It was great chatting with so many smart students, and to be able to peruse the institute’s exhibits about its namesake, the late Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.

The Dole Institute, I was told, would have been the site of the senator’s presidential library had the three-time presidential candidate — and 1996 Republican presidential nominee — ever won the White House.

Instead, it stands as a monument to Dole’s 35 years in Congress, including his central role in numerous bipartisan legislative efforts, from the Americans with Disabilities Act to the McGovern-Dole international food program, which (as of 2022) had provided 5.5 billion school meals to more than 31 million children around the globe. You don’t need to become president to leave an enormous legacy.

And maybe we should have a few more congressional libraries to remind people of that!

Anyways, thanks to everyone who sent in such great questions for this week’s mailbag edition. Here’s what we’ll be tackling this morning:

• How is the Iran war being paid for?

• What’s the latest with Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots?

• Will ICE agents be sent to the polls?

• Could Alaska become a 2028 swing state?

• Can Congress change the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”?

• And more!

If you’ve found yourself wondering about any of these questions, then this morning’s newsletter is for you.

There will be no newsletter on Monday in observance of Labor Day, but I will see you back in your inbox on Wednesday. I hope you all have a great holiday weekend.

Let’s dive in!

Paying for the war

Q: I am interested in how America pays its bills for the Iran war in 2026. It seems the budget has been set and I don’t know that any additional funds were approved for the war. What happens if the Pentagon goes over budget? Do they take money from elsewhere? Can they just overrun the budget without consequence? Who stops them from spending money that wasn’t approved by Congress?

The Pentagon has a massive budget: more than $800 billion from the regular appropriations process, plus $150 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill.

That huge store of money has given the Defense Department a lot of room to move funds around and put together the resources to wage a war. However, the questioner is right that Congress has not approved a cent in extra funding for the Iran war — which means (even with almost a trillion dollars in its coffers) the war has forced the Pentagon to take money away from other important priorities and left the military squeezed for cash.

Per NBC News, the Defense Department has been forced to cancel some training exercises. It has had to delay repairs to bases in the Middle East that have been damaged by Iranian attacks. It also has little money to purchase new weapons amid a munitions shortage that has many military experts concerned about America’s ability to respond to future conflicts.

The questioner is right that, eventually, the Pentagon was bound to just run out — and potentially have to take money from elsewhere. In fact, that appears to be exactly what’s happened. Just yesterday, House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) alleged that the Defense Department signed an interagency agreement to give it access to funding appropriated to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for biomedical research, in order to make up for the budget crunch created by the Iran war.

The Pentagon has yet to confirm this — though DeLauro said the NIH confirmed it to her — and we don’t know how much money was handed over. But this does provide us with a clue of how the DOD is paying for the war: taking money from other parts of the Pentagon, and then taking money from other parts of the federal government to make up for it.

In response to a request from the Trump administration, the House has advanced a plan to supply the Pentagon with $60 billion to help refill its coffers, but the measure has stalled in the Senate, leaving its future unclear.

How much has the war cost overall? The Defense Department has not been too transparent. Secretary Pete Hegseth offered an estimate of $37.5 billion in late July, though that number is already outdated — and even at the time, many experts said they believed the true cost of the war was likely much higher.

Blue-laska?

If Mary Peltola wins her Alaska Senate race, how seriously should Democrats take the state in the 2028 presidential race?

Read more

With Labor Day looming, we are almost at the unofficial start of campaign season: just two months until the midterm elections.

Plus: the Iran war is still in a state of uncertainty. House Democrats are squabbling. The national debt has topped $40 trillion. And another Pentagon official has departed.

What’s on your mind this morning? I’m planning a mailbag edition tomorrow and would love to answer your questions about American politics, government, history, and more. Here’s the link to submit a question.

Send a question!

Wondering how a certain race will go? Curious about something that happened in Washington recently? Want to pick my brain on something? No questions are off-limits!

Excited to hear what’s on your mind and give some answers tomorrow.

Ask away!

Talk to you tomorrow,

Gabe

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Not to cast aspersions on anyone’s intelligence, but the 21st century political ecosystem is not particularly adept at doing this. In many political conversations these days, there is often little room for nuance or the possibility that two things might be true at once.

Let’s see if we can change that. When it comes to the White House ballroom, four things can be true at once:

1. It’s not crazy to think that the White House might need more of an event space. It’s a little silly that the president of the United States needs to put up tents every time he wants to host more than 200 people.

2. That doesn’t mean it’s that big a deal. If I were president, this would be something like #8,379 on my list of priorities.

3. Thinking the ballroom makes sense as a policy matter doesn’t mean it’s legal for the president to build it unilaterally. That is a decision best left to Congress.

4. But that also doesn’t mean just anyone can sue to stop the president from trying. Normal legal rules should still apply.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court paused a district court ruling that would have blocked President Trump from moving forward with construction of his ballroom. The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal justices in dissent, and the rest of the conservative justices in the majority.

In my opinion, both groups of justices got something right: Roberts and the liberals were right about the ballroom construction being likely illegal, but the conservative majority was right that the group challenging it probably lacked the standing to sue.

This is not normally an issue I would devote much attention to. As I’ve already gestured at, I think there are fine arguments for the White House having a ballroom, but it’s not really an issue I find that important. I’m not an architecture reporter, and I won’t try to moonlight as one.

But I actually think the ballroom case is worth considering, because it lets us take a deeper look at an important concept you might not know much about: standing doctrine, the framework governing who gets to sue over what.

It also raises an important separation-of-powers question with implications that go far beyond the ballroom: Are there times when a president might do something illegal, but no one is able to challenge it in court? It’s a question that has come up repeatedly throughout Trump’s second term, on issues ranging from the ban on TikTok to the war in Iran.

In a presidency that has been marked by brazen executive actions — on which the courts have served as the primary check — it’s never been more relevant to think through this possibility. We’ll do that together this morning. But first: let’s do a bit of a ballroom talk to help understand how these legal gaps come about.

What Roberts and the liberals got right

We’ll start with where I agree with the Supreme Court minority: it was likely illegal for President Trump to unilaterally knock over the East Wing and start building a ballroom in its place without first getting approval from Congress.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to “dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States,” such as the White House. The president (even a president with relevant experience in the field) is given no competing real-estate power in the Constitution.

Congress has exercised this authority in numerous ways, including with 40 U.S.C. § 8106, which states:

A building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.

President’s Park, on which the White House sits, is a public ground of the federal government in Washington, D.C. Therefore, Congress needs to give express authority to build any structure, such as a ballroom, there. It may be President’s Park, but it is still within Congress’ jurisdiction.

The Trump administration agrees that it has no constitutional right to build a ballroom, but points to two statutes where it says Congress delegated that power to the executive. The first is 3 U. S. C. §105(d)(1), which states:

There are authorized to be appropriated each fiscal year to the President such sums as may be necessary for the care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting (including electric power and fixtures) of the Executive Residence at the White House.

However, the ballroom is not being built as part of the “Executive Residence” of the White House, which is distinct from the East Wing, the part of the building that was knocked down and is being replaced with Trump’s new event space. Even if that were not the case, it would be a stretch to say that destroying an entire wing of the White House and building something new counts as the sort of “alteration” or “improvement” that Congress had in mind here.

“We would not expect” authorization for such a major project to come alongside “such anodyne matters as the President’s ability to use congressional appropriations to maintain power outlets and keep the building warm,” wrote the appeals court judges whose ruling against the ballroom was blocked by the Supreme Court.

And even if that were not the case, this statute still wouldn’t allow the president to do anything, because this statute is not even directed at the president. It is what’s known as an “authorizing statute,” which is a directive from Congress to itself, authorizing not outside action, but future legislative appropriations. (Remember: federal funding is often disbursed according to this weird, two-step process, where Congress first passes an authorizing statute, allowing itself to appropriate money for a certain purpose, and then an appropriations statute, where it actually does so.)

All this statute is doing is letting Congress appropriate money for White House maintenance; by itself, it’s not a permission slip for the president to do anything. Indeed, for the current fiscal year, Congress appropriated $2.475 million under this authorizing statute — not nothing, but also not enough for a $400 million ballroom. (The fact that Trump says the ballroom will largely be funded by private donations is neither here nor there. The project would still need to be authorized by Congress under the statute giving lawmakers power over D.C. public grounds.)

The second statute that the Trump administration points to is 54 U. S. C. §100101(a), which states:

The Secretary [of Interior], acting through the Director of the National Park Service, shall promote and regulate the use of the National Park System by means and measures that conform to the fundamental purpose of the System units, which purpose is to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wild life in the System units and to provide for the enjoyment of the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wild life in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

Once again, it’s quite a stretch to say that this broad language about the Interior Secretary being able to “provide for the enjoyment of the…historic objects” at National Park sites (of which the White House is one) equals permission to build a presidential ballroom.

Congress does not “hide elephants in mouseholes,” the late Justice Antonin Scalia famously once wrote. Nor do they typically hide ballroom authorizations in laws about conserving nature.

And that’s it: that’s everything the White House has pointed to in order to say that the ballroom was legally authorized. Personally, I do not find it to be much, especially in light of the fact that Congress has typically passed specific laws to approve major White House renovations in the past.1

That said, just because the construction is likely illegal, it doesn’t mean that this lawsuit is the right one. Indeed, the Supreme Court majority didn’t take a view on the legality of the ballroom, because they ruled that the lawsuit against it was likely improper. And that’s what brings us to standing doctrine.

What the conservative majority got right

The landmark Supreme Court ruling on standing is Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, from 1992.

It says that, for someone to sue in a federal court, they have to have suffered a “concrete and particularized” injury. If I defame Taylor Swift in this newsletter, you would not have standing to sue, because you did not suffer any harm stemming from what I wrote. But Taylor Swift might have been harmed, so she would have a stronger standing case (no matter the merits of her underlying defamation case). Standing requirements prevent the courts from being clogged up by frivolous lawsuits from people who haven’t actually suffered a legal injury.

In the case of the White House ballroom, the Trump administration was sued by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a congressionally chartered (but privately funded) nonprofit. They sued under something called associational standing, which allows an organization to sue on behalf of a member if that member would have standing on their own and the lawsuit relates to the mission of the organization.

As their injured member, the National Trust put forward Professor Alison Hoagland, a historian who used to work for the National Park Service and has written several books on the architecture of Washington, D.C.

Here is how Hoagland described her injury in a court filing:

I live on Capitol Hill, about 2 miles from the White House. I first moved to DC in 1977 and stayed until 1994, then returned in 2009 and have been here ever since. I travel to the White House neighborhood frequently to attend meetings, view exhibits, and have medical appointments. In the past year alone I have attended two rooftop gatherings with views of the White House. I regularly walk through portions of President’s Park, including Lafayette Square, in order to enjoy the historic buildings, the beauty of the L’Enfant Plan (which placed the President’s House on axis with 16th Street), and the innovative preservation project concerning the buildings surrounding Lafayette Square (overseen by Jacqueline Kennedy). I also regularly view the White House from the south side, whether driving by on Constitution Avenue or walking on the Mall.

…As a resident of Washington, D.C., I intend to continue to travel to the area around the White House, to walk through Lafayette Square, to attend functions in neighboring buildings, and to continue to be impressed by this iconic building. In the past I have had reason to be in the area about once a month, and I expect that pattern to continue. In addition, when the National Trust holds its board meetings in Washington, which it does at least annually, it usually holds them at the Decatur House on the northwest corner of Lafayette Square. I plan to attend those meetings in 2026.

Just as I was not compelled by the White House’s case that Congress had authorized the ballroom, I can’t say that I’m too compelled by Hoagland’s case that she has been injured by its construction.

To be fair, she’s not coming completely out of left field here. There is a thing called “aesthetic standing,” which dates back to a 1972 Supreme Court case and allows plaintiffs to sue when they use a certain area in the environment or outside world in a way that would be disrupted by a proposed change.

The appeals court judges in the ballroom case noted that past D.C. Circuit cases have granted aesthetic standing to people who fish in a river that was being polluted, an insect enthusiast who took annual trips to photograph a specific beetle that was being disturbed, and astronomers whose view of the sky was being impacted by light pollution. They, like Roberts and the liberal Supreme Court justices, ruled that Hoagland fit into this lineage.

However, there are some clear differences. While you can’t see a specific beetle if it’s not there, or the sky if it’s being polluted, Hoagland can continue to walk by the White House and go to her rooftop gatherings even if the ballroom is built. She might not like what she sees — but that isn’t an injury. Hoagland wants to “continue to be impressed by this iconic building.” But aesthetic standing, broad as it may be, is about being able to continually carry out a given activity, not about continually guaranteeing one’s subjective enjoyment. (After all, being impressed by something isn’t even internally stable: the same person could be impressed by one building one day, and not impressed by the same building the next. Their legal standing wouldn’t shift depending on their mood.) The fundamental activity Hoagland is referring to here — frequently being near the White House — will not be interrupted by construction of the ballroom.

If you remember the standing standards laid out in Lujan, the other issue is that an injury has to be “particularized,” like the specific person with an interest in that one specific beetle or the specific people who fish in that one specific river. It is always going to be easier to challenge a change to a local landmark that you might have a specific connection to than a national symbol like the White House, which obviously a lot of people walk by and a lot of people feel a generalized connection to.

To address this, Hoagland notes her professional interest in the White House as an architectural historian. Again, in her own words:

The White House affects my own research on more locally focused architecture in two ways. As one of the first prominent government buildings in the new capital city, it drove development around it, helping to define commercial and residential areas while also serving as a landmark defining [the original D.C. architect Pierre] L’Enfant’s plan for the city, and attesting to the promise that city construction would follow. Secondly, as the most important house in the city, the White House was also on the leading edge of all improvements—running water, water closets, electricity, etc. A study of Washington’s architecture without the White House as a reference point would be incomplete

In her court filing, Hoagland repeatedly praises the L’Enfant Plan, which promoted “republican simplicity” in making the White House look more like a house than a palace. But Hoagland has no legal right for the L’Enfant Plan — however admirable — to be carried out in perpetuity, and she can still continue to study the history of the White House and how it once looked without it still looking the exact same. A historian of Victorian-era England has no legal right for Victoria to still be Queen.

I happen to be sympathetic to Hoagland’s affection for the “republican simplicity” of the original White House. But, as a legal matter, how the White House will look in the future doesn’t really have a bearing on her ability to study how it has looked in the past.

If not her, who?

Would anyone have standing to sue? It’s possible, and the Supreme Court ruling technically leaves the door open for the ballroom to be blocked if such a person were to materialize.

Clearly, local architectural historians are out. Someone whose taxes go towards funding parts of the White House renovation also wouldn’t qualify: the Supreme Court has repeatedly dismissed the idea of taxpayer standing outside of specific circumstances.

One obvious answer is Congress, though there are issues there too. The Supreme Court has generally blocked individual members of Congress from bringing these sorts of lawsuits when they haven’t been authorized by their chamber and when legislative remedies are still available. The court has expressed more openness to lawsuits authorized by an entire chamber of Congress, which could become a possibility if Democrats retake the House. But the law there is still unsettled, and the fact that legislative remedies — like passing a law blocking the ballroom — would still be available might hurt the hypothetical case.

Finally, the Trump administration previously suggested that people affected by the noise of the ballroom construction might have standing to sue. (Per the president himself, Melania Trump is “not thrilled” with all the noise, so perhaps she is a potential plaintiff?) No one in this category has filed a lawsuit as of yet.

There’s also the possibility that no one has the standing to sue over the ballroom — even if it’s against the law.

We’ve seen Trump take advantage of this dynamic before. Courts have generally said that neither troops nor members of Congress have standing to sue over military conflicts (even those unauthorized by Congress), which leaves little judicial space to challenge Trump over the Iran war. Similarly, when the president refuses to enforce a law — such as the TikTok ban — it’s not always obvious who might have standing to sue. Trump’s acceptance of a plane from Qatar, in potential violation of the constitutional requirement that he seek congressional approval before receiving foreign gifts, falls into this same category.

These all speak to alleged violations of the U.S. Constitution: the Declare War Clause. The Take Care Clause. The Emoluments Clause. But, under standing doctrine, not every constitutional foul comes with an obvious plaintiff. If the president breaks the law, but nobody is specifically injured, does it make a sound?

Prior generations have wrestled with just this problem. The late Justice Harry Blackmun, dissenting in the landmark Lujan standing case, warned that the ruling represented an “unseemly solicitude for an expansion of power of the Executive Branch.” Justice Scalia, quoting an earlier precedent, responded in his majority opinion that the courts are not supposed to be “virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and soundness of Executive action.”

The courts are meant to settle private disputes that emerge in response to specific injuries. “Vindicating the public interest (including the public interest in government observance of the Constitution and laws) is the function of Congress and the Chief Executive,” Scalia said.

Over the years, there have been some proposals to rejigger the status quo. During Watergate, then-Sen. Walter Mondale (D-MN) proposed creating a legislative office that would be able to bring a lawsuit attempting to “require an officer or employee of the executive branch of the United States Government, or any agency or department thereof, to act in accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States,” when requested by just six senators or 24 House members.

Earlier this summer, as part of a column outlining a hypothetical fourth branch of government, I proposed a “Fourth Branch Solicitor General,” who could bring lawsuits if the president was violating his constitutional responsibilities, as requested by a certain number of lawmakers.

Then again, the common response to ideas like this is, If Congress can vote to bring a lawsuit, couldn’t they also vote to stop the president through legislation? And if they can’t, doesn’t that suggest there isn’t a majority of Congress who oppose the given executive action, which means the president is acting in accordance with the will of Congress anyway? Why do lawmakers need to go to the judicial branch before they’ve even tried to exhaust their own legislative options?

The response to this is generally that, whatever legislative options Congress could be taking, they almost never actually take them — which means the system, as constructed, isn’t working. There is also the fact that, even if Congress were to pass a law constraining the president, the president could veto it, meaning the executive branch will always be one step ahead of the legislative branch in these competitions: able to take action as long as nobody has standing to sue them; able to block legislative solutions with their veto pen.

Then again, the veto was very much part of the constitutional design, so its use isn’t exactly a good argument for the judicial branch to start taking on cases that they might be constitutionally prohibited from taking.

The truth is, although progressive commentators are painting the Supreme Court’s ballroom decision as a betrayal of the separation of powers, standing doctrine is itself a product of the separation of powers. Descending from the Constitution’s command that the courts only take up “cases” or “controversies,” it is the court system’s attempt to stay within its jurisdiction without becoming a free-ranging referee for every dispute under the sun.

Through the decades, liberal and conservative jurists have repeatedly traded places in how they look at standing doctrine. Sometimes, a case being thrown out on standing grounds will be cheered by Republicans (as in the ballroom ruling); other times, it will be celebrated by Democrats (as when the Supreme Court, in 2024, unanimously ruled that a conservative group lacked standing to challenge medication abortion). While President Trump mocked Alison Hoagland as a “woman walking her dog, who has absolutely No Standing to bring such a suit,” he hasn’t always been a fan of standing doctrine either.

“The Supreme Court had ZERO interest in the merits of the greatest voter fraud ever perpetrated on the United States of America. All they were interested in is ‘standing,’ which makes it very difficult for the President to present a case on the merits,” he tweeted in 2020, after the court declined to hear his challenges to that year’s elections results.

There is a fair critique that — like everything else in the judicial realm — standing is in the eye of the beholder: held up by a justice as an attempt to enforce the separation of powers when they don’t want to hear a case, and swept aside by the same justice when they do.

Still, the broader concept represents the idea that the Founders did not intend for the courts to become an all-purpose arena to duke out policy disputes. Before they take any case, judges pauses to at least debate whether they are hewing to that vision.

I understand the frustration that my first assertion (the ballroom construction is likely illegal) can be sidestepped simply because of the second (this lawsuit is likely flawed). Shouldn’t the first statement be given more priority than the second? Not in the American judicial system, no.

Sometimes, liberals urge judges to grab more power for themselves and grant more expansive standing claims. Other times, conservatives will do exactly the same thing. But no matter who wins out in any given case: luckily, the Founders did create an all-purpose policy arena, and it’s located just down the road from the Supreme Court. In almost every case, when one side or the other blames the Supreme Court for ducking a case on standing grounds, their desired outcome is still very much available through the good, old-fashioned legislative process, if only they can persuade a majority of Congress to exercise it.

But, in my opinion, the most beautiful and essential part of the document comes towards the end: Article V, the section that outlines the process for the Constitution to be amended.

The Founders were humble enough to know that their work wasn’t perfect, and they embedded within the Constitution the possibility for it to be changed and transformed.

This has been the key ingredient that has allowed the document to persevere for 200+ years, by being flexible enough to mature along with the country and accommodate enormous changes: in who gets to vote (15th, 19th, 26th); in how the government is funded (16th); in how long its leaders are able to hold power (22nd).

The Constitution’s authors wanted this sort of change to be possible — but they also didn’t want it to be easy, which is why they set a high bar for amendments, which must be approved by two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures.

It has been 34 long years since any proposal has overcome that threshold. We are currently living through a constitutional amendment drought, which is unfortunate, because we are also living through a time of incredible frustration towards our system of government.

And yet almost nobody is trying to address this frustration through the path the Founders intended — constitutional amendment — because everybody is convinced it would no longer be possible, even though no one has really tried.

In the latest video for my YouTube channel, I speak to someone who knows a thing or two about amending the Constitution, because he’s singlehandedly responsible for the most recent amendment being ratified.

Gregory Watson has one of my favorite stories in American political history. He was a student at the University of Texas when he stumbled upon a quirky path to change the Constitution, and waged a 10-year campaign that ended with ratification of the 27th Amendment, which prevents members of Congress from raising their own salaries.

I talked to Gregory about how he was able to change the Constitution as a college student and his thoughts on what it would take to amend the Constitution now. I also give my perspective: while Gregory is fairly pessimistic, I think there could be an avenue for an amendment to generate bipartisan support in the next few years — if only someone tries. I even have a specific one in mind. I hope you’ll give it a watch:

While you’re at it, also don’t forget to subscribe to Wake Up To Politics on YouTube. It’ll help our videos find more viewers, and it will make sure you see them as soon as they’re posted:

Subscribe on YouTube!

This video is actually coming at a perfect time because the House is set this week to do exactly what I recommended: vote on a constitutional amendment!

The chamber will consider H.J.Res.1, which would constitutionally set the size of the Supreme Court at nine justices (its current level).

I think it’s encouraging to see House leadership actually scheduling a vote on an amendment proposal, and I will be curious to see the vote breakdown. But I still wouldn’t say that this really fits the bill of what I was talking about.

For a constitutional amendment to actually be ratified, it would require nationwide attention and energy being put towards an issue. It would take more than just the House quietly slipping a vote on an amendment onto its schedule, without much notice or debate.

Gregory Watson’s story provides a great example of what it actually takes to amend the Constitution. I think you’ll enjoy listening to him as much as I enjoyed talking with him:

In race after race across the country, Democratic candidates are running into the same dilemma.

They said things in, roughly, the years between 2019 and 2021 — about opening the border, about defunding the police, about God being nonbinary — that they no longer seem so proud of.

Should they recant these positions to reassure swing voters, or double down to reassure their base? Increasingly, many Democrats are choosing Option C: dodging these questions entirely.

Perhaps the most prominent example of this has been Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who recently waved off some of the more left-wing stances that she and others took around this time. “Woke 1 was crazy,” Ocasio-Cortez shrugged to ABC News earlier this month, quoting a New York City councilman.

Abdul El-Sayed tried a similarly evasive strategy this week in an appearance on Fox News. As host Jesse Watters pressed El-Sayed on many of his past positions, the Michigan Democratic nominee opted each time to deflect the question.

How would El-Sayed go about enforcing immigration law? “When I travel the state, and I have traveled my state, more people are asking me about how they’re going to afford their gas and groceries,” El-Sayed responded. “They’re not asking me about immigration.”

Does he still believe that the NFL is racist? “The bigger issue that we have for football right now is I looked at ticket prices to try and go and see a game with my family. It’s astronomical, through the roof.”

Should minors be allowed to have gender transition surgeries? In the interview’s most viral segment, El-Sayed reframed the question by instead asking if Watters was circumcised. (He was.)

Watching El-Sayed bob and weave, I couldn’t help but think of yet another Democratic candidate who ventured into the conservative lion’s den when gearing up for a high-stakes general election.

In her high-profile sit-down with Fox News in October 2024 — the highest-rated non-primetime interview in the history of cable news — Harris was similarly pressed by host Bret Baier to account for a number of her 2020-era (“Woke 1”) stances.

Harris’ tactics were largely the same as El-Sayed’s. Asked, for example, about her previous support for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for transgender inmates — the subject of a ubiquitous Trump ad — Harris declined to say where she now stood (merely saying she would “follow the law,” without saying what she wanted the law to be), then tried to tag the other side as hypocrites (suggesting that the Trump administration had allowed such surgeries), then tried pivoting to safer ground (talking about economic policy).

These deflections didn’t work for Harris, and so far, they don’t seem to be working for El-Sayed. A recent series of polls from Fox’s well-respected, non-partisan polling unit found that El-Sayed is the only battleground Democratic Senate candidate whose favorability rating is underwater (and 13 points underwater, at that).

According to the same poll, a majority of Michigan voters (54%) are concerned that El-Sayed’s positions are “too extreme.” (Similarly, according to a 2024 New York Times poll, 47% of the electorate viewed Harris as “too liberal,” compared to 32% who said that Trump was “too conservative.”)

So, how should Democrats handle questions about their past positions, which are only bound to grow louder as 2026 turns to 2028?

David Clementson is an expert in the Art of the Dodge. He is a former political operative who used to train candidates in answering (or ducking) questions. Now, he is a professor of political communications at the University of Georgia, who has made this area into a bit of a niche of his, researching how voters respond when candidates dodge questions.

Some of his findings are counterintuitive, and they’re not all bad news for Democrats trying to pivot away from questions about their previous stances. For example, Clementson has found: voters often don’t notice when politicians dodge questions.

In a 2022 study Clementson conducted, one group of voters was shown video of a politician dodging a question, while another group was shown video of the politician giving a straight answer. When asked to give their impressions of the candidate, members of the first group were no more likely to make a comment on evasiveness than members of the second group.

Only about 10% of them seemed to register the dodge. Even when party labels were introduced, Democrats were no more likely to notice a Republican candidate dodging a question, and vice versa.

Here’s the wrinkle, though.

Read more

It has not been a great month for the polling industry.

First, Abdul El-Sayed won his Senate primary in Michigan by only a single percentage point, after the polls said he was on track to clean up by double digits. Then, Francesca Hong narrowly lost her gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, after polling averages had her ahead by 20 points.

And now, pollsters have to contend with concerns not just about whether they’re wrong — but about whether they’re even real. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that “Median Strategies,” a supposed polling firm that had announced survey results in the Los Angeles mayoral race and Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, had been a complete sham.

The perpetrator was later revealed to be a 21-year-old recent college graduate named Rahil Prakash, who said he was conducting a “short-term social experiment.”

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Prakash told The Guardian. “And as it turned out, it could.” Before their origin was revealed, Prakash’s “polls” were shared by the mayor of Los Angeles and news outlets including the California Post, the West Coast offshoot of the New York Post tabloid.

These results and revelations have combined to create yet another round of hand-wringing about the role of polls in American politics and journalism. Some commentators, including the former New York Times and Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan, are now once again calling on reporters to stop covering polls entirely.

But this is a misdiagnosis. Our problem right now isn’t having too many polls; it’s having too few of them.

I know this might sound surprising. After all, we seem to be living through a time of polling abundance. The number of active national pollsters in the U.S. more than doubled between 2000 and 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. In the 2024 election cycle, more than 2,600 polls were fielded across the country. That’s not enough?

Well, here’s the problem: it’s easier than it’s ever been to field a poll — but harder than it’s ever been to field a good one.

This chart from Pew shows that the recent explosion in pollsters mostly comes from an increase in outfits fielding online opt-in surveys, at the expense of live phone polls, the “gold standard” method that once had a near-monopoly on the industry, and other forms of probability-based surveys.

Online opt-in polls are what are known as “non-probability” polls, where participants voluntarily select to be polled, by responding to ads on a website or social media platform. (Pollsters still generally screen respondents before letting them into the poll.) In a “probability” poll, meanwhile, pollsters use a database of phone numbers or addresses to proactively contact a random sample of the area they’re polling. Live phone polls generally fall into this category.

In both cases, after collecting responses, pollsters will “weight” their pool of respondents to match the demographics of the area being polled: as a very crude example, if an area is 10% Black, but their respondents were only 5% Black, then the Black respondents’ answers would be weighted to count for double, to try to represent the true proportion of Black voters in the area. (In reality, pollsters are trying to capture an accurate representation of a much broader range of demographics at once — race, gender, education, income, etc. — so the calculations are more complicated than this.)

Non-probability polls generally require more weighting than probability polls, since they don’t start out with a random sample: rather than choosing who to contact, they’re at the mercy of who decided to opt in to the poll at the beginning, which could have massively overrepresented some groups. The more weighting a poll has to do to mimic a representative sample, the more potential for error is introduced.

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Now, none of this is to say that non-probability polls are all bogus and probability-based polls are all perfect. In fact, some evidence exists to suggest that the two types of polls performed similarly in the 2024 election. But it is worth noting that non-probability polls are much, much cheaper to produce — putting out ads and setting up an online panel for whoever answers is relatively easy; for a phone poll trying to reach a specific sample, 50 phone calls will often yield just one respondent — which means they dramatically lower the barrier for entry for polling.

Not all non-probability polls are bad. But their rise has allowed the zone to be flooded with all sorts of low-quality polls, which end up mucking up poll averages and skewing perceptions of a race.

I often hear from people who say, “How can you still trust the polls? No one answers their landline anymore, especially not young people.” First of all, phone polls reach people via landline and cell phones, just to clear that up. (And, as can be seen by the Pew chart above, few pollsters only use phone polling now. Most use it in conjunction with other methods.) The age critique, meanwhile, mostly gets things backwards.

While phone polling might oversample older voters, online polling often oversamples young voters — and online polling is much more common nowadays, so more frequently, pollsters are dealing with samples that are disproportionately younger than the electorate, in addition to their samples being disproportionately politically engaged (a problem for pollsters using any method, since politically engaged people are more likely to opt in to a poll or pick up the phone for one).

The Michigan and Wisconsin polling misses were likely due to a plethora of reasons. Both states host open primaries, which make it harder for pollsters to predict who the universe of voters will be, since they’re not restricted to just Democrats or Republicans voting. The Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, in particular, contained a lot of upheaval: three top Democratic candidates ended their bids in the final month of the contest, including the eventual winner David Crowley (who only re-entered the race a few weeks before Election Day). If a poll was fielded while Crowley was out of the race, it can’t exactly be blamed for not correctly projecting the result.

But there are also sampling issues at play. In general elections in the Trump era, polls have often overestimated Democrats, since the most politically engaged slice of the country has leaned to the left, skewing polling samples. In these recent Democratic primary elections, it appears that polls suffered from a similar issue: the most politically engaged slice of the electorate has leaned really to the left, skewing polls towards candidates like El-Sayed and Hong. Since so many of the polls were online surveys, they appear to have similarly overrepresented young voters, who also disproportionately vote for more progressive candidates in Democratic primaries.

These ubiquitous online polls are also vulnerable other pitfalls, including respondents merely clicking things and not telling the truth, which can lead to eye-popping (but probably false) results, or being duped by AI bots that pretend to be human respondents.

So you have the existing background problems with polling any primaries, and the problems that popped up in these primaries specifically. Then you have the dominance of online polls, which bring a host of potential problems, including overrepresenting a specific type of voter. Plus, add in the sheer number of new actors in the polling space: some entirely fake, others merely irresponsible (one new polling outfit recently admitted to changing the raw responses they received, an enormous polling no-no), and still more who have an interest in changing perceptions of the race (the Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher has documented just how many polls now are internal polls, conducted and released by campaigns themselves).

Suddenly, you have a toxic stew of polls of varying quality, all of which are flattened and equalized once they’re blasted out on social media and injected into the discourse all looking the same, without much discrimination based on quality. A poll from Median Strategies, the firm that was pumping out fake numbers, is showered with retweets and treated the same as a poll from The Public Sentiment Institute, the firm that was fiddling with its own results, is treated the same as an internal poll, which campaigns only ever release for a reason (either to scare donors into thinking a favored campaign is losing or an underdog campaign has a shot, or to manufacture false momentum and convince voters that their team is winning and they should hop onto the bandwagon now) is treated the same as a poll by the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Any of these polls can then impact what prediction markets like Kalshi or Polymarket have to say about a race. Since actual news outlets now report these numbers as data — CNN has a partnership with Kalshi, for example — these prediction market figures can influence broad perceptions about a race, even though they generally just move in response to polls, and many of the polls are shoddy. Garbage in, garbage out. By the end of this not-so-virtuous cycle, questionable numbers from subpar (and maybe even malicious) pollsters have hardened into conventional wisdom about a race.

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After all that, how can I still be saying we need more polls?

Well, we need more good polls. Because of the high expenses involved (and reputational costs when they get things wrong), a number of blue-chip pollsters have exited the game. Gallup stopped polling elections in 2016, and stopped polling presidential approval earlier this year. Monmouth University closed up its well-respected polling shop last year. Iowa’s polling “queen” Ann Selzer stopped producing political surveys after getting the 2024 election very wrong.

This is the void that’s been filled by shoddy online pollsters and internal surveys that are trying to skew perceptions of a race, rather than dispassionately analyzing the electorate.

According to the New York Times, there were 11 polls conducted in the final month of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. But only one was conducted by a firm deemed a “select pollster” by the Times. (“Select pollsters” must be conducting their survey for a non-partisan sponsor and meet two of the following three criteria: having a “track record of accuracy in recent elections,” being a member of a professional polling organization, and conducting probability-based surveys.) Most of the rest were conducted on behalf of El-Sayed’s campaign, or by other less reliable sources.

In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, there was only two polls in the final month by a “select” pollster (and they were both conducted by the same firm). The Minnesota Democratic Senate primary, another closely watched contest, didn’t see a single “select” poll.

We are in striking need of more high-quality polls of the 2026 midterms; otherwise, we are flying blind, guided by more surveys than ever, but surveys of low or uncertain quality. Think of how many people were absolutely sure about the results of the aforementioned primaries, based mainly on subpar polls and the prediction markets that moved in response to them, without much (or any) mainstream polling being conducted.

This problem isn’t brand-new. In 2022, the last midterm cycle, we also saw a surge of internal polls flood the zone, primarily from Republican sponsors. Many of them incorrectly overestimated the emergence of a “red wave,” skewing the broader narrative before the election — and leading to a narrative afterwards that the polls had gotten the election wrong. But, in fact, most traditional non-partisan pollsters had a good year. It wasn’t a question of listening to the polls. It was a question of which polls you listened to.

This will only get worse as time goes on, as more and more people realize they can make a quick buck by putting out a fake poll to juice prediction markets, and more and more candidates realize they can skew perceptions by blasting out internal polls. “Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith recently told the New York Times. (And, yes, studies show that seeing that a candidate polls well can increase the likelihood of people voting for them.)

That means that we all need to become more discerning poll consumers. When you see a poll, CTRL+F for “methodology” and see how the survey was conducted. (If the poll offers no information on its methodology, dismiss it out of hand.) Look into whether the poll was conducted on behalf of a campaign, or on behalf of a non-partisan organization or well-known news outlet. Consult the Silver Bulletin pollster ratings to see if the pollster in question has a track record of accuracy (or even any track record at all).

If all that sounds like a lot of work, well, you probably shouldn’t put too much stock in any individual poll anyway. It’s better to look at polling averages, which take an array of surveys into account, especially ones like the Times’, which separates the wheat from the chaff. Many mainstream news outlets didn’t include the surveys by “Median Strategies” in their polling averages — even before the firm was revealed to be fake — because they have a policy of not including pollsters whose methodologies they can’t discern.

Many polling aggregators on social media (including accounts with tens of thousands of followers) failed to put that same work in, and unwittingly promoted the sham numbers. Prediction markets also failed the test, proving liable to being swayed by misinformation: both Polymarket and Kalshi saw Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ odds of being re-elected rise after her campaign shared the fake Median Strategies survey.

Why are polls — good polls, that is — still worth paying attention to, despite these pitfalls (and despite the calls from some corners for media outlets to ignore them entirely)?

Because polls serve an important democratic purpose. We hold elections every two or four or six years; polls are the best tool, in between those contests, for Americans to understand how their fellow countrymen are thinking and for politicians to understand the mood of their constituents.

We all have mental models of the world. But our mental models tend to be very, very wrong. This is one of my all-time favorite charts, from a YouGov poll in 2022 that shows just how bad Americans are at accurately perceiving America, by comparing the proportion of the country that people estimate that certain groups make up, versus the actual proportion of those groups.

We’re also really bad at accurately estimating metrics like crime and unemployment. And the same dynamics hold true in public opinion. We tend to believe our policy positions are more common than they really are, an effect that is even more common among political elites, who are particularly vulnerable to this “egocentrism bias.”

This is why good data, including polling data, serves as such an important corrective in American life.

I often hear from people who express skepticism about a certain poll result, because the people they know in their life don’t reflect that outcome. But think about our vast, diverse country. What are the odds that the people you know make up a representative sample of America? Pretty darn low (especially in an era of geographic and social polarization). Polls, on the other hand, are purposefully designed to capture a representative sample of the country. Between a well-designed poll and your own experience, I’ll take the poll any day.

Good polling gives us the accurate picture of reality that we can’t just seem to construct on our own, which makes voters savvier observers of the country and what’s going on around us and makes politicians more attuned to the opinions of their voters.

The era of polling-driven journalism isn’t perfect, but it is much better than the sort of reporting that came before it — and that some are trying to usher in now — which relies merely on gut instinct, and “vibes,” and interviews with a handful of voters who might not be a representative sample of anything.

That doesn’t mean all polls are created equal, or that you shouldn’t be careful when consuming them. But, when done right, polls help us understand the country, beyond our narrow slice of it, and gird us against falling for fake “vibe shifts” that might show up in the conventional wisdom but don’t show up in the data.

That’s why we need more polls, not fewer. More good polls, at least.

These questions concern the legal status of two Trump actions: his recent executive order on vaccines, and the ongoing construction of the White House ballroom.

If you’ve had questions about one or both of these issues, this morning’s newsletter is for you.

As always, you can submit questions for me here or by emailing me at gabe@wakeuptopolitics.com.

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Q: Is it legal for Trump to create executive orders, like on vaccination, that run afoul of science?

In general, there is no freestanding requirement that executive orders comply with science. After all, what would that mean? Who, or what, would constitute the “science” that cannot ever be contradicted?

However, there are specific situations where the federal government must consult scientific advisers before making a decision, and vaccines do happen to be one of those areas.

Let’s start with the executive order in question here, “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans,” which was issued by President Trump earlier this month.

Federal childhood vaccine recommendations are split into three categories: vaccines recommended for “all children,” those recommended for “certain high-risk groups or populations,” and those recommended based on “shared clinical decision making,” which means parents are advised to make a decision in consultation with their child’s doctor.

Below, via the Congressional Research Service, you can see how Trump’s “Gold Standard” recommendations deviate from the child vaccine recommendations in place before he took office — including downgrading the Covid vaccine from “All children” to “shared clinical decision making” and removing the monkeypox vaccine (formerly recommended for high-risk groups) from the list entirely:1

Remember, though: executive orders are generally not the president saying, “I will do X,” because there are only so many things the president is empowered to do under laws and the Constitution. Rather, executive orders are the president telling an executive agency, “You should do X,” in an area where (in theory) a statute gives that agency the power to do something.

In this case, there is no law that gives force or effect to childhood vaccine recommendations from the president. That’s why, in his order, Trump directed “each executive department and agency” to “review” his recommendations and “take any appropriate steps to advance them, to the fullest extent allowable by law.”

When it comes to vaccines, the main executive agency that applies to is the CDC.

Funnily enough, Trump’s “Gold Standard” recommendations are identical to vaccine recommendations that the CDC already tried implementing earlier this year. However, a federal district judge blocked that effort in March, and here’s where the requirement for scientific rigor comes in.

Judge Brian Murphy paused the CDC’s recommendations because the agency had not consulted the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a scientific panel set up to offer advice on vaccines to the federal government. Murphy’s ruling pointed out the several places in law that Congress had required ACIP to play a role before decisions on vaccines are made. (The Trump administration argues that those are only specific situations that require ACIP consultation, and that its action falls outside of those requirements.)

Partially because of the failure to consult ACIP, Murphy ruled that the CDC recommendations likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the 1946 law that prohibits agency actions that are “arbitrary” or “capricious,” or taken “in excess of statutory jurisdiction.” This is a statute that frequently trips up presidential administrations trying to take sweeping action, as we’ve discussed before.

In short: Trump cannot just alter vaccine recommendations himself, he can only order the CDC to do it, which means this executive order will only mean anything if the CDC listens to it. But the CDC has already tried to do something similar, and if the agency follows Trump’s order, it will likely fall into the same trap its last vaccine push did: the fact that, per Judge Murphy, the CDC also cannot alter vaccine recommendations itself, without listening to scientific advisers.

It’s also relevant to keep in mind that CDC’s recommendations are just that: recommendations, not binding on doctors (who actually administer the shots) or states (which decide which vaccines are required for schools).

As is often the case, because of the limited role the president plays in our constitutional scheme, executive orders can end up being more flash than substance.

Q: Why when the courts have said the Trump Ballroom cannot go forward, he can continue to build during appeal? How many appeals can any one lawsuit have? Does everything have endless appeals until it gets to the Supreme Court? Regular people don’t have this.

There are a few questions to unpack here. First, to answer the “endless appeals” question, there are three levels at which litigants can bring cases in the federal court system.

Cases start at the district court level. The loser at that level can then appeal to a circuit court (also called an “appeals court”). The loser at that level can then appeal to the Supreme Court.

It’s important to note that regular people do have this! Anyone who loses a district court case can appeal to the circuit courts, and anyone who appeals at the circuit courts can appeal to the Supreme Court — you don’t have to be president of the United States or anything like that. Granted, you can’t force the Supreme Court to actually agree to hear your case, and the president certainly does have a better chance at that.

But you do both get to try under our system, and the Supreme Court does take up cases from “regular people” all the time (and also recently refused to hear a case from the president). This is true on both the court’s normal “merits” docket and its emergency “shadow” docket.

Earlier this month, a California woman who owned a dog named Bruce filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court asking the justices to pause a lower court ruling ordering that Bruce be euthanized after he bit three people. The court denied the request, but the fact that Bruce the dog got all the way to the Supreme Court underlines the idea that the same appeals process is available to everyone (even every dog).

But the real question here was about the White House ballroom, and why construction on it has continued despite a string of adverse court rulings.

The answer is something called an “administrative stay,” which is when a court pauses a ruling from a lower court in order to give itself time to make a decision on something.

In this case, Judge Richard Leon ruled on April 16 that construction of the ballroom was likely unlawful. On April 17, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit administratively stayed Leon’s ruling until it could make a decision.

Then, on August 7, the same three-judge panel upheld Leon’s ruling, but still kept it frozen, adding a new 14-day stay to allow the Trump administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court, which it then did.

On Friday, just before the 14-day deadline was about to expire, Chief Justice John Roberts entered an administrative stay of his own, which will last until the full Supreme Court rules on the administration’s emergency petition on the ballroom.

None of this is out of the ordinary. The idea here is that a court should be very careful before intervening in private or public conduct, so a given ruling shouldn’t take effect until the next rung on the appellate ladder has had a chance to look it over.

In cases where a ruling requires someone to do something, an administrative stay skews to the benefit of the person who doesn’t want to do something. But the ballroom case is a case where a ruling required someone to stop doing something. In a case like that, an administrative stay will generally skew to the benefit of the person who does want to do something — here, Trump wanting to build his ballroom.

As a result, ballroom construction can continue during this legal gray area; in fact, according to the White House, 250 people are now working on the construction 20 hours a day, seven days a week. The administration says that the ballroom is now about two-thirds complete.

Administrative stays keep the status quo in place; in this case, there is no question that the status quo favors Trump, although it is not unlike any other situation where an administrative stay allows someone to keep doing something they would otherwise be prohibited from continuing.

We’ve seen this with previous Trump cases as well, including the tariffs case, where lower court rulings against the tariffs were stayed as they worked their way through the courts (before the Supreme Court eventually struck the tariffs down for good). In the tariffs case, the fix for this period of time where the import taxes were (illegally, per the Supreme Court’s eventual ruling) in place has been refunding the businesses that paid the tariffs. So far, about $129 billion in refunds have been initiated (out of $166 billion that the administration collected).

Admittedly, it’s harder to know what the remedy could be here if the Supreme Court did eventually rule against the White House ballroom (though I wouldn’t necessarily bet on them doing so2). Judge Leon, however, hinted at one possible (though hard-to-imagine) outcome in his initial ruling.

“The Court gives fair notice to Defendants, however, that any above-ground construction [while the ruling is stayed] that is not in compliance with my Order is at risk of being taken down depending on the outcome of this case,” Leon warned.

Happy Friday and welcome back to another edition of Wake Up To Politics.

This morning, I have a mailbag issue for you, where I’ll be going deep on two great questions that were sent in by readers:

• What is the strategy behind Jon Ossoff’s recent viral dig at Donald Trump?

• After a string of outspent candidates have won Democratic primaries, does money really matter in American politics?

Part of this Friday newsletter is available for everyone, but part is available only to paid subscribers. Becoming a paid subscriber allows you to access the full range of WUTP content, like interviews with bestselling authors like Maggie Haberman. It’s also the best way to support my journalism, including pieces like the one this week about serious, sober-minded politicians having a bit of a moment in 2026. (Who would have guessed!)

Most news outlets aren’t incentivized to run stories like that, since Serious Politicians Are Winning doesn’t exactly drive clicks. But it’s your support that allows me to write those sorts of stories, being honest about the true trends in American politics without having to worry about clicks or corporate sponsors.

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As always, if you have feedback about the newsletter, you can reach me at gabe@wakeuptopolitics.com or by clicking “reply” on this email. It really does go straight to my inbox!

Let’s dive in…

Q: Sen. Jon Ossoff has raised the stakes with sharply outspoken public criticism of Donald Trump. Gavin Newsom has done it more quietly in social media for considerably longer. Sen. Mark Kelly added his own tart comments in the past week as well. When Trump does it, it’s called firing up his base. Is this an orchestrated strategy turning up of the tone as the midterms approach and do you think it will fire up Democrats and perhaps Independents for this fall’s election?

Ossoff caused quite the firestorm this week when saying, at a rally on Saturday, that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” and simply “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

With Natalie?

That was a reference to Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant and close aide who was among the handful of officials who joined him on a secret flight out of Turkey last month, while Cabinet secretaries like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent remained on a decoy flight (the one that everyone thought Trump was on, but that he didn’t take due to an apparent threat from Iran).

Facing re-election in Georgia, Ossoff — a former documentarian — hasn’t been running a campaign so much as a content creation studio. Per Politico’s Jonathan Martin, Ossoff’s rallies are carefully staged to achieve maximum virality; before each one, his team “tips off a handful of progressive video clippers,” who are responsible for injecting his punchiest moments into Democratic social media feeds. To extend the wave of attention, he then generally appears on MS NOW “a few days after one of the weekend rallies, which ensures TV coverage of the clips and a cable news hit that itself can be clipped for the days ahead,” Martin wrote in June.

Sure enough, as of this writing, Ossoff’s “Natalie” comment has drawn 6.1 million views on X from a post by @Acyn and 10.9 million from a post by Aaron Rupar, two of the top “progressive video clippers” who spend their days finding (or, in this case, being directed towards) short-form videos to set the left-of-center Internet on fire. Then, like clockwork, there Ossoff was on MS NOW on Monday and Wednesday.

The remark had its intended effect. It’s not as though there had been no reporting about the uber-loyal Harp before Ossoff’s comment: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in the New York Times in 2024 that Harp was Trump’s main information conduit (known as his “human printer”) and that she had unnerved some Trump aides with a series of fawning letters she sent to the president. (“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one letter. “I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work,’” she wrote in another.) Then, Haberman and Swan reported in their recent book that Trump had described Harp as his only aide who loved him as much as his wife and children. (“All of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me,” he would tell aides, referring to Harp.)

But Harp was still relatively little-known until this week, when Ossoff’s comment — as well as the fierce White House pushback — led every news outlet on the planet to run with more Harp stories, from CNN interviewing her estranged brother to the Daily Beast obtaining her full letters to the president.

So, yes, this was very much orchestrated: to get attention, to get under Trump’s skin, to shine a spotlight on a story that was sure to make him uncomfortable. (No, no evidence has emerged to support the speculation that there is anything untoward about Trump’s relationship with Harp.)

What will be its electoral effect?

The questioner asked if comments like this might help fire up Independents. Probably not. Trump, of course, mounts these sorts of personal attacks all the time, but polls routinely show that it is among his least favorable qualities in the eyes of the electorate, especially Independent voters.

If anything, this sort of rhetoric can backfire electorally: one study earlier this year found that candidates lose roughly 2.5-3 percent of the vote for every standard deviation increase of character attacks they mount.

But those comments from Trump do fire up the Republican base, as the questioner said, and Ossoff’s remark is designed to do the same on the Democratic side. The goal isn’t votes, per se: in fact, many Independent voters in Georgia will probably never hear about this firestorm.

Yes, Google searches for Harp’s name have exploded over the past few days, but I would be willing to bet that these searches have mostly come from people who are fairly politically engaged, enough to tune into MS NOW or to watch news content on their social media feeds. I would guess that, nationally, Natalie Harp’s name ID is still probably very low.

But Ossoff’s goal with the comment was to reach exactly this slice of voters, since these are the voters who donate to political campaigns: small-dollar contributions to Ossoff’s campaign are sure to skyrocket after his viral moment. (Indeed, Ossoff was the top fundraiser on the donation platform ActBlue this week, although he has been high on that list this entire year.)

Then again, Ossoff doesn’t really need the money. As of June 30, he had raised $98 million this cycle, compared to just $7 million for his Republican rival Mike Collins. But these sorts of voters are also the type who vote in presidential primaries, and this might be Ossoff’s true goal.

Early 2028 primary polls show that the best way for a Democrat to increase their stock is to be seen as the candidate fighting most aggressively with Trump. The questioner mentioned Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, both of whom have been beneficiaries of this phenomenon. In the chart below, see how Newsom peaked last summer when he started trolling Trump on social media, while Kelly surged in November after Trump called for his execution:

Some of that energy is already starting to flow to Ossoff.

In March, when Saint Anselm College polled the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary field, Ossoff drew exactly 0%. By June, he had ticked up to 2%. When the university released a poll this week, conducted on Monday and Tuesday (right at the peak of Ossoff-Harp-mania), where was the Georgia senator? 12%, a 10-point increased that landed him tied (with Kelly) for third place.

Ossoff’s made-for-virality comment wasn’t designed to reach Georgia swing voters, many of whom probably didn’t see it and may not have even liked it. Or even Georgia Democrats, who are already lined up behind him. (96% said in a recent Fox poll that they planned to vote for Ossoff, while 86% said they are motivated to vote in November.) Instead, voters in the 2028 Democratic primary were likely his intended audience.

Mission accomplished, it appears.

Q: I would appreciate your take on the role of money in US political races these days. Some days I seem to get dozens of requests from political candidates across the country for contributions so obviously some still think money is critical. However, Nixon’s recent win in the Florida Senate primary race in spite of being heavily outspent and Peltola turning down Kamala Harris’s contribution seem counterintuitive. Are these examples just outliers or is something different going on in American political campaigning these days?

This is not just your imagination.

Read more

Hey all,

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done a mailbag post, so I’m planning to send one out tomorrow.

Do you have burning questions you’d be interested in seeing me cover? Send them over using this anonymous link:

Send your questions!

I’m excited to get back into the Q&A groove and see what you all are curious about this week.

In the meantime, if you missed yesterday’s newsletter on the Revenge of the Serious Politician, or last Friday’s interview with “Regime Change” author Maggie Haberman, I highly recommend you check them out:

Do you have pushback on either of these newsletters? Questions on other topics I’ve covered recently? Questions on topics I haven’t covered? Questions that have nothing to do with the daily news cycle? You know what to do!

Send your questions!

See you in your inboxes tomorrow!

— Gabe

President Donald Trump’s endorsement is generally seen as a golden ticket in Republican primaries.

On the surface, it seems as though that has held up this year. According to Ballotpedia, a remarkable 96% of the candidates Trump has endorsed in GOP primary elections this cycle have won.

However, that statistic (which Trump is very fond of) is a bit misleading, combining victories that are genuinely impressive — like his successful bids to purge Republican incumbents like Sen. Bill Cassidy (LA), Sen. John Cornyn (TX), and Rep. Thomas Massie (KY) — with endorsements in primary races that were completley uncontested.

When you take a closer look, the power of Trump’s endorsement appears to be fraying.

In gubernatorial elections, for example, Trump has endorsed 10 candidates in contested primary races so far this year (defined, fairly liberally, as races where more than one candidate received at least 10% of the vote). Of those, five have won and five have lost, yielding a much less impressive success rate of 50%.

His most recent loss came last night, when Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder was crushed in the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary by state Sen. Eric Barlow. Trump urged Degenfelder to run in January (“Should she decide to enter this Race, ‘MAGA’ Megan Degenfelder has my Complete and Total Endorsement”), then reiterated his support in a video last month and two Truth Social posts and a tele-rally this month.

“So get out and vote for Megan Degenfelder,” Trump said during the tele-rally. “And you’re going to be happy. You’re going to say, ‘President Trump gave me a good idea.’ You’ll look back in the years and you’ll say, ‘That was a great, a great choice.’”

Degenfelder finished with 28.1% of the vote, to Barlow’s 44.8%.

She was one of three Trump-backed candidates who fell short in GOP primaries last night, joining Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) and Florida congressional candidate Catalina Lauf.

In total, according to a Wake Up To Politics analysis of Ballotpedia data, 13 Trump-endorsed candidates have come up short in GOP primaries this year, a far cry from his near-perfect record during the two election cycles in his first term. (Just one Trump-backed Republican lost a primary in 2018, and only four lost in 2020. Trump’s endorsement record was more mixed when he was out of office, with 16 primary losses in 2022 and 12 in 2024.)

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Let’s be clear about what this is and what it’s not. These primary results do not indicate a change in the party’s support for Trump himself. But they do represent a stylistic shift in the sort of candidates winning over Republican primary voters.

We’ll tackle the first point first.

It should be stated at the outset that the candidates beating Trump-backed opponents are not anti-Trump Republicans by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, these GOP primary contests are generally a competition over who can tie themselves to Trump the most.

“I’m running for Congress to support President Trump, get inflation under control, and to protect election integrity,” former local news anchor Ryan Elijah, who beat Mills, said in his first TV ad. “Together, we’ll help President Trump make America greater than ever before,” businessman Jim Schwartzel, who beat Lauf, says on his campaign website. Earlier this year, in North Carolina, a Trump-endorsed state senator lost to a candidate who had led the group “Sheriffs for Trump” in 2016.

The fact that the candidates in these primaries — Trump-endorsed or not — all speak the shared lingua franca of pro-Trump Republicanism generally allows Trump to quickly declare victory even when his preferred candidates lose in primaries, as he notes that the winner was pro-Trump, too, and rushes to rally behind them.

“Ryan stands for EVERYTHING MAGA, and is respected by ALL. He has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” Trump wrote this morning on Truth Social, referring to Elijah. (He also added that he had privately told Mills to “get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen,” though there was no public indication of this and Trump never rescinded his endorsement.)

Earlier this month, when another Trump-endorsed Republican incumbent (Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles) was defeated by a primary challenger, the president similarly acted like he had always known it was a lost cause (calling Ogles a “person who I remained loyal to even though he had virtually no chance of winning”) and called the victor Charlie Hatcher a “Great ‘Trump’ Candidate.”

But even if support for Trump has not been on the ballot in any of these races — with everyone more or less on the same page ideologically — the results still paint an interesting trend of Republican primary voters gravitating away from controversial candidates running in Trump’s mold stylistically.

We can use the Wyoming gubernatorial primary as an example. The state’s current governor, Republican Mark Gordon, is known as a mild-mannered, mainstream conservative who has crossed swords with the state legislature’s Freedom Caucus over issues like Covid policy and government spending.

Eric Barlow, who won last night’s primary, was seen as being in Gordon’s mold, while Megan Degenfelder, who Trump had endorsed, was viewed to be “considerably more pugnacious,” having made highly charged issues like DEI and gender policy the cornerstone of her tenure as state education chief and her gubernatorial campaign. A third candidate, retired Marine Corps colonel Brent Bien, was also aligned with the state Freedom Caucus.

“Barlow’s victory suggested that Wyoming’s heavily Republican electorate preferred a lower-key leader similar to the incumbent governor, Mark Gordon, rather than a bomb-throwing conservative or culture warrior,” as the New York Times put it. In the same night, at least 14 members of the state legislature’s Freedom Caucus were defeated, suggesting a farther-reaching move away from hard-edged candidates.

A similar story has played out this year in other Republican gubernatorial primaries. In Minnesota, Trump threw his weight behind Mike Lindell, the former MyPillow CEO who gained notoriety for promoting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Lindell lost the Republican primary last week to Lisa Demuth, a more conventional politician who currently serves as speaker of the state House. (Lindell, true to form, has refused to concede.) Another neither Lindell nor Demuth were seen as particularly likely to win the governorship in blue-tinted Minnesota, GOP primary voters went with the candidate who had at least a better shot at flipping the statehouse, over a zanier alternative.

Earlier this year in Georgia, another leader of Trump’s 2020 election denial movement — Burt Jones, who was tapped as one of the “fake electors” after that campaign — lost the GOP gubernatorial nod to businessman Rick Jackson, a former Liz Cheney donor, despite Trump having endorsed Jones. Jackson was not anti-Trump (though he did admit, “like JD Vance and Marco Rubio…I was late to the Trump Train”), but he was not the candidate most clearly in Trump’s mold.

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This isn’t just a matter of GOP voters elevating more traditional pols to be chief executives, or only thronging to that type in swingy territory. The same story has played out on the congressional level, and in deep-red seats.

The two Trump-endorsed House incumbents who lost in primary challenges this year, Cory Mills (last night) and Andy Ogles (earlier this month), were both plagued by scandal: Mills faced allegations of fraud and sexual assault; Ogles was being investigated for his campaign finances and had routinely provoked controversy over his Islamophobic social media posts. (“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” he wrote on X this year.)

Their losses showed that the Trump strategy of just blowing through scandal works only for him: voters (even Republican voters) are not willing to give politicians (even ones endorsed by Trump) anywhere near the same forbearance as they are willing to give the president.

The other Trump-backed congressional candidate to lose last night was Catalina Lauf, who served in his first administration but who did not have deep roots in the state she was running in (Florida), having lost two previous congressional campaigns in Illinois. Eventual victor Jim Schwartzel painted her as a carpetbagger, noting in ads that he had raised his family and started a business in the district.

Extending beyond just races with Trump endorsees, you can see a broader backlash brewing to the conventional wisdom that primary voters in both parties routinely pick the most outlandish candidate on the ballot.

As I’ve noted previously, several influencer-politicians have fallen short this cycle, including Jack Schlossberg in New York and Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois. And so have several politician-influencers: many of the most rabble-rousing House members on both sides of the aisle will be gone next year, now that Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have resigned, and Jasmine Crockett, Nancy Mace, Chip Roy, and Ralph Norman have lost bids for higher office. (A former politician in this mold, Missouri’s Cori Bush, also came up short in a comeback bid this month.)

With the losses of Ogles and Mills — plus the retirements or resignations of Eric Swalwell, Chuck Edwards, and Tony Gonzales — Congress will also be rid of many members who have found themselves in ethical hot water, proving that a scandal penalty very much still exists in American politics. Another unsuccessful Trump endorsee this cycle, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, was embroiled in corruption scandals and promoted conspiracy theories about the Black Lives Matter protests and 2020 election before being defeated by a challenger backed by Gov. Greg Abbott.

Other losses that fit this broader pattern last night include those of James Fishback and Dan Bilzerian, two far-right Republicans who racked up social media views to promote their openly racist and anti-semitic campaigns for (respectively) Florida governor and U.S. House, before both coming up short in Tuesday’s primaries. (Although, it should be noted, Bilzerian lost to Rep. Randy Fine, a congressman who himself has courted controversy.)

None of this means that ideologically extreme candidates do not still win primaries, as evidenced just last night by democratic socialist Angie Nixon’s surprise win in the Florida Democratic Senate primary.

But there does appear to be a bar above which many primary electorates require their candidates to sit. I call this the Logan Roy Rule, after the “Succession” character’s biting line directed to his own children: “You are not serious people.”

American voters are being offered tons of unserious candidates lately. But they mostly seem to be rejecting them — not necessarily balking at their ideologies, but declining to go along with contenders who don’t have real jobs, or don’t live in the district they’re running in, or who have been tinged by scandal. American voters — yes, even in the year 2026, with our politics as maligned as they are — still seem to want politicians who are serious people.

Trump tends to endorse candidates in his own mold: unconventional, hard-edged, doused in scandal. The fact that so many of these contenders have gone down in flames should tell us something about the state of American politics, and the replicability (or lack thereof) of Trump’s improbable rise. Voters have frequently proven willing to give Trump a pass. The same can’t be said for many other candidates, including those that he’s promoted.

One question I often receive is about the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to meddle with the 2026 midterms, which are now less than three months away.

American elections, as President Trump learned in 2020, are extremely hard to manipulate. They are conducted at several tiers, in accordance with an overlapping web of city, county, state, and federal rules, something that has annoyed both Democrats and Republicans in the past, leading to occasional efforts from each side to nationalize elections, which have repeatedly failed to come to fruition.

As it stands, the executive branch has little independent power over elections. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution says that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” but that Congress “may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” No mention is made of the president, which means the executive only has authority in this space insofar as Congress might have given it to him in those laws making or altering such regulations.

Still, as might be expected for a president who has made election security a signature issue, President Trump has made several attempts to use executive power to put his stamp on American elections, including an order that is currently pending before the Supreme Court. Here’s where these efforts stand:

Trump’s first executive order

The president’s opening salvo in this fight was his March 2025 executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” Most notably, that order:

• Directed the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to change the federal voter registration form to include a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement.

• Directed the Attorney General to take “all necessary action” against states that count mail-in ballots sent on or before Election Day but received afterward.

Large parts of the order were almost immediately blocked by several federal judges, including ones in Washington, D.C. and Boston. Both judges have since converted their temporary blocks on the order into rulings permanently barring Trump’s directive from taking effect.

“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled in D.C.

The rulings have been appealed to the federal circuit courts, although neither case seems to be proceeding particularly quickly: oral arguments in the Boston case aren’t set to take place on the appellate level until December 9, after the 2026 midterms have already passed, and even those arguments are only over Judge Denise Casper’s temporarily ruling against the EO, not her permanent ruling issued more recently.

Trump’s second executive order

With his first EO put on hold, Trump tried again in March of this year with another one, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

This order directed the Secretary of Homeland Security (in coordination with the heads of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration) to make a list of people in each state “confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.”

The U.S. Postal Service was then directed to put regulations in place ensuring that mail-in ballots would only be sent to people who are on the federal list of eligible voters.

In June, Judge Indira Talwani, a federal district judge in Boston, blocked the order from being enforced in 23 Democratic-led states that had sued over the directive. Then, last week, Judge Talwani expanded her block nationally, in response to lawsuits by national organizations including the League of Women Voters and the NAACP.

Separately, Judge Carl Nichols in Washington, D.C. rejected a different challenge to the order in May. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Nichols’ ruling late last month.

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to undo Judge Talwani’s initial, state-specific ruling on an emergency basis. Then, last week, the administration reiterated its request in light of Judge Talwani’s second ruling, which the Justice Department said “confirms the urgent need for this Court to grant the stay of the [initial order] and to explain its rationale for doing so.”

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on Trump’s emergency request any day now, the first time the justices will have weighed in on the president’s attempts to alter election rules.

The dueling rulings by Judges Talwani and Nichols offer insight into how the justices could rule. If they block the order, they will likely follow the path laid out by Judge Talwani, who ruled that Trump’s efforts violated separation of powers, exceeding the (slim) authority over elections given to him by the Constitution. Notably, Judge Nichols didn’t push back on that logic — nor did Trump’s lawyers when they asked the Supreme Court to review the issue.

Instead of dwelling on whether or not the EO was legal, Judge Nichols (and the Justice Department in its emergency request) said that it was too early to issue a ruling. Although Trump has ordered the Postal Service to impose regulations on who could receive mail-in ballots, the Postal Service has not yet done so.

Therefore, Judge Nichols wrote, the organizations bringing lawsuits had not yet suffered an injury that would qualify them to sue. “The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Judge Nichols ruled. “Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur. Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted.”

These are the same arguments the Trump administration made to the Supreme Court, essentially: You don’t know exactly how the Postal Service is going to write their regulations. Come back to us once the regulations are done and we can talk.

Because the Trump administration is not yet making an argument on the merits of the EO, it effectively ensures that even a temporary win for the president at the Supreme Court will not automatically translate into a broader victory. If the court sides with Trump, it will be doing so on procedural grounds, ruling that it’s too early to make a decision on the EO.

Then the Postal Service would have an opportunity to write its regulations, and the litigants would have an opportunity to sue again, potentially setting up another Supreme Court clash in the final weeks of the campaign.

Seeking voter data

Finally, the other big Trump election push worth noting is his Justice Department’s attempt to obtain voter rolls from the states, as part of the efforts laid out in the two EOs to ensure non-citizens are not being given the opportunity to vote.

So far, 30 states have declined to comply with the DOJ’s requests, sparking lawsuits from the Trump administration.

Of these 30 cases, federal district judges have ruled in 23 of them. The Trump administration has lost all 23 times, including its most recent loss yesterday in Minnesota. One appeals court, the Sixth Circuit, has ruled, also rejecting the Trump administration’s request.

Attorney General Todd Blanche opened the door Sunday to appealing the case to the Supreme Court. “Absolutely it’s a possibility,” Blanche said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Until then, there is little positive news for Trump in this particular uphill battle.

When Ted Kennedy was running for president in 1980, he was famously tripped up by that one little question: “Why do you want to be president?”

Donald Trump has wanted to be president for decades, and has now had his wish fulfilled for more than five and a half (non-consecutive) years. To hear Maggie Haberman tell it, Trump’s answer to that question wouldn’t be all that complicated.

“The things that make him happiest, really, are things that he can feel and touch, and then things that are, in his mind, hopefully irreversible physical testaments to himself,” Haberman told me.

Haberman estimated that 70% (!) of Trump’s brainpower these days is spent on renovation projects, from the White House ballroom to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

That is a remarkable statement: Trump is president of the United States, leader of the free world, commander-in-chief of the planet’s greatest fighting force. He has powers, to change the country and people’s lives, that most of us could never dream of. And his attention is predominantly focused on interior design and architecture, according to Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times who is widely considered to be the reporter who knows him best.

What about things like inflation, or health care, or tech policy? “He finds the economy boring. It’s not what he wants to talk about,” Haberman told me.

“Policy is about other people,” she said. “Monuments, in his mind, are him.”

Haberman, who has covered Trump since she was working for the New York tabloids and he was a frequent character in them, is the author of “Confidence Man,” the best book for understanding his rise in the worlds of both business and politics (and the throughlines that connect them), and co-author of the new book “Regime Change,” the most comprehensive book yet on Trump’s second term in office.

“Regime Change” is packed with richly reported anecdotes that flesh out the themes Haberman and I discussed in our interview, the latest installment of the Wake Up To Politics Book Club.

There is the scene of him sitting down with the four top congressional leaders — on the eve of a government shutdown — and repeatedly diverting the meeting to dig through a bowl of candy and pull out “Trump 2028” hats. There is the time that the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie Bunch, came to the White House to try to defuse the president’s recent criticism of the museums. But when Bunch got there, Trump never said a negative word, instead taking Bunch on a tour of the White House, meticulously “noting which artworks were correctly framed and which were not.”

At one point, waiting with Mike Johnson as July 4th festivities were about to begin, Trump treats the House speaker to “his own indoor version of a light show,” using a laser pointer to show which presidential portraits in the Oval Office were made with “good oil paint” and which ones with “cheat paint.” At another, Trump suddenly pauses a conversation to phone Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. What urgent matter did the president have to discuss with his French counterpart?

“Emmanuel? Emmanuel?” Trump said, according to Haberman and her co-author Jonathan Swan, a fellow Times reporter. “I’m building a big arch, Emmanuel. I’m trying to figure out if I need a viewing deck. Your arch—do you have—do you have a viewing platform?”

Haberman is careful with her words. She is the farthest thing from a partisan cheerleader — for either side — and she is unflinchingly fair in her coverage. Her liberal critics sometimes bemoan that she does not editorialize more (she “normalizes” or “sanewashes” Trump, they will allege), but the truth is, her assessments of the president are all the more biting because they are so matter-of-fact, and stripped of any partisan outrage or reaction.

Reading how Trump is described in “Regime Change” — picking Cabinet secretaries based off looks, or dropping bombs on Iran in 2025 because of the “nonstop adulation” Israel was receiving on Fox News for its attacks against Tehran, or acting sympathetically towards Mexico because he “liked the way [its president, Claudia Sheinbaum’s] voice sounded” — I couldn’t help but walk away with the impression that Haberman views Trump as, fundamentally, a simple person.

She admitted there was something to that. Trump is “shrewder and more calculating than people realize,” Haberman said. “But in terms of the things that either animate him or will compel him to take actions, those tend to be fairly simple.”

In our conversation, Haberman gave me an inside perspective on what is truly animating Trump at this point in his political life — and what isn’t. On their own, many of the things she told me would make for shocking assessments of an American president:

• That he “really doesn’t” care whether his political party controls Congress after the midterm elections.

• That he went to war with another country, destabilizing the U.S. economy and foreign policy, in no small part to get revenge for threats made against him personally.

• That he now regrets launching the war, one of his most significant presidential decisions, in the first place.

Taken together, they paint an extraordinary picture of how the president thinks and how he operates.

Perhaps the most striking thing to me about Trump’s conception of the presidency, in Haberman’s account at least, is how backwards it all is.

Most presidents are forgotten. But some are remembered as great leaders, the type we carve into mountains and build statues of. To get there, though, presidents typically have to do things: win a war, or create a lasting legislative program, like the New Deal or the Great Society or Reaganomics. On the basic level, that sort of recognition requires some sort of policy agenda and showing of achievement.

Trump is trying to skip a step. He doesn’t spend his time on policy — Policy is about other people, after all — and instead focuses on erecting monuments he hopes to be remembered by, not realizing that impactful policies are actually how presidents typically reach such hallowed status. Why do great things to then get monuments for you, when the monuments could simply be your great things? It’s a cheat code to a legacy, in his view, without any of the work involved.

But the truth is, Lincoln isn’t remembered because he has the Lincoln Memorial, and Washington isn’t remembered because he has an obelisk. It’s the other way around. They have those monuments because they did things worth remembering.

If only for no other reason than self-interest, and his own legacy, Trump would probably be better off spending his time focused on policy, in order to advance the sort of agenda that might land him in the pantheon of presidential greatness. There are likely aides around him who have recognized this, too, but “Regime Change” depicts a group of courtiers terrified to contradict the president or offer adverse opinions.

It’s sad, really. Trump spent years working to return to the Oval Office — and now that he got there, he has spent the whole time obsessed with how he will be remembered, without even trying to do any of the things that could potentially burnish a lasting presidential legacy. “Buildings can outlive him,” Haberman told me. “I don’t think it’s that complicated, I really don’t.” But is the Kennedy Center really the main thing people think of when they think of JFK?

Towards the end of our conversation, Haberman told me that I was making a common mistake, “trying to apply a framework for all of this that does not fit for Donald Trump.”

Perhaps. But my bet is that this more traditional framework for presidential legacies will win out in the end. Policy may be for other people, but “other people” are also who write history books, and who get to pass judgement on Trumpism at the ballot box. When all is said and done, Trump might end up wishing he spent a little bit more time on policy and not so much on architecture.

You can watch my interview with Haberman above, touching on how Trump views everything from China to Iran to the Supreme Court to a potential House Democratic majority.

The beginning is available for everyone; like all “Book Club” installments, the full thing is available to paid subscribers. This is the type of extra content that you get with a paid subscription. If you haven’t subscribed already, I think you’ll find this to be a fascinating conversation and I hope you consider upgrading.

A full transcript is available below for paid subscribers. As always, thank you for your support, which allows me to bring you conversations like this one.

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It was later revealed that Carlock was among dozens of underage boys who were being sexually abused by the camp’s longtime director, Peter Newman. As a young adult, Carlock eventually sued Kanakuk for allowing Newman’s abuse to take place. The two sides reached a settlement, which included Carlock signing a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) preventing him from speaking out about what he experienced.

Carlock struggled with having to stay silent, describing the settlement as “blood money” and hesitating to tell even his family the details of what he went through. In 2019, Carlock died by suicide at the age of 28. “They will always control me, and I’ll never be free,” he had told his therapist.

Carlock’s ordeal has become a catalyst for legislative change, with his family advocating for a bill known as Trey’s Law, which would prohibit the signing of NDAs in cases of child sexual abuse. It would also retroactively make any current such NDAs null and void. The measure aims to shield other child sexual abuse victims from the mental anguish that Carlock’s NDA caused him — and to help bring perpetrators of sexual abuse to justice before they can harm other children. Other campers had similarly reached settlements with Kanakuk Kamps, but no one knew about the extent of Newman’s actions because each victim had signed NDAs pledging them to secrecy.

Due to advocacy by Carlock’s family, versions of Trey’s Law have been passed on the state level in Missouri, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. (A similar law already existed in California.) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a federal version in March of this year, with bipartisan co-sponsors including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The bill was passed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. Six days later, it was passed unanimously by the full Senate.

The measure has not yet received a vote in the House — not because of any disagreements with the merits of the bill, but because, Cruz says, of a blockade in the House being enforced against any pieces of legislation that arrive from the Senate.

“House leadership has decided to adopt a strategy that is, frankly, indefensible,” Cruz said on the Senate floor last week, calling on the lower chamber to take up Trey’s Law. “It is a strategy where they pass bills that originate in the House; they ignore bills that originate in the Senate, and they let them die.”

A Wake Up To Politics analysis confirmed a stark drop-off in the number of Senate-passed bills that have been approved in the House this Congress, especially compared to previous Congresses where both chambers were controlled by the same party.

Between January 2009 and August 2010 — the equivalent portion of Barack Obama’s presidency — 51% of Senate-passed bills were approved by the House. In the same stretch of Donald Trump’s first term, 40% of Senate-passed bills were approved by the House. Between January 2021 and August 2022, the opening of Joe Biden’s administration, the House greenlit 45% of bills that passed the Senate.

So far this Congress, a mere 36 bills passed by the Republican-led Senate have been approved by the Republican-led House. That is a rate of 21%, the lowest this century. It is just below the percentage of Senate-passed bills that were approved by the House between January 2023 and August 2024, when Democrats controlled the Senate and Republicans controlled the House.1

That’s right: House and Senate Republicans are currently on such different pages that it’s as if Congress isn’t being controlled by the same party at all.

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Like nearly everything else on Capitol Hill these days, the bicameral tensions seem to come back to the SAVE America Act, President Trump’s top-priority legislation, which would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote and to provide photo ID before casting a ballot. (Trump has also called for the bill to be expanded to end mail-in ballots, prohibit transgender women from participating in women and girl’s sports, and ban gender reassignment surgeries for minors.)

Trump has called on the Senate to end the filibuster, which requires most pieces of legislation to have 60 votes to advance, a level of support that the SAVE America Act currently lacks. Senate Republicans have, so far, refused to do so.

In March, a group of 25 House Republicans penned a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) threatening to oppose any Senate-passed bills that came to the House until the Senate approved the House-passed SAVE America Act. “Consider this our filibuster,” they wrote.

Since then, these conservative members have repeatedly shut down the House floor to protest the Senate’s failure to approve the SAVE America Act.

As Trump’s anger towards Thune has risen — “His patience is running out,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently said — his allies in the House have doubled down.

“Aside from Reconciliation and a fixed version of the NDAA, the Senate will not get any legislation passed in the House because there are Members of Congress in the House that will vote against anything they send over based on the fact that they are refusing to pass the SAVE America Act and Voter ID,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) wrote on X last week. “No Senate bills until SAVE AMERICA is passed,” she wrote again two days later.

Hanging in the balance are bills like Trey’s Law. “Every day of delay is another day victims of child sexual abuse and trafficking can be legally silenced in America’s civil courts,” Elizabeth Phillips, Trey Carlock’s sister, told me in a statement.

There are other pieces of legislation recently passed by the Senate that are likely to similarly languish in the House:

• The Older Americans Act Reauthorization Act, which extends and expands programs to help senior citizens, including Meals on Wheels, the national eldercare locator service, and programs to prevent elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

• The Tribal Warrant Fairness Act, which would allow the U.S. Marshals Service to help tribal law enforcement track down violent criminals and search for missing children at a tribe’s request, assistance that the Marshals are currently authorized to provide to other law enforcement agencies but not to Native American tribes, despite the high rates of violence many tribes face.

• The Officer John Barnes and Chief Michael Ansbro Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program Expansion Act, which would speed up the process of awarding benefits given to law enforcement officers disabled in the line of duty, or to the families of officers killed in the line of duty. The measure is named for an officer who had to wait for several years to receive his benefits, and another who is still waiting, eight years later.

• The Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, which would prevent the ability of pharmaceutical companies to set up “patent thickets,” the practice of obtaining several overlapping patents around a single drug, making it impossible for competitors to bring lower-cost generic or biosimilar versions to market.

• The Rural Community Hospital Demonstration Program Reauthorization, which would extend a program tinkering with the Medicare reimbursement formula for rural hospitals, in an attempt to keep more of these remote hospitals with fewer than 51 beds afloat.

All of these bills passed the Senate unanimously. None of them are the type of measures that frequently receive national media attention. But, if they became law, they would make a meaningful difference for older Americans who are hungry, or missing Native American children, or police officers hurt in the line of duty, or people who rely on prescription drugs, or patients at rural hospitals — or children who have been sexually abused. Each bill now faces a difficult path in the House, where about 80% of Senate-passed bills are being stalled, seemingly due to partisan anger about an unrelated issue.

This phenomenon does not run in only one direction.

In fact, even fewer House-passed bills are being approved in the Senate than Senate-passed bills being approved in the House: just 7%, according to my analysis.

This stands out less because the House and Senate trends are very different: while the House, which tends to reflect the partisan balance of a given moment, generally approves more Senate-passed bills in periods of united control (like we are in now), the Senate has been approving fewer and fewer House-passed bills for more than a decade now, as partisan polarization and the increased use of the filibuster have combined to focus the upper chamber’s time on confirmations instead of legislation.

Still, it is hardly the case that the House is the only chamber that has effectively stopped considering bills — even broadly supported ones — from their colleagues on the other side of the Capitol.

In fact, Cruz has now launched a blockade of his own, rising on the Senate floor last week to block two House-passed bills from receiving unanimous consent: the Stop Secret Spending Act (which would increase transparency requirements for federal spending) and the Improving Social Security’s Service to Victims of Identity Theft Act (which would simplify the currently lengthy process for people to get help when their Social Security numbers are stolen).

Cruz said that he had no policy objections to either measure. Rather, he announced plans to block any House-passed bills from receiving unanimous consent in the Senate until the House started taking up Senate-passed bills like Trey’s Law. “If you want to change the behavior of another chamber, the only way to do so is to exercise leverage,” Cruz said.

Later in the week, just before the Senate left for its summer recess, Cruz dropped his hold on the Stop Secret Spending Act, though his spokesperson told me that a broader breakthrough has yet to be reached.

In essence, the two sides of the Capitol have stopped functioning as a bicameral legislature, prioritizing petty feuds over substantive bills being passed by the other chamber. It is now incredibly rare for the House to pass a Senate bill, and even rarer for the Senate to pass a House bill, despite the fact that both chambers are led by the same party. The president of that party, however, does little to hide the fact that he has essentially no legislative agenda (besides the SAVE America Act, of course), which has allowed Congress to atrophy and spend more time squabbling than legislating.

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When initially blocking the House-passed Stop Secret Spending Act, Cruz noted that the Senate had already unanimously passed the legislation before the House passed an identical version of the same bill to send over to the upper chamber. “Now, mind you, that was not because they had any substantive objections to [the Senate version], but, rather, it was because they were refusing to do their job as another chamber in this Congress,” Cruz said.

“I would love to see my name at the top of the bill and it listed as a Senate bill,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the measure’s Senate sponsor, responded. “I discussed it with my staff. I am in the last 6 months of my final term in the U.S. Senate. I would love to have more of my legacy items with my name on them, but I told my staff that it is more important that we get these bills done. I don’t care if it is a House bill. I don’t care if this has my name all over it. The important thing is that when we have good pieces of legislation put in front of us and that we worked hard in a bipartisan manner, in a bicameral manner, and it is good for the American people, that we move forward with those bills.” (This argument must have eventually won Cruz over, since he later dropped his hold.)

However, the Senate has been doing the same thing, passing bills identical to measures that were already passed by the House — but using different legislative vehicles, so the bill has to be voted on again by the other chamber to become law, even though the two chambers have already both backed the underlying legislative language. Recent examples include the Youth Poisoning Protection Act (which would ban the sale of a product frequently used to help young people die by suicide) and the DeOndra Dixon INCLUDE Project Act (which boosts funding for Down Syndrome research).

There is really no reason to do this except for credit-taking. It certainly does not help suicidal youth or people with Down Syndrome, for whom identical versions of these bills have now passed both the House and Senate — but cannot be sent to the president’s desk, because lawmakers cannot agree whether the law should say “S. ___” (the designation for a Senate bill) or “H.R. ___” (the designation in the House) at the top.

To be clear: it is not new for tensions to emerge between a House and Senate controlled by the same party. In fact, it happens basically every time, usually for the same reasons: the boisterous House being upset that the lumbering Senate is not moving fast enough to enact their party’s agenda. We saw this with Republicans during the “Contract with America” in the 1990s and with Democrats in the Obama era.

If you really want to see petty, read about the so-called “Battle of the Octogenarians,” when the government nearly ran out of funding in the 1960s because a pair of Democratic House and Senate committee chairs couldn’t agree on things like which side of the Capitol to meet in. The classic line here is about a freshman House Democrat around this time who referred to the other party as “the enemy.” No, a more senior colleague supposedly told him: “House Republicans aren’t the enemy. They’re the opposition. The enemy is the Senate.”

But Trump, as is often the case, has ratcheted tensions to a high, needling his own party’s Senate Majority Leader and egging on House conservatives to block Senate bills as a result. Musing recently about the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) platform, there was one particular plank Trump didn’t sound so averse to. “Sometimes, I’d like to get rid of the Senate too,” he said.

At a time when Americans frequently complain about Congress’ inability to get anything done across party lines, understanding the House-Senate cold war can help provide a glimpse into what is actually going on in Washington.

So far this Congress, the House and Senate have actually passed the same or a higher number of bills originating in their own chamber (655 and 171, respectively) as previous Congresses up to this point. But fewer bills have become law — only 102, compared to 168 at the same point in the Biden presidency — because there has been such a breakdown in each chambers approving bills from the other.

This means the issue is not Democrats and Republicans working together, which they are doing at perfectly normal rates, on issues from child sexual abuse victims to prescription drug prices. Rather than earlier in the process, it is at the last, final step (unfortunately, the very one required for a bill to become a law) that the system isn’t working — bills going from one side of the Capitol to another — largely because of petty squabbles within a party, rather than partisan beef between them.

I haven’t touched on this issue in the newsletter yet, but luckily it’s the topic of my latest YouTube video! If you’re curious about how Iowa got to spend so many decades at the top of the calendar in the first place, why Democrats are swapping it out, and how that will impact the 2028 race, here’s the video for you:

Now, onto our regularly scheduled programming:

If the central story of President Trump’s second term has been his quest for complete control, then he continues to run into disappointments.

His own U.S. attorney here in D.C., longtime friend and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, has ended — against Trump’s wishes — the prosecution of an Olympic canoeist who Trump has accused of vandalism in the nation’s capital. His party’s top Senate leader, John Thune, allowed the chamber to leave this weekend for its August recess without advancing a party-line measure that would have included parts of Trump’s beloved SAVE America Act.

Iran is issuing new demands in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, while a U.S. munitions shortage has limited Trump’s options to return to military escalation. (Trump told Axios that his new strategy in Iran was “low-keying it.”) Ten days ago, Trump was boasting about a “HISTORIC agreement” between Israel and Hamas that would be a “monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY.” Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was rejecting the deal, refusing to begin withdrawing from Gaza until Hamas completely disarms. (The U.S. plan had envisioned both the Israeli withdrawal and the Hamas disarmament taking place in stages.)

I’ll say one thing for Trump, though: he doesn’t give up easily. In the last few days, Trump has sought rematches in several of his highest-profile legal losses of the second term. I’ve already written about one of them: Trump attempting to impose a new wave of tariffs to replace the ones struck down by the Supreme Court. Groups of states and small businesses have already filed lawsuits challenging these tariffs, which means we could see another fight over trade eventually bubble up to the high court.

This morning, I want to break down two other back-up plans Trump is trying to execute, picking new fights over birthright citizenship and Federal Reserve independence after his first attempts were squashed by the Supreme Court. How can Trump be trying again on these scores after being told “no” by the Supremes? Let’s dig in.

First, let’s start out by stipulating that this isn’t abnormal. Presidents frequently try to do something, get told “no” by the Supreme Court, and then try to do something similar in a different way. It’s what Joe Biden did on student loans. FDR did it repeatedly, trying to revise and refashion New Deal legislation that got struck down by the justices. When the Supreme Court rules on something, it generally doesn’t say, “you cannot attempt this policy” broadly, it says “you can’t do this in the specific way you went about doing it,” so it’s not surprising that presidents might try to find a different way.

This isn’t defying the court; in fact, it’s accepting the legitimacy of the court’s decisions, by working within the confines of the ruling the court laid out.1

With all that said, let’s start by looking at Trump’s latest actions with respect to the Fed:

Trump v. Cook, Round 2

Almost exactly a year ago, Trump purported to fire Lisa Cook, one of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the influential body that helps set interest rates.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 says that Fed governors can only be fired “for cause,” though the statute does not elabroate on what that means; until Trump, no president ever tested it. In a letter to Cook last August, Trump alleged that she had purchased two properties in 2021 and described both as her primary residence when seeking mortgages.

Trump wrote Cook that there was “sufficient reason to believe you may have made false statements on one or more mortgage agreements,” and therefore there was “sufficient cause to remove you from your position.”

Importantly, in its 5-4 ruling in Cook’s favor earlier this summer, the Supreme Court did not weigh in on whether or not these allegations that Cook committed mortgage fraud before taking office (for which she was never formally charged or convicted) rose to the level of “cause” required by the 1913 statute.

Instead, the court ruled that it was moot because Trump had not followed the proper process when attempting to remove Cook. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted the Supreme Court’s 1901 ruling in Reagan v. United States, which said that officials who serve in positions where Congress fixed the term of office for a certain number of years — Fed governors serve 14-year terms — must receive “notice and hearing” before being removed.

This is not a requirement explicitly written into the statute (or explained much in either the 1901 or 2026 court rulings), so it still isn’t entirely clear what “notice and hearing” has to look like. According to University of Virginia law professor Aditya Bamzai, whose research was cited by Roberts, only two other presidents have ever tried to remove officials “for cause”: William Howard Taft and Richard Nixon.

Taft appointed a three-person “committee of inquiry” to investigate two members of the Board of General Appraisers he was considering firing: one who stood accused of using his position for personal gain, and another who was accused of lacking qualifications and abusing alcohol in a way that had “brought scandal upon the Board.” The committee held a public hearing and interviewed several witnesses, before recommending to Taft that he fire them both, which he did.

Nixon, on the other hand, fired the president of Fannie Mae, by sending him a letter saying, “You are hereby removed for good cause,” without offering much elaboration. He was given no hearing to plead his case.

In his opinion for the court, Roberts seemed to say that Trump needed to give Cook something in between the Taft and Nixon routes: a “full-blown judicial trial” was not necessary, Roberts wrote, but giving the official advance notice of the charges against them, and an opportunity to defend themselves (even just in writing), was.

And, no, Trump linking on Truth Social to a news article about the allegations against Cook a few days before announcing her firing did not count as “notice,” Roberts added. “That will not do,” the chief justice wrote. “At minimum, Cook was entitled to some explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response, and a deadline by which a response would be due.”

Last week, Trump responded by giving Cook exactly that. White House personnel chief Dan Scavino penned a three-page letter to Cook on Wednesday, spelling out the allegations of mortage fraud in detail. “Based on these facts,” he wrote, “a jury could find that you intended to defraud these institutions for your own benefit, but at a minimum, this conduct was grossly negligent and demonstrates that you are unfit for the office in which you serve as a controlling member of the Federal Reserve.” (Note that he said a jury “could” find her actions criminal, not that one “would.”)

Scavino then gave Cook an avenue to respond (by emailing the White House counsel) and a deadline by which to do so (August 26).

Now, we wait. Cook will either respond in the way that Scavino requested, or renew her lawsuit, or both. Either way, this is likely setting another Supreme Court clash into motion, forcing the justices to more explicitly say what “notice and hearing” has to look like and then — if they decide that the process Trump is now according Cook is sufficient — whether the allegations against Cook, properly processed, rise to the level of “cause.”

In his opinion, Roberts explicitly rejected the definitions of “cause” put forward both by Trump (who said the bar was met any time a president has concerns about a person’s “conduct, ability, fitness, or competence”) and Cook (who said that a president had to prove “inefficiency,” “neglect of duty,” “malfeasance,” or “ineligibility” for office).

He said that Trump’s definition of “cause” for firing a Fed governor was “too lenient” and Cook’s was “too stringent,” but declined to offer one of his own. Roberts did make clear that the bar, for him, would be high. It would have to be “substantial,” he said, in order to “reflect the Federal Reserve’s unique historical status and role.”

“Whether ‘cause’ for removal exists in any given situation will depend, at least in part, on the seriousness of the alleged misconduct, and the extent of any nexus that may exist to the Governor’s professional duties,” he added. “The key issue is whether ‘[t]he cause assigned’ truly ‘impl[ies] an unfitness for the place’—or whether it simply represents an effort to secure a ‘more congenial’ replacement.”

Scavino tried to establish such a nexus in his letter to Cook, writing that it was important that Fed governors “be above reproach, particularly in financial matters,” considering their role in the financial system.

Will that be good enough for Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the other conservative who joined his Cook opinion? We are likely to get a bit more clarity in the coming months.

Trump v. Barbara, Round 2

If Roberts’ majority opinion in Cook was written as narrowly as possible, then his opinion in Trump v. Barbara — the birthright citizenship case — was written fairly broadly.

Faced with Trump’s Day One executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants in the U.S. illegally or temporarily, Roberts could have punted on the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and ruled simply that only Congress, not the president, can attempt to reinterpret it. (This was Justice Kavanaugh’s preferred path.) He could have struck the order down by saying that the children of illegal immigrants are U.S. citizens, while leaving vague how he would categorize children of temporary visitors or “birth tourists.” (This was the path that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, in their dissents, seemed open to.)

Instead, Roberts produced a fairly sweeping legal defense of the concept of jus soli (Latin for “right of the soil”), the idea that someone receives citizenship in the U.S. by being born on U.S. soil, not because of anything to do with their parents or ancestry.

While the dissenting justices wrote at length about the concept of being “domiciled,” arguing that the citizenship of a child was tied to whether their parents had made a permanent home in the United States, Roberts tied citizenship to the idea from British common law of the King owing his protection to anyone born within his territory, and these subjects owing him allegiance in return.

There were a few exceptions to this arrangement — children who the King was not expected to protect, or were not expected to be allegiant to the King — which gave way to the four exceptions to American birthright citizenship spelled out in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case:

1. Children of “foreign sovereigns or their ministers” (meaning, children of foreign heads of state or ambassadors)

2. Children “born on foreign public ships”

3. Children of “enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory”

4. Children of “members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes”

Roberts kept these four exceptions in place.2 In a new executive order last week, Trump tried to broaden the first and the third exceptions, mandating that the federal government not recognize the citizenship of:

1. Children born in the United States to any foreign government employees (meaning, not just ambassadors, but anyone who works at a foreign embassy and isn’t a U.S. citizen)

2. Children of any member of a group or person listed by law as a Foreign Terrorist Organization or Specially Designated Global Terrorist

Trump also added two additional exceptions3:

1. Children whose parents engaged in a fraudulent “commercial transaction” to ensure that the mother is present in the U.S. to give birth (so-called “birth tourism”)

2. Children whose parents hire a surrogate mother in the U.S. for the same reason

Roberts’ opinion in Barbara does not explicitly speak to these specific situations, but it does seem to hint pretty heavily that the Chief Justice would not look kindly upon new exceptions to the birthright citizenship rule. As a philosophical matter, Roberts appears to dismiss the idea that the citizenship of a child should be tied to the circumstances of their parents, outside the narrow Wong Kim Ark exceptions.

Referring to the rule in the British common law, Roberts wrote: “A foreign mother could enter the British Isles, give birth, and leave with her child the very next day, and that child would remain a British subject. Why? Because the child owed an implied allegiance to the sovereign who protected him at his birth—no matter how ‘momentary and uncertain’ his presence in the King’s realms.”

He wrote that this was true even of children born to parents subject to expulsion, such as the Romani (then known as “gypsy”) people, whose parents were directed to avoid British territory but whose children were considered citizens when born inside the King’s realm.

In early U.S. history, Roberts adds: “The young Republic attracted tens of thousands of émigrés from the Old World—Scotch-Irish, French, German, Welsh, and many more, some of whom hoped to stay only a short time, others of whom hoped never to leave. No matter their intentions, however, they could be assured that their children would be American citizens by birth alone.”

The point is clear: A parent might be in the U.S. for a short amount of time. They might be here for one day. They might be here illegally. They might even be someone viewed with suspicion by the government. But their children would still be citizens, because citizenship is about where the child is born, not the status of the parents.

“Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order—‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’ — are absent” from the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, Roberts writes. “For a simple reason: they did not matter.”

Trump’s executive order once again uses similar words, which is why it’s a good bet that Roberts will once again feel similarly. Perhaps Roberts will include foreign terrorists in the U.S. as “enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory,” and therefore block their children from citizenship, though I wouldn’t even count on that. From there, his agreeing to broaden “ministers” (ambassadors) to include, say, embassy custodial staff does not seem likely; nor did he seem particularly sympathetic to arguments about birth tourism in writing that the “intentions” of a parent do not matter for the citizenship of a child.

“Fraud” and “surrogacy” are two more words that are not found in the 14th Amendment, he would likely note.

Of course, in the U.S., interpreting laws is not merely an academic exercise. A plaintiff can only sue over something they are harmed by, which means Trump’s second executive order on birthright citizenship may survive longer than the first partially because there is a dramatically smaller pool of people who could potentially challenge it.

A foreign terrorist or birth tourist might be loath to announce themselves as such, in an attempt to protect the citizenship of their child — though that also speaks to the difficulty of enforcing this executive order in the first place. Foreign terrorists and birth tourists will also be similarly loath to announce themselves as such at a hospital, which means their children will likely continue receiving birth certificates just as they would have before this order.

If the order does return to the court, however, Roberts’ opinion (joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett) pretty well tips his hand on how he would rule. (Justice Kavanaugh did not join the opinion, but wrote that changes to citizenship law would have to come from Congress, a test this order also does not pass.) Roberts’ opinion in Cook (joined by Kavanaugh) is a bit harder to parse — but only a bit. Like his ruling in Barbara, it offers clues about his broader philosophy (here, the premium he places on Fed independence) that suggest he would only allow a Fed firing over conduct that meets a substantially high bar.

You don’t hear the name Jim DeMint a lot anymore, but he was a very powerful force in the far-away era that was the Republican Party just before Donald Trump.

DeMint represented South Carolina in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005, and then in the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. While his same-state colleague Lindsey Graham had a reputation as a moderate, DeMint was known as a rock-ribbed conservative. He played a crucial role in pushing the GOP to the right, helping unleash the grassroots energy that Trump seized on in 2016.

In the 2010 cycle, DeMint emerged as a “godfather” of the Tea Party movement, one of the few incumbent GOP senators who not only didn’t fear the incoming class of rebellious Republicans but actively worked to bring them to Washington as reinforcements. His PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, poured money into Tea Party candidates that year. In 2011, he joined with those who were victorious, like Mike Lee and Rand Paul, to found the Senate Tea Party Caucus.

Then, in 2013, DeMint decided, in the Republican Party that he had helped transform, he would have more power as an activist than as a lawmaker. He resigned from the Senate and became president of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank.

DeMint has been on my mind recently because of a quote he gave in 2009, at the height of the Tea Party fervor: “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.”

The one thing I’ll say in defense of the quote is that, in the U.S. Senate, a small, passionate minority can slow down a lot of things. (That’s sort of the whole point.) But that’s about it. Being the 30 in a 70-30 Senate would be tantamount to suicide for any of your policy ideas. Because the other party would have a filibuster-proof majority, they would spend their days ramming legislation down your throat on every issue under the sun. You could slow things down, but you’d be powerless to stop them.

If you ever wanted to affirmatively pass a policy idea of your own, not just stall those of the other side? Forget it. 30 senators is not enough to pass a single thing. To prefer that to a 60-seat majority, which might require more difficult coalition management, but could actually turn bills into law, is crazy. It’s the difference between a fractious majority that can actually do things when you’re able to get everyone on the same page, and a committed minority that can do nothing. You would have purity, but no power.

That DeMint line has been echoing in my ears because it seems to be a popular philosophy lately.

First, of course, there’s President Trump, who seems not at all bothered by the prospect of replacing a fractious majority with a committed minority come November. According to reporting by Axios, “President Trump doesn’t much care if Republicans lose the House and/or the Senate in the midterms this fall,” precisely because he knows he will “enjoy a more pro-Trump” congressional Republican caucus, “win or lose.” Put another way, Trump would rather be sure that John Cornyn will be out of the Senate next year, than be sure that a Republican will be in his Texas seat.

“It seems like he’s given up on holding the majority and focusing on loyalty in the minority,” one House Republican told Politico in May.

You see strands of this thinking in the Democratic Party as well.

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As I’m writing this, former public health official Abdul El-Sayed was just declared the winner of last night’s Michigan Democratic Senate primary by the Associated Press. With more than 95% of precincts reporting, El-Sayed currently has 48.48% of the vote, while his rival, moderate Rep. Haley Stevens, has 47.51%, giving the progressive favorite an edge of just under one percentage point.1

There are already two takes forming:

1. Someone named Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed just won a primary for the U.S. Senate, overcoming opposition from the Democratic Party establishment on both the state and national level (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was privately steering support to Stevens, while Michigan’s sitting governor and outgoing senator publicly endorsed her) and a massive spending disadvantage (Stevens and her allies poured $65 million into advertising in the race, compared to just $7 million in ad spending by El-Sayed). This is a landmark victory for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who backed El-Sayed, and their broader left-wing political movement attempting to remake the Democratic Party.

Or…

2. Polling averages showed El-Sayed with a mammoth 13-point lead ahead of the primary, a benchmark he is poised to underperform by about 12 points. No matter your opinion on prediction markets as an oracle for the future, they are great vehicles for assessing conventional wisdom; 24 hours ago, the favored outcome on Polymarket was that El-Sayed would win by 15-20 percentage points, followed by him winning by 10-15 percentage points. Now, it is El-Sayed winning by fewer than five percentage points, which was deemed a remote possibility yesterday. After expressing a confidence that “can border on cockiness,” progressives badly underperformed expectations in this race.

Most pundits, depending on their factional loyalties, will spend most of the day trumpeting one of these two narratives. But here at Wake Up To Politics, we have no factional loyalties, so we can be honest: There is truth in both.

Considered on its own terms, El-Sayed’s apparent victory is deeply impressive: with all the party elites (and outside money) stacked against him, he could now become the first Muslim senator in U.S. history.2 But considered within the context of the renewed civil war that has been brewing within the Democratic Party all year — ever since Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary last June — the outcome is more of a draw. In a race that was decided by about 20,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast, it can’t exactly be said that either side of the Democratic Party ran away with a victory.

Instead, when considering the results from Michigan and other primary races across the country, a picture of two Democratic Parties — roughly evenly matched — comes into view.

El-Sayed trounced Stevens in Kent County (home to Grand Rapids), 61% to 35%, and Washtenaw County (home to Ann Arbor), 61% to 36%. Both counties are overwhelmingly white (70% and 67%, respectively). Washtenaw County, home to the University of Michigan, is disproportionately young and college-educated: 20% of the county is in their 20s (compared to 13% of Michiganders overall), while 60% have a bachelor’s degree or higher (compared to 33% statewide). Though not by as much, Kent County also punches above its weight in terms of education (42% of residents have at least a college degree). Both counties have higher median household incomes compared to Michigan overall.

Stevens, meanwhile, came out ahead in Wayne County (home to Detroit), which has a significantly smaller white population (48%) and significantly larger Black population (37%). Its educational attainment (28% have a bachelor’s degree) and median household income ($59,000) are both below the figures for the state overall. Stevens is winning there, 52% to 45%.

Statewide, according to the New York Times, Stevens is winning in rural counties, Detroit, and its suburbs. El-Sayed is winning in other suburbs and mid-size cities. In counties with more young residents, El-Sayed is winning by 21 points. In counties with more old residents, Stevens is winning by two.

These patterns would be striking if they didn’t align so perfectly with the results we have seen across the country this year. In June, the democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district (covering upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx). According to the Times, Avila Chevalier romped to victory in the younger, more college-educated, higher-income precincts. Espaillat won in lower-income areas. Avila Chevalier overperformed in the majority Black precincts in the district, while Espaillat overperformed in the majority Hispanic precincts. The same age and income trends held true in New York’s 7th district (covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens), though there left-wing candidate Claire Valdez overperformed in the majority Hispanic precincts while moderate Antonio Reynoso performed well in areas that were majority Black.

Yesterday, at the same time as El-Sayed eked out a victory in Michigan, his fellow left-wing candidate Cori Bush fell flat in Missouri’s 1st district (my home district, comprising St. Louis) against moderate Rep. Wesley Bell. The district is 43% Black (compared to 12% nationwide), with a median household income of $60,000 (compared to $81,000 nationwide). Bell beat Bush by 22 percentage points.

One of the two Democratic Parties is younger, whiter, more college-educated, and higher-income. This one is generally trying to tug the broader party to the left. The other is older, less white, less college-educated, and more working-class. This one is trying to keep the Democratic platform where it is, or move it to the center.

Despite what either faction might tell you, neither of these smaller parties has a clear advantage, which shouldn’t be surprising when considering the demographics of the Democratic Party as a whole. According to Pew Research Center, 56% of voters who lean Democratic are white. 44% are not. 47% are 18 to 49 years old. 53% are 50 or older. 45% have at least a college degree. 55% do not. The party is evenly split on all of its most salient demographic lines.

As a result, the party is split as to its direction. When a CNN poll last week asked Democrats whether they wanted their party to move to the left on policy issues, 54% said “yes” and 45% said “no.” When the poll then asked whether the party should move to the center, 54% said yes and 46% said “no.” (Yes, this means some Democrats answered “yes” to both.) There is no clear winner in the Democratic Party’s factional battle, only temporary victories based largely on the demographics of a given contest, which is how moderate Reps. Wesley Bell (in Missouri) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (in Washington state) can fend off left-wing primary challenges on the same day that progressives Abdul El-Sayed (in the Michigan Senate race) and Donavan McKinney (challenging incumbent Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar) eked out narrow victories.3

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All this said, it’s important to remember that the two Democratic Parties differ directionally, on the question of whether the broader party should inch left or right. But it really is a game of inches, with divides smaller than some make them seem.

Ahead of the Michigan primary, the journalist Astead Herndon (reliably a thoughtful observer of Democratic Party politics) penned an explanation of why the democratic-socialist faction of the party was on an “upward march.” (Remember, this was back when polls were saying El-Sayed would dominate.) “The left has a vision,” Herndon wrote. “Do moderates?”

Last week, I watched the final debate between Stevens and El-Sayed — their last opportunity to differentiate themselves before the primary — and I certainly did not come away with the sense that Stevens had a stirring vision for the future of the Democratic Party. But nor did it seem to me like El-Sayed had a clear policy agenda that was all that much different than the party’s existing platform.

For El-Sayed, nearly every question came back to campaign finance (and the $65 million barrage that was being dumped on him, about half of it from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC), just as for Stevens, nearly every question came back to electability (and the polls that showed her running ever-so-slightly better against Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the general election). These are both interesting political questions, deeply relevant in the heart of a campaign. But neither offers much of an indication of the broader policy agenda either candidate would push.

The very first question El-Sayed received was about what he would do differently than the politicians in Washington right now to address affordability, a pitch-perfect opportunity to speak to the No. 1 concern for voters in Michigan and across the country. “For me, it’s I don’t take money from the corporations who are jacking up your prices in the first place,” El-Sayed began his answer, before launching into an explanation of the companies that had contributed to Stevens and not him. But when he got around to the actual economic policy differences that he believed would stem from those differing campaign finance stances, his vision frankly didn’t seem that distinct from the broader Democratic Party that he largely framed his campaign around running against.

The three economic policies El-Sayed named were antitrust enforcement, taxing billionaires, and ending aid to Israel. The first two are pretty standard fare within the Democratic Party (Stevens supports both); the third is a notable foreign policy difference, but hardly as meaningful an economic point as El-Sayed made it out to be. Because he is not backed by AIPAC, El-Sayed said, “I can do things like make sure that rather than sending your money somewhere else to drop bombs on other people and their kids, we can keep that money here at home.”

But, as Bill Scher of the Washington Monthly noted: “For the last 15 years, the U.S. has spent about $4 to 5 billion a year on military aid to Israel, except for a one-year spike to $12.5 billion in Fiscal Year 2024 following the October 7 attacks. Annual federal spending on education between 2021 and 2024 roughly ranged from $170 to $180 billion. For health care, the range is $1.8 to $2.1 trillion.” Whatever your opinion on the morality of sending aid to Israel, its existence is not much of a budgetary barrier. Ending it would not unlock much fiscal space to fund a brand-new, progressive economic vision.

None of this is meant as a defense of Stevens or of the Democratic Party’s moderate faction, neither of which (to Herndon’s point) have articulated much of a vision for the last 10 years beyond opposing Donald Trump. Rather, I mean to question just how meaningfully either faction differs from that same, familiar party line.

El-Sayed, to his credit, has a detailed platform on his campaign website.4 But if you read it, the vast majority of the points either align with the Democratic Party or are vague as to how they differ. There are points about protecting “the rights of all Americans,” regardless of “how—or if—they pray, their sexual orientation, gender identity, how old they are, or how much money they make,” which all Democrats would agree with. There is support for a “muscular Federal Trade Commission that enforces anti-monopoly laws” and empowering Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, which were both signature Biden administration policies.

Unsurprisingly, much attention is paid to campaign finance, though his prescriptions (overturning Citizens United, banning super PACs, and public financing for elections) are broadly shared within the Democratic Party. Stevens certainly had a different policy than El-Sayed about accepting contributions to her individual campaign, but she is a co-sponsor of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and (like 219 other House Democrats) voted for the party’s H.R. 1, which would have imposed stricter campaign spending limits and expanded public financing.

Perhaps the three key points where El-Sayed differs from the party are: supporting Medicare for All, wanting to abolish ICE, and pushing for a change to U.S. policy in the Middle East. But none of the three points are as cut-and-dried as the sloganeering can make them seem.

Medicare for All is one of the key planks of El-Sayed’s campaign, but even he acknowledged, in an interview with the Bulwark, that “we’ve got to take a pathway there,” adding that he would support anything that “reduces the power of the health care corporations, expands health care, and does so publicly.” That doesn’t sound too distinct from Stevens’ preferred path to universal health care, a public option (where government-run health insurance is an option for all Americans, but not required, competing with instead of replacing private plans).

On ICE, El-Sayed’s platform calls for ending ICE, but maintaining “a safe, secure border and immigration enforcement” program, without making clear how the two would differ from each other. In the debate, he called for an agency that would enforce immigration policy, but in accordance with the Constitution, hardly something any sitting Democrats would disagree with (whether they would call that agency “ICE” or something else).

Finally, on the Middle East, El-Sayed has called for an end to Israel aid but left unclear his broader vision for the region. In the debate, he said he supported “self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.” Does that mean he supports a two-state solution? A single, binational entity? El-Sayed has repeatedly refused to say.

He has also frequently called for taxpayer funds to stop flowing overseas and instead be spent domestically. “I believe that in an era where our schools are crumbling and healthcare is unaffordable, we should be spending our taxpayer dollars here at home,” his campaign website says. How far does that extend? In the same section, he refers to “supporting Ukraine against Russian invasion” as being on “the right side of justice.” So, is he opposed to foreign aid, or are there some taxpayer dollars that should be spent on bombs abroad, depending on the circumstance? It’s never quite made clear.

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On two of these policy issues — health care and Israel — El-Sayed clearly aligns with the Democratic base, and has used his obvious communications abilities to accentuate cleavages between Democratic leaders and their voters. In a recent New York Times poll, 50% of Democrats said they wanted the party to move to the left on health care and 60% said they sympathized more with the Palestinians than with Israel.

I don’t mean to minimize the split on Israel, which is obviously incredibly salient within the party. One common strand among American voters of all ideological stripes is that they hate being told how to feel and resent a conventional wisdom being forced down their throats. This explains much of the backlash to the “wokeness” phenomenon c. 2020. It also helps explain why the divide over Israel has become so motivating to so many Democratic voters, as they break away from a pro-Israel consensus that has dominated American politics for so long, creating an easy litmus test to separate those politicians who are still hewing to old ways and those who are updating their thinking after a deadly war.

But a meaningful difference on one foreign policy issue does not equal an entirely new political vision. On almost everything else, for all the sturm und drang about running against his party and remaking the Democratic platform, El-Sayed falls into the same rhythms as the rest of the party, but just with superior communications skills. Like Stevens and many other Democrats in both the mainstream and progressive factions, El-Sayed shies away from expressing positions on social issues. According to the same Times poll, pluralities of Democrats want the party to move to the center on immigration, crime, and transgender issues. Here, El-Sayed and Stevens both offer the same, familiar moves to the left.

During the debate, El-Sayed was asked, “What is the No. 1 thing Senate Democrats are failing to do right now that you would do differently?” His answer — that he would eliminate the Senate filibuster — was downright bizarre, for two reasons. The first is that almost all Senate Democrats already support eliminating the filibuster, at least when they are in power. But the second is that the question was about “right now,” which suggests that El-Sayed wants to end the filibuster now that Republicans are in the majority and Trump is in the White House. El-Sayed has repeatedly suggested that Democrats are not doing enough to counter Trump, but the filibuster is the Senate Democrats’ only real tool to do so, the tool that progressive activists have called on them to use again and again, to stop everything from government funding bills to the SAVE Act.

So if El-Sayed was in the Senate right now, his answer would be to fight Trump … less?

Surely this was a slip of the tongue, but it gets at a broader sidestepping about where exactly this big new vision differentiates itself. Here’s the question I would ask: If Abdul El-Sayed was Senate Minority Leader right now, not Chuck Schumer, what would currently be different?

A few weeks ago, Politico leaked audio of El-Sayed, which mostly drew attention for him referring to an “ogre on a pike” (which Stevens took to mean her, but which he said was referring to John Fetterman). But, to me, the more interesting part was El-Sayed’s description of his job for the next two years, if elected to the Senate: “throwing as much sand in the gear of the Trump administration as I can and using them to posterize them,” by which he meant conducting investigations to “tell the story about the corruption” within the administration. Democrats are going to investigate Trump with or without El-Sayed in the Senate. The real difference, then, is about messaging. It’s stylistic, not substantive.

El-Sayed is no doubt a superior communicator to Chuck Schumer. But I’ve yet to hear the specifics of what he would be doing differently to counter Trump5 or reach voters who are turned off by the Democratic Party’s existing social or economic policies — or, for that matter, to cobble together the three-fourths majority in state legislatures needed to overturn Citizens United, as he calls for.

The Democratic Party is split between two camps, which have some differences at the margins on where the party should go, but largely are offering the same policy prescriptions that Democrats have been selling for years, with mixed success. The great promise of El-Sayed’s candidacy, according to a sympathetic profile at its outset, was his ability to attract “working- and lower-middle-class Americans who pulled twice for Obama before switching to Trump over the past decade.”

El-Sayed will now have the opportunity to test that theory in November. So far, like other left-wing candidates, he has appeared no more adept at winning working-class voters than the existing Democratic ruling class, who does well with the segment of this constituency who votes in Democratic primaries but often struggles among the remainder who participate in general elections. The fact that polls showed both El-Sayed and Stevens running about even with Rogers, in a state with two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, in a year where a Republican president is historically unpopular, is a warning in of itself. Michigan is to the left of about half the country, friendlier territory than many of the states required for Democrats to win the Senate.

There may be two Democratic Parties, but neither appears to have much of a vision for winning a lasting majority or making the changes needed to win over voters beyond their base.

Graham Platner’s Reddit posts. Abdul El-Sayed’s tweets. David Crowley’s burner account.

After many years of warnings, this is the election cycle where politicians’ social media archives have finally been turned inside-out. Several high-profile races have been jolted in recent months by the discovery of old (often deleted) social media posts by candidates.

Many of the finds have had a certain ideological flavor: progressive Democrats who posted things in the Peak Woke era of 2019-2020 that are no longer quite as fashionable. See Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted X posts calling for defunding the police. Or: New York House candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier (“In New York they don’t say ‘I love you,’ they say ‘NYPD suck my dick’ and I think that’s beautiful”), Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (“radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country”), and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong (“Cancel Thanksgiving”).

Other candidates plagued by their social media histories have been caught doing what everyone else does on social media: spouting off. The most notable example has been Platner, the former Maine Senate candidate, who was dinged for his thousands of deleted Reddit posts, opining on everything from foreign wars to porta-potties. Late last month, CNN reported that Troy Jackson — who took Platner’s place as the Senate Democratic candidate in Maine — used an anonymous alias to blow off steam about Republicans in the Bangor Daily News comments section while working with them in the state legislature.

Then, a few days later, NBC News reported that Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley — who is running against Hong for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nod — had used his personal email address in his 20s to register an account with the name “Dirt McGirk” and handle @No_pork_plz.

Many of the posts on the account were racially and sexually charged. One said: “#confession I’ve never boink a white woman!! Is that bad???” Another: “That’s just NASTY!!! I wouldn’t f– her with YOUR d–!!!!” #slapyourself” Crowley’s campaign said the account, which was active from 2010 to 2014, was shared with 10-12 other people, and that Crowley himself did not author any of the controversial posts.

Notably, in their unguarded and (they thought) fleeting missives, many of the posters-turned-candidates were found to have shared disparaging things about key constituencies they were now courting. On Reddit, Platner called rural Americans (aka 62% of Maine) “racist” and “stupid.” On Twitter, Utah state Sen. Nate Blouin, who was running for a House seat earlier this year (but was defeated in the Democratic primary), was found to have described the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (aka 61% of Utah) as “a bunch of bigoted assholes.”

Mallory McMorrow, who was running against El-Sayed for the Michigan Senate Democratic nomination (but has since dropped out), deleted X posts in which she complained about the politics of her adopted home state and even pined to leave. “There are days like these that make me miss California even more,” she wrote in one post. “Pushing for [a] future where we don’t own cars… Cars are dead,” she wrote in another, years before running for office in a state defined by its auto industry.

This is not the first election cycle where old social media posts have come back to haunt political candidates: Marjorie Taylor Greene had to answer for hours of old Facebook videos when she was first running for the House in 2020; Mark Robinson’s 2024 campaign for the North Carolina governorship never quite recovered from the revelation that he referred to himself as a “black NAZI” in comments on a pornography website’s message board. (Yes, that was a real sentence.)

But several opposition researchers I spoke to agreed that this cycle stood out for the sheer quantity of candidates being dogged by their social media pasts. “I think we are reaching kind of the peak of this,” said Tyson Brody, who has worked as a “ragpicker” (his words) for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, among others.

Brody, one of the top Democratic opposition researchers, noted that there is a bit of what he calls an “echo effect” going on here. “Whenever there’s a big oppo story on someone, it just makes people want to do the same thing on other people,” he said. In this case, Platner’s trove of Reddit posts meant that every opposition researcher in America started looking through the social media archives of other candidates. Brody likened it to when Trump allies accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of committing mortgage fraud, and then suddenly trying to find the same dirt on all his other enemies, from Sen. Adam Schiff to Fed governor Lisa Cook.

There’s also the age factor, of course. X (formerly Twitter) is now 20 years old. Reddit is 21. Facebook is 22. If you were, say, in your 20s or 30s in the early days of the technology, you’re now the perfect age to be running for Senate or for governor. In addition, this cycle has also seen a wave of less traditional candidates — Platner included — who might have been less likely to have had perfectly manicured pasts on social media.

At the same time, Pat Dennis, the president of the Democratic opposition research super PAC American Bridge, told me that combing through social media archives has become harder as more platforms have made it difficult to access old posts in one fell swoop. Opposition research is “much more manual and boring” nowadays, Dennis said. “There are tools that allow you to sort of pull down tweets and read them programmatically. Nothing like we used to have.”

But there are a few tricks of the trade. Oftentimes, people will use the same username across multiple social media accounts — for Mark Robinson, it was “minisoldr”; for Platner, it was “P-hustle” — which means if an oppo researcher can find one account, they might stumble on a goldmine. “A lot of the real effort is finding out what username somebody is associated with, which can be a real jackpot,” Dennis said. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, whose KFILE team has unearthed many of the most damaging social media stories this cycle, has said that he found both the Platner and El-Sayed posts in this fashion.

Joe Rodota, who was one of the first political consultants to specialize in opposition research as a Republican operative in the 1980s (and now writes a Substack on the topic), told me that artificial intelligence has also changed the field. This sort of oppo research requires taking a large corpus of text and picking through it to find interesting themes or examples, the exact sort of thing AI is great at. “This is the first cycle” where AI tools have been adopted widely for opposition research, Rodota said, perhaps contributing to the explosion of stories about old social media posts.

While these scandals have ripped through the headlines all year, there is less consensus on how many races they have actually changed. McMorrow’s old posts appear to have contributed to her losing momentum in her Senate primary, though there were other factors (including her lack of a clear ideological lane) that also played a role. It can hardly be said that Platner’s Reddit posts are what sunk his campaign, though they did contain a sign of what was to come: months before he was credibly accused of sexual assault, we already knew that he had repeatedly downplayed sexual assault in Reddit comments.

Several of the candidates have tried to turn the posts into an advantage, with varying success. “I’m a very real person, warts and all,” Platner said about his Reddit history. “These are normal tweets by a normal person,” McMorrow’s comms director told CNN.

There is also a live question among operatives about whether candidates are best served by deleting the posts; some sources I spoke to said having “deleted” in a headline can make even mundane missives seem more suspicious. Perhaps it’s better just to lay it all out there, knowing there are tools that exist to find things either way. (“No, I think you should delete them,” Dennis responded. “I think you should delete the posts. That is my advice to all candidates.” Especially as platforms start making it harder to access old posts, you never know what might just never be found.)

While this certainly won’t be the last cycle to feature old social media posts, I do wonder how long the trend will last. Many of the aforementioned posts are from a certain time and place: a period in the 2010s when people would create accounts called “Dirt McGirk” with their friends, or dispense every stray thought on Reddit or Twitter, littered with hashtags.

In some ways, those days are over. Studies show that Gen Z social media users are much more private with their social media presences, less liable to overshare than the age cohort slightly older. Indeed, many of these candidates caught up in these scandals this year are from the same generation: McMorrow is 39, Crowley is 40, Platner is 41. All grew up on an internet that was much more casual, and their posts are, frankly, very Millennial. As social media becomes more polished, and not as much a place for random thoughts, it’s possible that (somewhat cutting against expectations) fewer young candidates will reckon with these scandals over time.

As an example, Brody noted 42-year-old JD Vance’s personal website (jdhamel1.blogspot.com) that resurfaced when he was running for vice president in 2024. “No one does a Blogspot anymore,” Brody said. “The idea that you would literally have this kind of personal diary online is horrifying to a lot of younger people, who are more cognizant of finding a job and stuff like that.”

“We are cresting a high point,” he added, “but Millennials are going to be running for a while. There’s still going to be this 15-to-20-year period haunting a lot of people.”

And there will always be ways for people to express thoughts that come back to bite them — just as they always have been. In his 1884 presidential campaign, James Blaine was haunted by a series of letters that were leaked to the press and appeared to link him to allegations of bribery. In 1934, when the author Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California, the Los Angeles Times (which was openly working to defeat him) placed a box on its front page every day, “Sinclair on ____,” which would contain an out-of-context quote from one of his novels saying something inflammatory, not unlike the ads that now broadcast old social media posts from Platner or Talarico.

Even if Gen Z candidates-to-be stop posting so openly on social media, many still vent their innermost thoughts in forums they think are more private.

“If you want to talk about things that are in their golden age right now, it’s the group chat,” Dennis said. “You’ve seen this time and time again across the right wing. As people have become more afraid of posting things on the open internet, things have moved to Discords, they’ve moved to group chats. They’ve moved to these smaller walled gardens that seem really safe, until the Achilles heel that we’ve seen: somebody inside the group chat leaks on you, and then you were just acting as if this is a safe space, and it is not.”

No matter the platforms people gravitate to, for opposition researchers, “Business is always booming,” Brody said. “People are always interested in this stuff.”

That’s about three months until 435 House seats, 33 Senate seats, 36 governorships, and thousands of state legislative seats are up for grabs. The fate of President Trump’s final two years in office and the future of the two parties are on the line.

With the primaries almost over and the general election starting to heat up, I thought now would be a good time to level-set and look at what we know about the 2026 midterms — and what we don’t. Here are the four questions I’m watching as campaign season kicks into gear:

1. Can Democrats win converts, not just preach to the choir?

At the highest level, the question is not really whether Democrats will win the House this November. They almost certainly will. Historical trends and voter enthusiasm tell us that much. (Democrats boast a 20-point edge among voters who say they are “extremely motivated,” per a new CNN poll.)

A combination of angry Democratic base voters rushing to the polls and disengaged Republicans staying home will likely be enough for Democrats to win the House gavel: if the party only wins the seats labeled “Lean,” “Likely,” or “Safe Democratic” by Split Ticket, that would be enough for a 223-seat majority, which is perfectly reasonable by modern standards. That’s about as many seats (222) as Democrats won in 2020 and Republicans in 2022. Republicans won 220 in 2024. (Anything after 218 is a majority.)

The real questions are how big a House majority can Democrats win and whether Democrats can flip the Senate along with it, both of which require more than just turning out the Democratic faithful. It requires playing in deep-red territory — like House seats in south Texas or rural Iowa, or Senate seats in Ohio or Alaska — and persuading voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2024 (and maybe even in 2016 and 2020) to now pull a lever with a “D” next to it.

Luckily for Democrats, with the Iran war, Trump is giving his opponents a generational opportunity to win over his supporters. Four separate polls were released this week — by AP, CNN, Quinnipiac, and YouGov — showing that the president’s support has shrunk to just one-third of the country, a notably smaller contingent than the 40% that was thought to represent his polling floor in the first term.

Of particular interest has been his drop in support among white working-class voters, the key group that has powered Trump’s political success since 2016. According to averages calculated by the Cook Political Report, Trump is now at a nine-point deficit among white voters without a college degree, a stark turnaround from the 13-point advantage he boasted among this demographic at the start of his second term. It is the first time in Trump’s political career that polls have consistently showed a majority of white non-college voters step outside his camp.

But disapproving of Trump is different than voting for a Democrat. A recent Washington Post poll showed only 76% of Trump disapprovers planning to vote for congressional Democrats in November. (By comparison, 86% of Biden disapprovers voted for congressional Republicans in 2022, according to the exit polls, while 88% of Trump disapprovers voted for Democrats in 2018.)

To win more than just a slim House majority, and to flip the Senate, Democrats will need to persuade these former Trump supporters who are now disillusioned with the president but uncertain about voting for the Blue Team. The path to the Senate majority runs through these voters, especially because Democrats will likely have to win at least two states out of a quartet (Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Texas) where white working-class voters are so prominent.

The party still has work to do. Last month’s New York Times/Siena polls found that 48% of white non-college voters in Iowa disapprove of the president, but only 41% of the same demographic back Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek. In Ohio, Trump’s disapproval among white non-college voters was at 40%, but Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown’s support was at 35%. In Alaska: disapproval of Trump is at 37%, support for Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola is at 32%.

Democrats will have to get those numbers closer together if they want an expansive House majority or an advantage in the Senate. Trump has taken the first step for them, by softening these voters up more and more as the Iran war continues. Democrats will have to do the rest.

2. Can the DSA play in purple territory?

We know that democratic socialists can win in upper Manhattan, and also lower Manhattan, and also Brooklyn. How about the Rust Belt?

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The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) received three tributes in Washington on Tuesday.

The first was a memorial in the Capitol Rotunda, where Vice President JD Vance, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), and other dignitaries saluted Graham’s career in public service. The second was a funeral at the National Cathedral, where President Donald Trump was among the eulogists. The third, fittingly, came from Graham’s home of 23 years: the Senate floor.

In a whopping 86-12 vote, the Senate voted to advance the bill now known as the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which the South Carolina senator was working on right up until he died.

The measure was notable for several reasons: in relation to Graham’s legacy; because of the effect it will have on the wars currently being fought in Ukraine and Iran; and because it represents the first time in Trump’s presidency — after more than a year of tariffs being at the forefront of conversation — that Congress is poised to actually authorize new tariffs.

That’s right: a bill just advanced in the Senate to expand Trump’s tariff powers … and 77% of Senate Democrats voted for it. That seems like a bill worth digging into.

The latest version of the legislation is 61 pages long, but I can give you the quick-and-dirty. If enacted, the bill would:

• Impose sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders, oligarchs, companies, banks, and energy projects, as well as any other foreign individuals aiding the war against Ukraine.

• Extend a slew of sanctions on Iran (which are currently set to expire in December) for five more years.

• Prohibit Americans from investing in Russia.

• Impose tariffs of up to 500% on Russian goods.

• Impose tariffs of up to 100% on goods imported from countries that purchase oil or gas from Russia going forward, or were among the top five buyers of Russian oil or gas in the past year (a list that includes China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union).

The bill offers a significant amount of leeway to President Trump. He is required to impose the sanctions and tariffs detailed in the legislation, but can terminate those levied on individuals or countries outside of Russia if he certifies in writing to Congress that he has “received reliable assurances” that they will no longer engage in the behavior they were being punished for. (Lifting the sanctions on Russians themselves will require the president to certify that Russia has signed a peace deal with Ukraine or “ceased all military hostilities” there.)

At several points, the measure also gives the president authority to decide exactly who to target: he is able to sanction any foreigners who “undermine the peace, security, political stability, or territorial integrity of Ukraine,” which is a pretty broad category. Determining which countries fit the bar for tariffs described by the bill is largely left to the president, as is setting the tariff rate anywhere between 0% and 100% (or between 0% and 500%, in the case of Russia itself).

However, Congress would still reserve some say in the process. The language of the bill says that the president “shall” impose the various sanctions and tariffs (not that he “may”), which means the default will be that the president must follow Congress’ will, unless he gives a specific reason to ease off. If the president does decide to lift the penalties, Congress would be able to override him by passing a joint resolution of disapproval within 30 days. Such a joint resolution would be subject to a presidential veto, but it would not be subject to the Senate filibuster.

In other words, the measure represents something closer to the normal push-and-pull between the legislative and executive branches.

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The legislative process is hard, and this bill has been no exception. Graham and a bipartisan group of colleagues worked on it for more than a year. The bill went through multiple drafts and iterations. When I first wrote about this measure last year (calling it the “Senate’s most popular bill,” since it had 80+ co-sponsors, almost unheard-of for a non-ceremonial piece of legislation), the tariffs on countries that buy oil and gas from Russia were able to go up to 500%. That has since been reduced to 100%, giving the president less room to punish other countries at his discretion.

The language about a joint resolution of disapproval has also been added in to assuage Trump’s critics, as well as an expiration date (five years after enactment, meaning this won’t be a permanent weapon handed from the legislative branch to the executive. If a future president wants to use these powers, Congress will have to re-up the law.) Trump had his demands too: to win him over, the bill was amended to include sanctions on Iran.

This was a long and jagged road, with many changes along the way. Ultimately, the bill’s advancement may have only been made possible by Graham’s death, and — less morbidly — a last-minute lobbying effort by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who met with Senate Democrats skeptical about giving Trump new tariff powers and convinced several of them that the bill would be necessary for him to win his war with Russia.

The revision process may not be done. The Senate vote yesterday was procedural; several more will be required for the chamber to pass the legislation. Somewhat unusually, that may include amendment votes: per Politico, Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Wyden (R-OR) are working on a proposal to rein in the tariff powers in the bill.1

Even if the measure passes the Senate, complications await in the House as well. As we know, there are two ways for a bill to pass in the House: 1) under a “rule,” which typically requires the majority party to be able to advance the bill on its own, with a simple majority, or 2) through “suspension of the rules,” which requires support from two-thirds of the chamber.

It’s not clear whether isolationist Republicans in the House would allow the measure to come to a vote through the first path, or whether enough House Democrats support the bill for it to pass through the second path. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee has come out against the measure, calling it a “massive backdoor authority for President Trump to impose more tariffs, including on our European allies, that hurt American families.”

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And so, the legislative process will continue, without clarity, at this point, as to how it will end. And that’s good! Tariffs are no small thing: it should take a long, drawn-out process to impose them, with input from Democrats and Republicans (and multiple factions within both parties) and a series of changes and revisions. If this bill does become law, it means that majorities of both chambers of Congress — representing a cross-section of the American people, with all their various differences and idiosyncrasies — will have debated the proposal and deemed it necessary.

Which happens to be exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote in the Constitution that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” (“Duties” and “imposts” are what we now know as tariffs.)

The winding process behind the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act stands in stark contrast to the processes responsible for all of the other tariffs imposed during Trump’s second administration, which have been handed down without congressional input.

As a result, many of the tariffs have rested on shaky legal ground. Trump’s most ambitious tariff project, claiming the power to impose unlimited tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), was struck down by the Supreme Court. A lower court then found his back-up plan for global tariffs illegal. Last week, as I previewed a few days before, Trump moved on to Plan C: a law that allows tariffs on countries that engage in practices like forced labor. A group of small businesses have already sued, arguing that the tariffs were not brought in response to forced labor, but merely as a guise to replace the Plan B tariffs, which expired.

Trump surely did not help his legal case when he told Fox News yesterday that the new tariffs represented “other ways of doing the same thing” as the previous ones.

If the Graham Act becomes law, and Trump imposes tariffs as a result, they will not be vulnerable to these sorts of legal challenges. Long and tedious as working with lawmakers may be, no one can question whether your actions comport with the will of Congress if you’ve gone through Congress first. There’s a lesson there for Trump and future presidents.

Saudi Arabia has been working towards a civilian nuclear program for decades. The country first expressed interest in nuclear energy in the 1960s, and began developing research centers to pursue the goal in the 1970s and ’80s. In 2008, the George W. Bush administration signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudis to offer American support.

A civilian nuclear program would help meet the country’s surging electricity demands — but it would also place Saudi Arabia in a position to pursue a nuclear weapon, if it ever chose to do so. (“Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told “60 Minutes” in 2018.) For that reason, discussions about nuclear energy in Saudi Arabia have always been treated with the utmost sensitivity. Many analysts fear that a Saudi nuclear program could set off an arms race across the Middle East, with other countries rushing to catch up.

During the last administration, Saudi nuclear talks took on heightened geopolitical importance, as then-President Joe Biden attempted to ink a “grand bargain” that would have allowed the Saudis to jumpstart their civilian nuclear program in exchange for recognizing Israel.

At this point, the issue touches on many of the thorniest questions in Middle East policy, itself one of the thorniest areas on any president’s desk. So why was a decision reportedly made on such an important question without President Trump’s knowledge?

Last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman reached a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement. This wasn’t some behind-the-scenes development: it was publicly announced as a done deal. Here it is on the Energy Department’s website:

The department hailed the agreement as “historic”; further down in the press release, Wright said that it would deliver “prosperity at home and security to our allies abroad.” The text of the deal was not immediately released, although the Wall Street Journal reported that it was a 30-year, multibillion-dollar arrangement under which Saudi Arabia will have to use American companies as suppliers to build out its nuclear program.

Controversially, the deal laid out a timeline under which Saudi Arabia could eventually enrich uranium on its own soil (as opposed to relying on imported fuel). The agreement includes safeguards to try to prevent Saudi Arabia from using such enrichment for military purposes, though it wasn’t clear how rigorous the inspection regime would be to ensure this.

The U.S.’ 2009 nuclear deal with the United Arab Emirates, seen as the “gold standard” for such agreements, required the UAE to pledge to forgo any domestic uranium enrichment and to commit to tougher inspections. (As CNN notes, the UAE agreement also includes a clause allowing for renegotiation if the U.S. gave better terms to another country in the Middle East, one more way that this deal could have a butterfly effect across the region.) Only 14 countries are currently known to enrich uranium, nine of which have nuclear weapons (plus a 15th, Israel, which is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons as well).

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Obviously, anyone can debate the merits of adding another country to this small nuclear club — but the point for our purposes is that the agreement had been finalized. A formal signing ceremony was held at the Energy Department on Wednesday.

By Thursday morning at 7:52 a.m., the whole thing was thrown up in the air. President Trump announced on Truth Social that the nuclear deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” the string of agreements from Trump’s first term that saw several Arab states recognize Israel. This had been a condition of President Biden’s during his administration’s nuclear talks with Saudi Arabia, but had not been a requirement set by the Trump negotiators (as evidenced by the fact that Trump’s own Energy Secretary had moved forward with an agreement that made no mention of the issue).

Such a last-minute reversal on such an important agreement (after it had already been signed!) was strange, but stranger still was the explanation that was given. CNN reported last week that Secretary Wright had not told Trump ahead of time that he was going to be announcing the Saudi agreement. The president hadn’t changed his mind so much as he hadn’t known that the deal wasn’t poised to include Israeli recognition, or that it was about to be unveiled.

Trump himself appeared to confirm this on Friday, when asked by a reporter about the Saudi deal after making an announcement about domestic nuclear energy in the Oval Office.

“Mr. President, did you authorize for Secretary Wright to sign the Saudi nuclear deal? If not, why did he sign it?” the reporter asked.

“Well, we didn’t talk about it, but it was always understood,” Trump said, with Wright standing behind his shoulder. “And Chris knew and Saudi Arabia knew that if they didn’t join the Abraham Accords, the deal’s not— I’m not going to do the deal.”

“So why did he sign it?” the reporter followed up.

“Because they understood that in order, you know, subject to Congress and everything else, in order for that deal to go through, they had to sign into the Abraham Accords,” Trump said, although CNN reported that Trump’s negotiators were not aware of the condition and it doesn’t appear that Saudi Arabia was either.

Of course, Donald Trump is not the most reliable narrator, and it’s always possible that he’s not telling the truth. Perhaps he did know that the agreement was going to be signed and had given his approval, but then changed his mind after it started getting criticism from Israel and its friends in places like the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Indeed, CNN also notes that Trump’s 7:52 a.m. announcement came mere minutes after the deal was discussed on “Fox & Friends” (which Trump is known to watch), with several panelists unfavorably comparing the terms of the Trump-Saudi deal to those that Biden had been pursuing. (The possibility of a “late intervention” from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also raised by CNN, though the network did not have any sourcing to confirm that Trump and Netanyahu spoke about the deal.)

At this point, we don’t know which of these explanations is true. (It’s also possible that Trump didn’t know about the agreement beforehand, but that the discussion on “Fox & Friends” and elsewhere still is what convinced him to override Wright.) But the possibility that the president might not have been aware of a decision of this magnitude (shocking as it might be) is made more realistic by the fact that this pattern has played out before.

As I noted in two previous pieces on this dynamic, administration officials have reportedly made huge decisions without Trump’s sign-off throughout his second term, including cutting off Ukraine aid (twice). The Saudi deal wasn’t even the first time this had happened this month.

On July 14, days after ICE traffic stops led to fatal shootings in both Texas and Maine, the immigration agency issued a nationwide order telling its officers to stop pursuing people in vehicles, a major reversal of Trump administration policy.

By July 15, Trump had reversed the reversal. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 6:45 a.m. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”

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Once again, NBC News and the Atlantic reported that Trump had not been aware of the initial policy change in advance. As with the Saudi Arabia shift, some sources were skeptical: There’s “not a chance” that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin would have paused ICE traffic stops without telling the White House first, one DHS official told the Atlantic. “Someone got into the big boss’s ear,” the official added. The Atlantic noted that Trump’s reversal came after Steve Bannon, Tomi Lahren, and other conservative media figures criticized Mullin’s decision.

But it is revealing how sensitive the White House is to the implication that Trump might not be read into every policy decision. “Every Cabinet secretary knows that they have to come to the White House for major policy decisions,” an administration official told NBC. “The president sees, hears, reads everything.”

But clearly not every Cabinet secretary knows that: the same official also told NBC that Mullin had paused traffic stops without going to the president. And administration officials also said that Trump was unaware of the Saudi deal. The White House is trying to have it both ways: insisting that Trump is the “final dealmaker” (as Karoline Leavitt said in response to questions about the Saudi deal), while also distancing him from decisions as soon as they run into criticism from his allies.

Personally, I find either explanation to be plausible. (Both, of course, cannot be true.) But the fact that it’s at least possible that Cabinet secretaries feel enough leeway to freelance on major issues like Middle East geopolitics or immigration enforcement is a revealing window into how decisions are made in the Trump White House — and whether Trump really is at the center of them, as he claims.

Of course, he clearly is the final decider: as soon as he puts out a Truth Social post, he can kill a nuclear deal or upend ICE policy. But how much is sneaking through without his knowledge, being enacted by Cabinet officials who assume he isn’t paying attention (except for the rare times when conservative media critiques bubble up to the president, leading him to belatedly step in)?

Nobody expects any president to be involved in every single policy decision made by the United States. The U.S. government is simply too vast and complicated for that to be a reasonable goal. Presidents sign executive orders they’ve probably never read and give speeches they didn’t write. Just this past weekend, Trump frequently interjected surprise at the jokes he was delivering in his White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech, seeming to confirm that his stilted delivery of the address was because he hadn’t previously laid eyes on it.

“Who the hell wrote that line?” Trump said at one point, breaking the fourth wall a bit. “That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech that they wrote,” he said later on.

That’s the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Who cares. Frankly, a president in wartime has better things to do than to spend time preparing for a comedic roast.

But setting nuclear policy in the Middle East (the very region we’re at war in, over a nuclear program) or refining a policy on immigration enforcement that has led to multiple deaths in the United States? Those are the sorts of decisions that a president is very much expected to be involved in.

There’s reason to believe that Trump’s Cabinet secretaries don’t think they need to receive presidential signoff before making decisions on those issues, which raises the question of just how much else is slipping by without presidential input, as Trump rages about the SAVE Act and the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and (seemingly) checks back into policy only after hearing about his own administration’s choices through conservative media.