Elaine Godfrey | The Atlantic

The Conciliator

2026-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

When I first met Gretchen Whitmer last fall, she seemed to want to talk about anything except Donald Trump. She avoided using his name, referring to him, only sparingly, as “the president.” She came closest to criticizing him when she lamented that “this constant tariff chaos is really hurting our economy.”

Our interview took place, at her team’s request, in a Marriott conference room in Ypsilanti. It lasted precisely 22 minutes. And the Michigan governor, who is formidable in person, with sharply arched eyebrows and dark hair streaked with gray, did not seem thrilled to be doing it. She smiled tightly and spoke with caution while, across from us, an anxious-looking staffer counted down our remaining time together. Whitmer was careful, in fact, to highlight her own carefulness. At a National Governors Association dinner that she had attended with Trump last year, “there was a lot of conversation that I did not agree with,” Whitmer told me. “But I just sat there and bit my tongue because I’m not going to win that debate in that moment, and it’s not going to serve Michigan well.”

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Had Whitmer gone soft on Trump? For more than half a decade, she’s been “Big Gretch,” the Bell’s-drinking, fuchsia-lipstick-wearing, sometimes-performative badass from up north. She became governor during the peak of the anti-Trump resistance. Then her clash with the president during the pandemic sent her rocket into orbit. When Trump dismissed her as “the woman in Michigan,” she put the insult on a T-shirt and wore it on television; Etsy artisans hawked prayer candles with her face on them. In 2020, Joe Biden almost chose her as his running mate. After his disastrous 2024 bid, many Democrats hoped that Whitmer, not Kamala Harris, would swoop in to replace him. Now Whitmer is on the list of potential presidential contenders for 2028.

But if Democratic voters are looking for someone to confront Trump directly, Whitmer might not be their candidate. In his second term, she has instead looked for ways to collaborate with him; one of her visits to the White House last year resulted in a much-mocked photo of the governor hiding her face behind folders in the Oval Office. Contrast this approach with the likes of J. B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, who have spent the past year waging insult warfare against the president. Even Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whose state looks a lot more like Whitmer’s in political makeup, has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration, including calling J. D. Vance “profoundly and pathetically weak.”

Whitmer, in other words, seems to have given up the fight. Which made me wonder: Was this a tactical move—Let Gavin lose his mind on social media, while I win back the Midwest—or was it something else? The governor, after all, was the target of a pretty terrifying kidnapping plot in 2020. Had a fear of violence caused her to change course?

Whitmer didn’t cop to either of these explanations in any of our three relatively brief conversations over the past few months. She maintains that her underlying governing philosophy hasn’t changed: “I’ll take all the heat in the world if I can deliver for Michigan,” she said when we discussed the Oval Office photo.

Some Democrats approve of Whitmer’s new strategy. Others, though, think the governor has lost some of the pugnacity that once defined her. They view Whitmer as “almost groveling” and “pulling her punches” with Trump, a former senior staffer for Whitmer told me. (This person and a few others I spoke with were granted anonymity to talk candidly about the governor, who, for some of them, remains a close colleague.) During a meeting that Whitmer attended with the state Democratic caucus last spring, one lawmaker praised her for being Big Gretch and a strong fighter against Trump. But Whitmer batted down the compliment, calling the nickname a “persona” that others have put on her, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.

Many of Whitmer’s supporters in Michigan have been feeling confused, one of these people told me. “They’re just like, ‘What happened to Big Gretch?’”

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Gretchen Whitmer enters the Clique, a diner in Detroit, in January.

Every Whitmer supporter—and even most of her critics—will tell you that the governor’s single greatest strength as a politician is that she sounds like a regular person. Whitmer, who is 54, is authentic Michigan, down to the nasal vowels; she’s never lived anywhere else. She seems to enjoy making fun of herself. In her book, True Gretch, the governor freely admits that she partied too hard as a teenager and once vomited on her high-school principal. She writes about pulling out her dental flipper to make her colleagues laugh. These days, Instagram provides the best glimpse of Whitmer’s personality. One recent video shows the governor’s endearing struggle with a family recipe for popovers. “Why is it so thick?” she asks, frowning into the blender. “Oh, the milk’s not in there!”

It took a while for me to see this side of Whitmer. While reporting this story, I watched her speak at political events and a book talk. Eventually, I was able to see her interact with regular Michiganders at a diner in downtown Detroit in January, though the crowd there wasn’t particularly organic; ahead of the visit, Whitmer’s team had asked several local party leaders and activists to attend. Still, I got a small taste of a bigger truth: Big Gretch is a good time.

Weaving among tables, Whitmer took selfies and clutched hands. “If I could carry a tune, I’d sing to ya!” she told a man at the counter celebrating his birthday. She posed for a photo with a group of waitresses and somehow ended up with a toddler in her arms. “You’re so cute!” she squealed. At one point, Whitmer joined three women in a booth, ordered a stack of silver-dollar pancakes, and then insisted that a staffer take one. “Eat it, Henry!” she chanted. “Eat it! Eat it!” Later, Whitmer told me with a sly smile that she’d read The Atlantic’s recent profile of Newsom. “I enjoyed that one of your colleagues described Gavin as handsome ‘in a faintly sinister way,’” she said.

A Detroit rapper popularized the nickname Big Gretch, which the governor’s team insists that she “loves,” during the early months of the pandemic. But Whitmer’s reputation as a political force in Michigan goes back decades. Her parents, Richard and Sherry Whitmer, served, respectively, as the Republican head of the state’s Commerce Department and the Democratic assistant attorney general. Whitmer studied communications at Michigan State University in the hope of becoming a sports broadcaster. But after interning for a Democratic lawmaker in Lansing, she followed the same path as her parents: law school, then politics.

She spent six years in the Michigan state House, and another nine in the state Senate, four of them as minority leader. Back then, Democrats were used to being outnumbered, which meant that they were used to having to shout to be heard. And Whitmer was louder than anyone else. When a fellow Democrat was barred from speaking after using the word vagina on the house floor, Whitmer helped stage a performance of The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the state capitol. Once, during a debate, she chided her Republican colleagues until they told her that she was out of order. “Go ahead and gavel me!” she replied. “Her stuff got quoted more than anybody else,” Randy Richardville, a former Republican majority leader, told me. She was funny and direct. “I used to tell my people to stop watching her, stop listening, stop paying so much attention,” he said.

Many Americans first encountered Whitmer in 2013, when she revealed in a speech on the floor of the Michigan Senate that she had been raped in college. Republicans had been pushing for legislation to require women to buy a separate insurance policy to pay for abortions, including in the case of rape or incest. “I think you need to see the face of the women who you are impacting with this vote today,” Whitmer told her colleagues. The legislation passed anyway. But women from all over the state called to thank Whitmer for her honesty.

Even though Whitmer was viewed as liberal, she seemed to genuinely like her Republican colleagues. Richardville recalled a time when Whitmer was particularly angry about some piece of GOP legislation and was harsh with him on the Senate floor. Afterward, the two still met in his office for a drink. “We were kind of like those cartoons—the dog and chicken or whoever they are. They punch in and punch out at five,” Richardville said. Years later, when state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, said that Whitmer was “on the batshit-crazy spectrum,” she sent him a birthday cake decorated with the words Happy 65th BAT Day!

Whitmer announced that she was running for governor a few months after Trump’s election in 2016. Her slogan, “Fix the damn roads,” was folksy and charming, and in November 2018, a generally excellent year for Democrats, she was elected by almost 10 points. After her first year in office, she delivered the Democrats’ response to the president’s State of the Union address, in which she called out Trump’s bad behavior. “Bullying people on Twitter doesn’t fix bridges; it burns them,” Whitmer said. One month later, the coronavirus came to Michigan.

Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux

Whitmer blocks her face as President Trump answers questions from reporters in the Oval Office last April.

Like other governors, Whitmer ordered residents to stay at home and schools to close as the virus spread. She felt comfortable criticizing Trump’s leadership from the start. “The federal government did not take this seriously early enough,” she said in a mid–March 2020 interview on MSNBC. In response, Trump urged Whitmer to “work harder.” A few days later, Whitmer doubled down on CNN. “I don’t want to be in a sparring match with the federal government,” she said. “But we are behind the eight ball because they didn’t do proper planning.” Soon, the president was on Fox News blasting Whitmer for complaining. He told reporters that he’d instructed Mike Pence, who was coordinating the federal and state pandemic response, not to call “the woman in Michigan.” On Twitter, Trump dubbed the governor “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer.”

The situation in Michigan felt especially volatile. Whitmer extended the state’s stay-at-home order through April and initially issued restrictions that many Michiganders found ridiculous, including closing golf courses and outdoor garden centers. That month, 3,000 protesters descended on Lansing. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” the president tweeted in support. Subsequent protests featured armed men loitering outside Whitmer’s office in the state capitol building. The governor faced personal scrutiny, too. After boating restrictions were lifted, her husband, Marc Mallory, tried to use their relationship to get his boat in the water before other people could. A year later, Whitmer was caught violating social-distancing rules with friends at a Lansing bar.

She apologized for some of those missteps. More important to liberals, she didn’t cower in the face of Trump’s attacks. “You said you stand with Michigan—prove it,” she tweeted at the president in March 2020, challenging him to send more masks and ventilators. She appeared on The Daily Show in the T-shirt printed with Trump’s quote, tweaked for a sharper effect: That Woman From Michigan. At the time, Democrats were desperate for heroes, and Whitmer quickly became one. “Big Gretch” merchandise began to appear in tchotchke shops alongside Nevertheless, she persisted mugs and Ruth Bader Ginsburg yoga mats. At one point during the pandemic, Robert De Niro called in to a Whitmer-administration finance meeting to show his support for the governor.

All of this attention seemed like it might add up to something, and by summer 2020, Whitmer was being vetted for vice president. She wasn’t sure about it at first, people familiar with her thinking at the time told me; she struggled to imagine herself as a creature of Washington, D.C. She got along well with Biden, though, and by the time he asked her to fly to Delaware for an in-person chat, she was ready to say yes. Biden didn’t ask. The moment called for a Black running mate, the former senior staffer for Whitmer told me, so he had to choose Kamala Harris. “But I think he wanted it to be Whitmer,” this person said. Asked to confirm, a former adviser to both Biden and Harris said that the assessment carried “some weight.”

Whitmer campaigned happily for the ticket, but behind the scenes she was dealing with a nightmare. Earlier in the summer, the head of her security detail had sat her down in the sunroom of the governor’s residence and offered an urgent update: A group of men tied to a militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen, outraged over her COVID restrictions, was plotting to kidnap and possibly kill her. For the next several weeks, federal and state officials monitored the group as it staked out Whitmer’s multiple residences. Publicly, the governor said nothing. Finally, in early October 2020, the agents had collected enough evidence to arrest the men and foil the plot.

On October 8, Whitmer delivered a steely televised address, calling the men “sick and depraved.” In an article for this magazine, she unloaded on Trump, writing that “his violent rhetoric puts leaders across the country in danger.” During an interview on Meet the Press, she had a small sign reading 86 45, an apparent reference to removing Trump from office, visible in the background of her shot. (When Michigan Republicans accused the governor of calling for Trump’s assassination, a press aide for Whitmer said in a statement, “It’s pretty clear nobody in the Trump campaign has ever worked a food service job.”)

The situation shook Whitmer and her family. Her husband had received so many threats at his dental practice that he was forced to retire early. Her then-teenage daughters, Sydney and Sherry, refused to return to the family’s summer cottage in Elk Rapids, one of the locations staked out by the plotters. In Lansing, $1 million in security upgrades, including a perimeter fence, were installed around the governor’s mansion.

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer’s teleprompter at the Detroit Auto Show

As Michigan emerged from the pandemic, Whitmer was winning again. She was reelected by a huge margin in the 2022 midterms, during which voters also approved a measure to make abortion a constitutional right and state Democrats got their first governing trifecta in nearly 40 years. With their new power, they repealed right-to-work legislation and made breakfast and lunch free for all public-school students, among other accomplishments. The national buzz around Whitmer was growing louder, and Whitmer didn’t shut it down. She filmed a viral social-media campaign that featured a Barbie doll named Lil Gretch zooming around Lansing in a pink convertible, wrote True Gretch, and launched a political-action committee to recruit and train candidates. “People frickin’ loved her,” one Democratic state lawmaker recalled.

But around the same time, some people in Michigan began to detect a change in the governor. Local journalists and state lawmakers who’d been accustomed to watching Whitmer banter with reporters and field unscreened questions from constituents noticed that she’d become less spontaneous and less accessible. Her already tight inner circle became tighter. Her team began giving news outlets notice of the governor’s schedule hours in advance, instead of days. “They never emerged from the lockdown, and they act like it,” partly because of the kidnapping threat, Chad Livengood, the politics editor of The Detroit News, told me. (A Whitmer spokesperson said that the governor maintains “very deep engagement” with state legislators, and that her office “implemented new security protocols” for the safety of Whitmer, her staff, and reporters.)

Livengood, who has covered Whitmer since she was in the state Senate, said that these days, the governor seems “so focused on trying to follow talking points and advisers that some of that old, jocular Gretchen Whitmer talk and haggling has kind of stopped.” One well-known cable-news host also told me that Whitmer’s aides have “a lot more desire to manage” her television appearances compared with other politicians’, which feels “out of whack” with Whitmer’s interpersonal skills.

It would be understandable if the threats had made the governor more circumspect; many Michiganders were—and remain—angry about the way that she handled COVID. “There’s a heightened awareness now that I didn’t have before,” Whitmer writes in her memoir. In one of our interviews, she elaborated. “I think I’m still processing it,” she told me. “I’ve had to have my guard up for so long in such a personal and serious way, that, you know, I’m trying to just let my guard down and be me.” Some of Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers are in prison; other accused conspirators were acquitted. One of them has filed paperwork to run for governor. “It’s a strange place to be in,” she said.

Whitmer’s new reticence also coincided with a quickly deteriorating political environment for Democrats. By 2024, they were struggling to make progress on many of Whitmer’s stated priorities, including paid family leave and government-transparency reforms. Some state lawmakers blamed themselves. Others were frustrated with Whitmer. “There was no vision,” Mark Brewer, a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, told me. “Someone had to lead, and she didn’t.”

To some observers, Whitmer seemed to have made the calculation that, because little was happening in the Michigan legislature, she might as well pivot to national politics. Lots of Democrats hoped it meant that the governor was angling to replace Biden on the 2024 ticket. But Whitmer never wavered in her support for the 81-year-old incumbent—even after his calamitous June debate against Trump. (Although Whitmer did not endorse Harris for 24 hours after Biden dropped out of the race, the governor insists that she was not thinking of challenging her. “I wanted to take a beat and get the lay of the land,” she told me. “It had to be” Harris, she added, because “Joe Biden took so long to make a different decision.”)

The election was devastating for Whitmer, bringing both a Republican resurgence in Michigan that ended her party’s trifecta and a sweeping Trump victory. During speaking engagements, the governor likes to tell crowds that she dealt with the disappointment by watching all eight seasons of the TV show Dexter—“A serial killer to lift your spirits!”—before getting back to work.

This also appears to be the moment when Whitmer decided to try something new with Trump. The kidnapping plot might have given her a heightened sense of awareness and changed her relationship with the press. But now came the strategic recalibration. “When I was ready to reengage, after a brief break, I had done the analysis,” she told me. “This president just got reelected. My own state helped put him in the White House again. I’ve got two years. What am I going to do with these two years?”

Sarah Rice / Redux

Whitmer takes the stage at a Detroit campaign event for Kamala Harris in September 2024.

Whitmer made her intentions clear right away. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, she wrote the president a letter congratulating him and praising his recent words of support for the auto industry. She also included her personal cellphone number and invited Trump to call her if he needed anything. In her State of the State address the next month, Whitmer offered a new declaration of purpose: “I am not looking for fights,” she told Michiganders. “My north star has always been collaboration.”

Whitmer began to set up White House meetings with Trump—she’s had three so far, compared with only one during his entire first term in office. They have discussed an array of Michigan-centric issues—emergency aid after an ice storm, a proposed semiconductor plant, a request for new fighter jets at Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard base. Which brings us to the moment that has probably played like a Chaplin-esque silent projection inside the governor’s brain for the past 12 months: One afternoon in April, Whitmer went to the White House with Matt Hall, the new Republican speaker of the Michigan House. She and Hall were expecting a private meeting with the president, but instead, a White House staffer ushered them into an Oval Office full of reporters. They spent the next hour positioned beside Trump as he signed executive orders related to his 2020-election lies. When a camera turned to Whitmer, she covered her face with a pair of blue folders.

Basically everyone knew it had been a setup. “She got sucked into some bullshit,” Tommy Stallworth, a Democratic former state lawmaker and a senior adviser to Whitmer, told me. (Hall defended Trump, telling me that the president had decided to merge events to save time.) But for some Democrats, the photo became an instant symbol of the party’s feckless response to Trump—and another crack in the Big Gretch persona. Unlike in Zohran Mamdani’s later visit to the White House, when the New York City mayor-elect seemed to charm Trump with his confidence, Whitmer looked helpless. The folder moment showed that Whitmer “is not the badass with these great political instincts that you’ve been led to believe,” one prominent national Democratic Party strategist told me. “I love Gretchen Whitmer,” Brewer said. “But oh my God.” (Months later, in an article dubbing Whitmer “Trump’s favorite Democrat,” Politico reported that the governor autographed a copy of the photo for Trump the next time she visited. She also brought him a mocked-up newspaper celebrating how potential federal investments could deliver a “historic jobs boom” for Michigan, as well as a flag and a bullet from Selfridge.)

To the extent that Whitmer has criticized the president in his second term, she’s kept her comments soft and a little vague. “There is room for her to be a louder voice, particularly because so many folks have gotten accustomed to hearing from her,” former Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes told me. At the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year, for example, Whitmer defended the Trump-maligned United States–Mexico–Canada trade agreement without mentioning the president directly: “We cannot and we should not—as some have said—we cannot and should not abandon it.” Whitmer did not issue a statement in the days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. When I asked the governor why, she said, “I do not need to put out an official Gretchen Whitmer statement on every single thing that happens, because all I’d be doing is putting out press statements every day.” Two weeks later, after Customs and Border Protection agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, Whitmer quickly released an official statement saying that “the violence must stop” without referring to Pretti directly.

Even though the governor has taken some action when state residents have been threatened by ICE, she has at times been slow to do so, including in a case in which state Republicans were eager to help, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Whitmer seems to have concluded that she can do more with her remaining time in office through conciliation than through confrontation. The past year shows “that you can’t be too cautious with Trump, and you have to choose your battles very carefully,” Julie Brixie, a Democratic state lawmaker in Michigan, told me. “Governor Whitmer has done a great job of that.” Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, a friend of Whitmer’s, told me that states are more at risk in Trump’s second administration, which is why she figures that the approach Whitmer and her team “took in the first term cannot be the approach that they take in the second.”

In some ways, Whitmer’s new posture is working. After her Oval Office visits, the president agreed to provide some emergency aid to Michigan, and to supply new planes for Selfridge. Notably, the National Guard has not yet been unleashed on Detroit. And even though ICE agents have conducted immigration-enforcement operations in the state, they haven’t made it a special target. Whitmer believes that she has set an example for other leaders, including Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to visit the White House and work with the president.

At least some of Whitmer’s constituents seem to appreciate this. Whitmer’s visit to the diner in Detroit took place a few days after Good was killed. As Whitmer greeted a group of elderly patrons, she alluded vaguely to the violence in Minnesota. “Crazy things happening out there,” she said, before adding, “We’ve gotta keep that from happening in Michigan.” One woman nodded and replied, “That’s why you gotta keep the channel of communication open.”

It’s not clear how long this strategy will succeed. Trump could change his mind at any moment about the new fighter jets for Selfridge, which aren’t set to arrive until 2028. Whitmer’s much-desired semiconductor plant fell through, thanks to tariffs and a shift in federal policy. “I don’t think it’s worked,” Brewer said of Whitmer’s closeness with Trump. “He’s given us a few trinkets.”

Last May, the president even dangled the possibility of pardoning some of the men involved in the kidnapping plot. When the governor learned this, she told me, she called Trump, who seemed to believe that the men had been treated unfairly. “I said, ‘No, Mr. President, they had trials, and this is very serious,’” Whitmer told him, before following up with a letter urging Trump not to go through with the pardons. So far, Trump has stood down. But “nothing is written in stone,” Whitmer acknowledged. (When I reached out to the White House for a response to this and a number of other questions, an official said in an email that Whitmer and Trump “have a friendly relationship and are willing to work together to get things done for the people of Michigan, whom the President loves!”)

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer at the Clique, in Detroit, in January

If Whitmer runs, her work-with-Trump strategy could double as a 2028 campaign platform. She wouldn’t say so directly, but some of her allies did. “Every social-media liberal believes that silence means complicity,” John Anzalone, Whitmer’s pollster and a Democratic strategist, told me. “Silence is sometimes just really fucking smart.”

Whitmer, who has less than a year left as governor, told me that a presidential campaign isn’t something that she’s “gearing up for.” And many Michigan Democrats think she isn’t interested, perhaps partly because of the 2020 threats against her. It’s also conceivable that, by trying to be as inoffensive as possible, Whitmer is positioning herself as the ideal vice-presidential candidate.

But the governor doesn’t seem to have ruled out a run of her own. A nonprofit group supporting her has raised millions of dollars and hired some of her former aides. While I was reporting this story, the governor attended a fundraiser and a book talk in Florida and a PAC event in Wisconsin. She launched a Substack where she plans to expound on the path forward for Democrats. And like several other would-be presidential candidates, she spoke at this year’s Munich Security Conference, though she kept her comments Michigan-focused and, somewhat perplexingly, seemed unprepared to answer foreign-policy questions.

The affirmative case for a Whitmer campaign goes like this: Right now, Democrats might want leaders who thirst for combat, but their appetites will change. Other Democratic governors have won the “mess-with-Trump primary,” the consultant James Carville told me, but in two years, the president will be “the last person that the country’s gonna want to hear about.” By 2028, voters will want candidates who, like Whitmer, have prioritized action over ideology. In this second age of Trump, Democrats “need to prove that you can make democracy work, that you have delivered for people,” the Democratic political adviser Jennifer Palmieri told me. After Whitmer met with Trump in spring 2025, her approval rating soared—and popularity in Michigan isn’t a bad barometer for someone potentially seeking national office.

The problem with this theory is that, right now at least, Democrats are not looking for careful politicians. A large majority of Democratic voters believe that their leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against Trump and his policies, according to one 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center. In a crowded 2028 primary, Whitmer “will be starting from behind, and leaning very heavily on her record, and I don’t know if that’s enough when people are just so rabidly anti-Trump,” the Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told me. Even though many Democratic donors were excited about Whitmer’s potential as a candidate in 2024, there is no longer much enthusiasm, one prominent donor-adviser told me: “There is no badass energy to Gretchen Whitmer anymore.”

Whitmer seems at least a little concerned about this perception. Toward the end of our final conversation, at the diner, I asked the governor whether she was still comfortable embracing the nickname she’d earned during the pandemic. She seemed exasperated. She spoke for a while, repeating what she’d told me earlier about advocating for her state, and noted that none of her predecessors had managed to get a Selfridge deal. Then she turned back to my question. “I am Big Gretch. Big Gretch is me,” she said. “I’m always going to show up for the people of Michigan—even when it comes at the cost of myself.”

The Manosphere Turns on Trump

2026-03-29T07:00:00-04:00

About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”

Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke. (The podcaster-comedians Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Dave Smith all fit somewhere in this camp.) With their help, Trump pulled off his improbable comeback.

But a lot has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow manosphere commentators seem to feel—by varying degrees—duped by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those grievances for months, starting with Trump's handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. To Schulz and others like him, a brand-new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so massive, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to hasten the rapture,” Dillon, another podcaster and comedian, said on a recent show. “The foreign and economic policy of our country currently is the rapture.”

The evolving views of Schulz and others in this cohort are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent had been mounting since even before Trump went to war. “The cracks have been forming for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, the director of the group Young Men Research Project, told me. For some, Iran “might be the last straw.”

The MAGA faithful are overwhelmingly sticking with the president. Not so for everyone else. A number of new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped power Trump’s 2024 win have lost faith in him: His support among young people has cratered; so has his approval among Latinos. According to one survey, more independent voters disapprove of the president now than they did at any point in his first term. The broad coalition that put Trump back in the White House no longer appears to exist. In the short term, this development bodes well for Democrats. Longer term, it might shed some light on the next iteration of Trumpism.

I’ve watched almost every new episode of Flagrant since the 2024 election. The show, which stars Schulz and his comedian sidekick Akaash Singh, along with their co-hosts AlexxMedia and Mark Gagnon, is often hilarious, sometimes insightful, and frequently mind-numbingly dumb. The most interesting segments involve Schulz and the guys debating the news of the day, when they argue gamely about their loosely held opinions, most of which don’t scan as neatly liberal or conservative. They sound, in other words, a lot like the average American voter.

Schulz voted for Trump in 2024 partly because he didn’t trust Democrats with the economy and partly because he considers the Democrats to be pious and annoying. He and the guys seemed particularly excited about the testosterone of the incoming administration. “The way that Tom Homan was talking about them cartels? This is fire!” Schulz said. Later, on the subject of the Houthis in Yemen, Singh gleefully predicted that “Trump be bringing the ruckus to these folks!”

But Trump didn’t bring enough ruckus. Six months into his second administration, prices were still high, and he’d signed a bill that added significantly to the deficit. Then, in an about-face from his campaign promises, he blocked the release of the Epstein files. “Obviously the Trump administration is trying to cover it up,” Schulz said in a July rant, during an episode in which he and his co-hosts are literally wearing foil hats. This was not what he had voted for, he added. “I want him to stop the wars; he’s funding them! I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget; he’s increasing it!” (Schulz, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.)

Even Trump’s deportations were getting to be too much. By December, Schulz and the boys were debating whether and how they’d hide migrants from ICE in their homes. The killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota by federal agents in January led to the second major milestone in Schulz’s Trump evolution. “ICE murdered an American citizen in cold blood,” he said. “I see the administration trying to spin it, and it’s fucking disgusting.” The operation had gotten out of hand, and Schulz and the others were starting to suspect that the cruelty and chaos were intentional. Alexx Media, Flagrant’s most consistently left-wing voice, couldn’t resist pointing out that Trump “said he was gonna do this.”

When Trump embroiled the United States in a war with Iran, Schulz and the guys couldn’t understand the point. “Naturally, Americans are furious about it, right? Because we’re like, ‘How the fuck does it benefit me?’” Schulz said. “‘I can’t afford to pay for college, I can’t buy a home, I can’t pay for health insurance, and we’re gonna spend billions of dollars in a war in a country I can’t even point at on a map?’” (Later, he predicted that it will be much harder to install a U.S.-friendly leader in Iran, a country led by theocrats for nearly five decades, than it was in Venezuela. Iran will “take it to the end,” he said, because, unlike Latin Americans, Iranians don’t “have reggaeton” or know how to “enjoy life.”)

Plenty of other bro-casters have followed the same trajectory as Schulz, as the initial thrill of Trump’s triumph over wokeness quickly gave way to confusion and disappointment. Last year, Joe Rogan was frustrated that Trump was withholding the Epstein files; earlier this month, Rogan complained that Trump’s moves in Iran are “so insane, based on what he ran on.” This week, Rogan asserted that MAGA is “a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks.” Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who’d also endorsed Trump, praised Joe Kent, who resigned over the Iran war earlier this month, and read back some of the anti-war campaign promises from Trump and others in the administration. “Every single one of these things is a complete fucking lie,” Ryan said.

[Read: The first big administration defection over Iran]

Perhaps predictably, some of this Iran-related criticism has veered into anti-Semitism. A number of Trump allies—including the conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes—have suggested that the president was manipulated into the war. “That is unfortunately becoming the narrative” among some young men, Dan Cassino, a pollster and political scientist who studies masculinity, told me. “It’s Oh, the Jews tricked Trump into this.”

Even before Iran, there was plenty of turbulence in Trump world. For months Owens and her internet goons have waged conspiratorial war against Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk over the murder of her husband, Charlie. Onetime pals Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro are at each other’s throats. As the GOP attempts to reel women back into its movement, conservative Christian hard-liners are publicly mulling revoking the Nineteenth Amendment.

[Read: (Some) MAGA girls just wanna have fun ]

Tack on a new war, and you’ve got something worse for MAGA than turbulence. You’ve got disappointment and apathy in a midterms year. You’ve got, as the right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich put it on X last week, “a generational coalition, squandered.”

Although the great majority of self-identified Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the war, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, only about half of Republican-leaning independent voters say the same. There are age gaps too: Older Republicans generally approve of Trump’s conflict, while less than half of those 18 to 29 do. Cassino told me that he isn’t terribly interested in Trump’s overall approval numbers. “The key thing I’ve been looking at is the number of ‘don’t know’” responses in polls, which have “gone through the roof,” Cassino said. The trend shows that many voters are no longer sure if Trump is trustworthy or doing the right thing for the country. To them, Trump has simply become one more unreliable politician.

Of course, most of the die-hard MAGA types will continue to vote for Republicans. (“I don’t care how mad you are at the Republican Party. You get death on the American streets if you vote Democrat,” Kelly said in a recent podcast.) But many of the disillusioned young men and independents who voted for Trump in 2024 have never identified heavily with either party and tend, generally, to tune politics out. These voters are probably not going to cast a vote for Democrats in November—but they also can’t be expected to get out and vote for the GOP. “Staying home,” Charlie Sabgir explained, “is the most likely result.” On the most recent episode of Shawn Ryan’s podcast, Kent told Ryan that Republicans are “going to need a lot of hard-core MAGA people to come out to knock on doors.” “Don’t come bangin’ on my fuckin’ door,” Ryan replied. “I don’t want to hear more of those fuckin’ lies.”

All of this is happy news for Democrats. Low GOP turnout might help them achieve a blue wave in the midterms, much like the one that overwhelmed Trump’s party in 2018. Already, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats across the country, and candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 showing by an average of nearly 13 points.

But the unraveling of Trump’s coalition also provides an inkling of where the MAGA movement goes next—and who might rise to lead it. There’s an obvious opening now for someone to pick up Trumpism’s fallen mantle and carry it further than the president has been willing to himself. That person could be someone like Representative Thomas Massie, the consistently anti-war libertarian congressman famous mainly for being a thorn in Trump’s side. It could also, theoretically, be someone more like Fuentes, a man with darker intentions and a growing following.

“If Trump did one of the things, we would’ve been happy!” Singh told Schulz in an episode from last July. “Stop the endless wars, stop the spending, release the Epstein files—we would have been like, ‘You know what? Okay, cool!’” Whoever follows through on those pledges might just win over the manosphere.

The Republican Party Continues Eating Its Own

2026-03-12T07:00:00-04:00

In a sea of congressional bloviators, Kevin Kiley has always stood out. The two-term California lawmaker, unlike most of his colleagues, does not reflexively defend the president and, at least recently, has been a frequent critic of his own party’s leadership. So it shouldn’t have been particularly shocking when, earlier this week, Kiley announced that he would run for reelection not as a Republican, but as an independent.

Kiley will be the newest initiate of Congress’s tiny club of independents, which, until this week, consisted of just two senators: Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. More important, though, the switch represents the latest example of the Republican Party eating its own.

Politically, Kiley’s decision is something of a Hail Mary pass. The new House maps that California voters approved last fall as part of the Democrats’ retaliation for GOP gerrymandering in Texas carved up his district, which stretches from the Sacramento suburbs hundreds of miles south along the Nevada border. Kiley had to choose whether to challenge a conservative colleague, Representative Tom McClintock, in a safe Republican seat, or to run in a district that Democrats drew in their own favor. He chose to avoid a potentially nasty intraparty primary and seek the seat that includes his hometown (and that voted for Kamala Harris by about 10 points in 2024). In such a Democratic-leaning district, however, running as an independent might be Kiley’s only chance to win.

[Read: ‘None of this is good for Republicans’ ]

Kiley’s move may have been prompted by short-term expediency, but it fits into a longer-running pattern of the Republican Party becoming less tolerant of free-thinking legislators and Congress as a whole becoming more polarized. Over the past two decades, the GOP’s moderate wing has shrunk to the point where most members avoid the term altogether. The Republicans who hold a dwindling number of swing seats are more conservative (and more loyal to party leadership) than were the most electorally endangered Republicans in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In recent years, those GOP lawmakers who regularly criticize Trump or vote against the party don’t last very long. In the Senate, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis voted against the president’s signature tax-cut bill last year and then promptly announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska voices his displeasure with Trump regularly; he, too, is retiring after this year.

Gerrymandering has only worsened this trend among House Republicans, as has Trump’s demand for near-total fealty within the party. With fewer competitive districts, GOP lawmakers fear a Trump-backed primary challenge more than a general-election defeat at the hands of Democrats. And when Republicans—egged on by Trump—launched their nationwide redistricting war last summer in Texas, Kiley became a casualty. His district was one of five held by the GOP in California that Democrats targeted; they redrew another five of their own seats to make them harder for Republicans to flip. “One of the evils of gerrymandering is that it elevates partisanship above everything else. It makes it the sum and substance of our politics,” Kiley told us in an interview. “So I thought, well, maybe one antidote to that is to just take partisanship out of the equation.”

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’ ]

Kiley has bucked the GOP a few times in the past, including, most recently, when he criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of the 43-day government shutdown, and then signed a discharge petition to force a vote on extending health-care subsidies. But even in shedding his party label, Kiley isn’t completely abandoning Republicans. He will continue to caucus with the party in the House, which helps the GOP retain its slim majority and ensures that Kiley can keep his committee assignments. Kiley attributed this decision to House rules that hand power almost exclusively to the majority party, though he said he would try to change them. “It’s a practical necessity to remain associated with one of the two caucuses,” he said. “And since I was elected for this term as a Republican, that seems like the right thing to do.”

Political independents have lately been more common in the Senate than in the House, although there, too, they tend to align themselves with one party or the other. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona left the Democratic Party in 2022, and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia did the same in 2024, briefly joining Sanders and King as independents who still caucused with the Democrats. (Neither sought reelection, and they both left Congress in January 2025.) In the House, Representative Justin Amash quit the GOP to become an independent in 2019; he, too, decided against seeking another term. Political prognosticators see Kiley’s experiment expiring with similar speed: The nonpartisan Cook Political Report, a top electoral forecaster, projects that Democrats will win Kiley’s district easily.

In declaring his independence, Kiley joins a parade that has been led not by politicians but by voters. The number of Americans registering as independents (or simply not choosing a party) has dwarfed gains made by either major party over the past several years. Kiley said he hopes other members of Congress follow his lead: “If I can help to encourage others to at least adopt that mentality, I think it’d be a really good thing for politics in this country.” Whether he does might depend on whether California voters reward his independence this fall.

Things Are About to Get Ugly in Texas

2026-03-04T19:37:21-05:00

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In the end, it wasn’t particularly close. Democrats in last night’s Texas Senate primary decisively chose their fighter for November: James Talarico, a 36-year-old state lawmaker who looks—and sounds—like a youth pastor.

At certain moments, the primary between Talarico and Representative Jasmine Crockett felt ugly. Online, supporters slung insults and accusations of racism. Crockett had harsh words for Talarico’s allies, and her campaign was hostile to the press, which it demonstrated by kicking me out of a rally.

But all of that drama was just a small taste of what’s coming next. On the right, the primary between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is heading to a runoff, which likely promises nearly three months of nastiness. “The second wave is going to be a bitch,” Chris LaCivita, a top adviser to President Trump’s 2024 campaign who is working for an independent group supporting Cornyn, wrote on X, tagging Paxton.

On the left, Talarico now faces the uphill climb toward winning statewide as a Democrat in Texas—a climb that, depending on which Republican emerges from the primary, will be somewhere between big and enormous. The real ugliness, in other words, starts now. It’s “open season,” Vinny Minchillo, a Republican consultant in Texas who is not affiliated with either candidate, told me. “They’re going to release the hounds.”

The two Democrats couldn’t have run more different campaigns. And last night, their strategies yielded very different results. Talarico, whose message is a careful blend of Christianity and economic populism, won the northern suburbs of Dallas, his hometown of Austin, and San Antonio. Crockett, who’d touted her opposition to Trump and promised to expand turnout among the party’s base, earned the support of more voters in Dallas and Houston—just not enough. Some voters in Dallas County were turned away from the polls because of a change in where people could cast ballots on Election Day, but not enough to have altered the outcome. Ultimately, Talarico won by more than six points.

Given Crockett’s slightly Trumpian tendencies, including her low tolerance for critical coverage and her apparent willingness to deny reality, it seemed plausible, at least for a moment, that the representative might refuse to concede. But this morning, she called Talarico to congratulate him. “Texas is primed to turn blue,” Crockett said in a statement, “and we must remain united because this is bigger than any one person.”

Still, Crockett seems to hold some lingering bitterness. After her call to Talarico, she did not directly respond to a New York Times reporter’s question about whether she would campaign with him. She added that she was concerned that her supporters might feel disenfranchised by the confusion in Dallas and be reluctant to turn out in the general election.

It is Talarico’s job now to earn their votes; he’ll have to if he wants to win statewide in Texas. Black voters, who polls showed overwhelmingly supported Crockett, are a crucial part of the Democratic electorate. “We’re not writing off any voter,” Talarico told me last week. “As folks get to know me, our approval ratings among Black Texans have gone up.”

[Read: ‘Elaine from Atlantic … she needs to leave’]

For Texas Democrats, who see Talarico as their best chance in decades to elect one of their own to the Senate, the hardest work starts now. Talarico has never run a race at this scale, making him relatively untested. As he attempts to bring moderates and regretful Trump voters into his campaign, Talarico is also particularly vulnerable to attacks from Republicans who seek to paint him as too progressive for Texas.

They’ve got plenty of votes and video clips to choose from. In the state House, for example, Talarico once spoke in opposition to Republican legislation that would prohibit transgender girls from playing in girls’ sports, arguing that there are “many more than two biological sexes.” Online, Republican activists are already sharing a 2021 X post from Talarico in which he wrote that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.” Last night, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a clip of the lawmaker saying in a floor speech that “God is nonbinary.” Minchillo, the Republican consultant, told me that Talarico’s position on these issues, and especially on gender, “is a real problem with the audience that he wants to attract.”

Talarico’s campaign is already preparing to defend those positions, sometimes on biblical grounds. I got a sampling of this last week when I asked Talarico, who is a Presbyterian seminarian, how he plans to respond when, for example, Republicans criticize his line about God being genderless. “Most Texans understand that God is beyond gender. The Apostle Paul says as much in his letter to the Galatians,” Talarico said. If Republicans have an issue with that, he added, “they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.” The line might sound like a banger to some of Talarico’s supporters, but it’s hardly a given that his progressive interpretation of scripture will appeal to conservative evangelicals.

The big fear for Democrats is that Talarico will go the way of Beto O’Rourke, whose 2018 candidacy attracted the party’s funds and fizzy optimism but who ultimately failed to defeat Senator Ted Cruz. Some Democrats argue that Talarico is different. “He knows how to talk to a lot of people who are turned off by partisan rhetoric,” Matt Angle, a Texas-based Democratic strategist, told me. “It allows him to identify himself as a different type of Democrat—a uniquely Texas Democrat.”

[Read: Trump is expected to endorse Cornyn]

The good news for Talarico is that, for the next 11 weeks, his two potential Republican opponents will probably be focused on each other. Cornyn has vowed to rain hellfire on Paxton, who was impeached in 2023 on charges including bribery and abuse of the public trust. A pro-Cornyn ad refers to Paxton as a “wife-cheater and fraud.” “Judgment Day is coming to Ken Paxton,” Cornyn said menacingly during a press conference last night. While those two “beat the crap out of each other,” Talarico will have time “to talk to Texans and contrast himself,” Angle said.

A last-minute endorsement from Trump might pour ice-cold water on some of that hellfire as well as on Talarico’s hopes for an opponent who may be easier to beat. Even though Cornyn is unpopular among some Republicans for being insufficiently MAGA, the president seems to recognize Paxton’s weakness in a general election—and, according to my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, is planning to give his support to Cornyn, which could help the senator. (Trump said on Truth Social that he plans to make an endorsement soon and to call on the other candidate to drop out, but he did not specify whom he would endorse.)

In Texas, Democrats and Republicans are weighing the same uncertainties ahead of the November election. Many believe that with Cornyn as the Republican nominee, a statewide victory for Talarico in November would be possible but unlikely. A Paxton win, however, would set up a much riskier general election, given his heavy baggage. In the coming days and weeks, as some Republicans do everything they can to avoid this outcome, Talarico’s party will be praying for it.

‘Elaine From Atlantic … She Needs to Leave’

2026-02-27T15:59:53-05:00

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I was not expecting Representative Jasmine Crockett’s team to call me a “top-notch hater”; kick me out of her rally in Lubbock, Texas; and march me to the side of a county road to wait for a ride. But I was much more surprised by what the congresswoman said later.

A CBS reporter on Wednesday asked Crockett about a report that I had been ejected from her rally and that her campaign had called the Capitol Police on a CNN journalist, alleging that he had trespassed by attempting to visit a campaign office. “It’s silly season,” Crockett said. “There is a specific journalist who is, she has a history of being less than truthful, and frankly there’s no evidence of anything that she’s talking about.” The Democrat from Texas continued to riff: The journalist in question had been previously and successfully sued for defamation, she claimed. “It is sad that there is any news outlet that actually would have her on staff when,” Crockett said, “the one thing that matters most is truth.”

I agree with the congresswoman on the latter half of that statement. So let’s get a few things straight. I’ve never been sued for defamation, let alone successfully. I did write a profile of the representative last year that she didn’t like. Most important, I was thrown out of her rally. There is evidence, because I recorded it.

[Read: Why I got thrown out of a Jasmine Crockett rally ]

But before we get to the audio, let me quickly set the scene. On Monday morning, I showed up early to Crockett’s “Community Conversation” in Lubbock and interviewed a handful of people in line. At the entrance, I showed my Atlantic press credential to a woman wearing a badge, who waved me into the building. Because I was having a bad hair day, and because I am trying to become more of a hat person, I was wearing my favorite Menards baseball cap.

After Crockett finished speaking, I attempted to join a closed-door press scrum with the congresswoman that was open to the other reporters at the rally. But I was turned away, so I walked over to interview people in the crowd. That’s when I heard my name from the same woman with the badge at the entrance—and hit “Record” on my iPhone. She asked me to leave, and armed security guards escorted me from the property.

Here is the unedited transcript of what transpired—you can also listen to the audio for yourself.

Your browser does not support audio playback.

Woman: Are you Elaine?

Elaine Godfrey: Yeah.

Woman: Okay, her team has asked you to leave.

Godfrey: Me to leave?

Woman: Can you get your stuff? (Speaking to someone else.) Her team wants her to leave, and they’re asking her to leave.

Godfrey: Why are you asking me to leave?

Woman: They just said, “Elaine from Atlantic, white girl with a hat and notepad. She’s interviewing people in the crowd. She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave.” (Speaking to someone else.) I just told her to get her bag and go [unintelligible] that’s from her team.

Security guard 1 (to Godfrey): Can we get up and leave now?

Godfrey: Sure. That’s crazy. What are they afraid of?

Security guard 1: [Unintelligible.]

Godfrey: You’re doing your job—that’s all right. [Unintelligible.] Thank you.

[Wind blowing]

Godfrey: I have to get an Uber so I’m gonna probably just wait outside for that.

Security guard 1: That’s fine.

Godfrey: I’m going to stand here because I don’t want to stand—

[Multiple security guards talking at once]

Security guard 2: You have to leave the property.

Security guard 1: You can wait outside the gate. That’d be great.

Security guard 3: You gotta get out.

Godfrey: Okay. All right.

After getting picked up by the Uber, I went straight to Lubbock’s famous Prairie Dog Town, where I received a warmer welcome. I called Crockett directly today to ask about all of this. When she answered, and I told her who was calling, she said, “Oh!,” sounding surprised, and hung up. She did not respond to my follow-up texts.

Why I Got Thrown Out of a Jasmine Crockett Rally

2026-02-26T17:08:19-05:00

Right before armed guards escorted me from the rally and left me on the edge of a Texas county road, I was informed that I was no longer welcome at an event that I had already attended. For the past hour, I’d watched as Representative Jasmine Crockett riled up her supporters in deep-red Lubbock, where voters were thrilled to receive a visit from the Democratic Senate candidate. But afterward, as I attempted to join the other reporters interviewing the lawmaker, a woman with a badge approached me.

“Are you Elaine?” she asked. I recognized her from the entrance of the event, where I had identified myself as she’d waved me into the building’s press area. Yes, I answered. “Her team has asked you to leave,” she said. When I asked why, the staffer looked at her phone and read dutifully: “They just said, ‘Elaine from Atlantic, white girl with a hat and notepad. She’s interviewing people in the crowd. She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave.’”

I will, of course, own up to being a white woman wearing a Menards baseball cap. But “top-notch hater” is a distinction that I had never considered for myself. Last year, I wrote a profile of Crockett that displeased the congresswoman. I interviewed her several times for the story, but after she learned that I’d called some of her colleagues in Congress without asking her permission, she told me that she was “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.” (In retrospect, I suppose this was a helpful signal that Crockett does not have a firm grasp on the First Amendment, or at least does not particularly care for it.)

As security guards began to materialize around me, I wondered to myself what distinguished a top-notch hater from a middling one. I agreed to leave, and four guards, including at least one who was armed, escorted me out of the building, through the parking lot, and right to the edge of the nearby highway, where they waited as I ordered a car. A spokesperson for the Crockett campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these events or for elaboration on the tiers of haterdom. A spokesperson for her team told Semafor that I had not been removed from the event. Crockett told CBS News there is “no evidence” that a reporter had been removed from an event. She added that there is a “specific journalist” who has a “history of being less than truthful,” and that this person had been sued for defamation and lost. Perhaps she was thinking of someone else, because that’s not something that has ever happened to me.

Perhaps my—very real—ejection shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Crockett is not known for calm restraint. This, in fact, is core to her appeal. For the Democrats who are sick of their leaders wilting before President Trump like cut hydrangeas, Crockett is a refreshing exception. The two-term congresswoman has established herself as the most anti-MAGA candidate in the race and is unafraid to match the president’s vulgarity with insults of her own, such as when she referred to former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body” and called Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels.” Crockett’s supporters believe that her pugnacity makes her well suited for this coarse, high-stakes political moment.

Her primary opponent, 36-year-old James Talarico, is responding to this moment very differently. On the campaign trail, the state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian bypasses Trump roasts in favor of quotes from the Gospel of Luke. Like Crockett, Talarico appears to be channeling the anger of millions of Democrats, but the target of his ire is not necessarily the president—it’s the billionaires who, he asserts, are rigging America’s economic system and rending its social fabric.

With five days to go until the primary, the two candidates seem fairly evenly matched in the polls. Since November 2024, Democratic voters have been clamoring for a fighter, but it hasn’t always been clear what they mean by that. On Tuesday, Democrats in Texas will have a chance to decide.

Online, at least, the Texas primary seems to get uglier every week. Last fall, Talarico launched his campaign for Senate against former Representative Colin Allred. But when Crockett entered the race in December, Allred bowed out. Earlier this month, Allred slammed Talarico over allegations that Talarico had referred to him as a “mediocre Black man” in a conversation with an influencer. Talarico denied having said this. On social media, proxies for Crockett attacked him as racist—Crockett personally accused a pro-Talarico super PAC of darkening her skin in an ad—while Talarico’s supporters accused Crockett of weaponizing the situation to smear him. This week, more news: The New Yorker reported that Talarico had ignored requests from other prominent Texas Democrats to run for a different office and that Crockett, after jumping into the race, had asked him to jump out. The anecdotes were used by both candidates’ online proxies as evidence of their opponents’ hubris.

But as I traveled through Lubbock, Dallas, and Tyler this week, not a single person I interviewed mentioned any of this drama. They liked both candidates, they told me. They felt lucky, in fact, to have two great options. Rather than policy, their preferences came down to style—and not much else.

The rally in Lubbock was full to bursting with Crockett superfans. When the 44-year-old congresswoman finally emerged through a set of shimmering silver curtains, the crowd, which for half an hour had been smoldering with anticipation, detonated. People shouted and shrieked and chanted. A few elderly women near me wept while, at the front of the room, Crockett embraced the teenage girl who had invited her to town. Attendees spoke about Crockett with reverence, and used words such as ferocious and direct to describe her.

Most had first encountered the congresswoman on television or social media, where they’d seen clips of her insulting Trump allies or questioning witnesses in committee hearings. “I like how she manhandles Pam Bondi,” Tammy Lowrey, a retired Navy chief petty officer, told me before the event, referring to Crockett’s questioning of the attorney general earlier this month. Crockett, who is an attorney, “brings the Texas,” a woman named Dawn, who declined to share her last name, told me. “We are not weak people. We are strong, and she brings that out of us.” For many people in the crowd—which was almost entirely Black, in a county with a Black population of roughly 8 percent—Crockett is also an inspiration. Mothers and daughters wore matching T-shirts with Crockett’s face emblazoned on them. At least a dozen members of Crockett’s sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, posed for group photos in their crimson-and-cream ensembles.

[Read: What happened to Pam Bondi? ]

Crockett is less interested in persuading Republicans or independents to vote for her than she is in energizing the Democratic base. During the hour that Crockett answered questions onstage, she reminded voters that she already has experience on the national stage. “It can’t just be conjecture. I’ve been out there,” she said, alluding to Talarico’s inexperience on the federal level. She reminded them, too, of her willingness to go toe to toe with the president. “I am that girl!” she said. When Democrats are back in power and “it’s time to prosecute some folk, we’ll be ready!” Around me, audience members nodded in agreement. Two people yelled, “Lock ’em up!”

The vibes were very different the next day in East Texas. Rather than frustration or outrage, the general feeling among Talarico’s fans in Tyler was something closer to desperate optimism. The crowd was younger, mostly white and Latino. Many of them had discovered Talarico, like Crockett, in clips on social media; some hadn’t heard of him until his conversation with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, who claimed earlier this month that CBS had refused to air the interview at the request of the Federal Communications Commission.

Onstage, Talarico stuck to an earnest, aspirational message about love and economic populism. “It’s not left versus right; it’s top versus bottom,” he said, an oft-repeated line that has helped him earn the endorsement of major progressive groups. Within seven minutes, Talarico was quoting scripture and reminding his audience that human beings are called to care for their neighbors. At the end of his speech, he quoted the late singer-songwriter John Prine: “‘I really love America. I just don’t know how to get there anymore.’” Although parts of Talarico’s speech occasionally verged on corny—“Hate can’t teach a child to read!” he said at one point—people seemed grateful for the change in tone.

Brad Ingram, who wore a cowboy hat and held his fiancée’s pink purse while she posed for a photo with Talarico, told me he’d voted for Trump before but wouldn’t do it again. “Being a fellow Christian, love is central to what we believe,” he said. “Republicans and the MAGA movement have gotten away from that.” A group of nine women in their 40s had come to the rally together; many of their husbands were Trump supporters, they told me, but they themselves wanted a change, and they were hopeful that Talarico might reach some of their family members. One woman told me that her conservative teenage son had recently called Talarico his “GOAT,” short for the “greatest of all time.” Talarico’s “message of hope is appealing to everybody, because everybody’s just tired of the negativity,” Faye Comte, one of the women in the group, told me.

Most of Talarico’s fans liked—or even loved—Jasmine Crockett. But they’d chosen him because they appreciate the way he talks about his faith, and because they believe that he’d have a better chance of appealing to Texans in a general election. Part of that is because of Crockett’s identity; some people I interviewed told me that they weren’t confident that Texans were ready to elect a Black woman to the Senate. But it’s also about Talarico’s appeal to kindness and respect—an easier sell for some of these voters than Crockett’s bombast. Patrick Bonds, an 84-year-old Vietnam veteran, cried as he explained to me that he’d voted Republican all his life but that Trump was “ruining this country.” Bonds is voting for Talarico, he said, because “his thinking is more like me; his behavior is more like me. The way he holds himself is more like me.”

For Talarico, bipartisan appeal is kind of the whole ball game. In his first election to the Texas state House, he flipped a Republican district. Now he’s positioning his Senate campaign as a safe space for independents, moderates, and voters with Trump-shaped regrets. Even his stump speech contains an invitation: “If you have voted for Democrats, but you’re tired of Democratic politicians always folding, you have a place in this campaign,” he told the crowd in Tyler. “And if you voted for Donald Trump, but you are fed up with the extremism and the corruption in our government, you also have a place in this campaign.”

[Read: The White House urges Republicans to ignore Trump’s diversions]

It could help Talarico that the Texas Republican primary is its own elaborate mess. The longtime Republican Senator John Cornyn, who is unpopular with the MAGA crowd, is running against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who carries substantial personal baggage. Paxton was impeached (and acquitted) over allegations of bribery and corruption, including using his position to benefit a donor; charged with felony securities fraud (prosecutors dropped the charges after Paxton agreed to serve 100 hours of community service); and, more recently, accused by his wife of having an affair. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is working to reelect Cornyn, is airing a new ad calling Paxton a “wife-cheater and fraud.”

If Paxton is the Republican nominee, Democrats could have a decent shot at winning a Senate seat in Texas for the first time since 1988. At a polling place in Arlington, a purple suburb west of Dallas, I met several Texans who’d previously voted for Trump but who were casting their primary ballot for Talarico. Two more told me that if Paxton becomes the nominee, they will seriously consider voting for Talarico.

All of this is exactly what Talarico is hoping to hear. When I told him about those interviews in Arlington, he didn’t seem surprised. A lot of voters “are looking for a home in this crazy political environment,” he told me. “I’m over here waving my hand like I’ve done this before. I’ve actually built this coalition. I’ve been able to win difficult races.” Later, I asked him whether he’d ever watched Crockett speak and considered being sharper or louder with his criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement. “In my experience,” he replied, “real strength is sometimes quieter.”

Now for the betting odds. Early voting in Texas has exploded this year, sending strategists and pollsters into overdrive analyzing county-by-county demographic data. More votes have been cast after nine days of early voting than at this point in both the 2024 and 2020 presidential primaries. Still, it’s hard to say what such a surge means for either candidate. It’s possible that Tuesday’s results will be close enough to prompt a runoff election in late May. Some recent polls have Crockett and Talarico neck and neck. Others show significant gaps: A survey published this week had Crockett ahead by 12 points. In response, Talarico’s team released an internal poll showing him up by four.

Crockett has not run a conventional campaign. Instead of traditional rallies, she has opted for small gatherings and quick events. She has an enormous social-media following but a small on-the-ground operation that, some Texas operatives told me, is run almost entirely by Crockett herself. None of this means she can’t—or won’t—win. But it does suggest that if Crockett is the Democratic nominee, she might have trouble scaling up for a statewide campaign. On Talarico’s side, the problem isn’t resources—he has raised and spent much more than Crockett so far. It’s the fact that many Texas voters are still learning his name.

In the end, maybe all of this effort will add up to nothing. Countless Democratic candidates with national buzz have been here before and lost—sometimes spectacularly. But when Texans head to the polls on Tuesday, we will probably learn something about the kind of fighter that Democrats are craving one year into the second Trump presidency: a firebrand famous for being her own kind of “top-notch hater,” or an earnest preacher-in-training focused mostly on the power of love.

Conservative Women Find a New Way to Talk About ICE

2026-02-10T11:51:48-05:00

In the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis, my Instagram algorithm served up a never-ending carousel of sizzling rage. Most of that rage was directed toward the country’s immigration-enforcement agencies, while some, of course, was aimed at defending them. But I wasn’t expecting the post from Blake Guichet.

“There’s a difference between compassion that is grounded and compassion that is hijacked,” Guichet, a pro-Trump Christian influencer who posts on Instagram under the handle “thegirlnamedblake,” had typed on butter-yellow slides. “You do not owe the internet a statement on the current tragedy.” In her caption, the Louisiana mom added that she had chosen to “opt out of the cycle of Internet outrage.”

I was surprised to see this, because Guichet so often opts in to the news cycle. During last year’s government shutdown, she logged on to explain that SNAP benefits are part of a “system of reliance.” She has posted seven times about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. “The enemy would love for believers to stay silent under the guise of being apolitical,” she wrote in November, “but silence doesn’t bring change.”

Over the past two weeks, I’ve noticed countless other Christian creators sharing similar posts alluding to ICE—messages reminding their followers to “protect your peace” and assuring them that “it’s my responsibility to carry my family, not the world.” Instead of offering a defense or a critique of the administration’s handling of immigration, these influential conservatives appear to have settled on an alternative strategy. Let’s call it “virtuous disregard.” They’re throwing up their hands, turning back toward their families, and encouraging their followers to do the same.

Generally speaking, conservative Christian lifestyle influencers are attractive, married women with kids. On Instagram, they tend to cultivate a very specific aesthetic: sourdough bread on gleaming white countertops; toddlers running through the yard and husbands coming home from work; Bible verses in wispy fonts alongside instructions for living a slow, intentional life. The captions offer a deluge of affiliate links for supplements and nontoxic cleaning products.

This community of influencers grew during the coronavirus pandemic; their focus on government overreach felt particularly urgent as people faced lockdowns and vaccine requirements. When these women wade into politics now, some of them do so more subtly, offering casual references to synthetic food dyes or “making America healthy again.” Others are more direct. Guichet, for example, has posted openly about her support for Donald Trump and his administration’s actions. Nearly everyone in this community was vocal after Kirk’s assassination in September, and made passionate calls for all Americans to condemn violence.

These influencers did not express such sentiments after immigration agents killed Pretti. The issue, for them, presents a conundrum: Choosing to aggressively defend the administration’s mass-deportation blitz—which includes shooting a man while he was restrained on the ground, and detaining a 5-year-old—would appear inhumane to many of their followers. But being too critical of the administration would risk alienating plenty of others.

[Read: ICE after Minneapolis]

So Guichet and her peers scrambled for a third way to respond—a “way of broaching the subject so that they can still maintain their status,” Mariah Wellman, a Michigan State professor who studies social-media influencers and the wellness industry, told me. The responses to Pretti’s killing ended up following the same general formula: Refer only vaguely to the events in Minnesota, insert a warning about succumbing to peer pressure and emotional manipulation, and advise women to focus on their families.

Sadie Gannett, for example, who posts as “organic.gannett,” wrote that she is “not interested in being another voice on the internet giving input on current events”—only in pursuing “truth and justice and critical thinking and law and order.” The best place to make a difference, she added, “is right inside our four walls.” A creator named Erin Wilkins, who goes by “essentiallyerin__,” explained on Instagram that she has “no desire to add fuel to the fire,” and that people “are being emotionally manipulated for an agenda.” Instead of engaging, Wilkins suggests that her followers “create peace in your home” and “build strong marriages and families.” (Guichet, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this story. The other influencers I reached out to, including Gannett and Wilkins, didn’t respond).

You can trace some of this language back to the conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, whose book Toxic Empathy asserts that progressives seek to manipulate Christian compassion in support of an amoral agenda. The former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton zeroed in on Stuckey late last month in an essay in this magazine decrying the “cadre of hard-right ‘Christian influencers’ who are waging a war on empathy.” In response to Clinton, Stuckey wrote a column for The Free Press arguing that women are allowing their emotions to be hijacked, as they were, she argued, during the 2020 protests after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Empathy “is the bait for pulling Christian women into the Democratic Party,” she wrote. But “if you know a message is meant to manipulate you, it’s not effective.”

Other conservative women with a microphone have echoed this rhetoric, effectively shifting the discussion from Pretti’s killing and immigration enforcement to an attack on the political left. “I believe that words like compassion and empathy and inclusion and love—they’ve been weaponized against us, especially as women,” the conservative activist Riley Gaines said on Fox News last week during a discussion about anti-ICE protests. “Feel first. React loudly. Ask questions later,” Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post. “We’ve seen this movie before.”

None of this is necessarily surprising. Political partisans tend to behave in a partisan way—even if that partisanship is disguised as apolitical, Christian living. What is notable is how the followers of these conservative influencers, who are also mostly women, have responded. Part of the point of messages like Guichet’s is to absolve her audience of the need to engage in a subject that makes them uncomfortable. “It’s emboldening people to say, I am not required to speak on this, and that doesn’t make me a bad person,” Wellman, the professor who studies influencers, told me. Guichet’s post, for example, now has 92,000 likes and 3,300 comments—far more engagement than other recent posts on her page. Many women who weighed in have welcomed the message of absolution. “I’m emotionally exhausted from everything happening in my real life,” one wrote. “Can’t be bothered with online anything right now.”

But dozens of other comments expressed dismay and disappointment. “It’s crazy” that these accounts “are all in lock step,” one self-described conservative wrote in a reply to Wilkins’s message about emotional manipulation. “We are supposed to be the free thinkers.” “You helped sway peoples opinions and votes and now you’re deciding it’s no longer your problem,” another commenter wrote to Guichet.

Of course, it’s hard to know how many of these dissenters are followers with genuine concerns—and how many are liberal interlopers. But Guichet responded to some of them anyway. “I am not a news source anymore,” she wrote in one exchange. “God called me out of that season.”

The next few months will likely present many more distressing events on which these influencers will feel pressured to weigh in. How they respond may be determined not by logic or even empathy—but by the particular season in which they find themselves.

‘Abolish ICE’ Is Back

2026-01-18T08:41:31-05:00

History might not repeat itself, but the slogans sometimes do. And in the days since an ICE officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, some Democratic candidates and commentators have joined in on a familiar refrain. “Dismantling ICE is the moderate position,” Graham Platner, the U.S. Senate candidate in Maine, said in a statement on X. “If Trump’s ICE is shooting and kidnapping people, then abolish it,” wrote Jack Schlossberg, a candidate for Congress in New York. Even Bill Kristol, the erstwhile Republican turned Trump critic, logged on to share a simple, straightforward message: “Abolish ICE.”

A growing number of Americans disagree with how the agency is handling its mission. But where many Democrats hear “Abolish ICE” as a righteous call to action, others in the party register the clanging of alarm bells. These anxious Democrats believe that such a maximalist demand plays directly into Republicans’ hands by making the party seem unserious about immigration. Some of them are pleading with members of their party to avoid adopting the motto. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws,” reads a memo from the center-left think tank Searchlight Institute, “you should not say you want to abolish ICE.”

The slogan conjures a not-so-distant time in American politics when even the highest-profile Democrats, under pressure from progressives, embraced a host of deeply unpopular positions, including defunding the police and decriminalizing border crossings. Many members of the party blame this period, at least in part, for the return of Donald Trump—and they’re desperate not to relive it. “Oh my God. Déja vú all over again,” Lis Smith, a national party strategist, told me when I asked about the slogan. “Sigh,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, texted me. “Can that be my on the record quote?”

“Abolish ICE” went mainstream in 2018 amid public outrage over the Trump administration separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border. The slogan, embraced widely by progressives, quickly became a litmus test for candidates running in Democratic-leaning districts across the country. But the movement was never especially popular among the broader American electorate, and its proponents could never seem to agree about whether the phrase meant abolishing ICE forever, or abolishing it and replacing it with something else. Critics worried that adopting the phrase hurt Democratic credibility on immigration, an issue on which the party already suffered from low public trust. Eventually, even the activist who helped popularize the slogan in 2018 mostly abandoned it.

[Read: ‘We need to take away children’]

Eight years later, as masked men patrol neighborhoods far from the southern border, calls to dismantle ICE are resonating differently. In the days since an ICE officer fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, stories have circulated of federal agents (from both ICE and Border Patrol) pepper-spraying and tear-gassing families and students, and shoving a protester into oncoming traffic. Photos have shown neighborhoods filled with tear gas. A Texas medical examiner is likely, The Washington Post recently reported, to classify an ICE detainee’s recent death as a homicide.

Polling suggests that Americans don’t like what they’re seeing: Roughly 57 percent say they disapprove of how ICE is handling immigration enforcement; about half believe that ICE is making cities less safe. And two polls taken after Good’s killing show that support for abolishing ICE has increased about 13 percent since July 2019. Even Joe Rogan, the high-profile podcast host who endorsed Trump in 2024, seems disillusioned. “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?” Rogan asked this week. “‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told me in a statement that ICE “will continue to carry out immigration enforcement for the safety of Americans who have been victimized by rapists, murderers, drug traffickers, and gang members.” In response to Rogan, McLaughlin said on Fox News that the agency has to have a presence in Minneapolis “because we don’t have state and local law enforcement’s help.”)

Most Democrats have not called for ICE’s outright abolition. But a few are recent adopters of the slogan. “I was of the belief that perhaps we could reform ICE. Now I am of the belief that it has to be dismantled as an entity,” Representative Adriano Espaillat of New York said last week. Michigan’s Representative Shri Thanedar, who in June was one of 75 Democrats who signed legislation expressing “gratitude” for ICE, just introduced the Abolish ICE Act. Other progressive members of Congress have been on this particular train for years. Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley have all reiterated their demands to abolish the agency in the past week. “I made this call back in 2018, and that’s because I saw where this agency was going,” Abdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan, told me. Trump is “trying to create an independent, domestic source of state power answerable only to him.” By now, he added, ICE is “corrupted beyond repair.”

A common belief among ICE’s critics is that no amount of funding or training can fix the agency. Abolition “is the baseline at a certain point,” Usamah Andrabi, the communications director at the progressive group Justice Democrats, told me. The organization works to unseat Democratic incumbents who aren’t sufficiently progressive, and will be focused on that goal as the 2026 primaries intensify. Democrats “need to heed the calls” of the people they represent, Andrabi said, and many of those people “are demanding that we abolish ICE.”

[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’]

All of this is nightmare fuel for a certain type of Democrat—namely, the kind who is focused on winning elections in swing states and purple districts. These Democrats believe that the mayhem caused by ICE’s raids gives the party an uncharacteristic upper hand over Republicans on immigration—and that demands to eliminate the agency erase that leverage. Americans mostly support immigration-enforcement efforts and, in particular, the deportation of unauthorized immigrants with violent criminal records.

“When you say ‘Abolish ICE,’ that means you’re abolishing the agency that’s in charge of enforcing immigration law in this country,” Tré Easton, the vice president for public policy at the Searchlight Institute, told me. “Especially in a time when Democrats don’t have a lot of credibility on the immigration issue, it’s really, really, a fraught path that they should not go down.” Easton and others argue that the demands to abolish ICE are akin to the calls to “defund the police” that progressives made in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd. Both slogans appeared in response to terrible abuses of power, they say, but both were overcorrections. As with police, “the question is not whether ICE should exist; the question is whether they should follow the laws and be held accountable,” Erickson, from Third Way, told me.

The fight over “Abolish ICE” can feel like semantics—and it sort of is. Strategists at the Searchlight Institute and Third Way have asked their fellow Democrats to please avoid saying “Abolish ICE” and instead to advocate for reforming it and retraining agents. They argue that Democratic leaders could use subpoenas, congressional hearings, and appropriations riders to hold ICE to account—and to make a broader argument about public safety. Some of them point to Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona as an example of an effective messenger: ICE is “out of control,” Gallego said in a recent interview. “People want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who ran for Congress in 2018 on a promise to abolish ICE, has in recent days reframed the issue as a question of funding. “The cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this,” she said of Congress letting health-care subsidies expire and increasing funding for ICE and other agencies. “You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.” That interview “is what highly effective messaging on ICE can look like—without saying ‘abolish ICE,’” Adam Jentleson, the president of the Searchlight Institute, wrote on X. (Ocasio-Cortez says she does still support shutting down the agency.)

The overarching concern for Democrats like Jentleson is that members of their party seem not to have absorbed a crucial lesson from recent elections: that Republicans can and will use Democrats’ own words against them. In 2022, for example, former Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes lost his challenge to Senator Ron Johnson by only a hair, after it came to light that Barnes had previously signaled support for abolishing ICE and defunding the police. (Barnes, in his current campaign for governor, has steered clear of the issue.) Vice President Kamala Harris’s own mixed record on immigration was fodder for Republicans. During the 2024 election cycle, which famously did not turn out well for Harris or her party, Republicans spent $741 million on immigration-related ads, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan policy organization America Forward.

Now, as then, Republicans are eager to exploit “Abolish ICE.” Democrats “don’t want our border secured or criminal illegal aliens being removed,” and want to defund “federal law-enforcement agencies who are protecting public safety,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press briefing after Good’s killing. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters this week that Democrats “have been for open borders” for years.

Notably, none of the leading 2028 presidential contenders has demanded that ICE be dismantled. Aside from Platner and El-Sayed, Democratic Senate candidates have stuck with calls for reform and for an investigation into Good’s killing. Still, as ICE expands operations in Minneapolis and beyond, and as anti-ICE protests intensify, it’s reasonable to anticipate more viral videos, outrage, and allegations of violence. Which means it’s also reasonable to expect that Democratic primary candidates will face pressure to condemn the agency in the strongest possible terms. How these Democrats decide to respond may help determine their party’s fate in November.

Does Congress Even Exist Anymore?

2026-01-07T18:34:19-05:00

Representative Seth Moulton is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, but he learned about the U.S. military’s middle-of-the-night capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the same way many Americans did: A friend who saw the news on the internet texted him.

“That is not the way Congress is supposed to be notified of operations by the Department of Defense,” Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told us wryly. Still, Moulton was surprised neither by the Trump administration’s decision to attack Venezuela nor by the fact that it declined to give Congress a heads-up about the mission, much less seek its approval. A Marine who served four tours of duty in Iraq, Moulton had watched for months as the military stationed warships off Venezuela’s coast, and he gave little credence to the insistence of senior administration officials, in classified briefings to lawmakers, that they were not planning to take out Maduro. “I know what it means to be a Marine, sitting on a ship off the coast, and you’re not there to interdict boats or conduct a naval blockade,” he said. “Those are ground troops. And so it was no mystery to me why they were there.”

The president and his aides can lie to Congress with impunity, he argued, because the Republicans who run the House and Senate have shown they will do nothing about it. “This is the weakest Congress in American history,” Moulton said, accusing Republican leaders of making a co-equal branch of the federal government “essentially fade away.”

Moulton is running for a Senate seat, giving him even more reason than usual to criticize the GOP. But his views about Congress’s self-diminishment are widely shared inside and outside the Capitol, and the facts are hard to dispute. In the first weeks after Donald Trump returned to the White House, top Republicans offered no protest as his administration flouted their constitutional authority over spending, shutting down agencies that Congress had authorized and funded. Now the same leaders are handing over Congress’s power to authorize war-making without a fight. They’ve hardly made a peep over a military attack in which the administration cut out even the senior-most lawmakers, who are customarily informed about major operations.

Speaker Mike Johnson has praised the capture of Maduro and parroted the administration’s argument that the mission amounted to a law-enforcement action rather than an act of war to oust a foreign leader. “We are not in a war in Venezuela,” he told reporters today. “It is not a regime change. I want to emphasize that. It is a change of the actions of the regime.” With rare exceptions, rank-and-file Republicans have offered similar support for the Venezuela mission. Some have joined Trump in denigrating Congress, echoing his assertion that congressional leaders couldn’t be trusted with advance news about the operation. “Congress is a sieve,” Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told us. “I’m glad that the president would forgo that formality.”

Other Republicans compared the Maduro mission to President George H. W. Bush’s unilateral 1989 invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega and President Barack Obama’s drone strikes on suspected terrorists in the Middle East. They also noted that the Biden administration put a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head. But as in so many other areas, Trump has pushed the boundary of executive power further than his predecessors. Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, acknowledged that if Obama had, say, “bombed Israel and not told us about it,” the GOP would want to hold him accountable. But he said Congress’s role in this case was simply to listen to the administration’s briefings about Venezuela. “I don’t think any accountability is warranted here,” Fine told us. “I think the president did the right thing.”

For a moment last fall, Congress showed some life. A group of Republicans joined Democrats to force the passage of legislation requiring the Justice Department to release its files on the convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, defying an aggressive push by both Trump and Johnson to kill the proposal. Similar bottom-up efforts have gained steam, including a bill that would extend health-insurance subsidies that expired last year. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California, an author of the Epstein bill, told us the legislation “changed the entire game. It’s opened up a floodgate of Republicans willing to stand up to the president.”

Still, the administration isn’t exactly demonstrating renewed deference to Congress. In addition to ignoring (and, according to Democrats, deliberately misleading) lawmakers on the Maduro operation, the administration has released only a small fraction of the required Epstein files, and those have come with heavy redactions. And the floodgates of Trump criticism end, apparently, at foreign and military policy—an area where, Khanna acknowledged, Congress has been abdicating its responsibility for decades: “I’ve unfortunately not seen enough of a reaction against these strikes.”

[Read: ‘They’re delusional if they think this is going to go away’ ]

Khanna’s Republican partner on the Epstein bill, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has sharply criticized the Venezuela attack. But other Republicans have returned to the president’s side. “He’s doing the right thing to keep America safe,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a Republican backer of forcing a vote on the Epstein legislation, told us. She didn’t fault Trump for the lack of a congressional heads-up, saying it would have been “a recipe for disaster because members of Congress just can’t be trusted.”

Beyond the GOP’s acquiescence, Khanna and Moulton have also been frustrated by the lack of a unified and unequivocal Democratic condemnation of the Venezuela attack. The House and Senate Democratic leaders, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, began their initial statements by noting how detestable Maduro is before shifting to criticism of the Trump administration for acting unilaterally to take him out. That kind of throat clearing, Moulton said, took some of the sting out of their response. Democrats, he told us, need to stick to “the blunt truth, which is that this is insane, utterly insane.”

In the Senate, Democrats are hoping that at least four Republicans will join them in passing a War Powers Resolution to bar the president from taking further military action in Venezuela without congressional approval. Its author, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, told reporters that it was time for Congress to “get its ass off the couch” and reassert its war-making powers. At least one Trump ally, Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa, took issue with the administration’s claim that the Maduro mission was a law-enforcement operation. He released a statement with the panel’s top Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, saying that if that was the case, it was “unacceptable” for the administration to exclude the committee that oversees the Justice Department from its classified briefings.

Over the weekend, it looked like another Trump ally, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, might break ranks over the Maduro operation. “I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force,” Lee posted on X before dawn on Saturday, briefly returning to his pre-Trump roots as a separation-of-powers hawk. Within two hours, however, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had brought his former Senate colleague back into the fold. By Saturday evening, Lee was reposting memes of Rubio dressed as a saint and a Latin American warlord.

A few Republicans have sought something of a middle ground, backing the Venezuela attack while arguing that Congress should have a say in what happens next. “From here on out, Congress needs to play a central role,” Representative Kevin Kiley of California told us.

Moulton sees little chance of that happening—at least as long as the Republicans in charge remain subservient to Trump. “At this point,” he lamented, “Trump could kill these Republicans’ kids, and they’d tell him it was a great job.”

House Republicans Aren’t Having Any Fun

2025-12-23T10:54:52-05:00

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On a particularly stressful day in a particularly stressful week during what has been, honestly, a particularly stressful year for House Republicans, the ever-sunny but perpetually beleaguered Mike Johnson insisted that he retained at least a modicum of power over the institution he ostensibly leads. “I have not lost control of the House,” the speaker declared to a gaggle of reporters trailing him through the Capitol.

Johnson’s own members, in the past month, have accused him of stretching if not wholly disregarding the truth, and his assertion last Wednesday that he has a firm grip on power was correct only in the most technical sense. On the day he uttered it, a group of Johnson’s most electorally vulnerable soldiers abandoned him to help Democrats force a vote on extending health-care subsidies, and a longtime lawmaker became the 25th House Republican—with many more expected to follow—to announce that he would not seek reelection next year. “This place is disgraceful,” GOP Representative Mike Lawler of New York vented on the House floor, calling out Congress’s failure to prevent a spike in health-insurance rates set to occur in January. In the preceding weeks, a member of the speaker’s leadership team—Representative Elise Stefanik of New York—publicly denounced Johnson as ineffective (shortly before she announced that she was, for now, quitting politics altogether), and another high-profile (albeit perpetually aggrieved) Republican, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, pined, in the pages of The New York Times, for the sturdy hand of Nancy Pelosi.

As Republicans approach the one-year mark of their trifecta under President Donald Trump, their party’s rank-and-file lawmakers are not a happy bunch. And like so many unhappy employees, they are directing much of the blame toward the boss: the speaker they elevated from obscurity a little more than two years ago.

“We need a course correction here,” Representative Kevin Kiley of California told us. A host of current and former GOP members of Congress we interviewed echoed his sentiment; they used more pungent terms when granted anonymity to speak candidly. These Republicans described a speaker who had, contrary to Johnson’s avowal otherwise, lost practical control of the House.

“I think he’s a good man, a good attorney, a good constitutionalist, and a bad politician,” one House Republican told us. Another said Johnson was well meaning, but to a fault: “In his obsession with not offending anyone, he offends everyone.”

The roots of Republican despair are both political and legislative, and they extend far beyond Johnson. Democrats will begin the new year favored to recapture the House in the midterm elections. (A Trump-led effort to fortify the GOP’s majority through aggressive gerrymandering has stalled.) With the majority in jeopardy, Republicans are bracing for a flood of additional members quitting their reelection campaigns after the holidays. A few, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are leaving even before their terms are up.

Dim electoral prospects aside, many Republicans are also realizing that being a member of Congress in the Trump era is not all it’s cracked up to be. For that, they have themselves at least partly to blame. From the opening days of the president’s second term, congressional Republicans largely ceded their constitutional authority over spending to the executive branch. With a few mostly tepid exceptions, they made no effort to constrain DOGE while the Elon Musk–led department ransacked federal agencies established and funded by Congress. They approved provisions, slipped into House resolutions by Johnson, that restrict lawmakers from acting to cancel Trump’s tariffs. Even the House GOP’s biggest legislative victory—the summer passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act—was a ratification less of their agenda than of the president’s. The speaker’s decision—criticized by some in his party—to keep the House out of session for the entirety of the six-week government shutdown this fall only added to the sense that the chamber was verging on irrelevance.

[Read: The state that handed Trump his biggest defeat yet]

It’s no wonder, then, that Republican frustrations seem to be intensifying. “They’re basically put in a position where they’ve got an honorary title as a member of Congress but no authority to do anything,” former Representative Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican who retired in 2017, told us. “Until the actual way you govern changes, they’re going to feel this way.”

From the start, Johnson’s unwavering loyalty—some would say obsequiousness—to Trump has defined his speakership. He’s developed a reputation for never saying what he actually thinks about anything, lest he cross the president. Yet some Republicans are beginning to join Democrats in seeing that as a fault of Johnson’s rather than a credit. “The reason he’s hanging on is because President Trump wants a weak speaker,” a House Republican told us. “He wants a speaker that essentially functions like a staff member, which is what Mike Johnson does.” Former Representative Bob Good of Virginia, an arch-conservative who left Congress in January, called Johnson “a puppet of the president” and said that Johnson remained speaker after Trump’s election only because of the president’s personal urging. “As has been sadly the case throughout the year, Republicans simply surrendered to his wishes,” Good said.

Johnson has also faced criticism from Republican women, who have accused him of not taking them seriously as policy makers. It did not go over well, one lawmaker told us, when Johnson remarked in a podcast interview that the Republican he would most trust to cook him Thanksgiving dinner was Representative Lisa McClain, the chair of the GOP conference—the rhetorical equivalent of a man giving his wife a vacuum cleaner for her birthday.

Among lawmakers’ many other complaints are that Johnson, perhaps even more than his predecessors, has tightly centralized power and deprived rank-and-file Republicans of the ability to secure votes on their legislative priorities, much less pass them. They say he also takes too long to make decisions and frequently punts the most difficult ones. “You can’t over-deliberate. Over-deliberation in this town is not good,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida told us. Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who like Donalds is forgoing a reelection bid next year to run for statewide office, said that House leadership needed to be more aggressive about acting on conservative priorities, even if they stand little chance of clearing the Senate. “We’ve done some good stuff, but we need to be on offense and do more,” Roy told us. “You can’t just rest on your laurels and hope that you’re gonna win the election.”

Some of these gripes are time-honored grievances, the kind that House members make about their leadership no matter who is speaker or which party is in charge. After we asked Johnson’s office to comment for this story, calls started pouring in from members who wanted to vouch for him. “The speaker is doing a beautiful job in a really tough situation,” Representative Celeste Maloy, a second-term Republican from Utah, told us. She specifically defended Johnson’s treatment of women in the Republican conference and gently chided his critics. “I would rather see women supporting each other and supporting the causes we all believe in, and working towards long term goals,” she said, “instead of focusing on short-term disagreements.”

Representative Jodey Arrington, the chair of the House Budget Committee, cast Johnson’s deliberative and collaborative style—a source of complaints from some Republicans—as a “member-driven model” of leadership. “With that, there’s more discussion and debate. It’s always more efficient in leadership if you just tell them what to do,” Arrington told us. Johnson, he said, “is not your typical Washington leadership guy who works in power plays and side agreements. He is fully transparent.” (In a statement, a Johnson spokesperson did not address the criticism of the speaker directly, instead boasting that under his leadership, the House GOP had “one of the most productive first years of any Republican Congress in history” and “stuck together to deliver the bulk of the America First agenda.”)

Johnson and his allies point out that the GOP majority is historically small, leaving him almost no room to maneuver and forcing him to achieve near-total party unity on any major vote. In shepherding Trump’s domestic-policy bill to passage, the speaker achieved a significant number of conservative wins—so many, in fact, that if they were split into different bills the House’s achievements for the year would look much more impressive. The speaker “is not getting enough credit for what House Republicans have been able to accomplish,” Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota told us. He turned to Jay-Z for inspiration: “I would say that Congress has 99 problems, but Mike Johnson is not one of them.”

[Read: The accidental speaker]

Yet dissatisfied Republicans have rebelled against Johnson in ways that Democrats rarely if ever did against Pelosi when she presided over a similarly slim majority during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. GOP lawmakers have frequently stalled legislation by defecting on key procedural votes, and in recent months they have gone around Johnson by signing Democratic-dominated discharge petitions to force votes on legislation that the speaker has tried to block.

These tactics have, in turn, annoyed Republicans who believe that their restive colleagues are making an already challenging political environment even worse for the party. As the year draws to a close, they have taken to complaining about all the complainers. “We need more happy warriors,” Dusty Johnson said, arguing that Republicans have fallen into a culture of “victimhood” that he used to associate only with the American left.

Whether the speaker’s job is secure has become a topic of some debate inside the Capitol. The most obvious threat will come in the November elections, but could Republicans depose Johnson as they did his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy? Stefanik told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that if a vote were called tomorrow, Johnson would not have enough support from Republicans to stay as speaker. Greene has also reportedly been talking with colleagues about an effort to oust Johnson, but she plans to leave the House next month. Asked if he was ready for new leadership, Donalds said, “Yeah, but I mean, look, it’s not coming up.” But then he added: “You never know in this town.” With Johnson’s support, Republicans changed House rules to make it harder to remove a speaker in the middle of a term. “Usually there are tremors before a speaker goes down,” one House Republican told us, “and this speaker has faced a number of tremors.”

Johnson’s challenges won’t get any easier when his unhappy Republican campers return to Washington in 2026. He’ll probably have to watch as the House passes a bill to extend health-insurance subsidies over his objections, and Congress faces the prospect of another partial government shutdown at the end of January. Johnson might hold the speaker’s gavel for another year, but the extent of his sway has never seemed more in doubt.

(Some) MAGA Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

2025-11-20T10:01:24-05:00

One night at a party in an East Village speakeasy, a pair of 20-somethings—high on youth and rail liquor—made their way to the bar’s single-occupancy bathroom, and proceeded to go at it. I know this because as I waited outside, the exuberant young man inside began to film the encounter. The bright light of his phone had reversed the effects of the bathroom’s one-way mirror to reveal a pantsless youth with a deeply unfortunate broccoli haircut, and a young woman in a MAKE AMERICA HOT AGAIN cap. When I mentioned the encounter to the event’s organizer, Raquel Debono, she clapped her hands and squealed, “I told you people find love at my parties!”

Debono’s path to party planning happened, in her telling, because she was bored. The MAGA gatherings she’d attended were stuffy. So last year, she started throwing parties under the auspices of a new movement—“Make America Hot Again”—to attract fun, sexy conservatives. The kind who might enjoy, say, low taxes and public fornication.

I have come to think of Debono, a 29-year-old lawyer turned influencer, as MAGA chic: a Chanel-wearing representative of the Barstool Sports corner of the womanosphere. She finds the president hilarious and supports his crackdown on illegal immigration, but she also believes that casual sex, abortion, and gay marriage are fine. “Literally do whatever you want; I don’t care,” she told me in one of our many conversations. I’ve found Debono fascinating because her attitude is so at odds with those of the more socially conservative women in her political party—women who like to advise their peers to prioritize starting a family over having a career, for example, and who talk about the importance of “submission” in marriage (and who might not, in other words, be so chill about a couple of sloshed singles getting it on in a bar bathroom). Debono and women like her have set off an angry debate about which kinds of women are in fact welcome in the MAGA tent.

For a decade, something particular to Donald Trump—his agenda, his vibe—has united America’s libertines and religious traditionalists under the same red cap. But now that coalition is cracking. Young women drove Democratic wins in three states earlier this month; and as Republicans argue over how to win back female voters, MAGA women are engaged in an existential clash about what, exactly, it means to be a conservative woman in 2025.

For Debono, the battle line is drawn between the irreverent, socially libertarian types like herself and the religious conservatives—or, to use Debono’s shorthand, the “city Republicans” versus the “tradwives.” This particular conflict, which plays out largely on social media, can feel mesmerizingly petty. But to those involved, the stakes are high. If the right wing doesn’t lighten up soon, Debono told me, “they’re going to push every woman out of the Republican Party.”

Jonah Rosenberg for The Atlantic

Raquel Debono, left, mingles at a “Make America Hot Again” event in New York.

In person, Debono is chatty and unfiltered. Moments after I arrived at her party, in May, she pulled me in close and gestured toward a man nearby: “He’s so hot,” she whispered. “Doesn’t he look just like Patrick Bateman?” Debono’s Instagram account is a gallery of photos featuring her sipping cocktails in Miami and strolling through ritzy New York neighborhoods, with captions such as “Fat women are invisible, but so are poor men” and “Make Skinny Great Again.”

Like many Trump voters, Debono supports the president for reasons that have less to do with policy and more to do with the freedom to offend: “A lot of it comes down to political correctness,” she told me. She often refers to things she dislikes as “retarded,” and in a recent video, she announced that “as a general rule of thumb, I really don’t like Muslims.” The strangest thing about Debono’s MAGA activism is that she is Canadian. She couldn’t cast a vote for Trump. (“It’s crazy, I know,” she told me.) Still, Debono has managed to make American politics at least a part-time job. After working for a few years as a lawyer, she quit to consult for private companies and political campaigns, and to focus on her modest social-media following (a little more than 100,000 users on TikTok and Instagram combined).

Every influencer needs a niche, and Debono has found hers: “I’m a Sex and the City conservative,” she told me. She sees her role as showing women that there is more than one way to be a Republican. “Breaking news: you can have a job, a martini and still be conservative,” she posted earlier this year. “Sry @ trad wives.”

Debono draws a line, for example, at attending events for women put on by Turning Point USA. The conservative youth organization, she says, is both “creepy” and “cult-y.” Every summer, the group founded by the late Charlie Kirk brings together a few thousand young women to hear about being feminine rather than feminist. The event is an explosion of frilly femininity in which attendees, many dressed in sundresses and hair ribbons, learn about the benefits of homeschooling and menstrual-cycle tracking. Speakers at these events are women who encourage the revival of biblical womanhood, which typically involves modeling a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:4) and submitting to one’s husband, as to the Lord (Ephesians 5:22–23).

[Read: The wellness women are on the march]

It is difficult to imagine Debono, whose spirit is neither particularly gentle nor quiet, thriving in such an environment. She admired Kirk’s work on college campuses, she told me, and loved watching his debates with students. But Turning Point’s messaging to women is predatory and hypocritical, she says: Plenty of Turning Point’s female contributors are single or work full-time as influencers and public speakers.

Jonah Rosenberg for The Atlantic

Scenes from the mixer at an East Village bar.

Women in the Turning Point universe have heard these critiques before, and some of them offer a slightly softer interpretation of the group’s message: “It’s not about either-or,” Alex Clark, a 32-year-old Turning Point contributor and podcast host, told me. It’s a promise that “women can have it all—but not at the same time.” Clark is not married and doesn’t have children, though she recently told an interviewer: “If I had the chance to become a wife and mother, but the show had to end tomorrow, I’m choosing wife and mother.”

When asked about Debono’s push for permissiveness, Clark was firmly opposed: “It’s not conservatism if a bunch of people are involved that aren’t conservative,” she said. Being conservative means something to Clark and her allies, and that something includes being pro-Christianity, pro-life, and pro–traditional marriage. Clark disagrees, for example, with the Trump administration’s plan to make IVF accessible to more Americans, because she believes that discarding unused embryos amounts to murder. “If that loses us some voters, then I can sleep at night knowing that I stood for the right thing,” she said.

Ultimately, Clark isn’t worried that Republicans will lose women forever: As more young men turn to the GOP, so will young women, because it’s their “natural instinct to follow strong men and strong leadership,” she said. In the meantime, Clark is focused on recruiting women by talking more about health and wellness. Her podcast, Culture Apothecary, features the occasional segment on conservative womanhood—“How to Nag Less & Let Him Lead”—but otherwise focuses mostly on food and Big Pharma: “How to Heal Your IBS in 30 Days (No Meds!).” Other conservative women have started similar projects. Evie Magazine, which was launched in 2019 as counterprogramming to girlboss outlets such as Cosmopolitan, offers a slightly less titillating range of articles, including modest fashion recommendations and sex advice marked with an asterisk: for married women only.

A universe of conservatives exists to the right of women like Clark. Over there in what I’ll call the “Ultra-Trad Zone,” hard-liners see some Turning Point influencers and contributors as covert feminists. And after young women voted overwhelmingly for Democrats this month, some of these ultra-trads argued that maybe the Nineteenth Amendment had worn out its welcome. There’s no way to make women more conservative, Savanna Stone, a 20-year-old married influencer, wrote on X. “You just take away their right to vote or make any political decisions.”

Sam Hodde / The Washington Post / Getty

Attendees of the 2025 Turning Point USA Young Women's Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas.

Sam Hodde / The Washington Post / Getty

Alex Clark, right, poses for a photo at the Turning Point USA Young Women's Leadership Summit.

Perhaps now is a good time to acknowledge that the job of any commentator or influencer is to provoke engagement; those sweet, sweet rage clicks won’t harvest themselves! But whether their positions are genuine—or designed, first and foremost, to shock—doesn’t especially matter, because female voters see and hear these positions, and take them into account when they’re deciding which political party has their interests at heart.

The MAGA influencer Emily Wilson understands this, and she sees the right wing’s hectoring about women’s roles as a huge political liability: “We’re going to lose elections if we don’t agree to go to the middle ground,” she told me. Conservatives “put all this effort into shit that the public does not agree” with them on. Wilson, a former Democrat who now posts pro-Trump content on Instagram under the handle Emily Saves America, is known for sharing her own provocative—and sometimes genuinely bigoted—videos. (“Black fatigue is real,” she declares in one recent clip.) Wilson also believes that “marriage at a young age is not good” and sees herself as working to make the MAGA movement more appealing to women.

Not everyone appreciates Wilson’s efforts. This spring, she posted a video mocking “tradwife bullshit.” Discouraging women from getting an education or earning their own living, she said, makes them vulnerable to being “trapped by a man.” The video got millions of views and lots of angry feedback, including from Sarah Stock, a Catholic commentator and self-described Christian nationalist. “She is spreading a toxic, far-left feminist message about homemaking in general,” Stock wrote in a blog post. “If she were some random liberal girl, this wouldn’t matter, but Emily has about half a million followers on all of her platforms—all people who look up to her as a face of the conservative MAGA movement.”

[Read: Conservative women have a new Phyllis Schlafly]

Three months later, the feud between Stock and Wilson boiled over in the pettiest way possible: Stock got engaged and announced it by posting, “I won,” on X, next to a photo of her sparkling new ring. But Wilson couldn’t help herself. “The ring size 💀,” she commented, before posting on her own page: “It’s gonna be hard to be a trad wife when your man can’t even afford a ring.”

The right wing erupted. A fashion designer dubbed Wilson “a disgusting feminist whore”; a Catholic commentator said Wilson was a “‘boss bitch’ with a body count higher than the national debt.”

Gentle spirits did not, in other words, abound. The whole exchange ended up serving as powerful confirmation for both sides. To Wilson and her supporters, the vitriolic responses were wildly disproportionate to the original ring insult. But to Stock, the back-and-forth simply proved that Wilson isn’t conservative. “I have no problem with infighting,” Stock told me later. “It exposes a lot of these people as frauds.”

Jonah Rosenberg for The Atlantic

“I’m a Sex and the City conservative,” Debono said.

This rift among women is not poised to split the MAGA movement in half. But so many people offering such wildly distinct definitions of womanhood makes it difficult for the party to communicate a clear message to persuadable women voters. The conflict also presents an important reminder about the fragility of coalitions: When Trump is out of the picture, will this uneasy mingling of “conservatism and coarseness” fall apart?

This month’s disappointing election results have Debono doubling down on her quest to win women and keep the tent big. She hopes to throw her Make America Hot Again events next year in every swing state, where she can register new Republican voters and give conservatives a reason to party. She dreams of building an organization that looks like Turning Point, she said, only with events that are “chic” and “not, like, cringe.” In September, Debono started consulting for Ethan Agarwal, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and candidate for governor of California, who also happens to be a Democrat.

Debono laughed when I expressed surprise at the choice. “He’s a moderate,” she said. It’s basic politics: “A Republican is not going to win in California.” Rather than aligning herself with a losing team, she has simply picked a more winnable fight.

The Limits of the Democrats’ Big Tent

2025-11-08T17:03:58-05:00

The Democrats finally have their groove back—or at least a semblance of a groove.

For the first time since Donald Trump was elected a year ago, the Democratic Party’s general vibe is one of tentative celebration. And why shouldn’t it be? On Tuesday, candidates from very different ideological wings of the party sailed to comfortable victories in three states. And residual excitement from that election was in the air yesterday at Crooked Con—an event brought to you by Crooked Media, which was brought to you by the Pod Save America guys, who were brought to you by the Obama White House—where party strategists and activists shared a stage and mingled over room-temperature soft pretzels.

The convention was held, somewhat awkwardly, at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., and was intended to be the first annual showcase for the Democrats’ big-tent coalition. Gone are the days of choosing between a former intelligence officer and a democratic socialist; the party is now asking: Why not both? And at every panel, speakers repeated the week’s key takeaway like a mantra: “Democrats don’t have to agree on everything.”

But on which issues will Democrats accept disagreement—and on which will they stand firm? No speaker at Friday’s convention offered any real specifics. Meanwhile, the no-shows were notable. “John Bel Edwards is not here. Mary Peltola is not here. Jared Golden is not here,” the panelist and Substack author Matt Yglesias told me about the past Louisiana governor, former representative from Alaska, and current Maine congressman, all of whom have won in red areas. Those lawmakers don’t have a secret sauce—they simply “have more conservative voting records,” Yglesias said. “And people just don’t like that answer.”

The attendees of Crooked Con are exactly the kind of people whom you might expect to buy a ticket to an all-day event in the basement of a D.C. federal building about the future of Democratic politics: progressive activists, Hill staffers, local pro-democracy lawyers, and a river—a flood!—of political reporters. In the main atrium, Crooked Media staff and Human Rights Campaign workers handed out decorative buttons—DEI Hire, Leave Trans Kids Alone, Bodily Autonomy—and asked attendees to use Post-it Notes to offer messages of queer allyship. (For a party newly focused on economic populism, Democrats had remarkably few products related to corruption, billionaires, or taxing the rich.)

[Read: Is this how Democrats win back the working class?]

The day’s proceedings kicked off with a “big, beautiful breath” guided-breathing exercise, and involved appearances from an array of leaders and consultants, including former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Searchlight Institute’s Adam Jentleson, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and The Bulwark’s Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell. Most of the panels were interesting or useful in some way, but only one—“Are We Having Fun Yet?”—was a perfect encapsulation of the Democratic Party’s current reality. In it, the host, Jon Lovett, attempted to moderate a conversation that quickly went off the rails among Miller, the Fox News resident Democrat Jessica Tarlov, the far-left streamer Hasan Piker, and MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend.

The panel started off well: Sanders-Townsend danced onto the stage like Ellen DeGeneres. Piker and Miller joked around, and Lovett made a well-received crack about former President Bill Clinton. They all agreed, to an extent, that a message of “affordability” had worked for Tuesday’s candidates.

[Read: The affordability curse]

Quickly, though, the panelists’ differences intruded: Zohran Mamdani, Piker said, is an example of a Democrat who had successfully centered a campaign on economic populism without compromising on any of the party’s other important causes. Tarlov countered that a big tent means allowing for moderation on social issues: Democrats shouldn’t dismiss concerns from people about trans women playing women’s sports, for example. “I’m not talking about being bigoted,” Tarlov said, but “the country operates differently in different places, and we give lip service to that but don’t always behave that way.”

The audience offered a few tepid claps. Then everything went downhill. Sanders-Townsend explained that such sentiments can make it seem like the party “wants folks to compromise on issues that, for me, are uncompromisable.” Then she, Piker, and Miller argued about whether Trump had appealed to moderates with his MAGA agenda—or whether he’d simply energized his base to win—in 2024. (Maybe both? Lovett offered.) Piker, whose day job is as a long-form Twitch streamer, was soon rattling off his personal political priorities—social housing, a federal jobs guarantee, free college. Miller, a former Republican, rolled his eyes. For a change of pace, Piker asserted that America’s police “don’t do their fucking jobs ever” and fought with Miller about Israel’s right to exist.

Eventually, Tarlov, who’d been conspicuously quiet for many minutes, chimed in, unsmiling: “I just want to say,” she said, “that the last 10 minutes were the opposite of fun.” The candidates who won on Tuesday “were affordability candidates,” she said, and that is how the party should unite.

A big tent is messy and, apparently, loud. In some ways, it’s a nice change of pace—at least for engagement purposes. I can’t remember the last time that I was so entertained by a political panel. “That was a spicy one,” Miller told me afterward. “It’s important to be able to talk about how you can agree and row the boat in the same direction—while having differences.” But did airing those differences help Democrats advance their goal of winning in red America? Miller was doubtful: “I don’t know that a ton of progress was made.”

That’s frustrating for some Democrats, who worry that the party isn’t serious about doing what it takes to actually win. Notably absent from yesterday’s convention, for example, were leaders from centrist organizations and representatives from the Democrats’ Blue Dog Coalition. “Jesse Jackson used to say the Democratic Party needs two wings to fly,” one prominent, moderate Democratic strategist who did not attend the event texted me later. Crooked Con “was a flightless bird.” It was more, Yglesias agreed, “like a medium-sized tent.”

The Democrats are still in a tough position: To win back the Senate next year, their party must win a handful of seats in red territory, a feat that might involve backing candidates who are more conservative than some in the party might like. Democrats have decided to embrace a big-tent mindset. Now comes the hard part.

The Democrats’ Heterodoxy Problem

2025-10-14T07:26:27-04:00

Updated on October 14 at 5:54 p.m. ET.

The age of the conventional Democrat is over. The time of the Democratic contrarian has come.

So says Adam Jentleson, anyway. The veteran political operative and former adviser to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently launched a think tank that asks Democratic candidates to ignore pressure from the far left, take positions outside the “liberal box,” and be a lot more “heterodox” in general. If this seems to you like Beltway speak for asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans, well, you would be at least partly correct. The Democratic Party used to have supermajorities in Congress because it allowed its members to hold a wide range of positions, Jentleson told me. To start winning again, the party needs to bring that back, he said. His new think tank, Searchlight Institute, plans to help.

With its seven-person team, a polling arm, and a $10 million budget, Searchlight promises to offer a “menu” of orthodoxy-challenging ideas for Democrats to run on. “We don’t need to create a new Joe Rogan,” Jentleson said. “We need people to go on Rogan with better ideas.”

Some Democrats are excited about that menu, at least in theory. The party needs to figure out an agenda beyond opposing President Donald Trump, they say. And there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. It’s “like that year in the 1980s when Saturday Night Live fired everybody and kept Eddie Murphy,” Mike Nellis, a party strategist and former adviser to Kamala Harris, told me. “Right now you’ve gotta prove you’re Eddie Murphy or get the hell out of here. So I’m not begrudging anybody that’s trying something new.”

But this attitude does not exist in all corners, and here, as they say, is the rub: Jentleson’s critics, who mostly come from the progressive end of the ideological spectrum, believe that his project amounts to asking Democrats to abandon their values. They have many ideas about what the party should be doing instead. One Democratic strategist, who has worked with Jentleson in the past and who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, thinks the party should sound more like Senator Bernie Sanders and prioritize talking about economic populism. “I wish someone would give me $10 million to say that,” they told me. Others believe that now is the wrong time to moderate. “In a moment in which we are not approaching fascism, but rather living inside its horrific grip,” to argue that America needs “another reactionary centrist think-and-poll tank is really pretty gross,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive consultant, told me.

You might be wondering how the creation of a Washington, D.C., think tank could possibly inspire this kind of anguish. The answer is that for many Democrats, this debate goes far beyond the impact of a single organization whose entire staff could fit comfortably inside a Kia Telluride. They see this as a fight about how Democrats can start winning again, which makes it not merely tactical but also existential: Party officials, strategists, and activists have spent a year sifting through the wreckage of an election that was calamitous to the Democrats’ governing plans as well as their very understanding of themselves. And there is no shepherd to guide them. The party’s erstwhile leader, Joe Biden, is widely scorned. Harris, its would-be standard-bearer, is busy promoting a backward-looking volume of grievances.

Now, as the Democrats fumble their way toward the midterm elections, most seem to agree: The only way out of this dark wilderness is through. But choosing the wrong path could make things a whole lot worse.

Let us begin with the think tank of it all. The point of such an entity is to research and poll-test policy solutions to problems, usually for one political party or another. The conservative Heritage Foundation, for example, birthed Project 2025. Way back in 2005, the It Girl of the think-tank world was Third Way, a Democratic Party–aligned group that vowed to pursue not left- or right-wing policy solutions, but a different, third way forward.

This might sound like the Searchlight Institute’s mission, but Jentleson insists that it is not. The group will come up with policy ideas that are both left and right of center. Heterodox, he says, is the word that distinguishes the project. He uses this word a lot. “The heterodox mix that works for Maine is going to be different than the heterodox mix that works for Iowa or North Carolina or Texas, but they all should be heterodox,” Jentleson told me. A Democrat in Maine should have views about guns and gun control that align with the people of Maine, just as a candidate from a border state should feel free to hold a different position on border security than the rest of his party. “No Democrat believes every left-wing position on every issue,” he said, and they shouldn’t pretend to.

The person Jentleson thinks Democrats should take a lesson from is Trump. “One of the most poorly understood parts of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was his heterodoxy,” he said. As a candidate, Trump opposed the GOP’s conventional positions on the Iraq War, trade, and foreign intervention. In response, voters called him an independent thinker and made him president. (Now, of course, the party’s position is whatever Trump says it is.) Democrats should follow that instinct, Jentleson said. Some already do. A few good heterodox party candidates already exist, he said, including Rob Sand, the state auditor running for governor of Iowa, who has demonstrated disdain for traditional partisan labels and who recently told a radio host that he doesn’t think transgender women should play in women’s sports.

[Read: The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa]

Like repeating a word again and again, dwelling for too long on the concept of heterodoxy tends to make it blurry. If every candidate is taking heterodox positions, then wouldn’t those positions cease to be heterodox? And what, exactly, is a heterodox idea? It’s hard to know, because Searchlight has not yet released any. Policy proposals will be rolled out in the coming months, Jentleson promised, as a rotating team of fellows works in a “Shark Tank–style” environment to generate them. The project appears to have plenty of funding, including from a handful of billionaires guided by the donor-adviser Seth London, a venture capitalist and former Obama-administration official. (After the 2024 election, London sent around a strategy memo criticizing identity-based political messaging and calling for the creation of new organizations to support “common sense Democrats.”)

Searchlight’s association with London’s wealthy clients is, in some ways, the soft underbelly of the project—a paunch that Jentleson’s opponents are eager to jab. “We don’t need a bunch of billionaires telling us what they believe is the best direction for the party to win back working-class voters,” the anonymous party strategist told me. However, most think tanks and similar organizations are at least partly funded by the ultrawealthy.

If it’s not obvious by now, many people on the left do not like Jentleson personally. They see the 44-year-old veteran operative—who once advised but has recently publicly distanced himself from Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania—as overly and often performatively hostile to progressives. Pushing back on that characterization is difficult when, in an article announcing Searchlight’s launch, Jentleson came out swinging against the Center for American Progress, calling it “100 percent pure uncut resistance drivel.” (Asked for her response, CAP’s president, Neera Tanden, told me that “this is a bigger moment than coalitional infighting.” On the subject of Searchlight’s work, she added, “I’m old-fashioned. I think think tanks should have ideas.”)

But the main problem that lefties have with Searchlight is that they believe heterodoxy is code for “abandon your principles.” Several Democrats I interviewed for this story complained that Jentleson’s project amounts to sacrificing trans people and other marginalized groups. A more generous reframing of this critique might be that Searchlight is telling Democrats to talk only about issues that poll well, rather than starting with fixed values and working to get people on board. “The purpose of politics is to get elected in order to enact your agenda, not to get elected for its own sake,” Shenker-Osorio told me.

Shenker-Osorio referred to Jentleson’s approach as “pollingism,” whereas Republicans, she says, tend to operate using “magnetism.” Trump and his allies, she said, “have an agenda and doggedly pursue it” until, eventually, they make their priorities mainstream. (Searchlight isn’t going to tell Democrats to take or reject any positions, Jentleson said; it simply wants “leaders to know when they are spending political capital and when they are earning it.” As for the rest of his critics, Jentleson added: “If we were not a disruptive force,” they wouldn’t be so upset. “We pose a really big threat to a lot of the way things have been done for a long time.”)

Democrats in Shenker-Osorio’s camp do not want to cede ground in any of the culture wars. Instead, they’d rather candidates employ a more aggressive message about the economy—think railing against CEOs, billionaires, and the rigged system—like Sanders does on his Fighting Oligarchy Tour and Zohran Mamdani has in his New York mayoral race. If Trump and the MAGA Republicans are going to blame the country’s problems on illegal immigrants and other outsiders, then Democrats need their own powerful counterstory. “The more that Democrats are willing to name corporate villains that are hurting working people, the more bolstered we are from culture-war attacks,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me.

One could easily dismiss the specific debate over Jentleson’s think tank as a squabble among the terminally online. And it is that. But Searchlight is only one horse in a galloping herd of similar new ventures seeking to shape a party that can’t seem to stop fighting with itself. These other projects, some of which accept funding from London’s clients, include Majority Democrats, a political-action committee backing moderate, pragmatic Democrats; WelcomeFest, an annual gathering of centrist Democrats; and The Argument, a new magazine promoting center-left ideas, launched by the Atlantic contributor Jerusalem Demsas.

It’s all “part of a general reckoning where, if you want to build a majority party, you’ve got to let people have a diversity of opinions,” Lis Smith, who works with Majority Democrats but is unaffiliated with Searchlight, told me. “Goddamn it, if we want to save this party, we have to try new things.” Democratic politicians and thinkers appear to be coming to the same conclusion. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who for years crusaded for all Democrats to support gun-control legislation, said in a speech last month that he was rethinking that position. Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and a co-author of Abundance, called for Democrats to open their minds to running anti-abortion candidates in Republican-leaning states.

Each of these efforts toward a party reset has been met with some version of the criticism that Searchlight is facing. Speakers who gathered at WelcomeFest in Washington, D.C., for example, were derided by some on the political left as lacking vision. Others characterized Klein’s notion of running anti-abortion candidates as a betrayal of women. “This is no time for compromise. To support a ‘pro-life’ candidate—from any party—is morally incomprehensible,” Jessica Valenti wrote in her newsletter, Abortion, Every Day.

In some ways, none of this infighting is new at all. Progressives have been disgusted by moderates since time immemorial, and moderates have always found progressives at least slightly poisonous to the broader party brand. The current debate is simply a fresh iteration of the persuasion-versus-mobilization fight that roiled the party in the late 1980s, when Elaine Kamarck and William Galston called for the Democrats to end their losing streak by appealing to a broad base of voters. Back then, party members used a slightly different vocabulary to ask the same question: What should the Democrats do now?

This time, though, as the Trump administration sics troops on American cities, seeks retribution against the president’s enemies, and threatens to suppress organized political opposition, answering that question feels much more urgent.

* This article originally said Senator Chris Murphy wrote a column about rethinking his position on gun control. In fact, he gave a speech.

What If This Is a Turning Point?

2025-09-13T08:00:00-04:00

When Tyler Bowyer logged on to Benny Johnson’s X livestream on Thursday morning, pieces of tissue were stuck to the stubble on his unshaven face. Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, had clearly been crying. Just a few hours before, he’d seen a video of his close friend and colleague Charlie Kirk being fatally shot in the neck.

“What he would want more than anything is for people to channel their anger into proper activism,” Bowyer told Johnson, a few minutes later advising viewers: “Consider yesterday that moment—that turning point for you—of thinking about getting involved in your local community or running for office.” Later, Andrew Kolvet, a longtime spokesperson for Kirk, joined the stream and echoed Bowyer. “Charlie was not a revolutionary,” Kolvet said. “He does not want to see the rage we’re all feeling be misdirected to evil” and would want “more speech, more freedom, less violence.”

This was not a gathering of individuals known for levelheadedness. Johnson is widely regarded as a far-right provocateur, and Bowyer was one of 11 people charged in the 2020 fake-elector plot in Arizona (the case remains active but was sent back to a grand jury in May). But the explicit calls for nonviolence coming from some of those who were particularly close to Kirk is noteworthy and meaningful in a moment when others on the political right, including elected officials, are not being equally careful with their words. Asked on Fox News yesterday morning how to address political violence, President Donald Trump did not seize the chance to lower the temperature. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem.” “Democrats own what happened today,” Representative Nancy Mace told reporters on Wednesday after the news of Kirk’s shooting broke. On X, Elon Musk wrote, “The Left is the party of murder.”

Other Kirk allies have similarly characterized this as a crucial moment for the country. “America now has a turning point,” Jack Posobiec, the right-wing influencer and Turning Point contributor, said yesterday on The Charlie Kirk Show, which has been rechristened The Charlie Kirk Memorial Show. He did not explain exactly what he meant. But how and who defines the phrase turning point will determine whether the next few weeks bring confrontation, de-escalation, or something in between.

Kirk, who was assassinated on Wednesday at an event in Utah, launched Turning Point in 2012 to create a conservative youth movement in the United States. Following his death, figures from across his movement have called for greater political involvement. Students at Vanderbilt announced on Thursday that they’re forming a new chapter of Turning Point. “Rest assured that TPUSA and the entire conservative movement just got bolder, stronger, and more effective than ever,” Alex Clark, a Turning Point contributor and the host of the podcast Culture Apothecary, wrote on X. She later shared a link for starting a new chapter. “Charlie would want a million Charlie Kirks to run for office over the course of what would have been his normal lifetime,” Bowyer told Johnson yesterday. “And if we can do that, then we’ve lived up to Charlie Kirk’s name and his passion and his desire to save this republic.”

[Read: Leading Democrats Are Condemning Charlie Kirk’s Murder]

Some of Kirk’s allies are seeking to portray him as a Martin Luther King Jr.–like avatar of nonviolence. Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, herself a former Turning Point organizer, has written a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson requesting that a statue of Kirk be installed in the U.S. Capitol. On social media, mourners, including Kolvet, have shared an illustration of Kirk standing alongside Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus. “Stop calling Charlie Kirk a ‘conservative activist,’” the conservative commentator Glenn Beck wrote on X. “He was a civil rights leader.”

Yesterday, with Posobiec hosting, The Charlie Kirk Memorial Show opened with the kind of tribute usually afforded to former presidents and statesmen by major networks. It aired videos of impromptu vigils for Kirk held on college campuses across the country. Mike Johnson, who joined Posobiec on the show, said that members of Congress were already discussing ideas for memorializing him. Johnson seemed to be trying to avoid inflaming the calls for retribution that emerged quickly from some on the right, urging conservatives to carry on Kirk’s fight “not timidly, but boldly,” before quickly adding, “But in love.”

Still, other Kirk allies have occasionally taken a more vengeful posture—one that seems to support, if not violent reprisal, then some kind of crackdown on Kirk’s ideological opponents. On Johnson’s show on Thursday, Luna warned that “there are going to be examples made of people” and added, “Everyone who has been responsible for coordinating this, you basically just took on the entire U.S. government.” In the Bible, Luna noted, “it says you don’t make peace with evil; you destroy it.” Later, in an interview on Fox News, Posobiec suggested that action should be taken “at the national and the federal level” to “stop the perpetuation” of this violence.

[Read: One of Utah’s Own]

“God, please heal this nation. Our society is sick,” Riley Gaines, a Turning Point contributor, wrote Thursday on X. Yesterday morning, she sounded different. “Publications like @nytimes,” she wrote, “are the reason Charlie is dead.” She followed up a few hours later with “Wednesday: disbelief. Thursday: sadness. Friday: anger.”

As time passes, more news will emerge, and rhetoric may shift. So, too, might interpretations of this moment. Kirk’s allies—and especially Trump—will play an outsize role in determining what happens next. In a press briefing yesterday in Salt Lake City, Utah Governor Spencer Cox appeared to understand the stakes quite well. “History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country, but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us,” he said. “I desperately call on every American—Republican, Democrat, liberal, progressive, conservative, MAGA, all of us—to please, please follow what Charlie taught me."

Texas’s Pete

2025-09-09T09:05:07-04:00

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET on September 9, 2025

Like the leaves of a Texas ash in autumn, the Democrats running to win the state are always vibrant and impressive, right up until they fall. By now, this is common knowledge. Yet for some optimistic Democrats, there’s something different about James Talarico.

You might recognize the 36-year-old state lawmaker from any number of viral social-media clips—calmly arguing with Fox News hosts, for example, or discussing his faith on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. The four-term Democrat and Presbyterian seminarian this morning announced that he’s joining the primary race for the Senate seat held by the Republican John Cornyn. In so doing, Talarico has cemented himself as his party’s newest, shiniest 2026 contender.

Talarico stands out for his relative youth but also for his particular brand of long-winded eloquence. He can sound, in some ways, like a southern-style Barack Obama or a Texas Pete Buttigieg. Two years ago, a video made the rounds of Talarico arguing against legislation that would require public-school teachers to hang the Ten Commandments in their classroom. “This bill to me is not only unconstitutional; it’s not only un-American; I think it is also deeply un-Christian,” he told his Republican colleagues in a committee hearing. “And I say that because I believe this bill is idolatrous. I believe it is exclusionary. And I believe that it is arrogant—and those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.”

[From the October 2024 issue: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Democrats hope his emphasis on faith will help Talarico reach across the aisle—something he seems eager to do. In an interview, Talarico told me that wooing voters is like navigating a school cafeteria. “You sit at the table where people want you to sit,” he said, and “it’s our job as elected leaders” to show voters that they’re wanted. This, Talarico says, is why he spent two hours talking with Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024. “You need to run for president,” Rogan told him by the end of the show. “We need someone who’s actually a good person.”

National Democrats see promise, too. Party leaders, including former White House adviser David Axelrod and California Governor Gavin Newsom, have shared videos of Talarico speaking on the Texas House floor. Even Obama himself reportedly called Talarico to praise him for his leadership when Democratic state lawmakers in Texas broke quorum in August. Talarico has “the ‘it’ factor,” the Texan Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told me. When it comes to persuading Trump-curious voters to reconsider, Talarico “brings lots of weapons to the arsenal.”

Former Representative Colin Allred is already in the primary race, and to beat him, Talarico would need to overcome Allred’s fundraising advantage and statewide name recognition. Even if he does that, he still has only a glimmer of a chance at being the first Democratic senator elected in Texas in 37 years. But a glimmer has always been enough to fuel the desperate dreams of Democrats. And some of them see Talarico not just as the best shot for winning Texas—but as a model for how the party can win back the voters it lost to Trump.

In modern American political discourse, Democrats have mostly ceded the topic of religion to Republicans. But the party could learn from Talarico’s example, some Democrats told me. “Talking about faith openly, talking about family, talking about things that bring us together,” Rocha said, is what Democrats “have to get back to if we want to have success in the long term.”

Talarico often preaches at his Presbyterian church in the Austin suburbs, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), a mainline Protestant denomination. A video of one of his 2023 sermons continues to circulate on social media. Christian nationalists “have co-opted the son of God,” Talarico tells his congregation in the clip. “They’ve turned this humble rabbi into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fearmongering fascist. And it is incumbent on all Christians to confront it and denounce it.” But Talarico doesn’t just talk about his faith; he uses it to articulate his political beliefs. All of Talarico’s political positions, he told me, stem from the command that Jesus gave his followers “to love God and love neighbor.” Democrats have plenty of policy ideas, he said, but they need to do a better job of communicating to voters “what values underpin those policy proposals.”

[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

Talarico is comfortable criticizing his own party. On Rogan’s show, he said that Joe Biden’s biggest problem wasn’t his age; it was his “ego” and “inability to step aside and let someone else do the job.” But age is definitely a factor in Talarico’s own appeal; on TikTok, the Millennial lawmaker has amassed 1.2 million followers, and clips of his floor speeches, rally remarks, and sermons regularly receive millions of views and likes. When I asked Talarico how Democrats can best move forward after the party’s major losses last November, he chided me gently. “We should embrace this time in the wilderness,” he said. “It’s where new leaders and new movements come forth.”

Talarico clearly hopes to be one of those new leaders. It helps that he has a good backstory. Raised by a single mother in Round Rock, Texas, near Austin, Talarico attended the University of Texas at Austin and got a master’s degree at Harvard. He spent two years as a middle-school English teacher in a poor school district in San Antonio before leaving to lead a Texas nonprofit focused on math education. (In addition to his duties in the state house, Talarico works at an Austin-based education consultancy.) His teaching experience was his main motivation for entering politics, Talarico told me, and in 2018, at age 29, he flipped a district that had been held by Republicans since 2002 to become the youngest politician in the legislature.

He won the seat, north of Austin, first in a special election and then in a general one, with his victory resulting from a 13-point swing toward Democrats. “I ran a different kind of race” than other Democrats who’d tried the same, he told me. Long before Zohran Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, Talarico walked 25 miles across the district (and, after almost falling into a coma, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes). He held on to the seat again in 2020, before Republican gerrymandering spurred him to run in a safer Democratic district nearby in 2022. Still, Talarico said, “I know how to win a tough area.”

Talarico has been a reliable progressive in the state legislature; he introduced legislation to cap insulin co-pays, and he helped draft a major overhaul of Texas school spending, both of which were signed into law. He also left the state during two quorum breaks, including last month, when he and dozens of state Democrats flew to Chicago in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to derail Republican gerrymandering plans. Like his former colleague Representative Jasmine Crockett in 2021, Talarico became the unofficial spokesperson of the moment. “My party has never gerrymandered in the middle of a decade at the request of the president of the United States, nor would we,” he told the Fox News host Will Cain in a clip that was widely shared on X. Later, Talarico asked, “If Republican policies are so popular, why would they need to redraw these maps?” Cain abruptly ended the conversation.

Sometimes, Talarico can sound like a progressive populist in the vein of Bernie Sanders. In interviews—with me, with Rogan—he likes to say that he thinks of politics as “top versus bottom” rather than “left versus right.” Like Sanders, he also tends to rail against the influence of billionaires in politics. But other times, Talarico scans as more ideologically ambiguous. In our first interview, Talarico didn’t mention the president until 30 minutes in, and only after I’d asked directly. “I get why people voted for Trump,” he told me. They find his straightforwardness refreshing, he said, “and I find it refreshing at times.” But Trump promised his supporters two things: lower prices and less corruption, Talarico told me. “Obviously he’s done the exact opposite,” he said, and now, voters might be looking for those things elsewhere.

[Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?]

This is where Talarico sees an opening for his candidacy—as well as a line of attack that has been available to Democrats but that, at least so far, many have struggled to pursue.

The problem for Talarico is that every Democrat who’s recently envisioned a path to victory has lost. In 2018, there was Beto O’Rourke, the Democrats’ great counter-hopping hope, who came close but ultimately failed to take down Senator Ted Cruz. Two years later, it was M. J. Hegar, the female combat veteran who lost to Cornyn. Last year, Allred, the biracial NFL linebacker turned lawyer turned U.S. representative, ran ahead of Kamala Harris in Texas, but couldn’t defeat Cruz.

A recent poll shows Allred eight points ahead of Talarico, a tighter gap than one might expect between a battle-tested former congressman and a relative newcomer. Still, Allred will be tough to beat. He’s got all the scaffolding in place from his 2024 campaign, including a statewide fundraising apparatus (last year he raised nearly $100 million). In an interview, Allred told me that this year, he hopes Democrats can keep their focus on working people. For too long, he said, Democrats have “been perceived as being too online, too elite, too disconnected from the lived reality that most folks are facing.” He said he’ll campaign on rising costs, as well as Republicans’ recent cuts to Medicaid. When I asked about Talarico’s entrance in the race, Allred didn’t comment about Talarico directly, but pointed to his own success outperforming Harris by more than five points statewide. “I’m a proven fighter,” he said.

Some Democrats wish Talarico would stay out of the race. “I admire James tremendously,” former Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who has endorsed Allred, told me. But he’ll lose the primary, she said, and “then he’s going to be that guy who once had a megaphone and gave it up for a losing race.” Talarico could have challenged Governor Greg Abbott instead, or run in one of the five revamped congressional districts Republicans are creating with their new district map. “It’s always sad” when two talented politicians are in the same primary race, Matt Angle, a Texas Democratic strategist, told me. On the plus side, he has “some sense of comfort that we can win with either one.”

To win, Talarico would have to become much more well known in Texas—and find a way to raise many millions of dollars, because state-media markets are astonishingly expensive. Unlike Allred, Talarico has never experienced a spotlight this big—or been on the receiving end of a Republican dirt-digging operation. Already, Talarico is facing criticism for accepting thousands of dollars from a PAC associated with Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, after Talarico had repeatedly decried the influence of money in politics. (“Just like the gerrymandering fight, I am not willing to unilaterally disarm,” Talarico said when I asked him about this.) Given that Talarico is, as Rocha put it, “the whitest white guy I’ve ever seen,” he might also struggle to build the diverse coalition of support necessary to win the state.

[Read: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

A few unknown variables could complicate the picture; both O’Rourke and Representative Joaquin Castro are reportedly considering jumping into the primary. Any of these Democrats will have a tough shot in a general election. But strategists from both parties predict that if Attorney General Ken Paxton beats Cornyn in the GOP primary, Democrats might have a better chance, given Paxton’s overall unpopularity. Paxton currently leads Cornyn in the polls.

Right now, Talarico is relying on Texans’ desire for someone new. People I spoke with used words like boring and milquetoast to describe Allred, and some Democrats are fearful that his candidacy might invoke for voters a general sense of “been there, done that.” Given their party’s historically low approval rating, this is precisely the vibe that Democrats are hoping to avoid.

There’s nothing like the rush of falling in love with a candidate for the very first time. And Talarico knows this. “The country is looking for a reset,” he told me. Right now, even facing the very longest of odds, he’s hoping Texans will trust him to provide it.

This article originally referred to Wendy Davis as a former state representative. She is a former state senator.

Only One Republican Is Holding This Many Town Halls

2025-08-30T07:00:00-04:00

Even as most congressional Republicans are avoiding their constituents, one has demonstrated an exceptional commitment to engaging with voters in the flesh: 61-year-old Mark Alford of Missouri held not one but 15 public events across his district this week, including five town halls. The second-term lawmaker is not an otherwise noteworthy member of Congress. He represents a safe Republican district, and has voted along party lines 89 percent of the time, according to Heritage Action. But in a moment when so few Republicans are making an effort to hear from the people who sent them to Congress, Alford has set himself apart. His forums, four of which I attended this week, offer a useful window into voters’ opinions of the current administration, and a preview of the biggest fights to come in 2026.

Alford, whose district spans 24 counties in west-central Missouri, is a former TV-news anchor with a square jaw and gray hair that make him resemble a slightly younger version of Pat Sajak. At each of his recent public events, which were announced weeks ago and were open to the press, Alford forwent the customary politician’s podium. Instead he perched on a stool to avoid the appearance, he told me, of “lording” over voters. In an interview, Alford said that he sees these public events as vital to the job. “That’s why we’re elected every two years—to be back in the district to listen to people,” he said. “I may not win them over, but I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that I at least listened to them.”

Since March, when Republican leaders in Congress advised their members against holding town halls, most GOP lawmakers have been AWOL during each congressional recess—physically in their districts, maybe, but mostly inaccessible. A handful of lawmakers have flouted this new advice by holding one or two stand-alone town halls, while others have only dared to host virtual events with prescreened questions.

[Read: What the next phase of Trump’s presidency will look like]

Alford declined to speculate about why so many of his Republican colleagues haven’t met with their constituents during the August recess. But the answer is probably that they don’t see much upside in being publicly heckled—which Alford was, often. Most of the attendees who showed up to the coffee shops and community centers where Alford spoke this week were not fans of his; several used the crowd mic to call the president a “dictator” and Alford his lackey. At Southwest Baptist University, in Bolivar, Missouri, a farmer named Fred Higginbotham asked the representative repeatedly when he would take his “head out of Trump’s ass.” (At this, two older women near me gasped.) Alford mostly ignored these insults, although at one point, he distanced himself from the president: “I’m not the best of friends with Trump,” he told Higginbotham. “I met him maybe five or six times.”

Mostly, however, Alford’s events were civil, if tense. Some questioners focused on local issues, such as how Donald Trump’s tariffs have affected Missouri farmers. Several attendees asked Alford about Trump’s deployment of federal agents and the National Guard in Washington, D.C. In the city of Lebanon, a combat veteran named Josh asked whether Alford was prepared to stop the president from sending troops into Missouri. In St. Robert, a high-school government teacher asked Alford “what’s so conservative” about loosing troops on the U.S. capital. (Alford’s response was to suggest that cities should be grateful for the extra help. When Kansas City co-hosts the men’s World Cup in 2026, would Missourians not hope to see the National Guard helping out?)

Arin Yoon for The Atlantic

A town hall hosted by Mark Alford in Lebanon, Missouri, on August 26

A topic that rarely came up was Jeffrey Epstein. I’d expected more voters to ask Alford about the Justice Department investigation into the financier and sex offender. Few did. But in Bolivar, Don Bass, a Republican and a retired police officer, told me before Alford took the stage that he wasn’t happy to hear the president dismiss the people advocating for the Epstein files’ release. “I voted for him three times, and he calls me a ‘troublemaker!’” Bass said. “It’s frustrating.”

As has become clear in other GOP town halls and in recent polling, the issue that had Alford’s constituents particularly frustrated was the new Republican tax-cut-and-spending package—Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Among other provisions, the legislation makes permanent the president’s 2017 tax cuts, eliminates $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and other public-health programs, and reduces food assistance by $186 billion. Independent estimates suggest that millions of Americans, including children, will lose health-care coverage or food-assistance benefits in the next few years. At the Bolivar event, a woman named Samantha asked whether Alford had considered this. “My question to you is, how do we fix it?” The next day, in St. Robert, a constituent named Allison told Alford that she works with disabled children who rely on Medicaid and SNAP. “I’m looking at these kids that I treat, and I’m like, Who’s going to lose their food stamps? Who might lose their Medicaid?” she said, her voice wavering. “It seems like we didn’t even need to make those Medicaid or food-stamps cuts if we had just not extended that tax cut to the rich.”

Arin Yoon for The Atlantic

Alford answers questions at the town hall in Lebanon.

Arin Yoon for The Atlantic

A constituent speaks with Alford at a town hall in St. Robert, Missouri, on August 26.

To each questioner, Alford’s response was the same: There was waste in the Medicaid and SNAP systems, and Republicans were eliminating it. Because Americans with dependents will continue to receive coverage under the bill’s requirements, no children will go without health care or food, he promised, and he said that those suggesting otherwise are promoting “misinformation.” (Economists and health-care experts have argued that, despite children being covered on paper, the bill’s new work requirements and administrative hurdles will likely cause many to fall through the cracks.) Alford’s team has set up a hotline for constituents to call if they are unduly removed from the system. “If there is a child kicked off Medicaid or SNAP, I’m going to fight for them,” he said. He also acknowledged the “tough times ahead” for rural hospitals, but he pointed to the bill’s $50 billion fund for rural health care.

[Read: Why Josh Hawley is trying to reverse Medicaid cuts he voted for]

Similar back-and-forths have played out at Republican events this spring and summer, including at a viral town hall held by Representative Mike Flood of Nebraska, and another hosted by Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, whose helpful response to concerns about cuts to Medicaid was: “Well, we all are going to die.” More than a month after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s passage, more people disapprove of it than approve, according to the Pew Research Center, and the president this week suggested a rebrand. “I’m not going to use the term ‘great big beautiful,’” Trump said. “That was good for getting it approved, but it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about.” Vice President J. D. Vance has been on tour to reframe the bill as a win for the working class. Alford is careful, too. When he talks about the bill, he refers to it as “HR 1.” I asked him whether this is a tacit acknowledgment that he sees the legislation as a political vulnerability. Alford said no. “One Big Beautiful Bill” is “a great name,” he said, but “why would I use something that is going to trigger” people?

Arin Yoon for The Atlantic

Alford speaks with constituents at Bean Depot in Laurie, Missouri, on August 27.

Alford’s town halls are not exactly changing minds; the people I spoke with seemed to arrive and leave with the same feelings about their representative and president that they entered with. At the St. Robert Community Center, Dawn, a retiree in a tie-dyed T-shirt who declined to share her last name, told me that she’d voted for Trump in 2016, but had changed her mind in the years since. She wasn’t happy about the 2017 tax cuts, she told me, and now she worries about Trump’s “blatant, wanton desire to just take over.” Dawn appreciated Alford’s willingness to listen, she said. “But will I vote for him? No.”

Still, Alford managed to hold a week’s worth of public events without screening questions or attendees. He de-escalated conflicts, and responded to substantive criticism from his constituents. “I’m not necessarily after their vote in the town-hall tours,” he told me. “I’m after their respect.” On this modest goal, Alford appears to have found at least some success. His Republican colleagues don’t seem interested in achieving the same.

How to Make Life Feel a Little Nicer

2025-08-14T16:54:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Last month, I wrote about my attempt to self-rejuvenate through small moments of joy, and I asked readers to submit some tips of their own. Boy, did you come through. Two clear themes emerged in the dozens of replies we received. The first: You people are wild about your pets! So many readers wrote in to share daily rituals involving terriers, retrievers, house cats, and even rescue rabbits (!). These suggestions inspired me to take a moment to inhale the scent of my own dog (she smells like corn chips). The other through line in your answers was an urge to be outside and behold Earth’s wonders. Many of the daily delights you submitted involved gardening, bird-watching, hiking, or sunset-savoring—sans phone or laptop.

Below is a selection of answers that I found particularly delightful, inspiring, or hilarious. They’ve been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

“During the pandemic, when we were both working from home, my husband and I started having a daily ‘tea-and-toast break’ when our schedules accommodated. It provides a few minutes each day when we talk, laugh, sit in the garden, or otherwise relax and enjoy each other’s company.” — Dawn Schneiderman, Williston, Vermont
“There is a food truck down the street that serves brisket tacos. I walk down a couple times a week. The owner calls me ‘Gramma.’ A little farther down is a bar/lounge that sells coffee from locally roasted beans. They call me ‘hot rod’ or ‘hot wheels’ because I drive a red 2007 Mustang convertible.” — D. E., 76, Texas
“I make my bed. But I don’t just make it; I ‘remake’ it: I air out the sheets while eating breakfast, then I start by smoothing down the fitted sheet before bringing up each layer again. In the end, I have a beautifully made bed that makes me feel that I have not only ‘closed the door’ to the night before, but that I have officially opened the door to the day.” — Tony D.
“Every morning, I hear my blue jays alerting me that they are sitting in the river-birch tree in the backyard, waiting for their morning peanuts. As soon as I toss the peanuts, a flock of jays flutters down to grab them. With a smile, I get my coffee and watch.” — Susan H.
“After I start the coffee, the dog and then the cat get their morning pets and rubs, from nose to tail. I inquire how they slept, about the day’s plans, and if breakfast was to their liking. The actors have changed over the years, but it is a well-rehearsed script.” — Denise L.
“When waiting for my computer to do something, I listen to a song-in-progress I’m recording in GarageBand and imagine how great it will sound when it’s finished, and how I will get it there.” — Bob C., Larchmont, New York
“Rather than start my day delectably, I end it, around midnight, with a short, slow walk to the park with my 9-year-old, chubby Norwich Terrier. Magnolia and I talk; I do it with words, she with looks and reactions, both of us unleashed in the coolness of the desert night after a day of three-digit temperatures.” — Rosemary K., 67, Las Vegas, Nevada
“I’ve been knitting, off and on, since I was 8. I keep a project in the car for when I’m stuck at a long train crossing, in the pickup lane at Walmart for my prescription, or at the Whataburger drive-through. You’d be surprised at how quickly you can knit a pair of baby socks in scraps of time.” — Lynn Elliott Davis, 73, Dallas, Texas
“I add a small delectable moment by letting my Sheltie dog lick my feet at the end of the day. Judging by her enthusiasm, this seems to be a delectable moment for her as well.” — Kim Stanley, 70, McPherson, Kansas
“I ask myself every morning what would enchant my day. The answers vary: a walk in the forest behind my house, mad dancing to ’80s tunes in the living room, reading for two hours straight in the evening, talking to my best friend, sipping a glass of something or other by the window sans screens.” — Sibylle L.
“I simply make a point of talking to strangers by finding something small we share at the moment—that the bus is late, or that an interesting dog just walked by.” — William Lynch Higgins, Port Townsend, Washington
“We recently discovered the Japanese art of dorodango, where you roll mud into balls and polish them until they shine like mirrored glass. It’s incredible, free, and utterly satisfying. The final result has the weight and hardness of a billiard ball—using nothing but dirt and water!” — Khara Plicanic, 46, Lincoln, Nebraska
“I try nearly every day to belt out all the words of my favorite earworm of the moment. Lately, it’s been Lady Gaga’s ‘Vanish Into You.’ It’s like I’m in a music video. Okay—probably more likely an episode of Girls.” — Brittany Shepherd, 30, Washington, D.C.
“My small, delectable moment is when I take a nap with my dog Rosie at around 3 p.m. every afternoon. She sleeps at the far corner of the bed when we nap. However, at night, when she also sleeps with me, she places herself right next to my head. I don’t know why she makes this distinction, but she always makes me laugh.” — R. F. Mezzy, almost 73, Hamden, Connecticut
“I am a full-time caretaker for my partner of 49 years. It’s hard and demanding work marinated in sadness, so small moments of joy are very important. My favorite time is the early morning, when I take the dogs for a walk as my loved one sleeps. Their wagging tails and springing steps remind me that happiness lives in me as well.” — Jane S., 79, California
“A landscape painter once told me that in order to truly capture a scene, he first tries to name the colors he sees. You have to stop and really take in something, be it a flower, a child’s eyes, a mountain, or a cloud, in order to describe its colors.” — Crys S., 69, Fernie, British Columbia, Canada
“One of the best moments of my day is my ‘thriller’ walk. I throw on a hat, grab a cup of coffee and my AirPods, and take an hour-long walk while I listen to a psychological thriller or mystery. It’s the only time I allow myself an audiobook, so I’m genuinely excited to wake up early and head out the door.” — Diane H., 62, Black Diamond, Washington
“I look for a gift each day. A redbud leaf with scalloped edges gifts me the awareness that a leafcutter bee is nearby. A hawk soaring. A toad in the yard, a turtle crossing the road. If I stop to be observant, I can identify the gift for that day.” — Cheryl
“Is it a cliché to point to morning coffee as an immediate, life-affirming delight? Each day contains exactly one first sip and no more. You need to make it through a whole day to earn another—and then it starts all over again.” — Meg Z. S., 71, Old Saybrook, Connecticut

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold a joint press conference after tomorrow’s one-on-one meeting, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Trump said he believes that Putin is “going to make a deal” on the war in Ukraine and added that he might invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for further talks if the meeting goes well.
Washington, D.C.’s police force is expanding its cooperation with immigration enforcement and will now permit officers making traffic stops to report undocumented immigrants—even those who have not been detained or charged with a crime—to ICE, according to an internal order.
Florida will open a second state-run immigration detention center called “Deportation Depot” in a former prison west of Jacksonville, according to Governor Ron DeSantis. The facility could hold up to 2,000 federal detainees.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: For centuries, humans have tried to understand how to define a “genius.” Helen Lewis writes about the flawed ways we decide who gets that label.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: CSA Images / Getty.

The Awkward Adolescence of a Media Revolution

By Jessica Yellin

There’s a quiet revolution in how millions of Americans decide what’s real. Trust is slipping away from traditional institutions—media, government, and higher education—and shifting to individual voices online, among them social-media creators. The Reuters Institute reports that this year, for the first time, more Americans will get their news from social and video platforms—including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X—than from traditional outlets. According to Pew Research, one in five adults now regularly turns to influencers for news.

For anyone who cares about credible information, this is a potentially terrifying prospect.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Culture Break

Pedro Nunes / Reuters

Look. These photos show the impact of a searing heat wave that has sparked wildfires across Southern Europe over the past two weeks.

Watch. In 2021, David Sims recommended 26 movies that critics were wrong about.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I recently went on the radio, on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, —and Lehrer and I took a few calls from listeners sharing their own small sources of happiness. One New York teacher rang in to say that when her students are feeling “sour,” she advises them to help another person. I love that idea. Just like being in nature, stepping outside of yourself to focus on someone else can be a hard reset for your day—and bring a little light to someone else’s.

— Elaine

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

How the Texas Standoff Will (Probably) End

2025-08-08T12:35:12-04:00

Texas state Democrats had been plotting their departure for weeks. But most weren’t sure they were going—or where they were headed—until just before they boarded their plane. For a successful quorum break, the timing “has to be ripe,” State Representative Gina Hinojosa told me. “Like a melon at the grocery store.” On Sunday, she and dozens of her colleagues hopped on a chartered plane and flew to Chicago in an attempt to prevent Texas Republicans from redrawing the state’s congressional maps. They don’t seem to know how long they’ll be there or when, exactly, they’ll consider the job done. Perhaps, Hinojosa suggested, they can attract enough attention to the issue that Republicans will be shamed into abandoning the effort.

Shame, however, is not an emotion experienced by many politicians these days, least of all ones who answer to Donald Trump. The likeliest conclusion of this effort is that Republicans will get their wish, just as they did after a similar situation in 2021.

Right now, the Texas Democrats’ quorum-break project appears to have two goals, one much more easily accomplished than the other. The first is to send a message; the gerrymandering attempt in Texas is a chance for Democrats nationwide to accuse Republicans of cheating, and to demonstrate a bit of the gumption their voters have been clamoring for. Because the party is effectively leaderless, now is a perfect moment for wannabe standard-bearers to soak up some of the limelight. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, for example, has made a lot of speeches and trolled Republicans; so has New York Governor Kathy Hochul. And tonight, California Governor Gavin Newsom will host Hinojosa and other Texas Democrats in Sacramento for a press conference.

The second, more practical objective is to run down the clock. If Texas Democrats can stay out of state long enough, they could make it difficult for Republicans to implement the new district maps ahead of the first 2026 election deadlines. This goal is optimistic, experts I interviewed said. Living in a hotel for weeks is expensive, and resources will eventually dry up. Pressure is mounting from Republican leaders. “And there’s a stamina factor at play that can’t be avoided,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me. It seems, he added, “inevitable that the new maps pass.”

[Read: How Democrats tied their own hands on redistricting]

State Democrats have only been on the run for five days in the Chicago area (as well as in New York and Massachusetts). The public is still interested, and Democrats have plenty of opportunities to shape the media narrative. “Democratic voters are paying attention,” Joshua Blank, the research director of the nonpartisan Texas Politics Project, told me. “Having something to rally around is very, very useful for them.” Republicans have not tried to deny that they’re making a blatant power grab, though they argue that they’re simply following the lead of Democrats in heavily gerrymandered states such as Illinois. “It’s just unilateral disarmament if you don’t match what Democrats have done on the other side,” Matt Mackowiak, a Texas Republican strategist who is working on Senator John Cornyn’s reelection campaign, told me. (The difference is that in Texas, they’re redrawing the maps five years early, rather than waiting for the census.)

But quorum breaks are, by nature, temporary. Eventually, the wayward lawmakers will go home. What matters is when. The candidate-filing deadline for the 2026 election is December 8, and the primary is in March, so theoretically, if lawmakers can stay out of state for multiple months, Republicans might run into legal problems getting their new map in place.

One problem with the run-down-the-clock strategy is that, in the past, Texas courts have simply postponed the state’s primary while congressional maps were being litigated. (That delay likely contributed to Ted Cruz’s 2012 Senate victory.) Another challenge is keeping up the political will; as time drags on, Texas voters will want their representatives to come home and do their job. Then, there are the logistical issues. A long quorum break means that Texas Democrats spend weeks or months living in a hotel, away from their families and racking up bills. Many of those state lawmakers have jobs outside politics—jobs that might not be well suited to working remotely from a hotel conference room. A few members brought small children with them to Chicago, Hinojosa told me, and some of those children will probably have to be back in school soon. “We’ve seen it before,” Rottinghaus said. “The biggest pull for members to come back isn’t always the politics; it’s most often the personal.”

[Read: A Democrat for the Trump era]

When I asked Texas Representative Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos how long she was willing to stay in Chicago, she told me that she understands the burden this puts on families; her own daughter is recovering from a liver transplant. “Am I prepared for two weeks? Three weeks? What is the alternative?” she asked. “If this is a sacrifice that we need to make, then it’s the sacrifice that has to be made.” But two or three weeks probably won’t be enough. (It’s possible, Rodríguez Ramos suggested, that the state’s 11 Senate Democrats, who remain in-state, could take their own turn breaking quorum; only one chamber needs to do so to stop legislation from being passed.)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s threats complicate the picture. This morning, he suggested that if Democrats “don’t start showing up,” Republicans will add a few more GOP seats to the new map. He has promised to fine the runaway Democrats $500 each for every day that they’re gone, and to go after any groups raising money for them. Abbott has also suggested that he’ll kick the Democrats out of their seats in the legislature—although experts say he does not have the power to do so directly. Earlier this week, the state house issued civil-arrest warrants for the rogue Democrats, and yesterday, Cornyn announced that the FBI had agreed to “locate” them. Although FBI involvement might seem far-fetched, “there’s very little that restricts” the agency, Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former FBI agent, told me. The bureau could share information with local law enforcement, he said.

A single one of these variables is not likely to shatter the Texas Democrats’ resolve, but over time, the pressure adds up. After making headlines for a few weeks, Democrats will probably be squeezed dry, emotionally and financially. A few will return home, and then, eventually, they all will. The new GOP district map will pass, perhaps in a slightly altered form, and Republicans will have what they’ve been fighting for: a few more GOP congressional districts, perhaps just enough to preserve the party’s narrow hold on the House of Representatives through what might be a tough midterm election.

But Texas Democrats aren’t willing to entertain that possibility just yet. In Chicago, members are reassessing the situation each day, Hinojosa told me. To sum up the general attitude, she paraphrased former Texas Governor Ann Richards. “All we have is the here and now,” she said, “and if we play it right, it’s all we need.” A more realistic view of the situation might be that Democrats are seizing the moment because they know it’s fleeting.

Captain Ron’s Guide to Fearless Flying

2025-08-06T10:00:00-04:00

On a hot Saturday evening in May, I reported to Terminal 4 of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. There, in a small conference room behind an unmarked door, I put on a name tag and joined 18 other nervous-looking people hoping to be cured by Captain Ron.

Captain Ron (real name Ron Nielsen) is a 78-year-old former commercial pilot who teaches a free class for nervous fliers roughly once a month. He has the wholesome look of a small-town minister: rectangular glasses, short-cropped white hair, and a whimsical tuft sticking out of each nostril. He’s like the aviation equivalent of Rick Steves—the kind of guy who, after a class that goes particularly well, exclaims, “It should be against the law to have that much fun!”

A fear of flying, Captain Ron explained, is nothing to be ashamed of. “You’re not broken.” The anxiety looks different for different people. Some worry mostly about external factors, such as crashes and terrorism. Others dread a panic attack—and how fellow passengers might react to it.

Sitting next to me was a retiree named Mike who had been coming to Captain Ron’s class regularly to address his claustrophobia ahead of a long-anticipated flight: a two-hour trip to Reno to visit his grandson. Across the table, Stephanie and her husband, whom she’d brought along for moral support, were planning a trip to Cambodia. “Over water,” someone across the room offered. Stephanie’s eyes were wide. We understood completely.

Lots of people suffer from a fear of flying, including at least 25 million of us in the United States, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Our worries are often dismissed as irrational—planes are much safer than cars, etc. But a recent succession of terrifying airplane incidents has only seemed to validate our phobia—most notably, the crash landing of the Air India Dreamliner that killed 241 people on board in early June, which came just a few months after the midair collision that killed 67 people near my home airport, just outside Washington, D.C.

Recent events notwithstanding, most aviation fears boil down to a lack of control, Elaine Iljon Foreman, a clinical psychologist and co-author of Fly Away Fear, told me. Sometimes these fears are triggered or exacerbated by a specific flying experience, or major life changes. Alex, a 42-year-old IT manager who sat near me in class, said that he developed his fear of flying when his wife was pregnant with their twins. The couple were forced to fly twice from Phoenix to Los Angeles for medical care to save the pregnancy, and for Alex, it was a traumatic experience.

I’d experienced 21 years of unmemorable flights before my own fear of flying took hold. In May 2015, I was traveling from my home state of Iowa to New York City for a summer internship. I was already nervous about moving, and then, somewhere above Illinois, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and dropped what felt like a thousand feet. Several people screamed. For the first time in my life, I began to experience what I would later understand to be panic: My face and neck went clammy, and black spots filled my vision. At one point, an overhead bin popped open and a few unbuckled passengers smacked their head on the ceiling. They were all okay, and, physically, so was I. But I had unlocked a new fear.

I’ve been a white-knuckle flier ever since. Upon boarding, I proceed down the aisle like a bride heading to a doomed marriage, quietly assessing my fellow passengers for trustworthiness, should a crash require us to forge a Lost-style alliance of survivors. At the first bump, my palms start to sweat and my calf muscles tighten. In particularly rough air, when the pilot urges the flight attendants to please take their seats, I begin to administer my own last rites—You’ve had a good run, my brain whispers—and fire off a few farewell notes to loved ones: “Really bad up here,” I text my boyfriend. “Love you.” Once, on my way to a friend’s wedding, I was so overcome with anxiety that I passed out at the gate, my body folding over my suitcase like a wilted flower.

For a while, I considered a flightless future. But the cost was too high. I remembered Royce White, the Iowa State basketball player whose fear of flying required him to drive hundreds of miles to away games, and contributed to the end of his NBA career. I thought of a longtime family friend named Betty whose aerophobia I had always interpreted as an abiding love for trains. Betty regularly traveled between Iowa and Florida via Amtrak sleeper car, a journey that took 96 hours, required layovers in Chicago and D.C., and cost approximately $4,000.

I’ve kept flying, but many of the others in Captain Ron’s class hadn’t. Alex had flown only once since his wife gave birth (the twins are in grade school now). Mike, the claustrophobic retiree, told me that on a recent attempt to fly, he took an Ambien and drank a few shots of whiskey, yet he remained too terrified to board. Tired and tipsy, he had to call his daughter for a ride home.

The main portion of Captain Ron’s class took place on a stationary Southwest airplane. After introductions, he handed out boarding passes bearing our names but no destination, and together we marched warily from the ticketing area through security. At gate D-13, a Southwest agent led us down the jet bridge and onto a waiting Boeing 737 Max 8 and, once we were seated, made a formal boarding announcement: “Good evening and welcome aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 1234, with service to nowhere!”

For the next hour, Captain Ron stood in the aisle and delivered a lecture that flitted between airplane trivia and personal anecdotes. We learned how much time is generally required for a plane to become airborne (35 to 45 seconds) and how much fuel planes typically carry for domestic flights (more than enough to get to their destination). We were reminded that turbulence, while unpleasant, is not dangerous. We learned about strategies for overpowering our emotional “elephant brain” with our logical “rider brain.” If we needed an “actionable task” to distract ourselves during takeoff, Captain Ron suggested journaling about our anxiety or quizzing a travel companion with rapid-fire math problems. Together, we inhaled for four seconds and exhaled for six. Sometimes, we learned, it helps to breathe through a straw.

[Read: Fear of flying is different now]

Very little seemed to crack Captain Ron’s cheery exterior, including questions about the recent air-travel incidents. Newark airport had just experienced a brief radar blackout, and on the same day our class was held, the aviation hub was having air-traffic-control staffing issues. A student asked Captain Ron whether people should be worried. “Great one, great one,” he said. Airports, he explained, reduce the number of planes in the air if there aren’t enough controllers to keep people flying safely. (A few days after our class, NBC News reported that, according to an anonymous Newark air-traffic controller, the airport had lost radio contact with pilots multiple times in recent months. “I can’t tell you that that’s a desirable situation,” Captain Ron told me by phone. But pilots “have procedures” for this.)

After an hour together on the plane, we disembarked and took a group photo at the entrance to the jet bridge. A few of my classmates would be back in a month, to commune again with other anxious fliers and spend another hour on a plane hearing Captain Ron’s soothing words. For some, just sitting on that grounded plane is a form of exposure therapy. I wished I could join them.

Matteo Giuseppe Pani

The irony was not lost on me that attending my fear-of-flying class required taking two long plane rides. But the next morning I was feeling confident, and decided to forgo my usual Xanax before the flight home. Captain Ron had advised me to try boarding early, to meet the pilots, something I had assumed only a child could do.

In the cockpit, I told the captain and first officer that I hated turbulence. “That’s what everybody seems to be afraid of,” the captain said, laughing. “It’s never caused a problem.” I smiled politely. The first officer explained that he often falls asleep when he flies as a passenger—“and I wake up when we touch down!” Very helpful.

At my seat, I focused on Captain Ron’s actionable tasks. I timed our takeoff, which took exactly 40 seconds. I journaled my feelings, and listened to an audio recording created by Captain Ron called “Harmonizer,” a 32-minute cacophony of sounds and hypnotic phrases meant to desensitize and distract your brain. (“No more fears, no more suffering,” Captain Ron says on the recording. “I’ve had it, and now I’m changing. Today’s the day!”) For a more absorbing diversion, I watched a few episodes of a smutty Netflix drama about British prep schoolers.

Halfway through the flight, the plane hit a rough patch, and my skin grew clammy. What if I had distracted the pilots from their preflight checklist? Soon there was a new bout of bumps, this time bigger. My chest tightened, and I tried to breathe in for four seconds and out for six.

I thought of one of my classmates, Irene, who told me she practices accepting her lack of control by reminding herself that the universe does “what it’s going to do.” I tried to achieve a similar state of acceptance. After a few minutes, my heartbeat slowed.

The flight turned out to be one of my bumpiest, and therefore most unpleasant, in recent memory. Captain Ron had not fixed me. But I was a slightly different flier. I had learned some new tools for managing my fear. And I’d come to view that fear as something other than a shameful secret. Yes, I’d been anxious. But I had flown to Arizona. I’d eaten carne asada, hiked the Big Butte Loop, and laughed at the name “Big Butte Loop.” I had faced my discomfort—and boarded the plane anyway.

A few days after I returned to D.C., my classmate Alex was set to fly to Chicago with his family—his first airplane trip in years. I texted him the night before to say that I was thinking of him. When I didn’t hear back, I worried that his fear had once again gotten in the way. Then, late the following afternoon, I received a text. It was a picture of distant red-sandstone hills—Phoenix’s Papago Park—from a tiny airplane window.

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Captain Ron’s Guide to Fearless Flying.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Republicans Want to Redraw America’s Political Map

2025-07-30T18:58:00-04:00

Texas Republicans are planning to redraw their congressional districts this year, five years ahead of schedule. As with most other recent examples of norm-breaking behavior in American politics, the reason for this involves Donald J. Trump.

Earlier this summer, the president asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott to dabble in a little gerrymandering to produce five more Republican-leaning districts in his state ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. In July, Abbott answered the call, summoning state lawmakers back to Austin for a 30-day special session, in part to begin working on a new district map. (The Texas legislature is in session only once every other year.) The state has been holding public hearings about the redistricting plan; this morning, state lawmakers released a proposed new map that could give the GOP 30 of the state’s 38 House seats and help pad the party’s slim majority.

Not much appears to prevent Texas Republicans from doing this. States typically redraw their congressional districts every 10 years, after a new census is conducted. But the Texas GOP has gone off schedule before, way back in 2003, and the Supreme Court later ruled that the Constitution doesn’t prohibit mid-decade redistricting. There’s been plenty of resistance from Texas voters, who’ve filled public-hearing rooms in protest, and from high-profile politicians, who’ve appeared at rallies and raised money to fight the new map. The state’s Democrats might consider breaking quorum, like they did in 2021 to block a vote on the issue, but GOP lawmakers probably have the leverage to force them back to the table. So far, things are going according to plan for Texas Republicans. They have the votes, and at least right now, they seem to have the political will.

But just as important as whether Texas Republicans follow through with redistricting is how Democrats will respond. A gerrymandering war, in other words, could be on the way. “We’re saying to the Texans, ‘You shouldn’t be going down this path,’” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week. “You want to go down this path? We’ll go down together.” The governors (and wannabe presidential contenders) Gavin Newsom of California and J. B. Pritzker of Illinois both suggested that they will consider redrawing their own state’s districts to favor—or further favor—Democrats. Similar efforts are being considered in New York and Maryland too.

Many experts—and Democrats themselves—have long argued that partisan gerrymandering is undemocratic and unfair. Their embrace of a gerrymandering tit for tat would reflect a new mindset that many Democrats have adopted in the second Trump era: that they should be just as politically ruthless as Republicans—and when the GOP goes low, the Democrats should meet them there.

But two questions complicate this approach. The first is a logistical one: Can Democrats even do what they’re threatening to? “It’s a state-by-state determination,” the election-law expert David Becker told me. Some states, such as California and New York, have independent redistricting commissions, which means that any attempt at partisan gerrymandering would require turning that power back over to politicians—a complicated and slow process. Other states, such as Illinois and Maryland, have laws allowing for a little more flexibility when redrawing maps.

The other, more pressing question for Democrats is whether they should. They certainly may feel inclined to match the GOP’s aggressive tactics, but extreme partisan gerrymandering carries a certain amount of risk, one that Texas Republicans would be undertaking, Becker said. To maximize Republican wins in more districts overall, they might have to reduce their margins in others, making some of those new districts vulnerable in a potential blue-wave election.

All this partisan maneuvering is arguably a race to the bottom. Imagine a future in which every two years, states redraw their congressional maps: Voters would find themselves in a new district several times each decade, unable to get to know the people who are supposed to represent them. “This would do incredible damage to faith in institutions” and add to the cynicism that so many Americans already feel about politics, Dan Vicuña, a senior policy director at Common Cause, told me.

“There appears to be a temptation to meet attacks on democracy with more attacks on democracy,” Vicuña added. It’s up to Democrats to decide if they’ll resist the urge.

Related:

Republicans discover the horror of gerrymandering. (From 2022)
Has the tide turned against partisan gerrymandering? (From 2018)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Former Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she will not run for California governor in 2026, choosing to instead focus on supporting Democrats nationwide after her 2024 presidential loss. Harris didn’t confirm any specific future plans.
An 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s Far East region yesterday, triggering tsunami waves that reached Hawaii, California, and Washington. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem confirmed this morning that the threat of a major tsunami had “passed completely,” with no significant damage reported.
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady, despite pressure from President Donald Trump to lower rates, and warned about slowing growth. Officials have signaled potential cuts later this year, as inflation remains somewhat elevated and economic uncertainty increases.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Denzer

A Love Letter to Music Listings

By Gabriel Kahane

About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled because of an approaching nor’easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show’s cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town?

This used to be easy.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Culture Break

Ross Harried / NurPhoto / Getty

Read. “Preamble to the West,” a poem by Iris Jamahl Dunkle:

“Can’t lick the witch wind that carries rumors / over shining aurora-lit prairies: / horror of what comes to light at the dawn / of the mind.”

Take a look. These photos capture Guédelon Castle, in France, where builders use 13th-century techniques to re-create medieval craftsmanship.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Lots of you responded to last week’s newsletter about finding simple moments of joy in your daily life, and I’ve loved reading your answers. I’ll share two of my favorites here, as a bit of a prelude to a forthcoming, small-delights-focused issue of the Daily.

Eric wrote in to say that he was inspired by the 2023 movie Perfect Days (which I need to watch!) and is now trying to incorporate a simple, daily gesture into his life: “When I walk out my door to go to work, I try to remember to just stop, stand, look at my neighborhood and the sky, and smile—it may take only 10 seconds, but it begins the public version of my life on the right foot.” Another idea I liked, from Sarah, is buying one new thing at the grocery store every time you visit: “It’s a mini flavor adventure every trip, whether it turns out I’d buy that thing again or not.”

Stay tuned: More tips coming soon!

— Elaine

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A Democrat for the Trump Era

2025-07-27T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload.

She was losing her race to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn’t actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though “that person did the worst” in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were “reaching out and asking for donations,” she said, but those same colleagues “won’t even send me a text back” about the Oversight job.

To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party’s bigger predicament. Her colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told me.

In poll after poll since Donald Trump’s reelection, Democratic voters have said they want a fighter, and Crockett, a former attorney who represents the Dallas area, has spent two and a half years in Congress trying to be one. Through her hearing-room quips and social-media insults, she’s become known, at least in MSNBC-watching households, as a leading general in the battle against Trump. The president is aware of this. He has repeatedly called Crockett a “low-IQ” individual; she has dubbed him a “buffoon” and “Putin’s hoe.” Perhaps the best-known Crockett clapback came last year during a hearing, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made fun of Crockett’s fake eyelashes. Crockett, seeming to relish the moment, leaned into the mic and blasted Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” Crockett trademarked the phrase—which she now refers to as “B6”—and started selling T-shirts.

At the time, I wrote that the episode was embarrassing for everyone involved. But clearly it resonated. Crockett has become a national figure. Last year, she gave a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention and was a national co-chair of Kamala Harris’s campaign. This year, she has been a fixture on cable news and talk shows as well as a top party fundraiser; she was in Atlanta, in part, for a meet and greet with local donors. At an anti-Trump protest on the National Mall in April, I saw several demonstrators wearing B6 shirts. Others carried signs with Crockett’s face on them.

Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there. That approach, her supporters say, appeals to people who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024, including many young and Black voters. “What establishment Democrats see as undignified,” Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, told me, “disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.” Republicans understand this, Crockett said: “Marjorie is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.”

Perhaps inadvertently, Crockett seemed to be acknowledging something I heard from others in my reporting: that the forthrightness her supporters love might undermine her relationships within the party. Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats worry that her rhetoric could alienate the more moderate voters the party needs to win back. In the same week that Democratic leadership had instructed members to focus on Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for billionaires, Crockett referred to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels.” (Crockett claimed that she was referring to Abbott’s busing of migrants.) In an interview with Vanity Fair after the 2024 election, Crockett said that Hispanic Trump supporters had “almost like a slave mentality.” She later told a CNN host that she was tired of “white tears” and the “mediocre white boys” who are upset by DEI.

Unsurprisingly, Trump himself seems eager to elevate Crockett. “They say she’s the face of the party,” the president told my Atlantic colleagues recently. “If she’s what they have to offer, they don’t have a chance.” Some of the Republican targeting of Crockett is clearly rooted in racism; online, Trump’s supporters constantly refer to her as “ghetto” and make fun of her hair.

[From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’]

None of this appears to be giving Crockett any pause. The first time I met her, a month before our conversation in Atlanta, she was accepting a Webby Award, in part for a viral exchange in which she’d referred to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina as “child” and Mace suggested they “take it outside.” Backstage, in a downtown-Manhattan ballroom, I asked Crockett whether she ever had regrets about her public comments. She raised her eyebrows and replied, “I don’t second-guess shit.”

This spring, I watched Crockett test her theory of politics in a series of public appearances. At the Webbys, most of her fellow award winners were celebrities and influencers, but only Crockett received a standing ovation. A week later, Crockett flamed Republicans and the Trump administration during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing about Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A 15-minute clip of her upbraiding ICE agents—“These people are out of control!”—has racked up more than 797,000 views on YouTube; I know this because she told me. On TikTok and Instagram, Crockett has one of the highest follower counts of any House member, and she monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio. She is highly conscious, too, of her self-presentation. During many of our conversations, Crockett wore acrylic nails painted with the word RESIST, and a set of heavy lashes over her brown eyes. The lock screen on her phone is a headshot of herself.

Representative Jasmine Crockett rides in a vehicle after attending events in the Atlanta area last month. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

Behind the scenes, the representative speaks casually. At the Waldorf, I watched her deliver a quick Oversight-campaign pitch via Zoom. It was a virtual meeting of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, she’d explained to me beforehand. But then, after the call, she wasn’t sure. “CAPAC is the Asian caucus, right?” she asked. “Yes,” the aide confirmed. “That would’ve been bad,” Crockett said with a laugh. She can also be brusque. During our interview at the Waldorf, she dialed up a staffer in D.C. in front of me and scolded him for an unclear note on her schedule. Another time, in the car, after an aide brought Crockett a paper bag full of food from a fundraiser, she peered inside, scrunched her nose, and said, “This looks like crap.”

Still, Crockett is often more thoughtful in person than she might appear in clips. Once, after a hearing, I watched as she responded to a request for comment with a tight 90-second answer about faith and service. Another time, a reporter who was filming her tried to provoke her by asking what she would say to people who think she is “mentally ill.” “They can think whatever they want to, because as of now, we live in a democracy,” Crockett answered calmly, before taking another question. “I don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that this is someone with a very fine, legally trained mind,” Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, a mentor of Crockett’s, told me.

Crockett’s Republican critics like to say that she’s a private-school girl playing a plainspoken Texas brawler for social-media clout. They’re not wrong about her background. Crockett grew up an only child in St. Louis, not Dallas, and attended private high school before enrolling at Rhodes College, a small liberal-arts school in Tennessee. When Crockett was young, her father was a life-insurance salesman and a teacher, she told me, and she has talked often about his work as a preacher; her mother, she said, still works for the IRS. Crockett’s stage presence precedes her political career. At Rhodes, from which she graduated in 2003, she was recruited to the mock-trial program after a team leader watched her enthusiastic performance as the narrator Ronnette in Little Shop of Horrors, her former coach, Marcus Pohlmann, told me. She won a national award during her first and only year in the program.

As Crockett tells it, she became interested in the law after she and a few other Black students at Rhodes received anonymous letters containing racist threats. The school hired a Black female attorney from the Cochran Firm, a national personal-injury-law group, to handle the case, Crockett told me. The attorney became Crockett’s “shero,” she said, and inspired her to attend law school herself. When I asked for the name of her shero so that I could interview her, Crockett told me that she did not remember. I reached out to a former Cochran Firm attorney in Tennessee who fit Crockett’s description; she remembered the incident in broad terms but was not sure if she had worked on the case or with Crockett. Although Rhodes College had no specific records of the incident, two people who worked at the college at the time told me that they recalled it.

Crockett worked for a few years as a public defender in deep-red Bowie County, Texas, before starting her own law firm, where she drew attention for defending Black Lives Matter demonstrators. She was sworn in to the Texas state House in 2021 and became the body’s third-most progressive member, according to the Texas Tribune, authoring dozens of bills, with an emphasis on criminal-justice reform. (None of the legislation for which she was the main author ever passed the Republican-dominated legislature.) “Most freshmen come, they are just trying to learn where the restrooms are,” but Crockett “came with a fight in her,” Texas Representative Toni Rose, a former Democratic colleague of Crockett’s, told me.

[Read: The real problem with Democrats’ ground game]

Having defeated an incumbent Democrat to win her seat, Crockett was already viewed as an agitator by some of her new colleagues. Then, in 2021, she became the unofficial spokesperson for a group of more than 50 Texas Democrats who fled to D.C. in a high-profile effort to stall Republican legislation. Her dealings with the press built up “real resentment” with Democratic leaders, one Texas-based party strategist, who was familiar with caucus actions at the time, told me. (This person, like some others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.) “When they broke quorum and it was important that everything be secret, she was on the phone to the press talking about what they were getting ready to do,” the strategist said. Both Crockett and her chief of staff at the time, Karrol Rimal, denied this version of events and told me that she had not given an interview before arriving in D.C. Rimal said that Crockett had agreed to do press only if the story would not be published until the Texas lawmakers crossed state lines. He added that state Democrats were sometimes jealous because Crockett “outshined them.”

Crockett attends a conference at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, in June. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

The state-House drama was short-lived: After one term, Crockett became the handpicked replacement for 15-term U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Crockett sailed to victory, and less than a year later, her breakthrough moment arrived: While questioning a witness in a committee hearing, Crockett held up a photograph of several boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. The classified documents, she said, looked like they were “in the shitter to me!” Trump critics praised her as an “absolute star” and their “new favorite Congresswoman.”

Not everyone agreed. Johnson felt that the freshman representative was dismissive of her experience and advice, according to two sources familiar with the relationship. “I don’t think it was a secret” that by the time Johnson died, in December 2023, “she had had second thoughts about Jasmine,” the Texas-based Democratic strategist said. Crockett strongly denied this characterization and said that she had never heard it from those close to Johnson. I reached out to Johnson’s son for his view, but he didn’t respond.

The race to replace the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, the late Representative Gerry Connolly, presented a multipurpose opportunity. Democrats could preview their resistance strategy for a second Trump administration. And Crockett, who’d run an unsuccessful, last-minute bid for a leadership position the previous year, could test her own viability as a party leader.

In late May, Crockett brought me along to a private meeting in the green-walled office of a freshman member—Maxine Dexter of Oregon—where she made her pitch: The Democrats have a communication problem, Crockett said. “The biggest issue” with Joe Biden’s presidency wasn’t “that he wasn’t a great president,” she explained. “It was that no one knew what the fuck he did.” (Crockett acknowledged to Dexter that the former president is “old as shit,” but said, “He’s an old man that gets shit done.”) Crockett highlighted her own emphasis on social media, and the hundreds of thousands of views she had received on a recent YouTube video. “The base is thirsty. The base right now is not very happy with us,” Crockett continued, and if any lawmaker could make them feel heard, “it’s me.”

Crockett told Dexter that she had big plans for Oversight. She wanted to take hearings on the road, and to show voters that “these motherfuckers”—Republicans—are all “complicit” in Trump’s wrongdoing. She wasn’t worried about her own reelection. “I guess it’s my fearlessness,” she told Dexter.

Dexter asked Crockett about her relationship with leadership. Another young firebrand, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had bumped up against then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she arrived in Congress, Dexter noted. Crockett dismissed that concern, explaining that she had never wanted to “burn it down” and prefers to be seen as working on behalf of the party. The national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is a good idea, Crockett said, but it “kind of makes people be like, Oh, it’s about them, right? Instead of the team.” (Through a spokesperson, Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment. Crockett told me that the two have a positive relationship.)

[Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?]

By the end of the meeting, Dexter was ready to vote for Crockett. But she would never get the chance. Five days after Crockett’s fundraiser in Atlanta, Punchbowl News reported that she had “leaned into the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump,” which spooked swing-district members. Representative Robert Garcia of California was quickly becoming the caucus favorite. Like Crockett, he was relatively young and outspoken. But he had spent his campaign making a “subtle” case for generational change, Punchbowl said, and he’d told members that the Oversight panel shouldn’t “function solely as an anti-Trump entity.”

The same day the Punchbowl report was published, 62 Democratic leaders met to decide which of the four Oversight candidates they’d recommend to the caucus. The vote was decisive: Garcia, with 33 votes, was the winner. Crockett placed last, with only six. Around midnight, she went live on Instagram to announce that she was withdrawing her name from the race; Garcia would be elected the next morning. In the end, “recent questions about something that just wasn’t true” had tanked her support, Crockett told her Instagram viewers. She hadn’t campaigned on impeaching Trump, she told me later; she’d simply told a reporter that, if Democrats held a majority in the House, she would support an impeachment inquiry. And why not? She was just being transparent, Crockett told me, “and frankly, I may not get a lot of places because I am very transparent.”

Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats find that candor refreshing. “People don’t necessarily agree with her aggressive communication style,” Representative Julie Johnson of Texas told me. “I’m thrilled she’s doing it, because we need it all.” Garcia, in a statement from his office, told me that Crockett is “one of the strongest fighters we have,” and that, “as a party, we should be taking notes on the kinds of skills she exemplifies.” But several other Democrats I reached out to about the race seemed uninterested in weighing in. Thirteen of her colleagues on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, along with 20 other Democratic members I contacted for this story, either declined to talk with me on the record or didn’t respond to my interview requests. Senior staffers for three Democratic members told me that some of Crockett’s colleagues see her as undisciplined but are reluctant to criticize her publicly. “She likes to talk,” one of the staffers said. “Is she a loose cannon? Sometimes. Does that cause headaches for other members? 100 percent.”

Crockett said that people are free to disagree with her communication style, but that she “was elected to speak up for the people that I represent.” As for her colleagues, four days before this story was published, Crockett called me to express frustration that I had reached out to so many House members without telling her first. She was, she told me, “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.”

Crockett does not have supporters so much as she has admirers. Everywhere she goes, young people ask for selfies, and groups of her red-clad Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters pop up to cheer her on. A few days before she dropped out of the Oversight race, a congregation outside of Atlanta full of middle-aged Black Georgians was giddy to host her: Here was Jasmine Crockett, recounting her feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“She thought she could play with me,” Crockett told Pastor Jamal Bryant, the leader of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and a progressive activist. There were a few “oh no”s in the crowd. “The average, maybe, person in my party potentially would have just let it go,” Crockett went on. “I wasn’t the one.” There were claps and whoops. “I was steaming, and I was ready,” she said. “I was like, ‘Well, two wrongs gonna make a right today, baby, cause I ain’t gonna let it go!’” The righteous anger in Crockett’s voice was audible; people applauded for it, probably because it sounded a lot like their own.

Audience members react to Crockett during a live recording of Pastor Jamal Bryant’s podcast at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

Crockett’s fans are rooting for her to go bigger. And when I asked if she was considering running for Senate in the future—John Cornyn is up for reelection next year—Crockett didn’t wave me off. “My philosophy is: Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready,” she said. Crockett imagines a world in which Democrats are associated with lofty ideals and monosyllabic slogans, like Barack Obama once was. When I asked her what the party should stand for beyond being against Trump, and what she stands for, she explained, “For me, I always just say ‘the people,’” adding that her campaigns have always been associated with “fire.”

[Read: Where is Obama?]

Plenty of other Democrats believe that Crockett’s approach comes dangerously close to arson. Her critics argue that it’s easy to be outspoken in a safe Democratic seat; they might also point out that Crockett received 7,000 fewer votes in 2024 than Johnson, her predecessor, had in 2020. You can see James Carville coming from a mile away. “I don’t think we need a Marjorie Taylor Greene,” the longtime Democratic consultant told me. Crockett is “passionate. She has an instinct for making headlines. But does that help us at the end of the day?” he said. “You’re trying to win the election. That’s the overall goal.”

Crockett is not Marjorie Taylor Greene; for one, she is not peddling space-laser, weather-control conspiracy theories. Yet Crockett’s combative style could be a misreading of the moment, Lakshya Jain, an analyst at the political-forecasting site Split Ticket, told me. “People think the brand issue that Democrats have is they don’t fight enough and that they’re not mean enough,” Jain said, but “those are all just proxies for saying that they can’t get stuff done for people.” In Congress, Crockett has championed progressive causes and introduced plenty of legislation, but none of the bills she’s been the lead sponsor of has become law.

Clearly, though, lots of real-life voters want Jasmine Crockett. At the church outside Atlanta, Pastor Bryant triggered a standing ovation when he declared, “Jasmine Crockett for president” and “2028 is coming, y’all!” Outside, in the parking lot, someone shouted at Crockett, “First Black-woman president!” June was a disheartening month for Crockett. She was soundly rejected by her own colleagues and shut out of a chance at institutional power. But when we talked in her hotel room in Atlanta, she’d framed the situation differently: If Americans on the outside could vote, she’d insisted, “I absolutely feel like I know where it would go.”

An Easy Summer Project Worth Doing

2025-07-25T16:49:00-04:00

Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in the sun with a book until my skin was slightly crisp, making full meals out of cheese and rosé. Of course, when I returned, I felt very, very sad. Real life is rarely as sunny and sparkly and juicy as vacation life. Right away, I found myself wishing that I could somehow preserve those delicious vacation morsels and store them in my cheeks like a chipmunk preparing for winter. Which is when I remembered something important: my own free will. What was stopping me from replicating the joy of vacation in my regular life?

So began my quest to do things differently. Call it “romanticizing my life,” if you want. Or call it self-care—actually, please don’t. But soon after returning from my trip, I was living more intentionally than I had before. I was searching for things to savor. I woke up early(ish) and started my day with a slow, luxurious stretch. In the evenings, rather than melting into the couch with the remote, I turned off my phone, made a lime-and-bitters mocktail, and read physical books—only fiction allowed. Less virtuously, I bought things: a towel that promised to cradle me in soft fibers, a new Sharpie gel pen, a funny little French plate that said Fromage in red cursive.

The effort was not a complete success. Replicating the exact feeling of holiday weightlessness is impossible; the demands of work and life always tend to interfere. But I did discover that these small changes were making my daily life, on average, a teensy bit happier. Someone once said that you should do something every day that scares you, and I’m sure those words have galvanized many powerful people to action. But regular life is frightening enough. What if we sought out daily moments of joy instead?

I asked some of my colleagues how they create their own tiny moments of delight. Here are a few of their answers:

Staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig wakes up and starts working the group chats, sending a “Rise n’ grind” to her girlfriends and a “Goooooood morning lads” to her passel of politics-chat guys. “It’s like starting the day by going to a party with all my friends,” she told me. “Instantly puts me in a good mood.” On the flip side, Ellen Cushing is working on texting less and calling more. She now talks with her oldest friend, who lives far away, almost every weekday—sometimes for an hour, other times for five minutes. Their conversations, which aren’t scheduled, involve two simple rules: You pick up the call if you can, and you hang up whenever you need to.
Senior editor Vann Newkirk tends to his many indoor plants: a fiddle-leaf fig, a proliferation of spider plants, a pothos, a monstera, a couple of peace lilies, some different calatheas, an African violet, a peperomia, and a ponytail palm. “Even on no-water days, I like to check on them,” he told me, and “write little notes about how they are growing or where they grow best.”
For a while, Shane Harris, a staff writer on the Politics team, began each day by reading a poem from David Whyte’s Everything Is Waiting for You. The purpose “was to gently wake up my mind and my imagination, before I started writing,” he told me. “It’s such a better ritual than reading the news.”
Staff writer Annie Lowrey decompresses her spine(!) at night, which, she told me, involves bending over to hang like a rag doll, or dead-hanging from a pull-up bar: “It’s the best.” She also journals every morning about the things that she’s thankful for, and prays in gratitude for achieving difficult feats. “Maybe you accepted a vulnerability and your ability to handle it? Maybe you realized you could celebrate someone else’s success rather than wishing it were your own?” she said. It’s annoying when the “obvious advice,” such as drinking more water and getting more sleep, is right, she said. But gratitude is, unsurprisingly, good for your mood and mental health.
Isabel Fattal, my lovely editor for this newsletter, curates playlists for her morning and evening commutes—which are based less on genre or Spotify’s suggestions than on the kind of mood she’d like to be in at that point in the day. “When I was a college intern in New York, I once managed to go seven stops in the wrong direction on the subway because I was listening to the National (I had a lot of feelings in that era),” she told me. “I’ve since improved my spatial awareness, but I maintain that the right music can elevate any experience.”

If you have kids, you can include them in your happiness project, as many of my staff-writer friends do. Ross Andersen, for example, has enlisted his kids to make him a cappuccino every morning, which is genius and perhaps also a violation of child-labor laws. Clint Smith and his son spent a summer watching highlights from a different World Cup every day, which, he told me, was “a fun way to grow together in our joint fandom and also was a pretty fun geography lesson.” And McKay Coppins told me he loves his 2-year-old’s bedtime routine, which involves a monster-robot game, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and a good-night prayer. “Bedtime can be notoriously stressful for parents of young kids—and it often is for me too!” McKay told me. “But I always end up looking forward to this little slice of my day.”

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A shooting at a University of New Mexico dorm left one person dead and another wounded. Law enforcement is searching for the suspect.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the “largesse” of the Fed’s headquarters renovations, just a day after President Donald Trump appeared to ease tensions during a visit to the Federal Reserve.
The Trump administration will release $5.5 billion in frozen education funds to support teacher training and recruitment, English-language learners, and arts programs ahead of the new school year.

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Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Edward Bottomley / Getty; Dario Belingheri / Getty.

Science Is Winning the Tour de France

By Matt Seaton

For fans of the Tour de France, the word extraterrestrial has a special resonance—and not a fun, Spielbergian one. In 1999 the French sports newspaper L’Équipe ran a photo of Lance Armstrong on its front page, accompanied by the headline “On Another Planet.” This was not, in fact, complimenting the American athlete for an out-of-this-world performance in cycling’s premier race, but was code for “he’s cheating.”

At that point, L’Équipe’s dog-whistling accusation of doping was based on mere rumor. More than a decade passed before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency declared Armstrong guilty of doping. His remarkable streak of seven Tour wins was wiped from the record, but misgivings about extraterrestrial performances have never left the event.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

See. Check out these photos of the week from an animal shelter in Colombia, a mountain church service in Germany, a memorial to Ozzy Osbourne in England, the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, and much more.

Examine. Hulk Hogan embodied the role of larger-than-life pro-wrestling hero with unwavering showmanship, even as controversy and complexity shadowed his legacy, Jeremy Gordon writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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The 2028 Presidential Race Has Begun

2025-07-24T19:47:00-04:00

Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and adviser to two Democratic presidents, is suddenly all over the news. This week alone, he’s appeared on a number of podcasts in what seem to be early forays into an exploratory campaign for president. Emanuel went on the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s podcast and answered “no” when asked if a man can “become a woman.” On another podcast, with The Free Press’s Bari Weiss, Emanuel said that Democrats lost in 2024 because Kamala Harris didn’t set herself apart from Joe Biden, and noted that his party “got sidetracked” by issues that were not front of mind for voters.

Emanuel was the most visible in the media this week, but he’s not the only would-be candidate we’re hearing from. This morning, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg went on the podcast The Breakfast Club; he also made a surprise cameo on a Barstool Sports podcast last week to present a jokey “Lib of the Year” award to the internet personality Jersey Jerry, who was wearing a MAGA hat. In an elegant Vogue spread, an old-school and somewhat stiff way to communicate one’s political ambitions, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear bragged about having once been on MrBeast’s show. “We’ve got to do the YouTube shows,” he said, telling the reporter that, unlike Harris, he would have gone on The Joe Rogan Experience. Buttigieg and Representative Ro Khanna of California have both appeared on the comedy podcast Flagrant, co-hosted by Andrew Schulz. California Governor Gavin Newsom invited the conservative activist Charlie Kirk to be a guest on the first episode of his podcast.

These appearances indicate that Democrats “are finally waking up to the fact that you can’t run a presidential campaign” simply “by going on CNN and MSNBC,” Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who worked on Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, told me. And these public appearances aren’t just a way for presidential hopefuls to introduce themselves to voters; they’re also opportunities for donors and party elites to start eyeballing their favorites and winnowing the primary field.

Most party strategists I’ve spoken with this year believe that Democrats need to appear on more nontraditional and ideologically diverse outlets to reach new voters and make more people—even those who don’t agree with the Democrats on everything—feel welcome inside the party tent. Donald Trump’s successful turns on Rogan’s podcast and on shows hosted by the comedians Theo Von and Schulz contributed to his victory last November.

Democratic hopefuls everywhere are swearing more and attempting to adopt a little more swagger. In his interview with Weiss, Emanuel, who once sent a dead fish to a political enemy, leaned back in his chair, looking unbothered; Buttigieg chopped it up with the bros on Flagrant for more than two hours. Notably, some female potential candidates aren’t yet in the mix—where’s Gretchen Whitmer these days? Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me that she didn’t know, but that it’s clear the party’s decline in support from men “has really lit a fire under Democratic dudes.”

Along with a broader shift in media strategy, we’re also seeing a shift in rhetoric from at least some Democrats. “These folks are right that the Democratic Party was seen as too extreme, and that contributed to our loss,” Erickson told me. She’s pleased, she said, that the current zeitgeist seems to be a move “toward the middle.” The Democratic course correction has begun.

Part of that involves punching left. After Emanuel told Kelly that a man cannot become a woman, Kelly sighed, lamenting, “Why don’t more people in your party just say that?” “Because,” Emanuel joked, “I’m now going to go into a witness-protection plan.” Newsom told Kirk that allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports is “deeply unfair,” and had broader critiques of the Democratic Party’s communication skills.

Democrats on the campaign trail have had a difficult time addressing topics around gender. One analysis conducted by a Democratic super PAC found that a Republican ad about Harris’s views on transgender identity was effective for Trump during the 2024 campaign. (Many Democrats criticized Harris’s campaign for refusing to respond to the ad, whose tagline read: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) Emanuel’s answer on Kelly’s show, whether or not it’s a winning message with the Democratic base, speaks to a tone change on the topic. Every 2028 hopeful can expect to be asked directly about their views on the subject—and “should be ready to answer,” Smith told me.

Even by the standards of the previous cycle’s incredibly early campaigning, all of this might seem rather premature to discuss. But as Emanuel himself is famous for saying, a good crisis should never go to waste. Democratic presidential hopefuls are well aware that the party’s leadership vacuum is an opportunity—and they’re determined to not misuse it.

Related:

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Today’s News

French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France will recognize Palestine as a state, which would make France the first G7 country to do so.
House Democrats repeatedly attempted to force votes on releasing files related to Jeffrey Epstein yesterday. The House recessed without moving forward on any legislation.
Columbia University announced last night that it will pay $200 million over three years to the federal government to settle claims that it failed to protect Jewish students; the move will restore most federal grants paused by the Trump administration.

Dispatches

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Illustration by Brian Scagnelli

The Problem With Rewards Credit Cards

By Ellen Cushing

Fancy cards are like coupon books or miners’ scrip, but they are also, in this sense, more like high-end gym memberships. The commodity they offer is access to a rarefied place, one where everyone else is attractive and competent, putting in the work and reaping the rewards. The product is a subscription to do more work—it’s a tax on laziness or a deposit on your future self’s conscientiousness. But it seems to me that credit-card companies, and gyms, know something consumers don’t: Everybody thinks they’ll be a more diligent person tomorrow.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

A24

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Home of the Brave

2025-07-12T07:00:00-04:00

A few specific sounds punctuate summer evenings in rural Iowa. A chorus of spring peepers, for example, or the shrill conk-la-ree of a red-winged blackbird on the side of a county road. But only one demands a response: the hostile, metallic beep of a NOAA weather radio.

For 25 years, my mother ran Camp L-Kee-Ta, a small Girl Scout camp in the southeastern part of the state, which meant that, every summer, she was responsible for the safety of 64 girls and a staff of 20 young adults. At the first declaration of a tornado warning, Mom would walkie the counselors, instructing them to move their campers indoors. She’d ring the camp’s cast-iron bell as the wind began to howl. And, because my family lived on-site, she’d toss me in the truck before driving from the cabins at Hickory Hills to the huts at Trail’s End, checking for stragglers. Within minutes, we’d all convene in the basement of the Troop House, the largest camp building, a few dozen girls sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor with snacks and songbooks. I don’t recall much crying in these moments as the storm raged above us. Mainly, I remember singing.

Camp felt safe, in the literal sense but also the figurative one; there, girls could challenge themselves, free from the judgment of the outside world. At camp, we—for several summers, I was a camper too—learned to dive, to build a fire, to make friends. We practiced our courage and resilience, how to skin our knees and keep on hiking, how to carefully extract a tick. Even when disaster sent us underground, we were always ultimately okay. It was good for campers to be a little uncomfortable and homesick. These moments were and are the purpose of camp—preparation for the trials of real-world life.

[View: Deadly flooding in Texas]

And what I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is the unfathomable tragedy that, last week in the Texas Hill Country, at least a dozen little girls lost their lives while they were learning how to be brave.

Camp leaders across the country can’t stop thinking about it, either. “It is quite literally our worst nightmare,” Georgia Del Favero, a co-director of Camp Birchwood, a Minnesota summer camp for girls, told me. Right now, hundreds of camps, including Del Favero’s, are in the middle of a summer session, or are about to welcome a new busload of children for three days or a week or a month. Moving forward requires accepting that, at camp as in life, we can make plans and follow guidelines, but even then, “we can’t always prevent tragedy.”

Camp Mystic is a Christian camp, and one of several summer camps dotting the Guadalupe River in central Texas. It’s a century-old, sprawling complex with two campuses and a range of activities on offer, including horseback riding, riflery, and synchronized swimming. Last week’s flood came only a few days into a month-long summer session, and hundreds of campers were spread out across several cabins. When the rain began in earnest, early on the morning of July 4, most of those campers were still asleep.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: An inhospitable land]

Details about what happened next are murky, and news reports are difficult for those unfamiliar with the camp layout to follow. What comes through most clearly, at least to me, is the charm of Mystic’s site names, instantly recognizable to anyone with camp experience: Senior Hill, where older girls stayed and were safe from the rising river; the Giggle Box and Wiggle Inn cabins in the lower part of camp, where girls were able to ride out the flood or evacuate; the Bubble Inn cabin, full of little girls who couldn’t. What comes through, as well, is the heroism of Mystic’s staff, who smashed cabin windows to push their campers outside, carried girls on their backs, and wrote campers’ names in Sharpie on their arms in case they were swept away in the flood. Dick Eastland, a longtime co-director of the camp, navigated his truck through the dark water and died trying to save the girls at Bubble Inn.

Many children currently attending summer camp still have no idea that any of this has occurred. Lots of camps follow a no-phones policy that provides kids a psychological haven from the noise of modern life. But their parents have seen the news, and camp-office phones nationwide have been ringing for days. It’s hard to know what to tell parents, Ariella Rogge, who oversees the High Trails Ranch camp for girls, in Colorado, told me. You can help to calm a parent’s fears by outlining the stringent safety standards most camps follow or the staff’s extensive disaster-preparedness training. Still, 10 girls from Texas are set to attend Rogge’s camp this week, and some of their parents are understandably unnerved, she said. “My husband didn’t go to camp, I didn’t go to camp, and I am incredibly risk-averse,” one mother told her, according to Rogge. Then again, the mother said, “this is what my daughter has been dreaming about all year.”

Rogge isn’t sure whether that mother will still send her daughter to camp next week. But she hopes so. She’s trying to help anxious parents recognize that two things can be true. “You can know this is going to be a really great experience for your daughter, and that she’s going to have all this personal growth,” Rogge said, “and you can be really nervous and scared.” Camp directors like Rogge and Del Favero will use this moment to review their safety procedures and communicate them to concerned parents; they’ll train counselors on how to comfort anxious campers. Some camps might need to reevaluate cabin locations or work with local officials to install effective weather-warning systems, which didn’t exist near Mystic. But my hope is that people won’t use this tragedy as an occasion to bubble-wrap their kids, or to take away from their child the chance at a life-changing summer.

[Stephanie Bai: The Texas-flood blame game is a distraction]

This week, I called my mom to ask what she would say to parents if she were still directing camp. “I’d show them how we mitigate risk,” she told me. But then, she said, she’d tell them all the stories: of the girls who’d been shy before camp and who, by week’s end, bloomed with confidence; of the campers who cooked themselves dinner for the first time under a starry sky; of the little girl who fell from a horse, went to the hospital, and demanded to immediately be brought back to camp.

When Mom and I spoke about the Mystic campers, we talked less about the tragedy itself, and more about all the times when we were sure that they’d been brave. How, woken by the sound of thunder, girls might have climbed down from their bunks and gathered their bunkmates with urgent voices. How they might have waited one extra minute for a new friend to grab a flashlight or a teddy. How afraid they probably were, but also how determined, as they waded together into the muddy water.

The Biggest Anti-Abortion Victory Since ‘Dobbs’

2025-07-01T18:23:00-04:00

Amid all the news coverage of the GOP’s spending-bill extravaganza—the late-night deficit debates, the strategy sessions, the hallway blanket-wearing—one piece of the package has received comparatively little attention: a provision that would block abortion clinics from receiving Medicaid funds for any of the non-abortion services they provide.

During the past three years, abortion restrictions have mostly taken effect mostly in red and purple states—where legislatures have voted to enact them. But if this proposed provision passes, clinics all over the country will be affected. It would “have a pretty devastating impact on a lot of providers,” Mary Ziegler, a legal scholar and an Atlantic contributor, told me. Some would probably close, and others would have to limit the number of patients they serve. It’s “a really big deal,” she said, with perhaps the most significant consequences for abortion access since the passage of the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funds for abortions in most cases.

All of this is complicated—which helps explain the dearth of attention to the matter. But funding for independent abortion providers works like this: Clinics receive money from a variety of sources, including local donations, insurance payments, and Medicaid reimbursements. (Yes, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America receives millions in contributions every year, but most of those funds are earmarked for advocacy, Ziegler told me.) A big percentage of Planned Parenthood’s patient pool relies on Medicaid. In keeping with the Hyde Amendment, providers are not reimbursed for abortions, but they do receive federal payments for other services, such as breast-cancer screenings, Pap smears, and STI testing. This new legislation would make Planned Parenthood and other clinics ineligible for any kind of Medicaid reimbursement, Ziegler said.

If clinics are not paid for these services, then, in many cases, they won’t be able to provide them. Maybe some clinics would be able to find funds from state legislatures or local donors to fill in the gaps, but many wouldn’t. An initial version of the bill passed by the House would have blocked Medicaid funding for 10 years, but the current version, which passed the Senate earlier today, would prohibit that funding for just one year after the law’s passage. (That’s right—we’ll all be back here again soon.)

The cuts represent a pretty clear departure from President Donald Trump’s “leave it to the states” approach to abortion policy. They’d affect clinics everywhere, not just in places where Americans have grown accustomed to hearing about abortion restrictions. Most Planned Parenthood clinics at risk of closure under the bill are in states where abortion is legal, the organization says. That’s partly because more blue states have recently expanded Medicaid. Up to one-third of patients at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, for example, are on Medicaid, and reimbursement totals in the millions of dollars, PPNNE CEO Nicole Clegg told me. “We’ll work with our state leaders” and increase local fundraising efforts, she said. But it will be difficult to make up the difference.

The bill’s passage is part of an abortion one-two punch: Last week, the Supreme Court made it easier for states to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. “This is tremendous progress on achieving a decades-long goal that has proved elusive in the past,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in a statement about the SCOTUS decision and the GOP bill. “This proves what we’ve said all along: Congress can cut Planned Parenthood’s funding—and they just did,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, wrote on X about the bill. “The moral obligation is clear: If we can do it for 1 year, we must do it for good.”

The events of this week also represent a slight strategy change. Reporters like me who have long covered the anti-abortion movement anticipated that, under the second Trump presidency, activists would shift their efforts in a different direction: attempting to outlaw abortion via the 1873 Comstock Act. Many who follow this debate agree that they probably still will. But so far, Trump “hasn’t really been doing a lot of what the anti-abortion movement has wanted,” Ziegler said. She wonders whether it was “a self-conscious decision to go where they thought Republicans already were”—to work toward withholding funding, which is probably politically safer for the GOP than pursuing a relatively unpopular outright abortion ban.

Next stop: the House of Representatives. Lawmakers there took up the bill today and want to make it law by Friday. But defenders of abortion access are keeping an eye out. As always, with a razor-thin Republican majority, anything could happen.

Related:

Here are three stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Donald Trump visited “Alligator Alcatraz,” a makeshift migrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, and said that he wants to see more detention centers in “many states.”
Trump wrote in a social-media post that the Department of Government Efficiency might need to reexamine government subsidies for Elon Musk’s businesses.
Zohran Mamdani officially won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary by 12 points.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic

The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse

By Marc Novicoff

First, the bad news: Global fertility is falling fast. The aging populations of rich countries are relying on ever fewer workers to support their economy, dooming those younger generations to a future of higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three …

By about 2084, according to the gold-standard United Nations “World Population Prospects,” the global population will officially begin its decline. Rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging. And the rest of the world will have become old before it ever got the chance to become rich.

Sorry, did I say “bad news”? That was actually the good news, based on estimates that turned out to be far too rosy.

Read the full article.

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