all your information and opinions from social media and the Internet. You need to go talk to people. You need to go have hard conversations with people.”
LaGrange said some of the hottest topics are immigration, Flock cameras and artificial intelligence. Perhaps most pressing, however, is trying to get conservatives to align on the future direction of the GOP.
“I think the biggest question is, ‘Where does the Republican Party go after Donald Trump and MAGA?’” LaGrange said.
LaGrange said that most of his campus TPUSA chapter’s leadership is women and that about half of the people who come to events are women. He sees young conservatives’ voices as critical to the conversation about who will lead the movement.
Some are pushing to advance MAGA while others call for a return to older, traditional conservative politics, hearkening back to past presidents like President Theodore Roosevelt. LaGrange said he falls in the latter camp.
“Organizations like Turning Point have a lot of influence, so whoever they give their voice to will probably lead,” LaGrange said. “So I think we need to take the time to decide who really is a good leader for the future of conservative politics.”
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