With less than two weeks before some states begin mailing ballots for the 2026 midterms, there is plenty to worry about. Donald Trump is escalating his campaign to interfere with the machinery of American elections, demanding sensitive voter files, threatening state officials with prosecution and rewriting the rules for mail-in ballots. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the administration a procedural victory that could let parts of Trump’s mail-voting scheme move forward, and new litigation is already underway to stop it.
But looking past the daily torrent of alarming headlines reveals another story worth telling. The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters. Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project’s most enduring images.
Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda. The suit should have stripped “2000 Mules” of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago.
One of the supposed “mules” was Mark Andrews, an auditor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, who appeared onscreen in deceptively edited footage returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members before the 2020 election. The film treated a few seconds of surveillance video as license to publicly accuse an ordinary man of an election crime. D’Souza’s voice-over declared, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”
They weren’t. Andrews had done nothing illegal, and after Georgia investigators cleared him of wrongdoing, he sued D’Souza and others involved in the film. The settlement amount remains undisclosed. That is less satisfying than a jury verdict, but it is still a remarkable endpoint for one of the Trump era’s most consequential election-fraud narratives. It also follows D’Souza’s own acknowledgment that the whole project was a fraud. In December 2024 he apologized to Andrews, and Salem Media Group, which distributed the movie, also apologized and withdrew “2000 Mules” and its companion book from distribution.
While D’Souza’s unraveling took years, the next chapter of MAGA’s fraud theater is falling apart in real time.
Earlier this month, conservative provocateurs James O’Keefe and Cam Higby dressed in what they described as traditional Muslim clothing. With O’Keefe in a thobe and Higby in a burqa, the pair walked into Minneapolis polling places during the state’s primary to test a decades-old voter vouching law, which lets a registered voter attest that a newly arrived or recently moved neighbor lives in the precinct. O’Keefe used a badly affected accent and, in one instance, gave poll workers the name of a real registered voter, William Pomeranz, who learned days later that his identity had been used in a viral video without his knowledge. A third member of the group, Anthony Rubin, reportedly told poll workers he wanted to vouch for people he described as recently arrived Hamas members from Gaza.
None of them actually cast a ballot or completed a registration. Rather than uncovering a loophole, they appear to have landed themselves squarely in legal jeopardy.
Falsely signing a vouching oath is perjury under Minnesota law, punishable by up to five years. Misrepresenting your identity to obtain a ballot is a separate felony. Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, slamming the stunt, noted that fewer than 0.6% of the state’s 2024 votes involved vouching at all, and that roughly 71% of those were already registered voters simply updating an address. Local law enforcement in Hennepin County is now reviewing the footage, which has reportedly been viewed more than seven million times. O’Keefe, who was ousted in 2023 from Project Veritas, the right-wing organization he founded, over what its own board called financial malfeasance, built his career on precisely this kind of stunt. He targeted Minneapolis after Trump zeroed in on the state as a hotbed of election fraud based on nothing but racist vibes. Now it looks like O’Keefe is left holding the bag.
That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA’s election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too.
That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA’s election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too.
Scott Presler and his political action committee, Early Vote Action, offer another version of the same schtick. The watchdog group Public Citizen recently filed a complaint alleging that Presler and his group failed to register or disclose spending related to their campaign to unseat three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices in the state’s 2025 retention election. Under Pennsylvania law, any committee spending more than $250 to influence an election, including a judicial retention race, must register and disclose its donors and expenditures. Presler’s operation reportedly ran a two dozen person paid field staff in the state, sent tens of thousands of postcards to Amish voters and texted more than 100,000 people in Bucks County alone, yet it never once showed up in the state’s campaign finance database. The complaint alleges that Presler and Early Vote Action sidestepped transparency laws meant to let voters know who is bankrolling attempts to hijack their judiciary.
The justices Presler tried to unseat, all Democrats, were reelected anyway. Since then, he has become a prominent outside advocate for the SAVE America Act, pressing Senate Republicans to embrace the Trump-endorsed legislation’s proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification mandates. A separate Public Citizen complaint alleges that neither Presler nor his affiliated super PAC registered lobbying disclosures for activity promoting the measure on Capitol Hill.
The Trump administration is building an extraordinary federal apparatus, backed by the Supreme Court’s blessing on at least part of it, to police an epidemic of noncitizen voting that its own Justice Department cannot document well enough to win a single voter roll case in 23 tries. The propagandists who manufactured the visual evidence for that epidemic, chief among them D’Souza, are settling defamation suits and apologizing to the private citizens they smeared. The stunt artists trying to manufacture a fresh round of viral fraud evidence are instead generating criminal referrals against themselves. And the MAGA media personalities raising money and influence around the cause of “election integrity” are themselves facing questions about whether they followed the disclosure rules that govern political spending.
The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump’s inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it.
The midterms will bring more attempts to manufacture doubt with ominous warnings and baseless allegations of fraud. The lesson from 2020, despite Trump’s return to the White House, has not changed. Do not yield to MAGA’s performance. Fight back and protect the people who administer elections.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — who has repeatedly questioned the polls showing Democrats flipping the House of Representatives — insisted Tuesday there will be a “peaceful transfer of power” following the midterm elections.
Johnson called the question asking him to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in January regardless of what the results are “silly,” saying the Constitution will be followed.
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.
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise! We are starting off with some good news for a change — and, potentially, the end of one of the Trump Justice Department’s egregious overreach campaigns. For now.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.
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Sometimes it seems like the 2020 presidential election never ends.
Trying to prove that he actually won that race has been an animating feature of President Donald Trump’s second term, even though audits, investigations, and court cases have all found that he lost to former President Joe Biden.
Trump’s obsession has famously become a litmus test within the Republican Party. But a new analysis shared first with Votebeat suggests that, six years later, the issue may be losing some of its animating power for candidates.
States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports state officials in protecting elections, examined the number of people running for statewide office or Congress who backed President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, refused to certify the legitimate results of that election, or attempted to overturn those results. The group categorizes those candidates as “election deniers.”
The group found that the number of such candidates fell by about 30% between 2022 and 2026, dropping from 285 to 197.
The candidates this year on the States United Action list includes contestants for governor in key swing states, attorneys general, U.S. senators, members of the House of Representatives, and, perhaps most importantly, secretaries of state. If they win, it would give them expanded control over the levers of electoral power for what is expected to be a contentious 2028 presidential election.
Right now, according to States United Action, 27 current statewide officeholders on their list have some oversight of elections. This November, 33 candidates for statewide office are on the ballot across the country.
If history is any guide, most of them are likely to lose. Since 2021, according to the group’s analysis, fewer than one in four of such candidates have won a statewide office.
“We know that election denial is a losing campaign strategy and that Americans are tired of hearing the same old lies,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action. But, she added, “the threat they pose to our elections and the rule of law is very real: The candidates who win in 2026 will run our elections in 2028 and serve as a check on Trump’s power in the meantime.”
Such candidates are on the ballot in almost all of the swing states expected to be pivotal to the 2028 presidential race, including Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
One of the most closely watched races is the one for Arizona secretary of state, where incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes faces Alexander Kolodin, an attorney who helped bring unsuccessful lawsuits challenging Arizona’s 2020 election results and was later disciplined by the State Bar over election-related litigation.
Kolodin, who did not respond to a request for comment, rejects the “election denier” label. On the campaign trail, he has sought to highlight his work in the Arizona Legislature, noting that several of his election reform bills have passed with bipartisan support, though those largely came out of negotiations around must-pass pieces of legislation.
Meanwhile, Kolodin would not say at a recent debate whether Arizona’s elections were safe and secure.
The persistent attacks on America’s electoral system are starting to take a toll on voter confidence. Recent polls have shown shrinking confidence in the country’s elections. For example, a recent University of California, San Diego survey found that less than half Americans — just 49% — thought the November election would be free and fair.
Thad Kousser, a UC-San Diego political science professor, said that electing election skeptics to office doesn’t necessarily mean that they will throw a wrench into the process.
“The real question is not what people have said about past elections but whether the elections that they run are going to be rooted in reality, informed by the experts in their teams,” he said. “If people come into office and take an open and honest look, that’s going to be very different than if they came in with their mind made up, ignored the evidence and pushed for policies that are not rooted in reality.”
One recent case of that arose in South Dakota, where outgoing Secretary of State Monae Johnson entered office as a skeptic of the electoral office and is leaving as a defender of its integrity. Johnson, a Republican, is endorsing a Democrat to replace her in the fall election after feuding with her party over the issue.
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
For more than a year, journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had been trying — and largely failing — to raise awareness about the very strange story of Donald Trump and his aide Natalie Harp. Shortly after the 2024 election, the New York Times journalists published a profile of the lithe blonde in her early 30s, complete with photos of her gazing at Trump adoringly, explaining how she left him love letters with language like, “You are all that matters to me.” On Aug. 16, Haberman was still trying to raise the issue during an appearance on MS NOW, describing Harp as Trump’s “human binky.”
But in the end, it was Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who woke up much of the public to this disturbing relationship by mentioning Harp on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” the senator said of Trump, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The defensive reaction from the White House was so over-the-top that it backfired, drawing more attention to the relationship.
But a mystery remained. Haberman, Swan and many others had been talking about Harp, but it wasn’t until Ossoff said something that the White House truly lost their minds.
The reaction likely had little to do with Ossoff’s comments, as elegantly as they were constructed. No, this recoil was more about the messenger than the message. At 39, Ossoff isn’t just young. He is strikingly handsome. The boyish good looks of his early career have matured into something closer to the old-fashioned allure of a 1960s-era movie star, such as Gregory Peck or Warren Beatty. Broad-chested, with great hair and a winning smile, Ossoff has a cool demeanor, good sense of humor and moral seriousness in a proportion that’s rare in politics — and that hasn’t really been seen since Barack Obama. Ossoff, in other words, can get it.
I’m talking about votes.
Put another way, Ossoff is everything the 80-year-old president wishes he were, but isn’t. Harp’s presence is a touchy, daily reminder to both Trump and his staff of the president’s thick catalog failings as a human being. Having a young, handsome, talented man mock Trump for his emotional support aide had to have stung with a special precision. No one needs to tell the president or his staff that Ossoff feels just fine about himself — and doesn’t need a full-time emotional support aide to follow him around, praising his every move.
Considering how much the White House communications staff is extremely online, they are also likely to know that Ossoff has become quite the thirst trap, even among young women and gay men who otherwise aren’t especially political on social media. As Grace Panetta of The 19th recently explained, the senator is a reliable, if unwitting, model for light-hearted crush content, much like what creators generate in tribute to movie stars like Timothée Chalamet or Tom Holland.
“Take a scroll through Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll see fan edit-style videos of Ossoff at campaign rallies and in Senate hearings,” Panetta wrote. Women jokingly call out Ossoff’s “slutty Atticus Finch cosplay” or predict that Ossoff will be “a hot president in my lifetime.” It’s reached the point where a reporter from TMZ asked Ossoff if he has “BDE,” which is not short for Big Dictionary Energy, despite the senator very much seeming like he’d be a fan of Oxford’s quintessential publication.
Ossoff’s sex appeal doesn’t just offer a striking contrast with Trump’s oversized suits and comical combover. He’s also very different than men in the Republican ranks who are closer to his own age and, like himself, are widely seen as potential 2028 presidential candidates. At 42, Vice President JD Vance is also the subject a lot of online content. But most of it portrays him in a comically unflattering manner, with tiny dead eyes, oversized cheeks and a maniacal grin. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, isn’t mocked for his looks, but he is often portrayed as a sad sack, a man too slow-witted and spineless to be much use beyond his role as Trump’s patsy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 46, is blessed with good looks that even three breakfast gin-and-tonics can’t take away. But with the help of Colin Jost on “Saturday Night Live,” he is mostly viewed like an overgrown frat boy crushing beer cans on his forehead. None come even close to the dreamboat treatment Ossoff receives.
This disparate treatment is especially amusing because the MAGA movement has insisted for years that they are bringing back a more virile masculinity — supposedly to cure all the allegedly poisonous feminism inflicted upon America by those WNBA-loving Democrats. No doubt there are some people impressed by all the workout videos posted by MAGA leaders, though that audience probably doesn’t have much crossover with people who get second dates. But what all the chest-thumping and push-up contests of the right really communicates is overcompensation rather than reclaiming some “lost” masculinity.
Beneath the right’s meltdown over Ossoff’s relatively tame comment about Harp was a molten layer of male insecurity. Steven Cheung, the volatile White House communications director, tweeted, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman David Ingle called the senator a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” Both unwisely lobbed these insults from X accounts featuring photos of themselves. The handy comparison left the observer to contemplate how, with MAGA, it’s typically true that every accusation is itself a confession. Similarly, Trump compared Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman, a reference to a film that is older than the senator and only served to underscore how old and out of touch the president is.
MAGA’s belief that masculinity is on the decline is more a reflection of their personal fears and resentments than an accurate picture of the world. Men who can just act normal continue to do fine, or as much as one can in this economy. As with many of the thirst-trap Democrats that are rising stars, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a large part of Ossoff’s charm is that he possesses an easy masculinity, one comfortable with women’s equality. MAGA influencers may deny it, but men who actually like and respect women tend to be more attractive to women and gay men.
Being chill with women’s power projects confidence. Insecure men are the ones who demand that women are forced into subservient roles, just so men can feel bigger. It speaks to an internal belief that they can’t win without cheating. That’s loser energy, not the Big Dictionary Energy being given off by Ossoff and this new crop of young, vigorous Democratic men.
Andy Beshear has a favorite song: “Universal Sound” by Tyler Childers, the Grammy-winning country artist with a special place in the Kentucky governor’s heart. That title is something of a metaphor, about connecting to a deep, abiding spirituality accessible to us all. It’s meant to be an ecumenical message — just like the one Beshear hopes to deliver.
“Universal Sound” carried him through a “nasty” reelection campaign in 2023, which ended with a comfortable victory over his GOP opponent, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who had been hand-picked for the race by Sen. Mitch McConnell. Amid mounting speculation that Beshear could become a leading contender in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, “Universal Sound” may well become familiar to more voters.
Beshear’s newly published book, which is de rigueur for potential candidates seeking to raise their political profile and lay out a vision, is also stoking talk of 2028. With its title taken from the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country” explores how President Donald Trump and his administration have, in Beshear’s words, “hijacked” Christianity, and how the governor’s brand of inclusive faith underpins his political life, offering readers a blueprint for governing with compassion.
I interviewed Beshear last week on the sidelines of Bourbon & Beyond, the music festival held annually in Louisville, Kentucky. He spoke about a reinvigorated religious left, addressed the tricky question of whether Trump should be considered a Christian, discussed his willingness to take unpopular stands in a red state, hinted at his plans for 2028 and explained why, as a politician often compared to Mr. Rogers, his kindness shouldn’t be mistaken for weakness. (Full disclosure: My husband, the novelist Silas House, served as Kentucky poet laureate under Beshear, and I once briefly assisted the governor on a writing project.)
This conversation, which took place in a backstage trailer vibrating from the country and hip-hop tunes emanating from nearby stages, has been edited for length and clarity.
Governor, thank you for taking the time to talk. “Go and Do Likewise” is centered around the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. What do you think that story has to tell us and teach us today?
Well, it’s a perfect story for a moment of division. So the parable of the Good Samaritan is about a man lying bloodied and naked on the side of the road, and everybody that looks like him and thinks like him and votes like him and prays like him and loves like him goes to the other side of the road, ignores him and walks on. But Jesus chooses someone who’s raised to hate that man on the side of the road — the man on the side of the road was raised to hate the Samaritan — and that’s the person he has come over, not kick the man while he’s down, but lift him up, carry him to safety and, if you read it carefully, pay for his healthcare moving forward.
But the parable of the Good Samaritan is more than just a story to emulate; it’s an instruction, because Jesus then looks at the crowd and says, “Now go and do likewise” . . . This is one of the fundamental — not teachings but instructions of the Bible. It’s for us to be good, especially when it’s hard. For us not to judge people, and at people’s worst moments, to just be good to each other.
Faith is obviously so important to you, and I’ve heard you many times refer to it as your “authentic why.” What do you mean by that?
“In an age of authenticity — when your Instagram video is important and your TikTok video is important — people want to know you, what drives you. They don’t have to agree with what drives you. They just want to see that it drives you to do good. And for me, that is my faith.”
Well, first, I would never impose my faith on anyone. I’m not somebody who thinks that my faith needs to be written directly into law. That’s Christian nationalism, and I’m against that. But I do think in an age of authenticity — when your Instagram video is important and your TikTok video is important — people want to know you, what drives you. They don’t have to agree with what drives you. They just want to see that it drives you to do good. And for me, that is my faith.
It tells me I’m supposed to leave this world a little better than I found it, and that’s one of the reasons I’m still [here]. You know, I thought that two terms as governor would be enough, and they still may be. But I see a world now that’s moving backward and not forward. And doesn’t faith call you to stand up and to speak out at that moment?
What do you think being in that position — I imagine you sitting there in Frankfort at night, weighing this [calculus] — has taught you?
First, I believe in any job that I’ve taken on. I am fully dedicated to the people of Kentucky, and when I fight with the president, it’s not because I’m a Democratic governor and he’s a Republican president. It’s because he’s doing something that hurts the people of Kentucky, and whether it’s popular or not, that was the job I took on to do my very best to move us not right, not left, but forward.
But you know, [the COVID pandemic] taught me a lot of lessons. I did what I thought was the right thing, that might not be the popular thing, the thing that would save the most lives. And you know what I found? As long as you’re willing to respect people enough to explain your why and not just your what, doing the right thing is oftentimes the politically popular thing, even if it wasn’t beforehand. People respect conviction, even if they don’t necessarily agree with it. And when you’re willing to explain why you did something, people can disagree with you but still believe you’re coming from a good place.
One thing I’ve been thinking about as I read your book is that the religious left used to be such a strong force in American politics. You know, Bobby Kennedy, all of his work —
All of the War on Poverty, even if notcouched in those terms —
Yes. Bobby Kennedy’s work for social justice was rooted in his Catholicism. Jimmy Carter, famously a Sunday school teacher, spoke about his faith a lot. Even Hillary Clinton, in her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign and administration, talked about her faith and took a lot of flak from establishment media. What happened to the religious left? Why do you think it declined, or kind of went underground?
Well, what I think we’re seeing now, when you see the James Talaricos of the world, our Kansas Senate candidate [Democrat Adam Hamilton] who’s a Methodist minister and others . . . you know, the media will always try to take something as a tactic. They’re like, “Why are Democrats talking more about faith right now?” instead of “Why are people of faith running as Democrats right now?” And I think it’s because there is such a manipulation and a hijacking of faith going on, in such a transparent manner, that people of faith are saying, “I’ve had enough.”
When you see Donald Trump hold a Bible in a way that you’re pretty sure he’s never held it, much less never read it; when he says he doesn’t think there’s any way he’s going to heaven, he doesn’t seem to be worried about it; when he walks out after Erika Kirk gives voice to the Golden Rule in such a beautiful way, and says, No, no, I believe in the exact opposite; when you see JD Vance using faith to kick people while they’re down instead of lift them up, and to judge as many people as possible — then I think people of real faith want to stand up and take that back. Or at least to provide the counterexample. I think people are tired of seeing faith used for bad in public life instead of for good, and that’s the core of why I wrote the book.
You don’t shy away from going after President Trump. You write that he “makes people feel good about themselves by telling them it’s okay to be the worst version of themselves.” At another point you say, “Trump may occasionally talk about Jesus (or ‘Two Corinthians’), but he has missed the point. Jesus lifted up the very people this Republican administration pushes down . . . Trump throws Gatsby parties with his billionaire friends, while Jesus hung out with the exact opposite. Trump clears the very people out of city parks that Jesus would minister to.”
That’s a powerful indictment. You’re saying that the president doesn’t love his neighbor as himself.
No, he calls his neighbor “the enemy from within.” It is the most stark contrast. I think about “love your neighbor as yourself” versus the president [characterizing] your neighbor as the enemy from within. I also think about Erika Kirk saying, I forgive my enemies, and Donald Trump saying, no, I hate my enemies . . . It’s just the exact opposite of what the Bible is supposed to teach us.
At one point, you question if he even knows the story of the Good Samaritan.
I’m not sure he does.
Christ said, “You will know them by their fruits,” right? Do you think President Trump is a Christian?
I try not to question people’s faith, because I admit that that is judging. But he is not living and he is not governing like a Christian. Now, when you think about the miracle of the fishes and the loaves in each of the four first books of the New Testament, it’s that important. Jesus, in a time of scarcity, makes sure everybody has enough. Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to take food off kids and seniors’ table [and] was willing to use starving Americans as leverage during a government shutdown. That is not living or governing like a Christian, and I doubt they ever run out of food at the White House.
“Jesus, in a time of scarcity, makes sure everybody has enough. Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to take food off kids’ and seniors’ tables [and] was willing to use starving Americans as leverage during a government shutdown. That is not living or governing like a Christian.”
I think about the “Big Ugly Bill,” and it’s causing kids to lose having enough food, but it’s also taking doctors away from the sick. And while I think he was talking about spirituality, the actual words of the Bible — which many people believe is the direct word of God — is that Jesus said a doctor is for the sick. Yet there’s a lot of sick [people] that aren’t going to have a doctor. So Donald Trump certainly isn’t living out faith. And for those that preach that he is a person of faith, my granddad, a lay Baptist minister, always said, you know, faith without action —
Yeah, is “dead.” In the book you call for a “Great American Reset.” What do you mean by that? How would you define that?
I did not live through McCarthyism, but we have read about McCarthyism — about attacking and othering people, throwing them in jail — and Donald Trump’s doing it right now. He’s so desperate, he’s calling people communists. I mean, just blatantly ripping off Joseph McCarthy. But the president himself is doing it. But we reached a point where people said enough, and they took a breath, and we came back together and did not repeat it — at least until now.
I don’t want to leave a broken country to my kids or to anyone else’s. I don’t want to leave this divided of a country to anyone else. I don’t want to leave a country where we are told it’s OK to hate each other and that your neighbor is the enemy. And so while I judge MAGA politicians, I don’t judge MAGA voters — and I don’t even use that phrase. Why? Because I want them to take a breath and to say, “OK, you know, let’s do something better. You know, this went too far. Let’s repair the wounds that we have,” so that we don’t move from retribution from one side to retribution to another side, and back and forth and back and forth, but that we get something more like what we had growing up.
When you were talking, I thought of another scripture — “the repairer of the breach” from the Book of Isaiah, which Bill Clinton used quite a bit. That’s kind of what you’re talking about, bringing people back together, healing divides.
I feel like we’ve done that better in Kentucky than most places. I still don’t always agree with the way people vote, but if you look at where we were with [my predecessor as governor] Matt Bevin, [who was] going after everybody who is different, othering anyone and everyone, judging everyone . . . Look at where we are now. That last [presidential] election, you didn’t see nearly the signs or the flags or anything else. You saw people who, in the very least, wanted to genuinely respect their neighbors.
You talk about that happening here in Kentucky. How do you think that can begin nationally, though, when a lot of MAGA Republicans out there think, as you write in the book, that “Democrats are Satan in the flesh”?
Well, Republicans right now are costing them about $4,500 extra a year in tariffs, about $800 extra a year in gas. If they need diesel, it’s even worse. So they might think that Democrats are Satan in the flesh, but Republicans are bankrupting them. If you want to eat, to be able to afford groceries for yourself or your kid, if you want to be able to see a pediatrician for your child in your own community, you’re going to think about things a little bit different. Democrats have the chance to grab that lane. And we should be. That’s where we should want to be. That’s certainly where I’ve always governed.
Think about a soybean farmer, and you and I both know we got a lot in Kentucky, and I’m not sure if any of them voted for Kamala Harris. But look at what’s happened to them. First, the USAID program’s eliminated. That’s one of their major clients, because if you feed starving nations, people like the United States better. Then [Education Secretary] Linda McMahon comes in, using her wrestling knowledge, to end the farm-to-cafeteria program. Then Donald Trump — and he alone decides on tariffs — throws them on China, and they stop buying our soybeans. They’re the largest purchaser in the world. They move to Brazil and Argentina.
Then he decides to get in a war with Iran that he doesn’t even explain to the American people a couple days before in his State of the Union. And now the price of diesel, which runs all farm equipment, is at an all-time high. If that’s not enough, a third of the world’s fertilizer runs through the Strait of Hormuz. So, a soybean farmer that voted for Donald Trump, who believed that was their guy, is totally betrayed, trying to decide if they’re going to plant crops at all, or if Donald Trump has bankrupted their family farm.
You’re the most popular Democratic governor in the country, according to the polls, and this book is introducing you and your beliefs to a whole other set of people, of potential voters. What are your plans for 2028?
Well, I haven’t made any final decisions, but I will say when I walked off the stage in 2023 . . . I looked at [my wife] Britainy, and I said, “Hoo, I’ll never have to run for anything ever again.” As I’m here today, I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. And I’ll make that decision later.
But I think about two core tenets of my faith. Number one, that I am made by a loving God that calls me to love other people, and that ought to be the baseline. And number two, I ought to leave things better than I found them.
Listen: When you’re governor of a place you love, it’s enough. It’s special. What we’ve done in Kentucky together, all of us, people of all different parties over the last seven years, [has] been transformational, and I couldn’t be more proud — and I was willing to go out on top . . . But I can’t watch a country slide back. I can’t see progress that folks in Selma marched for 60 years ago, undone by a rogue Supreme Court. So I don’t know exactly what my role will be in the future, but I just will not leave a broken country to my kids or anyone else’s. I will not.
I want to ask you sort of a different question. Let’s say that a popular Democratic governor, who has been elected twice to that job in what many see as one of the reddest states in the country, decides to run for president. What would they offer the American people?
Well, a vision of both reviving the American dream, of proving to people [who] believe the economy is broken that it can work again. That if you work hard and play by the rules that you can get ahead — that you can take your kids on the same vacation that you went on, that you can leave your family better off. That we can fix the darn government that people look at as corrupt right now, and we can heal this divide that is such a threat to our future as Americans. And none of us enjoy — none of us wants to be mad at the person that lives across from us. I think we can get back to being, yes, an imperfect nation, but one that’s stable, [where] at least we are moving toward progress each and every day.
“Don’t mistake kindness for weakness. If I’m Kentucky’s ‘Mister Rogers’ — he went up against Trump before Trump. He went up against a Republican incumbent governor that attacked him every day for four years, and the ‘Mister Rogers’ is the one still standing.”
Right now, polls are showing that Democratic voters want fighters, leaders who are unafraid of punching back against corrupt and MAGA politicians. Some Democratic politicians are resorting to using strong language, dropping F-bombs to get their point across. You, by contrast, have built your political identity on leading with kindness. “Kentucky’s Mister Rogers” is how many people see you. One of your book’s chapters is titled “Be the Adult in the Room.” So I wonder if you think there’s room for that kind of politics in the party and America today, coming in the wake of Donald Trump.
Don’t mistake kindness for weakness. If I’m Kentucky’s “Mister Rogers” — he went up against Trump before Trump. He went up against a Republican incumbent governor that attacked him every day for four years, and the “Mister Rogers” is the one still standing. A lot of people can claim they’re fighting in different ways from the bluest of states. How many people have sued [Trump] 30-plus times from the reddest of states? How many people speak out against him when it could negatively impact their approval rating instead of positively impact their approval rating?
You know, every day that I stand up for Kentuckians and Americans, every day that I fight back against this administration, I have more to lose than anybody else. But what’s an approval rating worth if you’re not going to use it for something? So there are different ways to fight, and here’s what I’d say to a lot of people: If somebody’s yelling, and you yell back, then nobody can hear a thing. There’s effective ways to defeat that person to fight and win. But shouldn’t we want one that will actually win in the end? And so I think that when people look at who’s fighting in the hardest of places, they see this governor.
The midterms are about six weeks away. What do you think the Democratic Party is getting right, and where do you think it’s falling short?
“What’s an approval rating worth if you’re not going to use it for something? There are different ways to fight, and here’s what I’d say to a lot of people: If somebody’s yelling, and you yell back, then nobody can hear a thing. There’s effective ways to defeat that person, to fight and win.”
I think that they are getting right how hard the world is on American families right now. I hate to use the “affordability” word, because I believe it’s becoming like a political science term. What it really [means] is that your medical bills cost too much. That’s why we forgave $250 million in medical debt here in Kentucky [via executive order]. It’s that your utility bill is going up. It’s that groceries are too much, and my goodness, gas is through the roof. We need to make sure that we’re communicating in terms that the American people communicate in.
You said something at a recent book event that caught my ear, that the Democrats have gone too far on a few things. I’m wondering what those might be.
We went too far on overregulation. We’ve got to protect our environment, we’ve got to protect our workers. But if we make things so onerous, then it takes a long time to accomplish anything. If you believe we need more housing, and it takes that much longer to build housing, then people lose out. If it takes too long to build a factory, you don’t have those jobs that pay the good wages. So we’ve got to have a sense of urgency . . . Democrats have to design our policies in a way to get results, and if we believe truly in something, even if we’re only 80% right on what the policy looks like, understanding if we get it done faster, it benefits more people.
You come from what many observers would call the party’s more traditional wing. Right now, there’s a lot of energy behind progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, and democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. Do you think there’s room in the party for this wide range of political identities?
I think — and you’re not doing it — but I think that the media tries to put everybody in a box to have a narrative. How many people in a Trump plus-30 state that have vetoed every anti-LGBTQ+ bill that [has reached] their desk would suddenly be lumped in as a moderate? And that’s not to suggest I view myself as a progressive. I just — I don’t view myself as either. I view myself as pragmatic.
My job is to stand up for my people and all their rights, live out my faith and to see everyone as a child of God, but [also] to solve problems. And that’s where Democratic governors are. You know, I think that this debate can play out in the House and in the U.S. Senate, where they might have different caucuses. But governors aren’t one of 50 or one of 24 in a party. You’re one of one, and your job, if you’re doing it right, is to get things done, to actually improve people’s lives. So, I can’t be as ideological as someone who votes on the amendment to the rule, right? My job has to be to figure out how to get the best results for our people on each and every day.
Are you worried that Republican attempts to deploy terms like “communist” across the board will hurt the Democratic brand overall?
Oh, I think what the president’s doing is so hyperbolic and so transparent that people see right through it. There is only one elected official in the entire country actively engaged in socialism, and his name is Donald J. Trump.
The definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production, and he is the only person negotiating a U.S. government interest in a private company. But, you know, what you do is you call people the name that you’re worrying that you are, and so he’s calling people “communist.” So now that he’s engaged in socialism, which he is, what is the difference between that and communism? It is the people in charge enriching themselves, which he and his family are doing. It’s turning the police and the justice system into your own personal force, which is what he’s doing. You see in each and every one of these that the things that Trump is calling people is what he’s actively engaged in.
Daniel Drezner says we are now in the Wile E. Coyote phase of the 2026 midterm, the phase of six weeks or so in which everyone knows the GOP is toast but we pretend we don’t. Some of this is simply the political press’s collective suspension of disbelief. It’s neither fair nor fun to act as though the outcome is mostly known. Nor is this new. G. Elliott Morris notes that election odds makers consistently overstate the odds of the president’s party in the midterms, which is sort of another way of saying the same thing since the president’s party is usually on the losing end of the proposition. I would argue that a significant amount of this remains the structural, though not necessarily ideological, bias in favor of the Republican party — two decades on, Washington, D.C. remains wired for the GOP. But what all of this really reminds me of is the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and what was then referred to as the “vibe shift” — both the hidden reality Donald Trump’s narrow but clear victory had purportedly revealed but also the shift in attitudes about cultural power and the future driven by that victory.
In elite circles the argument and belief went something like this. We thought that MAGA was a movement of reaction fueled by those left behind or discarded by the forward march of history and culture trying to wrench society back to an imagined 1950s. Not at all. In fact, it was the movement of the young and the most vital elements of the culture and the future. It was even expanding in the non-white constituencies which were supposed to be the anchors of the political left, the communities which were supposedly the targets and victims of MAGA, not its latest converts. Most of all, MAGA now had cultural sway to match its electoral power. And both were growing.
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