China’s View of America Has Changed From Alarm to a Shrug

There is no shortage of Western commentary on US President Donald Trump’s second term. What’s missing is an honest account of how 1.4 billion of us in China see it – or at least how China’s officials and scholars do, since that’s who I can speak for here. I’ve spent a decade watching that view change, from real alarm in 2017 to something closer to a shrug today.
Four things now count as consensus among Chinese scholars. One, Trump is undermining America’s alliance system. His first term rattled Washington’s furniture. His second is dismantling the house. He has purged the civil service, stretched executive power, taxed friend and foe alike, and gutted America’s contribution to global public goods.

He appears to be governing for the next election, not the next generation – and this is speeding up the arrival of a multipolar world.

Two, hostility to China is bipartisan in Washington, but Trump’s version comes with a price tag, which we find oddly reassuring. When tariffs on Chinese goods hit 145 per cent last year, American retailers, farmers and manufacturers howled, inflation bit and the White House backed into a truce. The lesson we draw: his toughness is a negotiating tactic, not a crusade. That leaves room to manage the relationship.

Three, pressure has been a poor substitute for actual containment. The 2018 trade war spooked Chinese firms. By 2026, the mood has flipped. Turns out sanctions are quite good at building the thing they’re meant to prevent.

Chinese chipmakers have scaled up mature 28-nanometre production. Home-grown chip-design software now holds a quarter of the domestic market. Solar panels and electric vehicles have found new buyers across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. America’s share of China’s trade shrank.

Four, the real contest is in governance, and time is on China’s side. American policy lurches with every election. China’s five-year plans, for better or worse, tend to survive them. America still leads in technology and firepower, but we’re betting that policy continuity and industrial scale will keep narrowing the gap.

Add those four up and what you get is less an argument than a mood – of relaxed, quiet confidence.

Eight years ago, China absorbed Trump’s tariffs and improvised. Now it hits back with tools – export controls on rare earths, a blacklist of “unreliable” foreign firms, tariffs of our own on energy – while building alternatives to Washington-led institutions through Brics, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Belt and Road Initiative. It has gone from rule-taker to rule-shaper.

China is not trying to beat the United States. It is trying to improve the lives of its people, hit what we call “common prosperity” and complete national rejuvenation, by which we mean restoring China to what we see as its rightful place in the world.

That is both the official and our genuine position. Winning was never the goal. But if you improve your country enough, for long enough, overtaking the country that used to be ahead is simply what ends up happening.

In wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles, Chinese firms now account for more than half of global capacity, output and exports. The country has built the world’s largest ultra-high-voltage grid and energy storage system, which is how it moves power from where the sun and wind are to where the people are. A state-run satellite network monitors carbon emissions, giving global, high-precision coverage. China has become the country that sets the standard for what a green transition looks like.

In AI, America still leads on chips and the underlying algorithms, but China claims the lead on deployment: government services, smart manufacturing and smart cities. In space, the comparison we Chinese scholars like to draw is with Starlink – commercial, narrow, built for coverage – against China’s broader, state-run programme: crewed missions, lunar exploration, the BeiDou satellite network and the Tiangong space station. [...]

There are caveats. America still has the deepest capital markets, the best universities, and decades of accumulated research. China still lags in precision manufacturing and some industrial software; external pressure is squeezing its exports in the short term; and the wider geopolitical picture remains genuinely unstable. I’ll admit these caveats read a little like the fine print below an advert for something you didn’t need.

Ten years ago, many of us held an admiring, almost idealised view of America. That’s gone.

We credit America’s historical contribution to the modern world. We also see, clearly now, 20 years of financial excess, winner-takes-all politics and social fracture. The Trump years have been a blessing in disguise: the pressure stings now, but it is forcing China to fix its weaknesses faster. We don’t reject competing with America. We’d rather China compete without conflict, and coexist.

by Wang Wen, South China Morning Post |  Read more: 

Image: uncredited

[ed. A rational, coordinated national policy in action. Unfortunately, not ours.]

Corporate Power Approaches Escape Velocity

If corporations become more powerful than national governments, we are all in trouble. The reason for this is straightforward: Corporations are not real objects. They do not exist in nature. They are legal fictions created according to a set of laws that dictate what they can and cannot do. Those laws, which quite literally create corporations, are made by governments. The rights of corporations and the limits of their operations are entirely dictated by governments, which write the laws and administer the courts that both enable corporations to exist and make money, and put boundaries on them. If governments lose their ability to draw hard lines on the behavior of corporations—if corporations become so powerful that governments are no longer able to tell them what to do—then corporations become the supreme power on earth.

This is bad, obviously, but it is worth stating why it is bad. It is bad because governments, while imperfect and sometimes even malignant in many ways, ultimately derive their legitimacy from the will of the governed. Legitimate governments, good governments, democratic governments are obligated by some scrutable process to work for the public good, as they define it. We all know the many ways that this can go awry, but when governments are bad, we can tell that they are bad because they fail on their most basic task of empowering themselves with the will of the public to increase the public good.

That’s not what corporations do at all. Corporations care not for the public good, nor for the public’s very existence. Corporations are robots, algorithms—AI programs, if you like—that work for the lone goal of increasing profits. Their definition is the same as that of cancer. They grow without regard to the good of the larger body. A perfect corporation would enslave the entire world in order to enrich the last free people on earth, its own shareholders. (Indeed, various companies in history have tried their best to carry this out in portions of the world.) You can’t get mad at them for this any more than you can get mad at a bullet for killing you. This is their nature. This is their purpose. This is what they do. If you don’t want them to do this, you must place limits upon them. That is a big part of why governments exist.

This is rudimentary stuff, but I articulate it because unless we always keep it in our conscious minds, there is a risk that it can be stolen away. Corporations always and everywhere have a natural incentive to neutralize their master, the government. They do this by lobbying and buying politicians and running astroturf PR campaigns to shape public opinion and doing all of the other legal things that allow them to accrue formal political power, but all of that should be recognized as a half measure that they only tolerate while necessary. Corporations never seek to abolish or destroy the government—they need the government administering laws in order for them to exist. Instead they seek to completely subjugate the government to their own will. Their ideal state would be to write and administer the laws that govern their own behavior, to arrange society in such a way to maximally benefit them. Obviously! That’s what robots do. This has always been true and will always be true as long as private corporations are the primary way that global production is organized. Knowing that this is the case, government must always ensure that it is able to hobble corporate ambition before it begins to threaten society as a whole.

A three-year-long strike against Tesla in Sweden just ended. The strike was an attempt by organized labor in Sweden to get Elon Musk to acquiesce to the simple demand of collective bargaining with his employees. Setting wages and working conditions via collective bargaining, along with profit sharing and collective investment, are at the very heart of the Swedish postwar economic model that made the small nation into a haven of high living standards. The expectation that a company like Tesla would allow its workers to choose to collectively bargain a fair contract is much higher in Sweden than it would be in America. When multinational corporations go into, say, China to do business, and the governments demands that they, say, censor search engine results for “Tienanmen Square massacre,” the response from those corporations is generally to obey and then to turn around and shrug and tell their critics that they are obligated to follow the laws and customs of the nations in which they operate. But when it comes to something that might restrict their profits—allowing their workers to unionize—that attitude changes.

The strike in Sweden ran for three years, and pulled in support from organized labor throughout the country. It is done now, and it failed, because for all of those years, and despite the fact that collective bargaining is expected to be a central pillar of being a good corporate citizen in Sweden, Elon Musk (despite being the world’s richest man) simply refused. Tesla succeeded in buying out all of the striking workers until there was no one left to be on strike. This is sort of like buying a restaurant and closing it down rather than giving your waiter a tip. It is an abrasive and offensive act designed to prove a point about where the power lies in this relationship. [...]

Everyone who believes in democratic government and in human rights needs to have a radar that starts flashing when something like this happens. This strike is alarming in a way that the failure of a normal strike is not. This strike was popular, well-resourced, and supported in principle by the government and by the larger Swedish labor movement in ways that would be impossible in America. Tesla, a $1.3 trillion company whose stock price has risen by two thirds in the past year, could easily afford these workers’ demands. Elon Musk, whose net worth has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars during the time of this strike, would not have been affected one bit. Yet Tesla and Musk decided to buck public opinion and give the cold shoulder to all of Sweden and appear rude, obstinate, and greedy, in order to ensure that this small number of employees did not win a union. And Tesla succeeded.

by Hamilton Nolan, Works in Progress |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Monopoly Round-Up: How to Stop the Enshittification of America (BIG); and, We’re in a New Era of Class Warfare. Is Change Still Possible? (NYT):]

***

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”

The young man’s voice in the video is earnest and clear, forceful but controlled. His face is not visible, but his hand is shaking a little as he holds a lighter. “There goes your inventory.” More than $600 million worth of damages later, a Kimberly-Clark warehouse lay in a smoking mess, and the young man alleged to be in the video — Chamel Abdulkarim, who worked for a distribution company servicing the warehouse — was charged with arson.

Mr. Abdulkarim has pleaded not guilty; his possible motivations will soon be litigated in court. But even as they are, the early April torching of the warehouse in Ontario, Calif., seems to capture a political mood. That same week, someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail at the mansion of the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. In June, prosecutors revealed that their case against the man charged with setting the blaze that grew into the deadly Palisades fire in California hinged on the argument that he was motivated by class rage. (The jury, which could not reach a verdict, was less convinced.)

Hanging over all these attacks was the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., Brian Thompson, in broad daylight on a Manhattan street in December 2024, a crime that Luigi Mangione admitted to earlier this month. The manhunt for Mr. Mangione, and the ensuing coverage of his arrest and trial, helped cement an image of him as an avenger of all those wronged by private health insurance. But Mr. Mangione’s celebrity has spurred fear: Companies are spending more on security for their top executives. This year, a law enforcement intelligence hub put out a bulletin, as reported by The Intercept, stating that the rich are facing a “heightened threat environment” as more people blame them for economic duress: “Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives.” [...]

Today’s class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge, resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to abandon the hope of transformation.

Why So Quiet?

In May 2024, when then-Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced a Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and Bottom Trawl Clarity Act, the bills drew immediate backlash.

Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.”

Fast forward to 2026.

In her current campaign to unseat 12-year incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Peltola introduced a similar “Fighting for Alaska Fisheries” platform to no reaction from the trawl sector. Sullivan quickly followed by proposing a Bycatch Reduction Act, a revamped version of a 2022 Alaska Salmon Research Task Force bill that produced a report recommending more research. Again, no trawler reaction.

What’s the difference?

This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington.

There are fundamental differences between the two bills.

Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable” as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.

Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.

Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III.

This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.

During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon.

In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s.

by Laine Welch, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: David Csepp/National Marine Fisheries Service
[ed. Politics in a nutshell (and GOP politicians) - and the natural environment continues to get screwed. I don't think Republican politicians hate the environment per se, but if the choice is between protection and unfettered development, no contest. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres) here and here, and Big Bend National Park (Texas) under threat (here and here).]

***

"Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters’ faith. In the Big Bend region, the Trump administration has been figuratively shooting Texans in the face while the state’s leaders do virtually nothing. In recent weeks, bulldozers began ripping up Texas’s last, best wilderness—the one place that still honors the state’s mythology of wide-open spaces and endless frontier. Even with the federal boot heel (for now) off the neck of Big Bend National Park, it’s preparing to press down on the rest of the vast region with a mix of thirty-foot border walls, vehicle barriers, and new patrol roads. Hundreds of private landowners between El Paso and Del Rio may soon face eminent domain, their land seized by the feds for a project that few in the region think will do anything to secure a part of the border that sees vanishingly few illegal crossings.

In the face of all this, a spirited, bipartisan coalition of Big Bend enthusiasts—from crunchy river rats to MAGA border sheriffs—have been fighting back. Early in the summer, they managed to get the Trump administration to scrap plans for a thirty-foot wall in the park. This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott agreed to pause construction there while he visits the region. Governor Greg Abbott, after months of silence on the matter, has attempted to take credit for the pause."

"The Strongman Presidency"

On today’s episode, we’re continuing a conversation about presidential power that we broached a couple of weeks ago on Statecraft, in an essay titled, “What Trump Can Learn From Nixon.” It was about the attempts, in Richard Nixon‘s 1.5 presidential terms, to build what observers called the “administrative presidency” — a presidency that actually, fully controlled the administrative state.

My guests today have thought very deeply about presidential attempts to control the administrative state. William Howell and Terry Moe are co-authors of a book called, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. They’re both political scientists. Terry is a professor of political science at Stanford, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Will is the Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. There’s a fair amount of disagreement in this conversation, and I hope the result is pretty entertaining, and hopefully enlightening. [...]

Will you briefly articulate how you are defining democracy in the context of this book, and the threat you think Trump poses?

Howell: In some ways, our definition is quite conventional. It recognizes the importance of free and fair elections, and checks and balances. There are two dimensions we also want to bring into view, that offer a thicker understanding about what democracy requires. One is the rule of law. It’s hard to imagine a flourishing democracy without it — so violations of the rule of law are violations of democracy. Another important piece is that you have institutions that can effectively govern — translating the broad ambitions and intent written into legislation into action. Democracies are not just debating societies. They also attend to wishes expressed by a polity. That depends upon well-functioning governing institutions. When you lay siege to such institutions, you imperil democracy itself.

We’ve been very interested on Statecraft in well-functioning institutions that deliver on their commitments. But I’ve never combined that in my view of democracy. Is a democracy that has lower state capacity less of a democracy?

Howell: If you have a government that is routinely incapable of solving problems the public wants to see solved, you are vulnerable to the entreaties of a demagogue who will step in and say, “The state, the parties, these small-d democratic institutions have failed you. I will be the one that delivers for you.” Persistent failure opens up space for a populist strongman to step in. This was the dominant theme of the second book Terry and I wrote, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, wherein we talk about how ineffective government is vulnerable to the entreaties of a populist strongman that will not just challenge democracy, but transgress it.

Moe: If a democracy is going to be meaningful, it has to have a democratic policymaking process, and an administrative state that can carry out those policies. If you have a government that is tearing down the administrative state and undermining its capacity for effectiveness, you are undermining the meaning and effectiveness of democracy.

How should we picture the powers of the president before the Progressive Era?

Moe: To a large extent, we had congressional government. The parties were extremely strong from Andrew Jackson on, at all levels of government. Politicians were captives — products of those machines. Presidents weren’t above all that. It was a system that had almost no executive branch. The idea that the president would ride herd over all these agencies — that had programs, experts, and authority presidents could use to gain power — those things weren’t there.

What was not in existence in this period?

Moe: The government wasn’t doing all that much. Most of the employees of the federal government were mailmen. All the agencies you associate with the administrative state weren’t there, except for the Post Office, and a few things like that. The massive social upheaval at the end of the 1800s — industrialization, urbanization, immigration — transformed and disrupted American society, and led to demands for a government that worked and would do something — because all sorts of problems were being generated by an industrialized society.

People wanted solutions. How could you get that? You needed to have, “good government.” How could you get that? That’s where the Progressive movement came from. It was an effort to create a positive government that would address these pressing social problems. That’s how we got a presidency that was much more powerful. Teddy Roosevelt is the classic progressive president, then Woodrow Wilson.

Congress had been a cesspool of interest group influence and corruption. What they wanted was a bureaucracy that could carry out policies, be staffed with experts, and behave in a nonpartisan way — to do the scientifically objective thing and administer policy. Some of this was idealized, but that’s what modern government is about — having an administrative state filled with experts, hired on the basis of merit, who are capable of carrying out public policies, led by a president who has actual power. Not all power, but more power than in the past.

Howell: There’s a direct way in which this proliferation of agencies with all kinds of capacity, expertise, and personnel expands presidential power, because suddenly the presidency has access to capacity. When you look at the ambition behind a law — now we might be able to do something. From the word go, this administrative state is sitting within the second branch, and the president sits atop it.

Additionally, presidents can’t count on bureaucrats to do their bidding. Just because you have this expertise within these administrative agencies — how do you know they’re going to do the things that the president wants? From Franklin D. Roosevelt, even to Ronald Reagan, you see efforts by presidents from both parties to build out instruments of control, and strategies that will increase the odds that actions within all those far-flung agencies are aligned with the interests of the president. [...]

What are the tools that presidents in this period build to try and get control?

Howell: The two big categories are centralization and politicization. Centralization involves the effort to bring decision-making into closer proximity to the White House. You see the rise of the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and things like policy czars — so that the president can keep an eye on what’s being decided, and ensure it aligns with his policy preferences.

The other move is to appoint people whose policy preferences align with your own to oversee those agencies. You could see a tension between politicization and the expertise that justifies the rise of the modern administrative state. But the politicization is in the service of expanding presidential control.

Moe: The first thing that was created was the Executive Office of the President, under Roosevelt. That became the house to hold agencies created for the president to control the bureaucracy.

Before the Executive Office of the President — which is now 1,700 staff in the Eisenhower Building and the West Wing — who is making sure that what the president wants is happening?

Moe: This was all new. The progressives didn’t build much of an administrative state. It was the New Deal that exploded it. The EOP was created in 1939, right in the middle of this thing. It’s chaos. They’re creating this gigantic thing, filled with all these new agencies. How do you even think about controlling it? That was what they were up against.

What they eventually arrived at was: “We’re going to construct an Executive Office of the President, and we’re going to put stuff in there that allows the president to use little units to control the bureaucracy.” The first one they moved in was the Bureau of the Budget, which is now called the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It used to be in the Treasury Department, created in 1921. It became a purely presidential agency. In addition, there’s now:

• The National Security Council,

• The Domestic Policy Council,

• The National Economic Council,

• A Presidential Personnel Office,

• An Office for Legislative Affairs, etc.

All these units are mechanisms of presidential control. You have the administrative state, but then you have the president with his own bureaucracy that works for him to control everything else.

by Santi Ruiz, Statecraft |  Read more:

The Roberts Court

When President Donald Trump announced plans to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court on April 1st, the problem arose as to where to put him. The Court’s oral arguments have precise protocols, but none of them governed where a President should sit in the courtroom, because no President had ever done such a thing. Tradition—and respect for judicial independence—had prevented it. The case that the President wanted to see argued was Trump v. Barbara, which was among the more consequential matters the Court was considering that term. Trump had tried, through an executive order, to overturn the guarantee of citizenship to all babies born on U.S. soil—a conception of what makes an American that had been enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, and later reaffirmed by congressional statute.

Because none of the Justices had invited Trump, he couldn’t be placed in the section reserved for their families and other guests. Since he loathes the press, it was hard to imagine him sitting among the journalists, most of whom perch on creaky bentwood chairs in crowded alcoves. Because Trump was a party in the case, Court officials felt that he shouldn’t be given the seat Presidents occupy during swearing-in ceremonies for Justices—typically the only time they visit. In the end, the officials put him in the front row of the public section, where he glowered at the Justices, his signature red tie dangling, one hand on each knee.

It felt like a mafioso move. For months, he’d been denouncing the Justices—particularly two of his own three appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—when they didn’t decide his way. In February, after the Court ruled that Trump couldn’t invoke a national emergency in order to impose sweeping tariffs, he told reporters that Gorsuch and Barrett, who’d joined the 6–3 majority, were “an embarrassment to their families.” At a White House Easter lunch later that day, Trump made it clear that he sees judicial appointments as quid pro quos, doing a mincing imitation of Justices who won’t knuckle under: “ ‘I don’t care if Trump appointed me, I don’t care, it doesn’t make any difference to me—I’m voting against him!’ ” He added, “They want to show their independence, you know? Stupid people.” (The White House posted, then took down, a video of the speech.)

Watching Supreme Court oral arguments can feel like watching a play—the Justices emerge from behind red velvet curtains to take their appointed seats at a long bench. As Clare Cushman, of the Supreme Court Historical Society, told me, “It’s not entertainment, but it’s entertainment-adjacent.” On April 1st, Trump’s presence generated dark comedy and cringily implausible encounters. He arrived at the Court with a posse: Howard Lutnick, the billionaire Commerce Secretary; David Warrington, the burly White House counsel; and Pam Bondi, the obedient Attorney General whose firing, for not being obedient enough, Trump announced the next day. (He reportedly gave her the news while they rode in a limousine to the Court.) In the guest section, apparently at the invitation of one of the liberal Justices, sat Robert De Niro, an inveterate Trump critic. A few rows behind the President was John Eastman, a former lawyer known for opposing birthright citizenship; he’d been disbarred in California for his role in a scheme to return Trump to the White House after the 2020 election. On the plaza outside, the celebrity chef and activist José Andrés, wearing an “Immigrants Feed America” T-shirt, addressed protesters who carried signs saying “It’s Literally in the Constitution” and “Born Here, Belong Here.”

Peter Shane, a constitutional-law scholar at New York University, told me, “I wondered if Trump understood that he wouldn’t be the center of attention. The Chief Justice wouldn’t be staring him in the eye, there’d be no television cameras on him. That is not usually his cup of tea.” In the end, there were no disruptions, not even when Trump walked out after the government’s lawyer made his presentation and before the opposing lawyer, from the A.C.L.U., had got very far into hers. The Justices seemed to avoid even glancing at the President.

Still, it was another profoundly strange moment in a profoundly strange time for the Court—especially for the seventy-one-year-old Chief Justice, John Roberts. Twenty-one years into his tenure, he keeps waking up, “Groundhog Day” style, to the same ironic scenario: he’s a proponent of maximal Presidential authority who is compelled to deal with a President especially likely to abuse it. (Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee who is reflexively polite, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, probably wouldn’t even enjoy a round of golf with Trump.) Roberts has leveraged his mild persona to defend the Court’s political neutrality at a time when Americans increasingly see it as partisan; according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, more than half hold an unfavorable view of it—a near-historic low.

Whereas Roberts likes to stress that the Court is fundamentally nonpartisan and frequently unanimous—the Justices agree around forty per cent of the time, though typically on minor issues—many Americans believe that he has presided over a rightward march in the Court’s jurisprudence, on such issues as affirmative action, immigration and asylum, abortion, voting law, gun rights, and the separation of church and state. And, with a few high-profile exceptions, such as the tariffs case, his Supreme Court has overruled lower courts to permit much of Trump’s second-term agenda to proceed. This has often happened without explanation, because the decisions have been issued on the emergency, or “shadow,” docket—that is, decided without a full briefing, oral arguments, or detailed opinions. Of the thirty-five requests for emergency action made by the second Trump Administration—on everything from defunding scientific research to allowing people to be deported to “third countries” where they have no affiliations—the Court has ruled in the Administration’s favor, in part or in full, twenty-five times, generally with the three liberal Justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent. Among the fifty-six cases fully briefed and argued before the Court this past term, there were 6–3 splits between the Republican and Democratic appointees in thirteen rulings, compared with six last term.

To some observers, the fact that the Court ruled against the Trump Administration in a few major opinions—including, it turned out, the birthright- citizenship case—was a reassuring affirmation of Roberts’s view that it operates outside the realm of politics. Trump’s theatrics fuelled this impression: his clumsy attempts to tip the balance obviously failed. William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, argued in the Times that the Roberts Court was “one of the most independent” he could “imagine at this stage of the second Trump administration.” Yet the term was overwhelmingly favorable to the President, and, though the final rulings certainly matter, of equal importance is the Court’s choice of which cases to take up in the first place. Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, pointed to the Court’s handling of Louisiana v. Callais, in which the conservative majority gutted portions of the Voting Rights Act. Vladeck noted that the Court could have treated the case—involving Louisiana’s creation of a majority-Black voting district—as a smaller dispute, but instead it ordered the parties involved to re-argue the case as a broad test of the constitutionality of weighing race when redistricting. Vladeck said, “A big theme of this term is all these times when the Court could have looked like it was above politics but chose to lean in. This is the one institution left in the country that had a chance to say, ‘We have long-term principles’—and instead it got swept up in the political moment.”

Roberts has offered the occasional courteous rebuke to the President’s public trashing of the judicial branch. In 2018, after Trump dismissed a district-court judge who’d rejected one of his asylum policies as an “Obama judge,” Roberts declared, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Even those lofty, carefully considered remarks rankled Trump. At the Easter lunch this year, he said, “ ‘There is no Republican judge and there is no Democrat judge,’ a certain person says. And I say you’ve lost all credibility when you say that.”

For a man like Roberts, to whom the label “institutionalist” attaches like an epithet in the Odyssey, perhaps the only thing worse than Trump’s excoriation of the Justices is his gratitude when they do what he wants. In March, 2025, Roberts was present when Trump gave the annual Presidential address to Congress; afterward, Trump patted the Chief Justice on the shoulder and said, “Thank you again—won’t forget.” To many people, this sounded like an acknowledgment of Trump v. United States, the remarkably capacious 2024 ruling that granted Presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts. More immediately, the opinion saved Trump from facing trial for interfering in the 2020 election. Roberts had written the opinion for a 6–3 majority. J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge and a conservative, was close to Roberts for many years—he was a groomsman at his wedding—but has since become sharply critical of him. Luttig told me that he regards the immunity decision as “one of the two or three worst cases in all of American history, if not the single worst, because of the structural damage that it did to the Constitution and the separation of powers.” On Truth Social, Trump blamed “sleazebag ‘journalists’ ” for suggesting that his comment to Roberts was related to the immunity decision. He said that he’d just been thanking Roberts for swearing him in at his second Inauguration. Nobody who knows Roberts thinks that he could have found the gesture anything other than embarrassing.

Roberts, with his country-club equanimity, can seem like a man out of time—maddeningly or reassuringly, depending on your perspective. Even as a septuagenarian who peers at lawyers over reading glasses, he projects boyishness. He has the same modest swoop of a forelock that he’s had since his confirmation hearings. (A longtime Supreme Court sketch artist told me that Roberts’s bland good looks and buttoned-down comportment make him challenging to draw.) Roberts has called himself a “dinosaur” when it comes to A.I., and he’s never stopped writing opinions by hand. He still likes to boast about how collegial the Court is, though lately he’s had to temper those claims: in a speech at Rice University this past March, the best he could muster was “We’re not as much at each other’s throats as you might think.” Back in the nineties, both Democrats and Republicans loved to praise the unlikely friendship of the (liberal, feminist) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the (conservative, originalist) Justice Antonin Scalia. If such a friendship exists on the Court today, there’s no evidence of it.

In oral arguments, Roberts is generally unruffled. He takes up less airtime than most other Justices and seems less aggravated and indignant than the most aggravated and indignant among them—Samuel Alito for the conservatives, Jackson for the liberals. (An analysis by The Hill found that Jackson had the highest spoken-word count this past term, at more than seventy-five thousand, whereas Roberts was at about twenty thousand, ahead only of Clarence Thomas, who until recent years barely spoke from the bench.) Robert’s harshest interjections—and they aren’t that harsh—come when he reminds a colleague not to interrupt a lawyer or another Justice. [...]

His workplace is trickier than it used to be, though. Although his conservative flank has a lock on power, Roberts himself has less sway than ever over an increasingly fractious Court. Notably, the Chief Justice has less room for the cagey maneuvering, including narrowing the scope of decisions, that he’s often used to build consensus, as with a 2012 opinion that brokered a compromise on the Affordable Care Act by characterizing its insurance mandate as a mere tax. In 2018, Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota that “you can try to get as many people on board as you can” by keeping decisions narrow, and by only deciding “what is absolutely necessary to be decided.” But today’s Court often divides along stark ideological lines, and the liberals often sound truly distraught in their dissents. Jackson, describing the majority’s decision in the Presidential-immunity case, invoked “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance.” Kagan wrote an impassioned dissent to the Court’s 6–3 decision in the Louisiana-redistricting case. Opting to read passages of her opinion aloud from the bench, for impact, Kagan repeated “I dissent” like a chant as Roberts and Alito—whom Roberts had chosen to write the opinion—stared straight ahead. Kagan spoke of “the majority’s now completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” a law “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil-rights marchers.” [...]

Vladeck, the Georgetown law professor, said that the two-year period before Barrett replaced Ginsburg, firmly tipping the Court’s balance, was the high point of Roberts’s ability to work out compromises: “He will never be in more control than he was between 2018 and 2020, when he was the median on everything.” Ironically, the firmly conservative majority has watered down Roberts’s power. This became especially clear in 2022, when Roberts tried to find a middle way in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. When the Justices met for a final vote on whether they’d take the case, Roberts, Barrett, and the three liberals voted to turn it away, according to reporting by Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor, of the Times. But the Court requires only four Justices to grant a case, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Roberts had hoped would back his strategy of prudent avoidance, wouldn’t go along. Roberts ended up writing a concurrence, arguing for a “more measured course” in which the Court would uphold a Mississippi ban on abortions after fifteen weeks and toss out the long-standing rule that abortion was legal until a fetus was viable, but stop short of discarding Roe v. Wade altogether. He was following, he wrote, “a simple yet fundamental principle of judicial restraint: If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” But the liberals were having none of it, and the conservatives wanted to end abortion immediately. “In the aftermath of Dobbs, he was the proverbial man without a country,” Luttig said. [...]

It takes a determinedly selective eye not to see the increasingly open divisions among the Justices. Some of them have been speaking publicly about their chagrin with the Court, and with one another, in ways they rarely would have earlier in Roberts’s tenure—even though that surely displeases him. “This is a very careful guy,” David Leebron, a friend of Roberts’s from their law-school days, at Harvard, told me. “He’s a person who is not going to say anything he shouldn’t say.” [...]

People familiar with the Court’s inner workings told me that new ways of conducting business might also be fraying nerves. Until a decade ago, the shadow docket was used only occasionally, mainly for true emergency applications—such as capital cases in which individuals faced imminent execution. Now it’s the venue for all kinds of substantive statutory and even constitutional matters, from immigration to election law, in large part because the Trump Administration has made such aggressive use of it—constantly filing for “emergency” relief to vanquish lower-court rulings that impede its policies. A former clerk said, “More of those decisions are essentially battles of memos, rather than human processes where the clerks talk, and then the Justices talk, and there are multiple drafts of opinions. It’s much more impersonal, and it kind of crowds out any sense of compromise or engagement—of mutual understanding.” Shadow-docket petitions now pour in year-round, including in July and August—months when the Justices once had little, if any, Court business to attend to, and could enjoy speaking gigs in Rome or London, or work on their memoirs or children’s books. Today, Driver said, the Justices feel compelled to keep “interacting with each other” during the lull.

Roberts himself probably laments this change. He likes to paraphrase a quip by Justice Louis Brandeis, who said that he could do twelve months’ worth of Court work in ten months, but not in twelve. “We work at very close quarters on very important issues, on very sensitive issues,” Roberts said at a public appearance last year. “And we do need a little break from each other.” [...]

It may not be necessary to classify Roberts as either an ideologue or an institutionalist. Wermiel, the former American University law professor, told me, “I don’t think there needs to be an overarching theory that explains everything about him and the Court. I think he has some very strong, ideological views, and they take precedence. If he can try in a case to cool things off a bit and find consensus, and thinks that’s in the best interest of the institution, I think he does that, and he’s done it well on some occasions. But he certainly doesn’t do that all the time.”

by Margaret Talbot, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Illustration by Paul Rogers/Source photograph by Erin Schaff /Getty

Fantasy Land

This week, I have been reading “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the recent volume from my newsroom colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on the first year of President Trump’s second term.

It makes for compelling, often shocking, reading, and Haberman and Swan provide a great sense of the personalities involved in making the second Trump administration, as well as the relationships and dynamics that seem to drive his presidential decision-making.

Whenever I read an inside account of a presidency, I am on the lookout for anything that tells us something about the way the president in question relates to the office itself. Is there a particular way he manages the White House or attends to challenges and crises? On what issues does he defer to his staff members and subordinates versus take his own counsel? How does he deal with the endless stream of information and intelligence from a nearly infinite number of sources?

The growing complexity of the administrative state and the enlarged responsibilities of the office led presidents, beginning in earnest with Harry Truman, to create new, institutionalized processes designed to get the best and most accurate information available. In addition to practical considerations, this has been a way for presidents to combat one of the pathologies of executive authority: a tendency to value one’s own unique insight above all else. Even still, it is immensely difficult for presidents to avoid the trap, if you will, of getting high on their own supply.

Trump, according to Haberman and Swan, has not simply junked this process in its entirety — he has set up his White House to affirm his frequently arbitrary instincts above all other considerations. He has insulated himself from opposing views and made internal dissent verboten. At no point does Trump receive neutral information; just about everything is tailored to his whims, impulses and mercurial disposition. The result is that he is isolated from reality to the extent that he is practically living in a fairy tale.

Haberman and Swan describe a Trump who cannot see beyond the first few steps of any given action and is constantly taken aback by political obstacles and backlash. Recent controversies, from the depletion of our military’s stock of sophisticated munitions to worsening conditions on some of our naval vessels, are easier to fathom when you consider the strong odds that Trump is told precious little about the actual conditions of his war. More likely, he is told what he wants to hear: that America is winning and Iran is on the verge of surrender.

So far, much of the destruction of the second Trump administration is self-inflicted. It is Trump and his allies who have wrecked the administrative state, undercut science and mired the country in a new Middle East quagmire. There has not yet been an external crisis — the kind of catastrophic event that demands an active and effective leadership. Through their reporting, Haberman and Swan make clear that if and when this country faces such a crisis, both the president and his administration will be caught flat-footed.

When this happened in Trump’s first term with the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States still had a functional bureaucracy with experts willing and able to provide leadership in the absence of any from the White House. Should we see a similar disaster, we very likely won’t even have that.

by Jamelle Bouie, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
[ed. It really is as bad as it seems (if anything... worse). How cursed are we that we've had this guy during two of the most consequential threats in our lifetimes: Covid and the rise of AI. Not only that, but a completely cowardly and dysfunctional Republican Congress. See also: Republicans Are Trying to Hide These Health Care Cuts (NYT):]

***

One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.

President Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.

The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.

Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.

Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. The president and Congress are trying to ruin that success story.

Republicans’ attacks on affordable health care have taken two forms: one more passive, the other more direct...

[ed. Then of course, there's this: ‘A Blatant and Gargantuan Conflict of Interest’ (NYT):]

***

The Trump family’s crypto business exemplifies all of the sleaziest aspects of the president’s code of conduct, if we can call it that.

It is almost certainly unconstitutional and may well be illegal. Estimates vary, but according to a cryptocurrency analytics firm reported on in The Times, the Trumps made at least $1.4 billion, and their investors, lost nearly $4 billion from purchases of Trump-linked crypto. These purchases have — let’s say — coincided with pardons, dropped investigations and favorable regulatory decisions.

This crypto scheme is central to President Trump’s personal agenda: to use his office to vastly increase his and his family’s fortune.

The icing on the cake: A growing number of economists and financial analysts argue that crypto is itself a fiction, lacking a backup system of gold, silver or perhaps most important a national government, ordinarily considered essential ingredients of a currency. [...]

I asked a wide range of crypto experts about the Trump family’s involvement in the industry, and more than half pointed me to an independent analyst, Molly White, who regularly produces detailed reports for her newsletter, Citation Needed.

White, whose work has been praised in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, emailed her reply to my queries: “I wouldn’t say that running a crypto business inherently would lead to corrupt transactions, except that crypto is extremely poorly regulated.”

However, White continued, 

shady actors are extremely normalized in the crypto world so the usual reputational screening that might keep someone like that from investing in a business doesn’t seem to apply.

I do think Trump’s dealings are both illegal and unconstitutional. While it’s challenging to definitively prove a quid pro quo, the sheer number of times an individual or company has supported Trump’s campaign or invested in his crypto businesses and then quickly enjoyed favorable policy treatment or regulatory relief is so long it’s hard to believe it’s all coincidence.

The deals with the U.A.E. and the business with Justin Sun are particularly fishy. There should be serious investigations into all of this, whether under the foreign emoluments clause or 18 USC §201, and Trump should face both impeachment and criminal consequences.

Speaking of the last national election, White wrote, “the crypto industry was quite successful in politics in 2024, installing at least six new pro-crypto senators and more than a dozen representatives.”

With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, White said, the key regulatory agencies are controlled by “loyalist, pro-crypto commissioners.”

[ed. Just another day in Trumpland...]

Is the US Ready for President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

[ed. Or happy with the same broken system we've been stuck with for decades.]

"They assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.”

The words were delivered slowly, deliberately and with some steeliness by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her audience, crammed into the pews of Rockefeller Memorial chapel at the University of Chicago, burst into spontaneous applause. That was in May. In the three months since, the speculation around Ocasio-Cortez’s ambitions – for herself and for America – has only grown louder.

Friends and foes alike wonder if the stars are aligning for the New York congresswoman to run for US president in 2028. They point to voters raging against the machine – including the ageing Democratic party establishment – and hungry for change. They note how progressives pushing for economic justice and universal healthcare have won a string of impressive victories in mayoral elections and congressional primaries over the past year.

Then there are the opinion polls. Last month a Granite State Poll from the University of New Hampshire found Ocasio-Cortez leading a potential Democratic field in that crucial state. She has the kind of name recognition that money can’t buy, nearly 10m followers on Instagram alone and fans ranging from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.

As Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden showed, presidential elections have a habit of finding the right person at the right time in the right place. Ocasio-Cortez, a 36-year-old with a progressive agenda and can’t-be-taught social media smarts, could meet the moment for a nation eager for a fresh start after a decade of Trumpism.

If modern politics is about pendulum swings, it is hard to imagine anyone who better personifies a rebuke of the octogenarian Trump and his nativist “Make America great again” (Maga) movement. This week a Zogby Strategies national poll found that a generic democratic socialist candidate leads generic Maga candidate 45% to 33%.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chair of the DSA, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, said: “If she were to throw her hat in the ring, there would be a lot of excitement for it from members of Democratic Socialists of America. We definitely want to see a strong working class voice in the 2028 presidential primary.”

Ocasio-Cortez has not ruled out a run for president and her actions have done nothing to quell the notion of a campaign in stealth mode. Last year she joined her mentor, the independent senator Bernie Sanders, on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that drew huge crowds. More recently she has crisscrossed the country to support progressive candidates, further enhancing her national profile.

In the past week alone she made two moves that intensified political pundits’ chatter. First Ocasio-Cortez used Instagram to announce that she is freezing her eggs, a decision she described as a move to “feel more in control of my life”. She acknowledged the “political risk” in sharing personal family planning details but stated her goal is to normalise conversations about the professional and personal challenges women face. The internet quickly became awash in speculation that Ocasio-Cortez ended her relationship with and engagement to long-time partner Riley Roberts , driven by reports from Puck News and others noting she had long since stopped appearing with him in public and mentioning his name.

Then, when asked by ABC interviewer Jonathan Karl about the cultural battles of the 2020 pandemic era – including calls from some on the left to defund the police – she laughed and, quoting a New York city council ally, remarked: “Woke One was crazy” – apparently trying to draw a strategic line between hard-fought struggles for racial justice and the performative excesses of lockdown isolation that became an easy target for the right.

Unlike many would-be presidents of the time, Ocasio-Cortez does not appear to be driven by personal ego, according to those who knew her, which may prove to be her political superpower. She was a volunteer organiser for Sanders’ 2016 campaign, his first presidential run and one that built a national movement around his vision of democratic socialism, even as he lost to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

When she decided to run for office herself, the former bartender and waitress had virtually no money but was assisted by progressive organisations such as Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. In 2018 she beat 10-term incumbent congressman Joe Crowley, a member of the Democratic leadership and potential future speaker, in a New York primary.

Corbin Trent, her first communications director in the House of Representatives and the co-founder of Justice Democrats, was there on the night she ousted Crowley. He recalls that the political industrial complex began trying to map her career path before the ink on the ballots was even dry.

“Primary night, she beats Joe Crowley,” he recalled. “I get phone calls from elected officials and other people and their question is, what’s next? What’s the pathway here? What’s she going to run for? What higher office would she seek? This is literally a few hours after the polls close in the primary. That’s the way DC thinks. Not, hey, what can we do with Medicare for all or this or that or any of the other things?”

As Ocasio-Cortez’s national profile exploded – bringing in $15m in her first electoral cycle and attracting unprecedented demands from foreign heads of state – Trent tried to lay out a long-term strategic map. He suggested upstate New York events to prepare for a statewide Senate run. But she resisted the logic of political careerism.

“To my chagrin and frustration that never was a way in which she could plan or operate. She did not have an idea in her head of this ultimate prize of president or governor or senator.”

Instead, Trent argues, her appeal lies in a rare authenticity – an ability to validate the deep-seated economic anxiety of Americans. “Alexandria has two things going for her. She’s genuinely curious about other people. It’s not like she has to pretend to be. I’ve had politicians ask me, ‘How can I be more genuine?’ Well, that’s probably not going to help if you have to fucking ask me that.

“Two, she is genuinely open about herself. Some people believe that nobody cares what they think or who they are and then other people don’t want you to know who they are. She doesn’t suffer from either of those failings.”

Other observers agree that Ocasio-Cortez has that X factor missing from so many professional politicians: relatability. Chris Scott, a political strategist who served as the coalition director for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, said: “When you talk about AOC’s humble beginnings being a bartender that’s a lived experience story that resonates, especially with millennials, with their upbringing.

“What you are starting to see – whether it’s conservative or progressive - is people are leaning more and more towards candidates with lived experience that they feel they relate to as politics gets more polarising.”

by David Smith, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bloomberg/Getty

[ed. In a heartbeat. All you have to do is look at the responses of the various political operatives interiewed for this article to know what she's up against. Whether you agree with all her positions or not, at this point I'll take anyone who isn't motivated mostly by self-interest and power.]

Why Progressives Are Backing Off “Woke 1”

Earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) flashed her political dexterity on ABC’s This Week when she was asked about the policies of Peak Woke — call it Woke 1, that stretch around the 2020 pandemic when the American liberal machine seemed to be at its political and cultural height. “I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” the Bronx congresswoman said. “Woke 1 was crazy.”

She was quoting a tweet from Chi Ossé, a New York City Council member from Brooklyn, but the point underneath it was the real tell. The Democrats’ emerging left — fresh off primary victories in New York, Colorado, and now Michigan — has developed a playbook for handling any unpopular stance, or tweet, from the early 2020s, whether it’s pandemic masking, defunding the police, or the broader vocabulary of that summer.

The new plan: Brush it off. Then refocus on the present, and on the policies that will actually make people’s lives better.

So far, the strategy is working. Zohran Mamdani walked back his support for defunding the police during his 2025 mayoral campaign and is now the mayor of New York. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed congressional candidate in New York’s 13th District, had a stack of deleted posts that CNN’s KFile resurfaced this June — including one that read “all deportations are wrong.” When I asked her about them, she didn’t disavow a word. She won her primary, albeit in a deep-blue district, anyway. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong had a bad case of the woke mind virus in 2020 — the “cancel Thanksgiving” kind — and she’s still in the hunt in this week’s Democratic primary, where her candidacy has been far more focused on issues like data centers and education funding.

Electorally, at least, Ossé has been proven right. The pandemic was wild, and primary voters seem to be extending progressives a grace period of sorts — a chance to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years. And while Republicans are still hopeful they can relitigate some of these fights in a general election, they’ve struggled to make them stick in high-profile races since 2024.

But these are also the issues — race, gender, sexuality, affirmative action, religion, cancel culture — where the simplest story gets repeated out of ease. The national media’s distance from everyday people, and especially from working-class people of color, is felt most in how it covers culture. Catch-all terms like “wokeness” flatten real differences across the electorate and quietly impose a conservative frame on genuine arguments about equity and inclusion.

That was one of my biggest takeaways from that 2020 summer: our collective discomfort with all of these issues in the first place. I watched that year up close, traveling with Democratic and Republican candidates through the pandemic and the racial-justice protests, and there was never a clean “Two Americas” moment — at least not the left-versus-right one everyone expected. The real gap was between Masked America — coastal, professional, absolutely consumed by identity politics — and everyone else. Among ordinary voters of all parties, and especially minority voters, there was significantly more skepticism from the start toward the highly-specific “woke 1” litmus tests now being renounced by their leading proponents. At George Floyd’s memorial in Houston and in the city where he died, there was no consensus on defunding the police, only a shared agreement about racial injustice and a deep distrust of institutions. In south Chicago, people were already skeptical that the sudden flood of corporate money into racial justice would outlast the moment — even while the checks were still being written.

So no, I don’t love the tidy language of Woke 1 (then) versus Woke 2 (now). But here are a few lessons from that summer — and from our recent reporting on America, Actually — that I think apply now, especially to the progressives stepping back from things they used to say.

1. Woke isn’t dead

The broad ideals — diversity, equity, a basic sense of fairness — still matter to Democratic voters. Criminal justice reform still has real purchase with the base. Minority and women candidates have kept winning since 2024, and even ideas like reparations still resonate with big chunks of the Democratic electorate. What’s changed isn’t who these candidates are — it’s what they choose to lead with.

What has fallen out of favor is a way of talking. Let’s say it’s the nonprofit register, or the Ford Foundation cadence — the language that lived in mission statements and land acknowledgments, or that made sweeping generalizations about a specific group — white women, cis men, you name it. David Axelrod, describing Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong, gave it this label: a “font of zany liberal, faculty lounge exotica.” Yes, that’s the part that’s gotten less popular. The vocabulary changed more than the values.

2. The left rewrote its message after 2024

The clearest change is the affordability pivot. When Abdul El-Sayed ran for Michigan governor in 2018, the animating cause was climate and a Green New Deal. Today the center of gravity has moved to economic populism, affordability, and a rethinking of the US relationship with Israel. Climate didn’t vanish, but it’s no longer the headline. And “representation” was, at its core, a white-collar frame — it spoke loudest to people already inside the room.

Affordability speaks to everyone. When I sat down with El-Sayed on the show, this is how he described what Michigan voters were actually asking:

“Who poses the biggest pushback to a system of politics that has been bought off in ways that leave me unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home, unable to look at my kid’s school and believe that that’s a good place for them, unable to get healthcare when I need it — and then sending my money abroad, telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”

That’s not the language of 2020. It’s economic, universal, and it doesn’t ask anyone to first pass a vocabulary test.

It helps to remember that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was never really “woke.” He talked about class more than culture, the many against the money. And it repeatedly got him into trouble, leading him to adopt more of the left’s rhetoric and positions on identity and race after 2016. In 2028, the sweet spot is probably the middle, and that’s what the next generation of progressives — AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed — can do better than their Burlington forefather. They’re fluent in blending the class critique and the social one without missing a beat.

“This is about the many versus the money,” El-Sayed told me. “If you support a politics of the UAW, of working people everywhere, of teachers, of nurses, of working families, of Bernie Sanders and AOC, of people who want to break the chokehold of corporations and special interests on our politics — this is that race.”

by Astead Herndon, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images

[ed. How convenient, a simple rebranding to create distance from idiodic policies that should never have gained traction in the first place. I'm an Independent because I don't trust Democrats to always do the right thing, although I do believe they're orders of magnitude better than Republicans, who nearly always gravitate to the wrong thing - or more reliably, the self-interested side of the spectrum, everyone else be damned. What's lacking in both parties are adults in the room that will put their foot down and cut off the wackier elements of both parties, who by virtue of their wackiness garner the most attention and water down the party's main themes (while providing endless ammunition to their opponents). Are there any adults left in either party with enough gravitas to say enough is enough? Hard to say, since we're talking about politics, where everything is poll-driven and transactionable. See also: Are the Democrats going to save us this time? (Noahpinion).]

Americans Are Already Paying Dearly for the National Debt

Fiscal hawks like to drum up interest in the national debt by making the astronomical numbers more tangible. The United States owes $31.6 trillion to public creditors, more than $290,000 for each household. You could spend $1 million every day for almost 86,000 years before having to borrow more. But no one really cares. Talking about how many times all of the dollars laid end to end would go to the moon and back (6,000, as it happens) is just not going to get people to think differently about the national debt.

What should matter is that the consequences of this debt are not off in the future, but already here. The government’s deficits have saddled many American families with higher costs, largely from rising interest rates. The Budget Lab, the policy research center at Yale where I am the executive director, recently estimated that congressional-spending decisions since 2015 have raised Treasury yields by almost a full percentage point, which affects what American households pay to borrow. For someone taking out a 30-year mortgage at last year’s median home price, this rise in long-term interest rates has increased their borrowing costs by about $2,500 a year, or roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. (The Budget Lab has built a tool to help users calculate their own extra mortgage costs.)

The problem is not just for Americans who are lucky enough to buy a home. The bloated government budgets and waning federal revenues of the past decade are driving up costs across the board. Compared with a world in which these fiscal-policy changes did not take place, the annual borrowing costs on a typical auto loan are now up by about $120, and by about $770 on a typical small-business loan. Credit-card borrowing rates are also hovering near record highs.

Although affordability has become a watchword for politicians who understand that rising prices are hurting American families, lawmakers seem to have forgotten that reducing federal deficits would help bring down prices. In the 1990s, Congress and the White House prioritized bringing deficits down by both cutting spending and raising revenue—moves that lowered borrowing costs for American families by about 0.6 percentage points, according to Budget Lab calculations. But few lawmakers seem to be suggesting the spending cuts and tax increases necessary to lower costs now. [...]

Much of the big legislation of the past decade, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, pandemic stimulus bills, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, has grown the deficit. Lawmakers have passed some legislation to improve the fiscal outlook, such as the Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2023, which cut spending and clawed back unspent coronavirus-relief funds, but most federal policy has lately involved spending money that the country doesn’t quite have. This is hurting consumers, businesses, and the federal government.

The cost of the war in Iran, which the Pentagon put at $29 billion last month (other estimates are higher), will put slight upward pressure on interest rates (0.002 percentage points), according to our calculator. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which we estimate will raise the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade (not including interest costs), will raise interest rates on a typical 30-year mortgage by 0.4 percentage points by the end of 2030—about $1,060 annually for a home bought at the 2024 median price with a 20 percent down payment—and by 1.5 percentage points by the end of 2055.

Most economists support deficit spending during temporary crises, such as a recession, or in cases where an investment can be expected to generate more government revenues in the future, such as funding for infrastructure. But the United States has been spending far more than it takes in for well over two decades.

The main remedies for these problems—higher taxes and spending cuts—are generally politically unpopular. Every budget fix will have its critics, but some options are more palatable than others. Better funding for the IRS, for example, could help close the “tax gap”—the amount of taxes legally owed that are not paid in a timely way—which the IRS estimated at about $700 billion a year in 2022. Other levers include raising the retirement age and reducing Social Security benefits for high earners, who also tend to live longer; reforming Medicare Advantage, a program that has been shown to allow private insurers to overcharge the federal government; and removing the tax exemption on employer-provided health insurance, so that these benefits can be taxed as income. The Congressional Budget Office regularly publishes policies that could help close the deficit, and Americans need to decide what we’re willing to pay for and what we’re not.

A big challenge in making these hard choices is that the costs and benefits are asymmetrically understood: Whereas the costs of deficits are diffuse, the costs of policies that close the deficit are acutely clear only to those affected. For example, the Budget Lab has estimated that closing the carried-interest loophole could raise more than $100 billion in federal revenues over 10 years, which would help lower mortgage rates by 0.0064 percentage points. But this collective benefit is too slight for most people to know or care about it. The few people who benefit from this tax break, however, in industries such as private equity and venture capital, very much do care, so they are far more likely to push hard to keep it than the millions of affected Americans are to push to end it.

Politicians respond to electoral consequences. Right now there is nothing stopping them from doling out tax cuts and spending promises while also driving up interest rates. Voters may complain that their lives are becoming unaffordable, but hardly anyone seems to appreciate that federal deficits are partly to blame. If we want to see lawmakers actually address this problem, economists need to do a better job explaining the stakes. This means that instead of talking about the fact that our national debt could fill all 32 NFL stadiums with two tiers of construction pallets filled with $100 bills, we should be talking about how deficit spending is making it harder to pay our own bills.

by Martha Gimbel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic. Source: Getty

[ed. See also: America is Heading for a Debtpocalypse (Noahpinion):]

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As of 2026, we’re in double trouble. Our national debt is back up above 100% of GDP — similar to what it was right after WW2 (and much higher than in 1990). But now the interest rates our government has to pay on its debt are almost twice as high as they were after WW2: [...]

But things are worse under Trump than they were under Biden, for three reasons.

First, this is a very large annual deficit, and it’s all being borrowed at the new, higher interest rates. In addition, during Biden’s first two years in office, inflation eroded the debt. Inflation is back down to a fairly low-ish level now, meaning the debt isn’t getting eroded. And finally, interest rates have now been high for long enough that the debt Trump borrowed in his first term to pay for Covid relief is now being rolled over at higher rates.

So right now, the national debt continues to explode, because the government is borrowing money just to pay the interest on the money it borrowed before. This increased debt naturally results in even greater interest costs, forcing the government to borrow even more to fund those interest payments. And so on. Interest payments and debt just go to the moon.

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[ed. Let that sink in - we're paying interest on loans we've taken out to pay interest on the national debt. Also: Federal Debt 101; and Going For Broke (DS). And this: The Fiscal Crisis Facing American Cities (Urban Proxima):]

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As the cost of servicing the debt increases, Congress must borrow more, raise additional revenue, or devote a smaller share of the federal budget to everything else. Whichever path it chooses, the federal government will have less room to maintain the commitments on which American cities have come to depend. [...]

Federal money flows to cities in three flavors: direct transfers, indirect transfers, and what we call fiscal dark matter. Direct transfers are exactly what they sound like — money sent directly from the federal government to various localities. These include funds disbursed through programs like the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), which supports things like public infrastructure and neighborhood services. In 2022, direct transfers like the CDBG totaled $146.3 billion. That’s significant, but actually the smallest of the three categories.

Less visible are the indirect transfers. These monies are initially awarded to state governments, which then allocate funds to municipal-level programs and services in accordance with state prerogatives. The cleanest example is probably K-12 education, which receives federal Title I dollars to pay for teachers and programs, but federal highway dollars work essentially the same way. All told, in 2022, the federal government handed down $1.1 trillion to state governments. That amounted to 36% of overall state revenue for that year and, depending on the individual state, ranged from roughly 22% to 50% of state revenue. How much of that ultimately flowed down to cities is hard to say, which is itself a problem: it’s difficult to even establish how exposed local governments are to a pullback in federal support of state budgets.

The third category – our fiscal dark matter – is all the federal money spent into local communities that never shows up in a local budget. This includes housing subsidies like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and Section 8. It also includes food support programs like SNAP and even some direct funding for local food banks.

Rightfully or not, when the flow of federal money in this category starts to dry up, the resulting problems will fall squarely on the mayor’s desk. After all, the median voter is never going to see increasing numbers of homeless encampments and think to blame the head of HUD. [...]

The “eds and meds” economies that anchor cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Baltimore depend heavily on Medicaid reimbursements and federal research grants to sustain the hospitals and universities that rank among their largest employers. Cuts there could precipitate layoffs in the institutions that have been holding together post-industrial downtowns for 30 years. And therein lies the second part of the dark matter problem. Federal money doesn’t just fund services and pay for infrastructure. In some places, it also props up major employers who anchor the entire local labor market. [ed. And the integral supply chain business that support those services.]