This news has raised the ire of Trump’s critics. Juliana Stratton, the Illinois lieutenant governor and a Democratic Senate candidate, accused Trump of using his public office “to make billions while American families struggle to afford their basic needs. His infinite greed is disgusting.”

The White House denied Trump or his family has engaged in conflicts of interest. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people”.

But how exactly has Trump earned so much money from cryptocurrency?

How does cryptocurrency work?

A cryptocurrency is simply digital money. It differs from traditional money in two ways.

First, traditional currencies are issued by central banks of each country, while cryptocurrencies are issued according to rules written in computer code.

The computer code behind crypto may be controlled by a company. Or the code may be predefined ahead of time (for example, in a “white paper” that sets up the algorithm behind crypto) and controlled by no one at all.

Second, transactions in traditional money happen via the banking system, while transactions in cryptocurrency happen on blockchains, which are databases that store information on who owns what.

Bitcoin is the oldest and best-known cryptocurrency, with a decentralised structure and no single entity controlling its issuance or making profits off it.

Aside from Bitcoin, there are tens of thousands of privately issued coins, which run on public blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana. But private coins, unlike Bitcoin, are issued by private companies to make money.

Transactions on a blockchain can involve transferring many different versions of private crypto assets – anything that can be written into a piece of code, regardless of whether that digital asset has any value at all.

What are the Trump’s crypto businesses?

Trump and his family are involved in three kinds of digital assets: the $TRUMP memecoin, a governance token called WLFI, and a stablecoin called USD1.

Memecoins are coins with no real business behind them. They derive their value from investor attention – a digital equivalent of buying a kid’s scribble because it’s your kid, not because the scribble has value in the outside world.

Stablecoins, by contrast, are a digital equivalent of a fiat currency like USD. For example, each unit of USD1 is designed to be worth exactly US$1. To maintain this value, stablecoins are typically backed by short-term government bonds and cash.

Governance tokens are yet another type of coin, which give holders voting rights over a crypto project, but no ownership over the project itself, and no claim on its profits.

The $TRUMP memecoin launched three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. About 80% of its supply is held by Trump-affiliated companies, which also collect a fee every time the coin changes hands.

WLFI and USD1 are issued by World Liberty Financial, cofounded in 2024 by the Trump family and business partners. A Trump business entity owns about 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of net proceeds from token sales.

Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows World Liberty brought him more than $500 million last year, while the memecoin business brought in more than $600 million. Forbes now estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.

How do you make a billion dollars from tokens?

Let’s start with the stablecoin, USD1.

As a stablecoin issuer, you take in dollars, hand out coins, and use the dollars to buy US Treasury bonds. Then, you earn interest on Treasury bonds. The more coins you issue, the greater the amount of money you earn interest on. So the main trick is to convince someone to use your stablecoin and hand in the dollars to you, preferably in large amounts.

For USD1, that someone handing in the dollars was Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which had pleaded guilty to US money-laundering violations in 2023. Binance reportedly wrote the computer code underpinning USD1 and promoted it on its platform.

Then, in May 2025, MGX – an Abu Dhabi state fund chaired by the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – invested $2 billion in Binance and paid in USD1. This instantly created $2 billion of interest-earning reserves for the Trump venture, worth an estimated $80 million a year.

Binance today holds 87% of all USD1.

The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its lawsuit against Binance days after the exchange listed USD1, and in October 2025 Trump pardoned Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao. A Wall Street Journal investigation later revealed Sheikh Tahnoon had also secretly bought a 49% stake in World Liberty itself for about $500 million, four days before Trump’s inauguration.

The $TRUMP memecoin required even less effort.

With memecoin, you simply let speculators buy a digital asset that is effectively pure hype packaged as a currency. You make money on every trade. And because anyone, anywhere can buy the coin anonymously, legal experts warn that it operates as a channel for untraceable gifts to Trump and his family.

Some buyers openly spent $148 million in memecoin for seats at a dinner with Trump.

Like most memecoins, $TRUMP collapsed after the initial hype: it now trades at about 98% below its peak.

A Reuters investigation of Trump and his family’s four main crypto ventures – World Liberty, the memecoin business, American Bitcoin and AI Financial Corp – found the family has gained about $2.3 billion since Trump retook office, almost exactly matching the amount lost by more than a million investors.

Without precedent

Some of the crypto regulations issued under Trump are good policy.

For example, the GENIUS Act clarifies the rules of the game for all – something the crypto industry had sought for years.

But all the useful crypto regulation is at risk of being undermined by stories of special favours and institutionalised corruption in Trump’s crypto ventures.

It’s also likely to undermine the US reputation for the rule of law, as Trump’s crypto dealings are without precedent in US history: anyone seeking presidential favour can simply buy the president’s coin.

Marta Khomyn, Senior Lecturer, Finance and Data Analytics, Adelaide University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In Trump v. Cook, the justices took up the case involving Trump’s decision to terminate Lisa Cook, a member of the powerful policymaking Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. On June 29, 2026, Cook and the Fed prevailed. In a 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court upheld a lower court’s decision to keep Cook in her role while her case proceeds on whether she was terminated “for cause.”

The high court also held that Trump didn’t meet the due process requirements for dismissing a board governor when he “fired” her via a social media post. Trump claimed Cook had committed mortgage fraud, even though she had not been found guilty of any wrongdoing.

As a scholar of employment law, I had expected the court to side with Cook to some degree. But other recent Supreme Court cases have gone the other way, protecting the president’s authority to fire other high-level government officials at will.

Same court, different opinions

The court’s Cook decision and its constraints on presidential power stand in contrast to its rulings regarding other federal agencies. On the same day, the conservative majority sided with Trump when it ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that a “for cause” provision limiting his right to fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission was unconstitutional.

In earlier rulings, the court similarly affirmed a president’s right to fire leadership at the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

As I’ve previously written, it’s important to remember that a vast majority of U.S. workers are employed at will, which means they can be fired for any reason and terminated from their jobs with no advance notice. By contrast, Cook’s position is covered by the Federal Reserve Act, which states that board members are appointed by the president to 14-year terms. They can be terminated by the president, but only for cause.

The same was true, however, at the Federal Trade Commission, where agency heads can be terminated only for cause. But in the Slaughter case, the conservative majority deemed the cause provision unconstitutional.

In Cook’s case, the government didn’t try to argue that the “cause” provision was unconstitutional. It waived that argument early on in the case. However, in upholding the lower court ruling in Cook, the court more or less assumed that the cause provision in the Federal Reserve Act is valid.

How to make sense of this contradiction?

As Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted in a dissenting opinion, the majority opinion in Cook was “in serious tension” with Slaughter. She also criticized the majority opinion for addressing “a constitutional issue” that was “outside the scope of this case.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a similar point in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, characterizing the majority’s treatment of the Fed as an “ad hoc … exception” to the court’s “totalizing” and “half-baked” interpretation of presidential power. Sotomayor noted that Slaughter creates “line-drawing” problems that were previously absent under long-standing precedent protecting FTC agency heads from dismissal.

When facts matter as much as the law

It’s difficult to reconcile the two cases based on legal reasoning alone. That doesn’t necessarily make the outcome wrong. But it does suggest it’s important to consider other factors at play – namely, what’s happening out in the real world, beyond the courthouse. This interpretation of the law is known as “legal realism.”

Legal realism dates back to the 1930s, based on the commonsense critique that predictions about the law require some incorporation of the facts rather than purely abstract notions of legal rights.

Legal realism extends beyond the idea that a judge’s political ideology might influence outcomes, which is today a common basis for pundits to explain court decisions. Instead, legal realism acknowledges that facts on the ground sometimes matter more than the law.

Legal realism is useful here because there’s one overriding fact that makes Cook’s case distinct from the others involving presidential power over federal agencies. Simply put, the Fed is special. It preserves price stability and safeguards the economy as a whole over the long term by rescuing it in bad times and preventing it from overheating in good times. Former Fed Chair Jerome Powell described it as a “first responder in times of financial crisis.”

But to do its job well, the Fed needs to be insulated from outside political forces. That’s why Wall Street and global markets more broadly were watching the decision closely.

The Fed’s unique role

In Cook, both the majority and concurring opinions frequently referred to the Fed’s vital role in the modern economy.

The majority opinion invoked “the Federal Reserve’s unique historical status and role” and warned of the economic “calamaties” that would come with “political manipulation of monetary policy.” And Roberts seemed to suggest that the Cook opinion is all the more important in light of the Slaughter ruling, noting the importance of leaving no public “doubt” as to the independence of “one of our Nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions.”

Of the dissenters, only Justice Clarence Thomas took the position that the president should have had the power to fire Cook at will. The rest objected on various technical and procedural grounds.

That is, at least by today’s standards, something like a consensus.

Elizabeth C. Tippett, Professor of Law, University of Oregon

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We are scholars of human rights. Alongside the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks how well more than 200 countries and territories are meeting the human rights commitments their governments have made, we annually update scores measuring whether people can actually get the basics of a decent life, such as healthcare, adequate food and a quality education.

The latest data our team has amassed shows that the U.S. is falling short compared with what it could achieve, given its US$32 trillion economy. This is not a one-year blip – the U.S. has been underperforming for the past 25 years.

Economic and social rights

Two foundational human rights agreements, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, describe countries’ obligations to promote the welfare of their people. Countries should improve the health, education and occupational well-being of their people over time, as best they can, given their “resources.”

The United States co-authored and voted in favor of the universal declaration in 1948. Although President Jimmy Carter signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1977, U.S. lawmakers never ratified it.

Resources in this context generally mean a government’s wealth and capacity. We measure resources by using per capita gross domestic product – the amount of money in a country evenly divided among its entire population. Because rich countries, like the U.S., can do more than lower-income countries, like Haiti, they are held to a higher standard.

So we don’t just ask how healthy, well-fed or educated the people of a country are. We ask how well a country is providing for its people compared with other countries with similar resources.

A 100% score means a country is doing all it can with what it has, and further improvements would require more resources. A lower score means there’s room for improvement.

Doing all you can with what you have doesn’t mean a government has to provide goods and services directly. Governments can rely on private businesses, employers, nonprofits, public programs or a combination. What we score is the result: Are people actually getting what they need?

We compared the scores of the U.S. over time against 37 other high-income free-market based countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a forum for industrialized economies to exchange information on the best policies and practices to support growth and development. Then we calculated how many Americans would be able to have these things if the U.S. adopted better policies.

Across all five areas we track – health, food, education, work and income – the U.S. has either stalled or lost ground, relative to its own history and to its peers.

Right to health

The U.S. ranks below its peer nations on health. Even Turkey and Hungary, less industrialized countries where the GDP per capita is a fraction of what it is in the U.S., have guaranteed better health outcomes for their people when compared to their resources.

Health scores indicate how well a country keeps its people alive and well, like whether children are born and stay healthy, whether adults live long lives and if the incidence of preventable diseases is kept low.

The U.S. scores about 80% of what it possibly could. By comparison, Canada scores 90%, Japan 88%, Mexico 86% and Australia 93%. Iceland scores the highest at 97%.

U.S. health scores have been relatively flat for a quarter century, rising from 79% in 2000 to a high of 82% in 2012. In 2023, it had receded to 80%. The rising scores were likely due to more Americans gaining health insurance following the Affordable Care Act’s rollout. The later decline was caused primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We anticipate further declines. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 11.8 million Americans would lose access to government-subsidized health insurance due to changes in the big tax and spending package President Donald Trump signed into law in the summer of 2025. By 2034, that number is projected to rise to 17 million people.

Right to food

People who have realized the right to food and adequate nutrition can reliably access affordable, healthy and nutritious food.

Our score measures the percentage of people who find themselves in that situation. The U.S. is only achieving about 81% of what it possibly could.

If the United States allocated its resources more efficiently, we estimate that roughly 14.8 million more women and 9.1 million more men would always have enough healthy food.

Among countries for which we have food security data, the U.S. ranks 30th out of 37.

Our data for the right to food in the U.S. spans 2015 to 2023. The U.S. food score fell slightly during that period, from 81.9% to 81.1%. This means that as the U.S. got wealthier, Americans got hungrier.

This score peaked in 2020, before the pandemic. Persistent inflation, rising housing costs and changes to the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program led to declines.

Signs point to the share of Americans who have access to affordable and nutritious food declining further.

About 3.4 million people lost access to food assistance from September 2025 to June 2026, also due to cuts in Trump’s 2025 legislative package.

The effects are starker in some places. In Arizona, SNAP enrollment had fallen by about half as of April 2026, with more than 400,000 people losing benefits since July 2025. The Arizonans who were still getting SNAP benefits to help them buy groceries were receiving significantly lower benefits, ProPublica reported.

Right to dignified work and fair income

Can people find work? Do they earn enough to get by? That’s what we measured for this economic right.

We set the bar at half of what a typical American household earns. By that measure, the U.S. reaches just 27% of what a country this wealthy could achieve, which is the worst score for an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member country.

It does better at creating conditions where people can find a job, scoring about 75%, ranking 10th alongside countries like the Netherlands and Iceland. But it’s still far behind leaders like South Korea and Mexico.

If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line. About 5 million more would escape extreme poverty, surviving on less than $4.20 per day.

The country has been losing ground on work and pay for 25 years. After accounting for how much richer the U.S. has grown, its score fell from about 62% in 2000 to 51% today. This reflects the growth in economic inequality, with the gains in wealth skewing toward the richest Americans.

Right to an education

The U.S. scores a 76% on the overall right to education, placing it 20th among 38 OECD countries. It’s behind Japan and the U.K. but ahead of some peers, including Canada and Norway.

We measure education through access – whether students are enrolled in school – and quality – how well they score on tests in science, math and reading.

The U.S. rates a score of 90.7% on access but only averages 61.3% on quality.

An unmet promise

The U.S. is among the wealthiest nations in human history, but it falls far short of what that national wealth makes possible for its people – in terms of health, food, pay and what its students learn.

The reason isn’t that the country can’t afford to do better; we’ve found it’s because the U.S. doesn’t turn that wealth into opportunities for everyone to have a decent life.

Recent cuts to health insurance coverage and food assistance are pushing much of what we measure in the wrong direction.

Promoting the general welfare was written into the country’s founding promise – 250 years later, our data shows how far there still is to go.

Stephen Bagwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis and Susan Randolph, Associate Professor Emerita of Economics, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Landor v. Louisiana Department of Public Education and Safety, a 6-3 judgment, rejected the claim of Damon Landor, a Rastafarian whose hair was forcibly shaved in prison. Landor had worn long dreadlocks for almost 20 years as an expression of his beliefs – part of a biblical practice known as the “Nazarite vow.” Like lower court judges, the Supreme Court did not dispute that officials violated Landor’s rights. However, the high court’s majority ruled that he could not sue individual officials at the prison.

The case stands out for at least three other reasons.

First, Landor v. Louisiana underscores the complexity and far-reaching nature of religious freedom laws in the United States and the increasingly diverse faith traditions to which they apply. Christians now represent 62% of the American population, down from 78% in 2007, while 29% have no religious affiliation and 7% belong to other faith traditions.

Second, Landor’s case gained support from many groups typically at odds over how to protect religious freedoms – groups disappointed with this week’s decision.

Finally, the case highlights the religious rights of the nearly 2 million people in U.S. prisons, jails and detention and correctional facilities – and the challenge of holding their public employees accountable when those rights are violated.

Religious vow

Landor was incarcerated in Louisiana in 2020 for possessing methamphetamine, cocaine, amphetamine and marijuana.

At first, officials respected his religious practice. Just three years earlier, a federal appeals court affirmed that Rastafarian inmates must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under a federal law passed in 2000: the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

Toward the end of his sentence, Landor was transferred to a different correctional facility in the state. There – with three weeks left for Landor to serve – the warden ignored the judicial order, directing guards to shackle Landor and forcibly shave his head.

After finishing his sentence, Landor filed suit for money damages under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The act forbids the government and its officials from imposing “substantial burden(s)” on incarcerated people’s First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. It also protects religious groups from discrimination through zoning restrictions.

Journey through the courts

In 2022, a federal trial court in Louisiana condemned Landor’s treatment but rejected his claim, concluding that money damages were not an appropriate remedy under the act.

The following year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals “emphatically condemn(ed) the treatment that Landor endured.” However, the panel unanimously affirmed the lower court’s decision, based on its earlier ruling that plaintiffs cannot sue government officials in their individual capacities for monetary damages – only the institution.

Landor’s attorneys then sought an “en banc” hearing. In this uncommon procedure, parties seek further review by all of the judges in a federal circuit. The court denied this request, as a majority of judges in the circuit wrote that this was a question for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal after a variety of organizations, including the federal government, submitted amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” briefs in favor of Landor. These included Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for example, which typically supports plaintiffs wishing to keep religion out of public life. They also included the Becket Fund, which usually represents people seeking to increase faith’s role in public life, and the Trump administration.

At issue was not whether Landor’s rights had been violated but whether he could sue an individual official, namely the warden, for monetary damages. During oral arguments on Nov. 10, 2025, the Supreme Court seemed skeptical.

Legal dilemma

That skepticism was reflected in the court’s ultimate ruling. It was essentially a procedural ruling about the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act rather than a judgment on the merits of Landor’s religious freedom claim.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The majority’s argument that Landor could not sue centered on the spending clause of the U.S. Constitution – the source of Congress’ authority to create the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The spending clause allows the legislature to spend money to provide for the “general Welfare of the United States.” If a state or institution uses federal funds, their officials agree to certain conditions; if they violate those conditions, Congress can remove funding.

But the spending clause does not give Congress authority to hold individual employees accountable, Gorsuch argued in his 18-page opinion. Prison officials had not “voluntarily and knowingly consented to answer private suits” under the act, and so they could not be held directly liable for monetary damages. Otherwise, Congress would have “effectively unbridled police power.”

Jackson’s 29-page dissent disagreed with the majority’s interpretation of the spending clause. The ruling, she contended, “jettisons ‘a long line of this Court’s precedents’” under which “Congress has been able to use its spending power to reach beyond direct recipients of federal funds.” As such, she worried that the court’s order imposed a “novel consent requirement.”

Jackson also lamented the decision’s potential consequences for inmates. Although the goal of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act was to protect prisoners’ faith practices, she worried that people “like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons – no matter how blatant – will often be left remediless.”

Bigger picture

At a glance, the Landor case appears to be a procedural disagreement rather than one over religious freedom.

However, I argue Landor v. Louisiana must be viewed as a setback for religious liberty, raising a serious question about whether minority faiths have as much protection under the First Amendment as larger religions. The decision is also something of a surprise to me, because the Supreme Court has recently upheld free exercise rights in multiple high-profile cases, almost all of which involve Christianity – such as a football coach’s ability to pray on the field after public school games.

Portions of this article originally appeared in a previous article published on Nov. 6, 2025.

Charles J. Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and Research Professor of Law, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Politics and legal affairs editor Naomi Schalit spoke with John E. Jones III about the mass departure of federal government lawyers, as well as other recent issues related to the Department of Justice. Jones, now the president of Dickinson College, is a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002.

Schalit: What are the repercussions of this exodus of lawyers?

Jones: One thing that I could rely on as a federal judge was the professionalism of the Department of Justice, and hand in hand with that was its collective credibility.

When you have an exodus of those professionals, and when you have, unfortunately, Department of Justice attorneys going into federal courts across the country and outright misrepresenting – the stronger word is lying – to federal judges, it really creates a massive reputational problem for the department.

So “massive reputational problem for the department” means what happens between lawyers and judges. What are the on-the-ground implications of that for people who are caught up in the justice system?

It’s well to remember that the attorney general’s client – the Department of Justice’s client – is the United States of America. It is not the president of the United States, even though one would think that based on the way this president operates his administration. The mission of the Department of Justice is within its name: It’s to do justice, to uphold the rule of law, to operate without fear or favor, and to make sure its prosecutions are righteous and well founded.

There’s no question that through history we’ve had attorneys general who’ve gone off the grid, so to speak. But I don’t think there’s ever been historically as seamless an interface – in a bad way – between the president and the Department of Justice as what we see today. The president in his second term has had the attorneys general essentially do his bidding and prosecute his enemies.

Even going back to the Nixon years, Attorney General John Mitchell committed a number of acts that ended up with him spending almost 20 months in prison. But it didn’t involve selective prosecutions – it involved crimes that were largely outside his role as attorney general.

When Robert F. Kennedy was his brother John F. Kennedy’s attorney general, despite their brotherly attachment you didn’t see anything like this. In fact, history informs us that they were always concerned about conflicts and promoted the independent operation of their U.S. attorneys.

There have also been grand juries rejecting attempts by the Justice Department’s attorneys to get indictments.

That proves a couple things: that grand jurors are doing their job and being very, very clinical about issuing true bills of indictment. And also that the pervasive activities of the administration are becoming known to average citizens, and they are looking with a jaded eye toward the prosecutions that are being put in front of them. That’s happened not just in Washington, D.C., but in Chicago and other places across the country, and I would expect that to continue.

President Donald Trump has announced the nomination of Todd Blanche to be the U.S. attorney general. Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, had served as acting attorney general since Trump forced out Pam Bondi. If you were advising senators in confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche, what questions would you recommend they ask?

In terms of the prosecutions of the perceived enemies of President Trump, I would want to know just how much interface and discussions there have been between the White House and the Department of Justice, including obviously the president and Mr. Blanche. I’m not sure that you would get a straight answer, but I think it’s worth asking the question. I might want to know whether he has ever refused to investigate or prosecute someone the president ordered him to target.

I’m not put off by the fact that Todd Blanche was the president’s personal lawyer. That’s fine, he has a history as a prosecutor before that, and the personal relationship doesn’t disqualify him.

I might also ask him hypotheticals where you test whether or not he could speak truth to power – specific hypotheticals about fairly evaluating a White House mandate ordering him to prosecute the president’s enemies. But if he can’t – as even attorneys general in the first administration Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions did – speak truth to power and stand up to the president and instead becomes a rubber stamp to exact revenge on behalf of the president, I think he’s fundamentally unfit for this really powerful, critical Cabinet post.

Let’s turn to another constitutional question. In reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book, they detail that there was a move to suspend habeas rights, – which allow a person detained by the government to challenge that detention – for unauthorized immigrants, although one high-level administration lawyer advised strongly against it. As a former judge, what’s your reaction to any attempt to do that?

You know that the Great Writ, as it’s called, has only been suspended about four times in the history of the country. First by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and it was found to be an unconstitutional action, although the Congress in 1863 stepped up to provide the president the power to suspend the writ during the war when “the public safety may require it.”

On the one hand, it proves that there is at least one attorney in the White House who is willing to speak truth to power. There’s simply no current basis in law or fact to suspend the writ – look at the Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, which says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

I think the courts would stop the president if he tried to do it. The opinion that the president received from counsel was a mixture of both “You’re going to get stopped by the courts, you’re going to get engaged in litigation right away” and “This is going to look terrible if you do it.”

This would have been a quantum leap in the wrong direction had they actually endeavored to do it. Sadly, expediency regularly triumphs over the rule of law far too often in this presidency, and that puts the rights of all citizens at risk.

John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As president, Trump revels in ensuring he has the power to resuscitate, redeem and renew government property and public real estate – to rebuild and refurbish to perfection.

To that end, he has statues and fountains cleaned and repaired, roads repaved and parks replanted. Those smaller projects are welcome. Many Washington precincts look better, cleaner, fresher.

But much of what Trump has conceived is not applauded. The latest of these is the outrage cause by the US$14 million (A$20.2 million) renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which now has large strips of blue paint peeling away and a significant problem with algae.

The president insists it is the work of vandals. Social media is in meltdown. So how did it come to this?

In Trump’s second term, he has instituted several major Washington revamps with apparent disregard for public opinion. While there are laws, commissions, boards, and experts who are to be consulted on these things, Trump has ensured that those processes are realigned to comport with his will.

The first shocking destruction was the demolition of the East Wing of the White House. As Hillary Clinton said, “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”

All the artwork, the furnishings, and all the history of the service by First Ladies to the mansion and the country, demolished. The photos make it look like a casualty of a second world war bombing.

All this destruction is to build a ballroom, at a cost of US$400 million (A$576 million), for social occasions. Months earlier, Trump had Jacqueline Kennedy’s rose garden dismantled. In its place, a Mar-a-Lago style patio, with iron furniture and umbrellas placed on stone pavement.

The Oval Office’s white door has gold lettering in script affixed to it, informing those on the grounds that they are indeed at “The Oval Office”. Trump’s White House evokes a hotel.

Trump engineered the takeover of the John Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, a memorial to JFK with the grandest stages in Washington for culture, theatre, music, film and celebrations. Trump purged the board and installed his loyalists. The motive behind this coup was crystal clear when Trump decreed the building be renamed The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

A judge ruled this was unsupported by existing law and Trump’s name be removed. It was – at 3am one recent morning – with the work concealed by tarp hanging from the roof to the ground. The latest reports show that behind the tarp, Trump’s name has indeed been removed.

Trump has visions of an arc of triumph on the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac, to be a gateway to the haunting solemnity of Arlington National Cemetery, where those who made the ultimate sacrifice in battle to protect the United States and its people rest in eternal peace. Trump was inspired by his Bastille Day 2017 presence with French President Emmanuel Macron. Trump loved the military parade on the Champs Elysee, anchored by the Arc de Triomphe. His Washington must have it.

Peeling paint and algal blooms

Now, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It traverses a gorgeous setting between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. It has been world famous since Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream” address on civil rights there in 1963.

But the pool has been troubled for decades with plumbing and drainage issues, algae, trash, and discoloration. Trump wanted it fixed in time for America’s 250th on July 4 this year. No-bid contracts with friendly associates were signed. There was cleaning, waterproofing, sealant and its now-famous “American Flag Blue” colour.

The repairs failed within days. The algae were back, the drainage was clogged, the colour was anything but blue. Trump blames vandals for trashing the pool and shredding the sealant. A former Olympian was arrested for putting his hand in the water to feel the torn strip of the blue paint.

Attempted repairs when Barack Obama was president did not do the job. But why has this debacle under Trump received so much attention?

Trump has been obsessed with showing off his plans for the Reflecting Pool. He has talked about it incessantly in the Oval Office. But every moment spent on the pool is a moment not addressing the economic crisis caused by his war in Iran. Voters understand this all too well.

Moreover, the Reflecting Pool is a place of meditation and peace. It is not behind a barrier fence like the White House. It is not an elitist fine arts institution like the Kennedy Center can often be. It is not an imperial edifice like the proposed arc on the Memorial Bridge.

The Reflecting Pool is for the people to gather, to remember, to reflect, to honour, to celebrate, to breathe. Now, like so much in this second Trump term, it has fallen into scandal and disrepair.

Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Trump was inaugurated for his second presidency in January 2025, he announced his intention to be both a peacemaker and to pursue an “America first” foreign policy, focused on avoiding wars and bringing direct benefits to the US. By November 2025, he declared he had already settled eight “raging conflicts” across the world.

In January this year, the forced removal of Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela and installation of Delcy Rodríguez as a more US-friendly successor led Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, to tell CNN: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

But the Iran war has shown Trumpian diplomacy colliding with a real world that does not always bend to his will or succumb to US displays of force. The real world, it seems, is more complex than he thought.

Hitherto, five elements have characterised Trump’s approach to diplomacy.First, he prefers to eschew the traditional institutions and mechanisms of diplomacy. The State Department languishes, the UN is ignored. Traditional alliances, multilateral organisations and international gatherings have been disdained, unless they provide a platform for Trump to demonstrate his power and “call the shots”.

Rather than use US ambassadors or diplomats to tackle international issues, Trump relies on a small cast of trusted personal envoys – including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, real-estate developer Steve Witkoff and Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman who is father-in-law to his daughter Tiffany – to negotiate on his behalf. Even the secretary of state and national security advisor, Marco Rubio, is given a limited role, mainly in the western hemisphere.

Second, Trump’s approach to diplomacy, as to government as a whole, is distinctly personal. He likes to deal with other leaders directly, man-to-man, provided they are leaders he respects.

This tends to comprise a small group that includes Chinese president Xi Jinping, Russian president Vladimir Putin, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and (sometimes) Saudi Arabia’s ruler Mohammed bin Salman. Trump will see others but, as the Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa found, he likes to publicly demonstrate his superiority to them.

Third – as Miller reflected – Trump sees power as deriving from military might and economic strength. He is willing to use both freely in bilateral relations to get what he sees as a good deal for America. Appeals to principle, to the international rule of law, to human rights or to the value of democracy have all gone out of the window.

He has also demonstrated his willingness to strike first – by unilaterally imposing the so-called Liberation day tariffs, or by sending marines to Caracas – and talk later. Other leaders recognise that having friends can be a source of power – but this, it seems, is not an approach that appeals to the US president. Having friends requires building trust and accepting a reciprocal – not just transactional – relationship.

Fourth, public messaging is crucial. How do his actions look on the media, to his Maga faithful, to the markets and to the world? Trump’s use of his TruthSocial platform to negotiate in public – with friend and foe alike – is the antithesis of traditional diplomacy, where secret channels, confidential negotiations and trusted interlocutors play a central role.

His ability to “flood the zone”, by overwhelming the media and any critics while spinning his own message, has given him a big advantage in this social media-driven world. But as the Iran negotiations have shown, it has drawbacks when the hyperbole and spin are shown to be hollow.

Finally, Trump’s focus is relentlessly short term. “Strategic patience” – using restraint and timing to achieve his ends – does not appear in his lexicon. Results must be immediate, and the declaration of victory or peace or a deal is what matters – not the actual delivery of those outcomes.

The “deal” to end the conflict in Gaza, struck in October 2025, remains stuck in limbo as Trump’s interest has wandered. The Ukraine war that was to be settled in 24 hours grinds on relentlessly.

Trump’s weaknesses exposed

The war in Iran, in particular, has challenged Trump’s model of diplomacy and exposed its weaknesses. The Iranians refused to “cry uncle”, as he put it, when their leadership was wiped out, their nuclear facilities were pounded by bunker-buster bombs, and their economy was brought to its knees by sanctions.

Instead, they challenged the US to put boots on the ground, closed the Strait of Hormuz to hurt the US economy, and struck its erstwhile allies in the Gulf. They refused to talk to Trump’s envoys – who they distrusted after twice feeling betrayed when the US attacked them mid-negotiation – and they exposed the deception of his constant statements and social media posts claiming agreement had been reached, or victory was at hand.

As a result, Trump has had to rely on third-party intermediaries Pakistan and Qatar to negotiate with the Iranian regime. The UN remains firmly on the shelf, as Trump is resolutely opposed to the political constraints that operating through international organisations might impose on American freedom of manoeuvre. But even so, he has found himself in need of neutral third parties to do the deal that he could not.

Will Trump change? Yes and no. He has no ideological constraints, only pride and faith in his own abilities. So he could change course at any moment. But his antipathy to multilateralism and traditional diplomacy are unlikely to disappear.

The world at large is already adjusting to these new ways of doing diplomatic business. Some are seeking out “Trump whisperers” such as Nato’s chief Mark Rutte, or Maga-friendly lobbyists that, for example, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo have employed to secure US support for their respective struggles against Boko Haram and Rwanda.

Others are picking envoys to liaise with the likes of Witkoff and Kushner. The UK’s pick for this role is national security advisor Jonathan Powell, whose contacts with Witkoff played a significant part in calming US relations with Ukraine. As bilateral diplomacy replaces multilateral, the air miles of such envoys multiplies exponentially, while small countries are cut out of the action.

And yet, Trump’s last two summits with Putin and Xi yielded little – and he found himself spending more time at the latest G7 summit in France than at previous ones. Perhaps, the US president has found he needs some friends after all.

Nicholas Westcott, Professor of Practice in Diplomacy, Dept of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But are those older people in office a sign that the U.S. government is turning into a “gerontocracy” that is giving younger generations short shrift?

No – many older Americans are becoming worse off.

We are experts in elder law who have been following the legal treatment of older Americans for decades. One of us writes a leading elder law casebook, and we are co-authors of a book on aging that will be published in January 2027. Through our research, we have observed a series of federal policy changes that will make life harder for many Americans of modest means as they age.

In our view, those policies show why, more than ever, it is wrong to assume that rich and powerful older people will protect all older adults, including those who aren’t wealthy.

Social Security cuts loom

Perhaps the most publicized of these policy failures is that the federal government hasn’t taken steps to stave off Social Security benefits cuts.

The program will have to cut the benefits it provides by roughly 22% starting in 2032 unless Congress steps up. That would affect a lot of people: Currently, Social Security pays benefits to more than 60 million retired workers, as well as survivor benefits for the spouses of workers who have died and their eligible children.

But instead of taking steps to shore up the program, Congress has sped up that expected moment of reckoning.

A tax break included in the big tax and spending package Trump signed into law in summer 2025 that benefits some older people will actually weaken Social Security for everyone by reducing the tax revenue that funds the program.

Social Security’s revenue is further compromised by the declining number of immigrants in the workforce who contribute to the program through the payroll tax, even though many of them will never be eligible to receive its benefits. More immigrants departed the U.S. than arrived in 2025 due to the Trump administration’s policies, which are supported by funding for immigration enforcement approved by the Republican majority in Congress.

These changes will hit some older adults harder than others. Social Security keeps millions more women than men out of poverty, as well as more Blacks and Latinos than whites.

Long-term care concerns ramp up

Older adults in need of long-term care also face new risks.

In December 2025, the Trump administration rescinded regulations that would have required nursing homes that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding to meet new minimum staffing standards.

At the same time, just as the number of older adults who need long-term care is rising, the White House’s immigration crackdown has threatened the supply of paid care workers, as they are disproportionately from other countries. This labor shortage will impact older adults receiving care in institutional facilities like nursing homes. But it will likely have an even more significant effect on those hoping to receive care at home, as 1 in 3 home care workers are immigrants.

In addition, the federal cuts to Medicaid that Trump signed into law in July 2025 are expected to make it harder for older adults who require paid caregivers to remain in their own homes.

Federal law requires states to pay for nursing home care for older adults who qualify for Medicaid’s long-term care coverage. But the federal government does not require states to cover the cost of home-based care, which is what most older people prefer to institutional settings.

When Medicaid benefits are cut, states need to make up that lost money. Evidence from past Medicaid cuts suggests that services to help older people remain at home are among the first to be cut.

Support for older adults in poverty

Benefits that many low-income older Americans rely on are facing substantial reductions. The big legislative package Trump signed in 2025 cut federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, through which more than 6 million people 65 or older get benefits that help them buy groceries.

Due to the federal cuts, states – which administer SNAP – will need to absorb more of the program’s costs. The number of people who get benefits is already declining.

Many older adults also get other government benefits through programs that are being scaled back, including one that helps them pay for their energy bills.

This thinning out of the safety net troubles us in part because of another trend: More Americans over 65 are becoming homeless.

While homelessness declined from 2024 to 2025 for most age groups, it rose for those 65 and up, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That agency estimates that nearly 45,000 Americans age 65 or older were homeless. Nearly 104,000 Americans age 55 to 64 were homeless, too.

Meanwhile, as the number of older Americans has soared – it grew 13% from 2020 to 2024 – funding for important social services for people 65 and over has not kept up.

For example, on a per-older-person basis, funding for the Older Americans Act has decreased. That statute funds a broad range of core services for older adults, such as the Meals on Wheels program, transportation assistance, adult day centers and legal assistance.

In short, although many American political leaders are themselves over 65, programs that millions of older Americans of modest means rely on to stay out of poverty and make sure they can get the care they need are becoming less reliable and providing less support.

Nina A. Kohn, Distinguished Scholar in Elder Law, Syracuse University and Naomi Cahn, Professor of Law, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For the first time since the 1960s, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. is declining; because most farmworkers are foreign born, those losses are already beginning to strain American farms.

We are social scientists who study immigrant communities in Idaho and the challenges farmworkers face. We also run an annual survey exploring public opinion on a range of policy issues, including immigration and economic conditions. Amid the government’s heated rhetoric, our data shows public opinion on immigration in one of the country’s reddest agricultural states is diverging from national politics and may even be at odds with federal policy.

Immigrant labor in agriculture

According to the Center for Migration Studies, 86% of farmworkers in the U.S. are foreign born, and 45% are undocumented. In 2025 the Trump administration suggested it would not target farms. Still, farmworkers across the country are scared to go to work.

Between March and July 2025, the agricultural workforce declined by 7%, with farms reporting labor shortages in states that voted for Trump, including Pennsylvania, and states that didn’t, including California. Meanwhile, immigration crackdowns are threatening this country’s food security.

National polling on the administration’s immigration policies tends to follow party lines, drawing Democrats’ disapproval and Republicans’ support, but recent polling suggests some softening among the latter. Pew Research Center reported that half of all respondents disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration, and more than half say Trump is “doing too much” when it comes to deportation. Among Republicans the share is smaller – 20% – but rising.

Research suggests people think about immigration differently at the local level. To explore how public opinion on immigration varies in farm-dependent states, we looked at one of the most agriculture-reliant and Republican states in the country just as its farms face policy-driven labor shortfalls.

A closer look

Agribusiness is important for Idaho’s economy, accounting for 20% of its annual GDP, according to the Idaho State Department of Agriculture. Dairy is a cornerstone: The state is the fourth-largest milk producer in the U.S., according to the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. Ninety percent of Idaho dairy workers are foreign born.

Idaho is also a deeply red state: About 60% of voters are registered Republicans, and 67% voted for Trump in 2024. These numbers make Idaho a clear test of how national rhetoric and intensifying immigration enforcement track with public sentiment in places that have the most to lose.

Our 11th annual Idaho Public Policy Survey polled 1,000 adults in the fall of 2025. Because immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans, we designed a question around long-term residents without a criminal record – specifically, dairy workers and their families who have lived in Idaho more than 10 years.

The results showed broad support for a pathway to legal working status for them: 85% of respondents were in favor, with 56% strongly supportive and 29% somewhat. Just 9% opposed. We expected immigration positions to tie directly to political affiliation, but results cut across party lines, with 79% of Republicans, 88% of independents and 95% of Democrats in favor.

We also asked participants whether increased presence from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, would help or harm Idaho’s agricultural economy. More than half – 53% – said it would harm the economy, 19% said it would help, 18% said there would be no impact, and 10% were unsure.

The pattern was sharpest where it would matter most: Residents of agriculture-dependent regions were more likely to say ICE presence would hurt the economy. Republicans were more likely than others to say it would help; even so, only 35% of Republicans responded that way, compared with 11% of independents and less than 3% of Democrats.

In agriculture-dependent Idaho, many residents say they recognize the role immigrants play in sustaining local rural economies, and research shows that recognition can shift attitudes about immigration, potentially increasing support for more inclusive policies.

According to our research, public opinion in Idaho is more nuanced than the right-left divide suggests. We believe findings here are likely to hold in other places similarly dependent on agriculture, as farmers from Wisconsin to Delaware speak up about their reliance on immigrant labor.

Lisa Meierotto, Associate Professor of Global Studies and Environmental Studies, Boise State University; Matthew May, Research Scholar, Boise State University, and Rebecca Som Castellano, Director of Human-Environment Systems and Professor of Sociology, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In Texas, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, recently secured the Republican Party’s nomination over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

Cornyn and others have insisted that Paxton’s substantial legal and personal baggage – including corruption and bribery accusations that got him impeached by the GOP-led state House of Representatives – might lose Republicans a seat they’ve held for decades.

Democrats in Maine, meanwhile, have nominated Graham Platner, a political novice whose grassroots campaign and brash communication style propelled him to a decisive victory over the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, who remained on the ballot but suspended her campaign in April.

This, despite Platner facing a series of personal scandals ranging from alleged sexual misconduct to a tattoo that turned out to be an emblem of Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, or SS. Platner has claimed he was unaware of the symbol’s origins and has since covered it up.

Both Paxton and Platner won resounding victories in their primaries over more establishment candidates who were comparatively free of scandal.

As a scholar who studies Congress and elections, and the co-host of a podcast about political scandals, I believe political science offers answers about how Paxton and Platner pulled off victories in their states’ primaries – and why they might win in November.

Historic distance and distaste between the parties

Both Paxton’s and Platner’s flaws were well known prior to primary voting.

Early polling indicates that most of Texas’ Republican voters are likely to back Paxton in November. Polling also shows that Platner will continue to consolidate his party’s support in Maine.

Both parties’ leadership in Congress and beyond have also rallied behind their respective candidates. And both parties have used the opposing candidate’s scandals against them in the campaign, despite propping up flawed candidates themselves.

These actions can coexist thanks to two forces that political science has much to say about, precepts that have been steadily increasing in relevance over the past few decades: party polarization – or the distance between the two parties – and negative partisanship, voters’ tendency to vote based on negative feelings toward the other party.

Democrats and Republicans are far away from each other on policy preferences, issue positions and culture. They are also distant in terms of where they live, whom they support, how they feel and even whom they love.

Political science tells us that this polarized distance has increased feelings of personal animus between members of the two parties. Political psychology says the more different Americans are from each other, the easier it is for them to not just disagree with the other side but to dislike the other side to the point of viewing them as a threat.

These are trends Americans frequently see reflected in public opinion studies, many of which use the “feeling thermometer” to ask respondents to rate their personal feelings toward a person or party on a scale of zero degrees, or coldest/most unfavorable, to 100 degrees, or warmest/most favorable.

In the late 1970s, the average voter in each party was more or less neutral toward the opposing party, with scores hovering just below 50 degrees. By 2024, the average voter sentiment toward the other party had plummeted to 19 degrees.

In 1978, only 9% of Democrats and 7% of Republicans had a very negative opinion of the opposing party. By 2024, vast majorities in both parties – 64% apiece – reported such negative opinions.

Political science also tells us that these negative feelings about the other party are not simply prevalent. They are the driving force behind many voters’ election choices.

In other words, Americans are increasingly making voting decisions based not on who should win elections but rather on who shouldn’t. The opposing party is not just the less preferred option – it’s a threat that must be stopped at all costs.

When feelings about the other side are this negatively polarized, then winning – even with a less-than-ideal candidate as your standard-bearer – becomes more crucial than ever.

In fact, researchers have found that scandals involving candidates in a voter’s own party trigger a “defensive partisanship” that increases their hostility toward the other side. That is, scandals in a voter’s own party can make them more – not less – loyal to their team.

The higher the stakes, the lower the standards

Polarization and negative partisanship are not the only factors at work. The tight competition for control over major political institutions such as Congress and the presidency have raised the stakes of elections higher than ever. And, in the process, it has lowered standards for whom Americans are willing to support.

In her 2016 book, “Insecure Majorities,” political scientist Frances Lee found that partisan control over the federal government is more in question now that it has been in over a century. Lee says that closely fought elections that determine control of government help explain changing governing strategies in Congress.

But Lee’s findings also help explain our choices in elections and how – even in closely fought, high-profile races such as the 2026 Senate contests in Texas and Maine – voters end up nominating such blemished candidates.

In theory, closely fought competition should drive a “race to the top” in terms of candidate selection. Because control over institutions rests constantly on a knife’s edge, Americans might expect both sides to put forward their best, brightest and most electorally compelling candidates to try to win.

But thanks to polarization and negative partisanship, it isn’t always so. Instead, hard-fought elections among a closely divided electorate mean that individual votes matter more; that power hangs by a thread; and as a result, that one’s personal and political enemies are inches away from controlling the government.

Thus, closely divided elections only raise the stakes of one’s vote, along with the cost of defecting from your party’s candidate, however flawed they might be.

The lesser of 2 evils?

Voters constantly report feeling the need to “hold their noses” and vote for the “lesser of two evils.” The alternative – the other party taking power – is too grave to permit a truly principled stand. As a result, the race to the bottom continues, because the other side will always be worse.

These trends can help explain why, for example, Republicans circled the wagons around Donald Trump in 2016 despite his many scandals and serious misgivings within the party. They also illustrate why Democrats rallied around Joe Biden well into 2024, even as serious questions were raised about his physical age and mental fitness for office.

Whether Paxton’s or Platner’s partisan voters end up coalescing around them despite their scandals remains to be seen. Regardless, the reappearance of such imperfect candidates each cycle tells a bitter story about what voters will put up with to win.

Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Much of this can be explained by voter perceptions of the state of the US economy. The chart below shows the relationship between the percentage of Americans who approve of the president’s handling of his job and consumer confidence. It covers almost 50 years of monthly data with the consumer confidence data coming from surveys conducted at the University of Michigan.

The two series track each other closely and so demonstrate a moderately strong relationship with a correlation of 0.44 (If they were unrelated the correlation would be 0 and if they were exactly the same it would be 1). In both cases higher scores denote greater approval and increasing consumer confidence. This confirms the well-known fact that the state of the economy is a big driver of presidential approval.

If we look closely at the consumer confidence index, the average score over the entire period was 84. In the late 1970s Jimmy Carter had low and falling approval ratings and consumer confidence scores. This goes a long way to explaining why he was a one-term president who lost to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.

A decade later, when Republican George HW Bush was president between 1989 and 1993, consumer confidence plummeted as an official recession in the US economy was declared in July 1990, leading to declining growth and rising unemployment. The Federal Reserve, which is responsible for US monetary policy, exacerbated a weak financial situation by raising interest rates in order to combat inflation. The result was that Bush senior became another one-term president and lost the 1992 election to his Democrat rival, Bill Clinton (whose campaign motto was famously: “It’s the economy, stupid.”).

However, the largest fall in consumer confidence over this period occurred after the financial crash of 2007-2008, which in turn produced a serious recession and rapidly declining consumer confidence. On this occasion George W Bush was in his second term as US president and his collapsing approval ratings paved the way for the victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential contest.

Finally, when Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, consumer confidence was relatively high. In January 2017 at the time of his inauguration the consumer confidence index stood at 99. Four years later in January 2021 when Joe Biden was inaugurated as president the index was at 79, a dramatic decline in historical terms.

The midterm elections for the House and the Senate take place in November this year and currently things do not look good for the Republicans. Pollsters have been asking what is called a “generic” question in their surveys about who respondents would vote for if the midterm elections took place today. They are virtually unanimous in their agreement that the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives. In addition, it is possible, though less likely, that the Democrats will win control of the Senate.

A thought experiment

An interesting thought experiment is to suppose that we were looking at a presidential election in November rather than the midterms. What light does the current consumer confidence data throw on such a hypothetical election?

The second chart shows the relationship between voting for the incumbent’s party in the 19 presidential elections since 1978 and consumer confidence in the month of these elections.

Once again, the relationship is moderately strong between the two series with a correlation of 0.43. Voters reward or punish the incumbent president or his party’s candidate depending on how they feel about the economy. As we observed in the first chart, the consumer confidence score was at its lowest at 55 in the 2008 election which Obama won. But the score on the index in June 2026 was 49, so – if consumer confidence continues to fall – then in a hypothetical presidential election in November Trump would lose very badly.

This is a thought experiment rather than a prediction of what is likely to happen in the presidential election of 2028. But when the war in the Middle East launched by the US and Israel threatens to produce a global recession it seems unlikely that consumer confidence in the US will improve any time soon.

Trump will not be on the ballot in 2028. But the Republican candidate in that election is likely to take a historical beating if the US and world economies do not improve in the meantime.

Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Meanwhile, for most of the show’s 2005-2013 run, his employees endured pointless meetings, cringed through his speeches and quietly counted the hours until they could leave. The joke worked because so many viewers recognized something universal: the gap between how bosses sees themselves and how workers actually experience them.

That gap is no longer just a sitcom premise. It may be the central reason American workplaces are in trouble.

In the U.S., only about 30% of part-time and full-time employees say they are engaged at work, according to an annual Gallup survey. That’s the lowest level in more than a decade.

Determining whether am employee is engaged boils down to a single question: Does the work matter to the person doing it? Engaged employees are invested in the outcome of their work. Disengaged ones have stopped caring.

I’m a cultural historian who has written extensively about workplace culture, including the book “The Authentic Leader: The Power of Deep Leadership in Work and Life.”

And I believe that when more than two-thirds of the workforce is checked out, it’s evidence of a widespread leadership failure.

What gets said behind closed doors

One reason why most workers aren’t engaged on the job has to do with their psychological safety, meaning whether they feel they can speak up, ask questions or admit mistakes without being punished. I have been tracking the gap between psychological safety as a stated value for employers and the lived reality of their employees for years.

Amy Edmondson, a leadership and management scholar, has pioneered research in this area. Teams with that have high levels of psychological safety outperform those that don’t, she’s found.

When employees feel psychologically unsafe, they go quiet, contributing to the widespread lack of engagement that Gallup has identified. Most workplace research relies on employee surveys, which capture what workers are willing to say in the moment. But those surveys don’t always capture what workers truly feel.

The 2026 Psychological Safety Study that the Center for Organizational Effectiveness, a consulting firm, released in March 2026 took a different approach. The study draws on anonymized clinical conversations with workers at over 100,000 companies, organizations and government agencies that employ 88 million people around the world. The data was drawn from what employees told licensed counselors in confidence.

Both studies estimate the scale of related problems.

Workers are running on empty

The Center for Organizational Effectiveness study identified the top three concerns impeding psychological safety in workplaces around the world.

Globally, the top concern is work-life balance, specifically when job demands consistently exceed the time and energy workers have to meet them.

The second is job-performance anxiety. That’s the stress of trying to meet a supervisor’s vague or constantly changing expectations.

The third is contending with unclear objectives. Many workers simply don’t know what they are aiming for, what their priorities should be or in which direction their employer actually wants to head.

That third finding connects directly to Gallup’s results. Only 46% of American workers feel that they clearly know what their employers expect from them, down from 56% in 2020.

A work-life imbalance

The Center for Organizational Effectiveness noted a different shift in the United States: For American workers, being stretched thin has become the new normal.

Work-life balance has displaced workplace trauma – harassment, violence or sustained high-stress environments – as the leading concern for American employees.

Chronic exhaustion is now a hallmark of employment, whether you work in an office or from home.

Employee fears of seeing their jobs eliminated due to the rise of artificial intelligence or a weak economy are adding to a perception of imbalance.

Same problem with different causes

The Center for Organizational Effectiveness’ report highlights distinct trends in different places.

For example, in France, the top workplace concern is a lack of room for professional development. With workdays kept short by strict labor laws, access to learning opportunities and, as a result, career mobility tend to be limited.

But unlike in the United States, work-life balance does not appear in France’s top three concerns.

American workers feel they cannot breathe. French workers feel overlooked and stagnant.

A lack of clarity about how well they’re doing their jobs ranked as a top concern for workers in 11 countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil and Mexico.

The workers who registered that concern are frustrated by their managers’ unclear goals and shifting priorities. This data suggests that corporate leaders are not defining what good performance means, which translates into their employees becoming risk-averse, which limits innovation and entrepreneurship.

“The Office” captured this dynamic perfectly. Michael Scott’s staff never knew what he actually wanted, because he didn’t know either.

Priorities shifted along with his moods. Success was whatever pleased him that afternoon.

The humor came from watching competent people freeze, hedge and stop trying because the target kept moving. Played for laughs on television, the same pattern in a real workplace produces exactly what the data shows: workers who play it safe because they cannot see the standard they will be judged against.

What employers are misreading

Employers are not ignoring these problems. They are misreading them.

Executives’ and managers’ intentions are usually good, as are Michael Scott’s. But their behavior – which workers read far more closely than any mission statement – tells a different story. I call this a leadership chasm: the gap between what executives believe and what employees feel.

Sensing that gap, workers default to skepticism. They measure what leaders say against what they actually do. They become skilled at spotting the distance between the two.

Many employees feel it when their employers adopt the language of psychological safety as performance without authentically creating a supportive culture. If an employee sees a colleague get rebuked after raising a concern, then they understand the real lesson, regardless of the manager or executive’s “open-door” claims.

“Psychological safety doesn’t exist in isolation,” says Donald Thompson, managing director of the Center for Organizational Effectiveness and author of “The Employee Engagement Handbook.” “It’s built on the daily realities of how people experience work.”

For employees to believe in their bosses, they have to watch it happen. For example, it helps if they can see a co-worker raise a tough question and their leader responds with openness, rather than defensiveness.

For most American workers, that moment hasn’t arrived. They’re too worn down or discouraged to give their best.

Bob Batchelor, Assistant Professor of Communication, Media, & Culture, Coastal Carolina University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many key details remain to be negotiated, including the future of Iran’s nuclear program. Another issue that remains uncertain – how the deal will impact the Kurdish minority in northern Iran.

The United States and Israel have failed to achieve the main goal of their war: overthrowing the Islamic regime in Tehran. US President Donald Trump is now under pressure to end the war as quickly as possible – and answer for its failures.

Instead, in recent days, he has reiterated an allegation the US sent weapons to the Kurds in the early days of the war to help overthrow the regime. Trump claims the Kurds kept the weapons for themselves.

The Kurds let us down […] I think it’s a disgrace, but I’ll remember that, Kurds.

For the Kurds, this is not surprising. This kind of rhetoric follows a historical trend. Washington has long promised the Kurds support in exchange for their help in Syria and Iraq, only to abandon them later.

Who are the Kurds?

The Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group without sovereignty over their own land.

The estimated population of 35-45 million (or higher) is divided among four countries – Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey – a legacy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Ottoman Empire in 1916.

In Iran, their population is estimated at between 7-15 million people – one of the country’s largest minority groups. They have long posed a threat to the Iranian regime, with opposition groups having taken up arms and setting up bases in neighbouring Iraq.

Before the US-Israel-Iran war broke out, six of the opposition groups formed a coalition aimed at ousting the Islamic regime.

Their potential role, then, in the future of the region’s political landscape cannot be ignored.

Were US weapons going to the Kurds?

In early March, CNN reported the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was working to arm the Kurds in Iran to lead a popular uprising against the regime.

However, Kurdish parties claimed the US had not engaged with them directly, continuing a long-running lack of support for their cause. Trump himself also poured cold water on the plan. This issue is quite sensitive regionally, as any plan to arm Kurds would be opposed by the US’ ally, Turkey.

Months later, though, Trump publicly accused the Kurds of seizing weapons his administration sent to protesters opposing Iran. He said:

Yes, the Kurds are tough fighters, but they have endless demands. The Kurds take, take, take.

The Kurdistan regional government in Iraq categorically denied receiving any weapons from the US, as did Iranian Kurdish parties. In fact, they expressed surprise at Trump’s seemingly irresponsible remarks.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to contain the situation, explaining Trump’s comments were a general expression of support for the Iranian people and not a confirmation of any secret arms deals.

But late last week, Trump made the accusation again in an interview with Fox News, saying he had “disagreed” with the US plan to send weapons to the Kurds in the first place.

So, the question remains: did the US and Kurds have a secret plan, and if so, what happened?

One possible answer, according to a former Israeli intelligence chief, is that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan talked Trump out of it, due to Turkey’s fears of a future independent Kurdish state in the region.

A history of abandonment

Henry Kissinger once said, “politics is not charity”. The quote perfectly encapsulates the way the US has historically treated the Kurds.

The Kurds have learned the US – or any power, for that matter – isn’t to be trusted, because politics is inherently unpredictable, with nations often acting in their own interests. Several moments in history illustrate this:

• the global silence in 1988 when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds, killing thousands
• the indifference the world has shown to the Turkish government’s systematic oppression of the Kurds
• the US abandonment of its commitments to the Kurds in Iraq after the fall of Hussein’s regime in 2003
• the opposition in the West to a Kurdish independence referendum in 2017

• Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Kurdish-controlled Syria in 2019, which enabled Turkey to invade with its forces
• and the negative US stance towards Kurdish forces during the Syrian government’s offensive against them this year.

This, along with other similar events, demonstrated, at the very least, an American coldness towards the Kurds.

In short, America’s relations with Turkey, Syria and Iraq matter more than the Kurds. Even countries without Kurdish populations are influencing the US position on the Kurds, as American interests in the region remain key.

In this context, some influential figures in the US government see the Kurds as a force to be used when needed. This has hurt Kurdish pride, which partly explains why they did not join the recent war by the US and Israel against the Iranian regime.

Setting their own agenda

In a phone conversation with me, a Kurdish official (who preferred not to be named) summed up all of this with great displeasure:

Since 1991, Kurdish parties opposed to Iran have tried to reach out to America without success. Is it wise for the Kurds to fight others’ wars for uncertain rights in a chaotic world where the powerful act freely most of the time?.

After decades of disappointment, the Kurds are now prioritising their own goals and their push for self-determination.

Ali Aziz, PhD candidate in philosophy, Western Sydney University and Charles Barbour, Associate Professor, School of Arts, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump claimed to have cancelled the strikes because of progress in negotiations between the two countries. In a statement posted on social media, Trump said: “Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved.” He later added that the deal is set to be signed over the “next few days”.

Whether this will happen remains to be seen. Trump has declared that a deal between the US and Iran is imminent on numerous occasions only for no agreement to be signed. Iran’s foreign ministry has also called claims that an agreement has been reached speculative, insisting that “nothing has been finalised”.

And, even if it is signed, the agreement Trump is talking about is far from a final peace deal. It appears to be a memorandum of understanding, establishing a framework for the two countries to talk about unresolved issues. These include Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and nuclear programme.

Rather than the supposed diplomatic progress, perhaps more significant in persuading Trump to pull back from renewing an all-out war with Iran was that a return to conflict simply would not have been in the interests of the US.

War, as Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed in his 1832 book, On War, is the continuation of politics by other means. Its enormous costs can be justified only when they are tied to a coherent strategy and when there is a clearly defined political objective that there is a reasonable prospect of achieving.

Measured against this standard, there was no argument for returning to war with Iran. The difficulty begins with the absence of any discernible plan in Washington. Trump has articulated no strategy and no definition of victory beyond a vague aspiration to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

He was drawn into prosecuting a war based on intelligence about the fragility of the regime in Tehran that proved flawed and on scenarios that were overconfident and have not come to pass. These scenarios suggested the decapitation of Iran’s leadership would lead to sudden regime collapse and a popular uprising that would see the country transition to democracy.

There is also very little a return to all-out war could have accomplished. The reason for this is that the Iranian regime is not a conventional state that can be brought down by overwhelming firepower. The regime, which is now dominated by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, can best be described as a militia with a state.

It is operating through a dispersed network of forces across air, land and sea, which were designed as an asymmetric instrument of power capable of absorbing, scattering and outlasting precisely the kind of concentrated military pressure the US military was built to deliver.

Weeks of intensive bombing earlier in the war did not shatter the regime’s centre of gravity. Rather, it consolidated the regime and has left it more cohesive and determined than it was before. In contrast to the more cautious regime of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which tended to wait and to respond, the new regime has become assertive.

It has been quick to retaliate against US and Israel attacks with severity and to set the pace of escalation. On June 8, for example, Iran launched barrages of missiles towards Israel in protest at the Israeli military’s escalating campaign in Lebanon.

Costs of war

Iran also retains the capacity to impose intolerable costs on everyone while retaining a high threshold of pain itself. If an all-out war returned, there was a very real risk that Iran would have moved to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa by mobilising its ally, the Houthis.

This threat is already on the table. The Houthis paused their attacks on shipping in the region after a ceasefire was signed in Gaza in October 2025, but have warned these will resume if the Iran war escalates. The Bab al-Mandab Strait serves as the principal bypass route for Saudi oil and for much of Gulf maritime trade, both of which are currently unable to transit the closed Strait of Hormuz.

Iran is also likely to have resumed direct attacks on the Gulf states with greater scope and intensity than before, which could have converted an already severe global energy crisis into something far worse. Perhaps the most consequential impact of returning to all-out war, therefore, was the prospect that it would have cost the US its valuable Gulf partners.

Every Iranian strike that American installations in the region attract reinforces a lesson the Gulf monarchies are increasingly inclined to draw, which is that the presence of American bases on their soil makes them targets rather than affording them protection.

Faced with a closed Strait of Hormuz, the global economy in decline and a looming defeat for his Republican party in November’s US midterm elections, Trump is clinging to the hope that he can pressure Iran into accepting a deal. The chances of this strategy proving a success are slim.

Andreas Krieg, Associate Professor, Defence Studies Department, King's College London

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In 2026, spring in the northern hemisphere took place in a neutral phase, which followed a relatively mild La Niña. Short-term forecast models indicate that by mid-year it is very likely that we will enter an El Niño phase. This El Niño could become very intense towards the end of the year, with talk of a “super-El Niño”. But what effects might it have? And has something similar happened in the past?

An anomalous Pacific current

This occasional anomalous warm ocean current in the Pacific was originally noted by 19th-century Peruvian fishermen. They called it El Niño – “the child” in Spanish – because it often arrived around Christmas time.

It occurred when warm waters from the equatorial Pacific replaced the usual cold waters off the coasts of Ecuador (south of the city of Guayaquil), Peru and northern Chile. These waters are normally quite cold due to the Humboldt Current – which flows from south to north along this sections of South America’s coastline – and due to the upwelling of deep cold waters.

The impact of these currents is significant. Take, for instance, the Chilean city of Antofagasta on the Pacific coast, and Rio de Janeiro on the Atlantic coast. They are at almost exactly the same latitude, the Tropic of Capricorn, but their average sea temperatures are very different: around 18°C in Antofagasta and 24°C in Rio de Janeiro.

For Peruvian fishermen, the arrival of the warmer El Niño current meant the disappearance of their most abundant and prized fish, the anchoveta, which thrives in cold, plankton-rich waters.

An ocean and atmospheric phenomenon

In the 1920s, British physicist and climatologist Gilbert Walker made a surprising discovery. While analysing vast amounts of atmospheric pressure data, he realised that when pressure increased in the South American Pacific, it decreased in northern Australia and Indonesia, and vice versa. In other words, these two regions of the planet, thousands of kilometres apart, were connected in terms of atmospheric pressure behaviour. This is what we now call a teleconnection, a long-distance meteorological link.

This coordinated oscillation in atmospheric pressure across the South Pacific was named the Southern Oscillation. But what does El Niño, an ocean current, have to do with the Southern Oscillation, an atmospheric phenomenon?

As well as having a negative impact on the Peruvian fishing industry, El Niño brings rainfall – sometimes torrential – to the arid regions of Peru and northern Chile, home to the world’s driest desert, the Atacama. In 1957-1958, a very intense El Niño caused torrential rainfall in Peru and other countries, and a severe drought in India and Southeast Asia, spurring further research into the phenomenon.

In the 1960s, Norwegian-American meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes found that the warming of the South American Pacific caused by El Niño was linked to the Southern Oscillation, thereby establishing a close connection between the ocean and the atmosphere.

When the South Pacific tropical anticyclone – with its associated trade wind pattern that blows from South America towards Australia and Indonesia – weakens, the waters of the equatorial Pacific warm and begin to shift towards Central America. There they branch off, mainly southwards, along the coasts of parts of Ecuador, Peru and Chile. This is how El Niño is generated.

Bjerknes demonstrated that the atmosphere and the ocean are closely linked, and that what happens in one part of the climate system has an impact elsewhere. Combining the names of the oceanic and atmospheric components gave rise to the El Niño’s official name: El Niño-Southern Oscillation (often abbreviated to ENSO).

The worst El Niño of the 20th century

In 1982–83, the most intense El Niño of the 20th century caused extreme weather events throughout the world, including floods in the American Pacific and in the southern United States, and droughts in north-eastern Brazil and Indonesia. It also caused a very mild winter in the mid-latitudes of Europe, Asia and North America.

From that point onward it was observed that, from time to time, temperatures in the equatorial Pacific also showed a negative anomaly, meaning they were lower than normal. At the same time, the South Pacific high-pressure system strengthened, along with the trade winds. This situation was the opposite of El Niño and was named La Niña.

In short, El Niño brings warm waters and instability, while La Niña brings colder waters than normal and greater stability to Ecuador, Chile and Peru. These phenomena form recurring cycles, though not over fixed periods of time.

The last intense El Niño of the 20th century occurred in 1997–98, causing severe flooding in California. It received widespread media coverage, as the disasters occurred in the US.

How might the next intense El Niño behave?

A super-El Niño would undoubtedly lead, if not in 2026 then certainly in 2027, to a higher global average temperature – a few tenths of a degree above what would be expected given the current rate of global warming. There would also be heavy rainfall in the aforementioned Andean countries, the Argentinian area of Mar del Plata, East Africa, and parts of the southern United States, with severe droughts in Southeast Asia, parts of Australia and northeastern Brazil.

In the Mediterranean basin, the El Niño-La Niña cycle is weaker, largely due to the region’s unique geographical characteristics. However, during a very strong El Niño event it can expect higher than normal temperatures, and perhaps a greater likelihood of extreme rainfall.

In any case, what once appeared to be a phenomenon confined to Peruvian fishing grounds is now known to be a global interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean, with repercussions that can be catastrophic in regions far removed from its source.

Javier Martín Vide, Catedrático de Geografía Física, Universitat de Barcelona

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By installing an MMA octagon on the most symbolically charged turf in American democracy, Donald Trump is doing more than celebrating a sport. He is staging a vision of power in which the head of state no longer serves the nation – he embodies it, as a champion who dominates and subdues.

With his administration navigating one of the gravest international crises of his second term, Trump appears consumed by two preoccupations: his plans for a grand White House ballroom and the UFC fight event scheduled on the South Lawn for June 14th. He has compared the structure being erected – a 27-meter-high octagon called “The Claw” to the Eiffel Tower, and has suggested it might never come down.

The event was deemed significant enough that according to Politico, the G7 schedule was adjusted G7 schedule was adjusted to avoid a conflict.

Claiming ownership of national symbols

Organisers have framed the event as a patriotic and apolitical celebration of American history: between bouts, the UFC plans to air segments honouring national heroes, the nation’s founding, and the 250th anniversary of the United States. Yet none of the commemorations invoked actually fall on that date. The 250th anniversary of independence will be marked on July 4 2026; the flag’s 250th anniversary comes in 2027; and the Army’s bicentennial was already observed in 2025.

The only milestone that actually falls on June 14 is Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. Under the cover of national commemoration, the event functions first as a presidential birthday party – and a political and financial operation.

The broadcast will air on Paramount+, whose parent company was acquired in August 2025 by David Ellison, the son of Oracle’s co-founder and a figure closely associated with Donald Trump. The audience has been carefully selected: military personnel selected by the Pentagon under specific fitness criteria will serve as the televised backdrop. Trump has personally acquired shares in TKO Holding Group, the UFC’s parent company, which he has been promoting for months. This is not a sporting event honoured by the president’s presence. It is a presidential event dressed up as an MMA gala.

A long-standing fascination with combat sports

Trump has long been drawn to combat sports and the spectacle of violence – this despite having avoided military service during the Vietnam War through a diagnosis of bone spurs provided by a physician who was a family acquaintance.

In the 1980s, he cultivated close ties with professional wrestling’s WWE. In 2007, he staged a scripted showdown with WWE owner Vince McMahon in an event billed as the “Battle of the Billionaires”.

Professional wrestling operates according to the logic of kayfabe – a convention by which audiences are invited to engage with a narrative everyone knows to be scripted. This dynamic illuminates much about how Trump operates. He grasped early that politics worked on the same principle: he did not turn politics into spectacle, he revealed that it already was one.

The UFC, however, belongs to a different register. The fights are real. Trump’s interest dates to the early 2000s, when he hosted several UFC events at his Atlantic City casinos. Dana White, the UFC’s CEO, regularly recalls the support Trump allegedly provided when the organisation was still struggling for legitimacy. This closeness is not a recent enthusiasm – it reflects a long-standing relationship with a cultural world that has become central to a significant strand of the contemporary American right.

From civic hero to fighting champion

To appreciate the full weight of this choice, it helps to trace how the figure of the heroic American president has evolved. From the founding era onward, presidents have frequently been associated with a form of heroism – beginning with George Washington, whose greatness derived not from force but from his willingness to relinquish power after victory. Lincoln embodied moral authority rather than military might. In the twentieth century, the president-as-hero – from Roosevelt to Eisenhower – drew legitimacy from the idea of service: suffering, sacrifice, putting the nation before oneself. The democratic hero existed to serve something larger than himself.

That model began to fracture after September 11, 2001. American political rhetoric gradually displaced it with the notion of toughness – hardness, resilience, the will to dominate.

The hero was no longer expected merely to serve; he was expected to win. George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, already gestured towards this shift. But it was still largely stagecraft.

The poster released by the White House to promote the June 14th event illustrates this transformation in striking terms.

The historic Uncle Sam – the lean, austere figure created in 1917 for military recruitment posters – has been replaced by a hyper-muscled colossus rendered in an openly AI-generated aesthetic.

The title reads: “America Needs a Champion.” The image draws heavily on ideals of physical strength and masculine authority. Political scientists and gender scholars use the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to describe cultural ideals of male authority associated with strength, dominance and competitiveness.

Days earlier, Trump had posted his own image as Uncle Sam on his Truth Social platform. The transformation is complete: the champion no longer represents the nation – he personifies it.

In combat sports culture, the champion does not merely defeat his opponent – he submits him. Transposed into political metaphor, that describes precisely the relationship to power Trump is performing: less a vision of governance than a performance of dominance.

MMA as a political vehicle

This event is not just about imagery – it also reflects deeper shifts in American political culture.

Research has shown that the UFC has become a powerful vehicle for male socialisation, promoting a model of masculinity grounded in physical hierarchy and competition. In 2024, according to CIRCLE/AP VoteCast, 55 percent of men aged 18 to 29 voted for Trump – 14 points more than in 2020. The shift was even more pronounced among young Latino men.

The June 14th event fits squarely within this logic: consolidating a male electorate around an imagery of strength, at a moment when polling suggests Trump’s support is eroding. But the stakes go beyond electoral tactics. Unlike Putin or Kadyrov’, Trump does not enter the arena himself, he imports it to the White House to drape himself in the values it represents: warrior masculinity, physical hierarchy, and hyper-masculine dominance.

Power in a cage

The fight cage erected on the White House grounds is more than a publicity stunt. It reflects the logic of kayfabe, where performance stands in for reality and displays of strength replace lived experience. While the UFC celebrates the victorious warrior under the spotlight, the crisis with Iran highlights what Trump has been reluctant to confront politically: the human costs and risks of actual warfare.

The spectacle has inevitably drawn comparisons with Roman emperors and their gladiators. Yet Trump operates within a democracy where opposition remains visible and criticism can still be voiced openly. One source of his political resilience is his ability to absorb dissent into the spectacle itself. Outrage, denunciation and protest often become part of the performance, reinforcing the attention economy on which it thrives. This is a form of democratic kayfabe: politics that relies less on coercion than on the normalisation of spectacle.

The symbolic battle is not settled. Lawsuits have been filed in an effort to block the event, while the “No Kings” movement has planned demonstrations on June 14, presenting itself as the defender of the very founding principles the UFC fight claims to honour. Ultimately, the controversy raises a broader question beyond Trump himself: who defines the nation’s symbols and values – the leader who seeks to embody them, or the citizens who view resistance to power as a patriotic duty?

Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, Spécialiste de la politique américaine, Sciences Po

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

While many media outlets cover this news as a one-day story, this year’s report should be seen as a much more ominous warning. The latest projection, released on June 9, 2026, is that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2032, at which point incoming revenue can pay only about 78% of scheduled benefits. For the 1 in 5 Americans who receive Social Security, that means a potential across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 22% unless Congress acts.

What makes this year’s warning especially troubling is that the deterioration isn’t driven by a temporary downturn but by deeper demographic and policy changes: Fewer expected births, lower immigration, slower growth in the workforce and reduced future revenue from the taxation of Social Security benefits.

The fundamental challenge, though, has been obvious for years. There are too few current and future workers to support the growing number of retirees. And now, there are fresh headwinds that make the math even more daunting. Record debt levels and elevated interest rates are reducing the fiscal resources available for lawmakers to implement solutions, while declining immigration and birth rates mean that the supply of current and future workers is even smaller than previously projected.

These pressures don’t mean Social Security will disappear. It will always exist as long as workers and employers pay into the program. But for anyone who expects to retire starting in the early 2030s, the potential for a cut to benefits is real.

As a scholar of public finance, I argue that this looming deadline recalls the crisis policymakers faced in the early 1980s. Once again, the issue of reform is about to move from a distant worry to an immediate political problem. And failure to reach a bipartisan compromise will bring both economic pain and political damage.

Fresh pressures

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck their historic bipartisan compromise to extend the life of the program by raising taxes and the eligibility age. This time, the challenge will be far harder.

To start with, the federal government now carries a much higher debt burden, topping 100% of annual GDP, compared to about 35% in the early 1980s. And the Congressional Budget Office projects large deficits adding to that debt in the coming decades, with the annual budget shortfall rising from US$1.9 trillion in 2026 to $3.1 trillion in 2036 under current tax and spending laws. Public debt is projected to rise to 120% of GDP by 2036, leaving less and less fiscal room to patch Social Security.

Servicing that debt is also becoming more expensive. Although the Federal Reserve trimmed interest rates in 2024 and 2025, the cost of borrowing remains elevated as concerns over inflation grow, exacerbated by oil price spikes and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Markets now expect the Fed to hold rates steady for a while, and some investors are betting it may even raise them later this year.

The demographic picture is also unforgiving. Baby boomers continue to retire, Americans are living longer, and birth rates have fallen sharply. Since 2007, the U.S. birth rate has fallen by 23% and has remained below replacement level for years. The result is fewer future workers paying payroll taxes, even as the number of retirees grows.

A final factor is immigration.

While other aging countries have turned to immigration to shore up public finances and revitalize their labor force, the U.S. has taken the opposite approach. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, net migration to the U.S. is estimated to have fallen by 2.4 million between 2024 and 2026, amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized migrants and its efforts to discourage green card applications.

The new report referenced these challenges, noting that lower immigration and fertility estimates will have “a negative projected effect on Social Security’s financial status.” It also addressed the effects of the massive policy bill that President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress pushed through in 2025, which among other things cut the income tax that retirees pay on Social Security benefits.

The near-term economic changes of that legislation will “have a positive effect,” the report said, but in the longer run it will also weaken the program’s finances.

A slow-motion crisis

It’s important to remember that before the 1983 deal was sealed, Social Security was far closer to insolvency than it is today. The program was nearing the point where it could no longer pay full benefits on time.

The problem was caused by a mix of high inflation, weak wage growth, the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, and mounting demographic pressure. Americans were living longer, birth rates were falling, and the number of workers supporting each beneficiary was declining.

The 1983 reform was negotiated under Reagan, a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate, with help from a bipartisan commission led by future Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. It addressed the program’s immediate financing crisis by accelerating scheduled increases in the payroll tax and phasing in a higher full retirement age, from 65 to 67. It also anticipated the retirement of the baby boomers and the growing burden they would place on future workers.

The historic overhaul, which came only after months of wrangling, bought the country time. Just as important, it showed that with bipartisan support, a Social Security deal is possible. But it also underscored the danger of waiting too long. When policymakers delay, the menu of options gets smaller, the required changes get larger, and the economic and political pain increases.

Social Security’s next crisis won’t arrive suddenly. It’s arriving in slow motion. The question isn’t whether the program can be fixed, but whether elected officials will act while they still have room to choose among less costly options. I believe the real lesson of 1983 is that waiting until the last minute will turn a chance for reform into a political emergency, and little good comes from governing by crisis.

John W. Diamond, Director of the Center for Public Finance at the Baker Institute, Rice University

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Confronted by higher prices for gasoline and a range of other everyday products, US households are spending more in total, rather than cutting back on their purchases. This defies the many economic forecasters who expected that paying more for the basics would discourage consumers from spending money on less essential items, holding back expenditure and GDP growth overall.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the US National Economic Council, has hailed the rise in consumer spending – and the associated surge in borrowing – as signs of an economic boom. It seems hard to argue that people are better off if they are having to pay more for the same goods and services as before, and are taking on more short-term debt to fund the extra spending.

Hassett is statistically correct, however. If people pay more for everything, and the higher prices are not entirely matched by extra cost for producers, more value is being created in the economy and GDP will rise in real terms. To the extent that higher bills are affordable to consumers and generate more profit for producers, the cost of living crisis may actually be promoting GDP growth in the US.

This contradicts the conventional economic opinion that views inflation as harmful to economic growth. But growth can happen under these conditions when consumers cannot or will not switch away from goods or services whose price rises faster than average.

This effect has long been visible in performing arts and other creative industries. These industries depend on individuals who, even with technical help, are unable to keep producing more in a day without losing quality.

While audiences often complain about the ever-rising cost of tickets for live music or sport, these events still sell out. So long as audiences keep paying, the real output of these industries keeps growing, even if there is no increase in the number of matches or concerts played.

Uneven growth

There are other reasons why recent GDP growth has not made the average US household feel better off, or revived the fortunes of Trump and his governing Republican party. Polling by the Economist suggests that 58% of Americans currently disapprove of Trump. This makes him the most unpopular US president since 2009, when Barack Obama was grappling with intense public anxiety over the global financial crisis, despite the uptick in growth.

GDP is a measure of total economic output. It is calculated by adding up the sum of all final incomes earned within a country’s borders, including wages, profits and taxes on imports. The calculation does not account for how much – or how little – individuals receive.

Much of the recent gain in the US has flowed to people already high up the income and wealth scale, shifting the distribution of GDP from wages towards profits. Expectation of a continued profit boom is one reason stock markets have continued to rise despite Trump’s tariff regime and wars, as well as other global turbulence since 2021.

At present, US growth is fragile. This is because of its reliance on borrowed money to fuel consumer spending. Household debt in the US was already at levels that trouble some economists before the latest cost-of-living squeeze. Total US household debt is greater now than when it reached crisis proportions in 2008, tipping the US and the world into recession.

US company debt is also higher now than in 2020, when the COVID pandemic began, though it has been declining since 2021 as firms have used recent profits to pay it down. There are fears that companies’ debt-to-income ratio may be higher than officially measured, due to a recent sharp rise in private credit. This form of debt is not monitored or regulated as heavily as debt from traditional sources.

The situation for indebted households and firms will improve if interest rates fall, as Trump has demanded from his newly nominated Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh. But financial markets are anticipating the opposite, as higher prices and government borrowing generate inflation that typically pushes interest rates up.

This leaves it doubtful that the bright start to US growth in 2026 can last through the rest of the year. Any rises in borrowing costs or a fall in stock markets would begin to squeeze consumer spending and business investment, even if the high oil prices have subsided by then.

Alan Shipman, Senior Lecturer in Economics, The Open University

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Taking into account the history of corruption in FIFA, the sport’s governing body, it would be hard to blame anyone who decided to ignore this year’s competition.

However, some viewers of this summer’s tournament may face an additional dilemma.

Political tensions are high in the U.S., where most of the tournament’s matches will be played. The Trump administration is historically unpopular, and its critics are already concerned about sportswashing: when governments use the spectacle of athletic competition to burnish their image and distract the public.

As I point out in my 2022 book, “The Ethics of Sports Fandom,” fans who are critical of their country’s behavior sometimes feel ambivalent about rooting for their national sports teams – and may even feel compelled to root against them.

After all, it’s one thing to pull for your national team when patriotism feels uncomplicated. It’s quite another when you aren’t feeling very proud to be an American.

The Cold War made it easy for many Americans to rally behind the 1980 U.S men’s hockey team in its victory over the Soviet Union in the “Miracle on Ice.” But what do you do when you don’t see your country as the “good guys”?

Patriotism doesn’t mean blind loyalty

Some fans might double down on their patriotic commitments during the tournament. They’ll use the occasion to champion America in all things, whether it’s the country’s battles in the Middle East or its national team taking on Paraguay at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.

Sports have a way of fueling nationalistic passions, and I fully expect plenty of people who don’t care much about soccer to channel their patriotic sentiments into the tournament.

However, rooting for your country’s national soccer team doesn’t mean that you endorse everything your country does, any more than wanting a friend to get a promotion at work requires you to support all of their behavior. As the philosopher Eamonn Callan has argued, a proper love of country requires citizens to be clear-eyed about its faults. The true patriot highlights problems and works to correct them, independent of how much they want the national team to win their next match.

By the same token, I think a deep love of country can coexist with ambivalent feelings about how the national team performs on the field. If patriots can disapprove of their country’s military adventurism – either because they see it as flatly unjust or because it casts their country in an unfavorable light on the international stage – there is nothing fundamentally unpatriotic about not wanting the U.S. to do well in the World Cup.

Other fans might invoke the mantra that it’s important to simply keep politics out of sports – that the games should be a refuge from the controversies that plague so many other aspects of civic life.

But as I argue in my book, fully separating politics and sports is almost impossible. It requires fans to view athletes as nothing more than bodies who exist to perform on the field. It means team executives and owners do little more than sign paychecks. And it ignores the reality that sports are woven into the social, economic and political life of communities.

Outcomes don’t change a thing

For fans who choose to watch, then, my suggestion is to view the action on the field as you would any other sporting event.

Root for whomever you want to win, for more or less any reason that moves you.

Because for all the political significance attached to the World Cup, the winner or loser of any given contest has essentially no broader political significance. The problems that existed before the tournament will still demand attention when it is over, no matter who happens to win.

Success or failure on the pitch isn’t likely to bring about meaningful political change. After all, whether a government has the right legislative agenda or approach to foreign policy is totally divorced from its national soccer team’s ability to score goals.

Viewed in this way, rooting for your country’s national soccer team doesn’t imply blind loyalty to your country or ignorance of its flaws. It simply means that you want the athletes who represent your country to win the game they are playing on that particular day.

Athletes have long been able to navigate this ambivalence. You’ll regularly hear them trying to separate a love of their country and its people from support of problematic regimes.

When Iranian soccer player Mehdi Taremi refused to celebrate a goal in a January 2026 Greek Super League match, he embraced precisely such a position. Thousands of people had been killed during protests of the Iranian regime, and the moment called for a different reaction.

“There are problems between the people and the government,” he said. “The people are always with us, and that’s why we are with them.” For Teremi, publicly celebrating as an Iranian citizen abroad felt too much like endorsing the current regime, something he had no desire to do. If the athletes who wear their national colors can maintain such nuanced views, surely fans can, too.

Of course, nuance can be difficult in today’s political climate, and the rhetoric around the World Cup likely won’t change that. When the U.S. men’s hockey team won gold at the Olympics back in February, Donald Trump attempted to turn it into a personal political victory by inviting the team to his State of the Union address.

“Our country is winning again,” Trump said, devoting nearly six minutes of his speech to the team’s victory.

The outlook for the U.S. men in this year’s World Cup is not quite as bright, but chances are good that someone will try to co-opt their success or failure for political purposes. Fans don’t have to fall into the trap.

Adam Kadlac, Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Over many years, and in many countries, a growing view among political actors and within political science was that class was losing its punch. The line was something like this. The working class once voted for labour parties. The middle class voted conservative. But over many years) that difference between how the classes voted got smaller and smaller. In some places it disappeared.

The “decline of class” narrative suited the leaders of labour and social democratic parties.

They could safely adopt market-based neoliberal policies, with a human touch added, in the knowledge their base wouldn’t desert them. But their base was changing. It was becoming more middle class, more individualistic, more awake to the benefits of market solutions to complex problems.

Now, those politicians are shocked by the rise of far-right political parties that now claim to represent the working class. In Australia, One Nation is close to matching Labor — in some polls, it is already ahead.

In the United Kingdom, Reform is leading in all the polls, while the governing Labour party is below 20%. In Germany, the neo-nazi AfD is presently leading in all opinion polls, while the Social Democrats are below 14%.

In the United States, the Republican Party has gone full Trump, on an agenda with aspects that look eerily reminiscent of prewar Germany. In France, the National Rally candidate is ahead in all opinion polls for the next presidential election.

‘Blue collar’ is not the same as ‘working class’

In many countries, the labour and social democratic parties are mere shadows of their former selves.

Perhaps the labour parties mistook the decline in “blue-collar” (manual) jobs for the decline of the working class. In Australia, the blue-collar share of jobs fell from 44% in 1979 to 28% in 2025. It’s fallen in the UK, the US and elsewhere.

Union membership, once a mostly “blue-collar” phenomenon, declined in most industrialised countries. It fell from an average of 30% of employees across the OECD in 1985 to 19% in 2005 and 15% in 2023. The fall was even greater in Australia.

But these changes did not reflect how likely people were to identify as working class.

In Australia, national attitude and election surveys give us a good idea of trends in people’s views. Between 1979 and 2007, the proportion of respondents in a standard national survey defining themselves as working class or lower class temporarily grew from 40%, to the low 50s in the 1980s and ‘90s, then back to 44% by 2007. In 2025, after a bit more movement, it was still 44% working class.

A British survey in 1983 found 58% of people claimed to be working class. By 2005, those identifying as working class had barely fallen to 57%. In 2023, still 53% of people identified as working class.

In the US, where the phrase “working class” appeared absent from public discourse for decades until Trump, a differently worded question showed that in 1976, 51% of Americans thought of themselves as either working class or lower class. In 2006, the same survey showed 52% identifying as either working class or lower class. Within this period, numbers had fluctuated from year to year — but always between 48% and 55% expressed working or lower class identity.

A Gallup poll added “upper-middle class” to the options, and the proportion claiming working or lower class status was only 39% in 2006. In 2024, that number was 43%.

In Canada, the proportion identifying as working or lower class was 36% in 1980 and still 36% in 1995. In 2017, a different poll found 37% identified as working class.

In short, while “blue-collar” jobs have sharply declined almost everywhere, the experience of “working class” has been relatively stable, within some fluctuating bounds. Differences in class identity between countries seem more notable than differences over time, perhaps due to how questions are asked or how different cultures interpret them.

This is not to say that giving a “working class” response to a forced-choice survey question is the same as a deeply thought position on class. But if people no longer thought of themselves as working class, you would expect to see some pretty big changes over time in answers to these questions.

How the working class was left behind

Sure, jobs changed, a lot. But there has never been much middle-class glamour in the “white collar” jobs at the checkout counter, behind the hamburger hotplate or in the call-centre factory.

Class relations didn’t weaken. In fact, inequality worsened in many countries. Neoliberal policies, including those adopted by social democratic parties, made the rich much richer, but they slowed the growth in the wellbeing of the majority of people, and left the working class behind.

The proportion that thought big business had too much power, and income and wealth should be redistributed, became larger.

Unions lost ground not because their ideas became unpopular with workers. It simply became much harder for unions to recruit and retain members in the face of increasingly hostile employers, governments and laws.

Working class voters didn’t have solutions to hand. But nor were they offered any by social democratic parties that barely spoke their language. Now the door has been opened to far-right parties, presenting alternatives that appeal to some facing those class problems.

There’s life in class voting yet, just not in the way we thought of it.

David Peetz, Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow at the Centre for Future Work, and Professor Emeritus, Griffith Business School, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed.

Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.”

Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates – tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders – whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.

Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form.

“We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”

How does he define the working class? “Essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth.”

The theory is all the same: Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats. The New Deal did it – Democrats can do it again.

I’m a political scientist who has written extensively about rural and working-class communities. I believe it is an open question whether these reformist Democrats are really interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms. Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, the right messenger, the right phrase. “Fight the oligarchy” probably isn’t going to do it.

Working-class voters have a worldview. For 50 years, it has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s – not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats did.

Working-class identity

Since the early 1950s, the American National Election Studies has asked respondents whether they think of themselves as members of the working class. This article uses my analysis of that data.

While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35% of voters for the past 70 years, 38% in 2024.

Working-class identity is something more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It is a specific way of looking at the world.

There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.

Working-class voters have never been a predominantly Democratic group – not even at the height of the New Deal coalition. Based on the American National Election Studies self-report measure, the working-class share of the Democratic coalition peaked around 56% in 1960 and has fallen more or less continuously since, sitting at just about 30% today.

Meanwhile, the share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for half a century: A majority did so in 1958, but not since.

Working-class voters have not become Republicans. Only in 2020 and 2024 – the first time in the survey’s history – did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then by narrow margins.

The data shows a working class that is politically homeless: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party.

Economic abandonment

So what drove them out?

A segment of the progressive left has a ready answer: Democrats abandoned working-class voters economically – on trade, wages and industrial policy. Working-class voters responded rationally. Fix the economics and the coalition comes back.

Trade is where the argument is strongest. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters groups favored limits on imports to protect American jobs.

By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while a majority – 54% – of working-class voters continued to do so.

Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization in their interest. Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix.

What fairness requires

In 1984, Democrats and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equally would mean fewer social problems. A divergence opened after 2008 and accelerated after 2016, with Democrats now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to think we should worry more about equality.

In 1986, half of mainstream Democrats and a slightly smaller percentage of working-class voters agreed with the idea that Black Americans don’t succeed because they don’t try hard enough. By 2024, Democratic agreement had collapsed to 13%. Working-class voters declined too, but to 32%.

The gap that opened between them is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It is a story about the Democratic Party’s rapid post-2008 shift toward a worldview that places far greater explanatory weight on structural barriers and far less on individual effort and personal responsibility.

Working-class voters, who historically have understood their own lives through a framework of hard work and earned reward, did not shift so dramatically.

Alignment becomes division

On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.

In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.” By 2024 a 25-point gap emerged.

On whether religion is an important part of their life: a near-zero gap through the early 1990s, but 17 points by 2024. On abortion, a 3-point gap in 1980 became 30 points in 2024. Regarding whether immigration levels should be increased, the two groups were virtually identical in 2000 – around 8% support – but by 2020 Democrats were at 48%, working-class voters at 24%.

But even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust the institution being asked to deliver it – a distrust decades in the making.

How the ‘system’ plays

In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money. By 2024 that gap reached 27 points – not because working-class voters lurched toward anti-government extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change.

Working-class voters are 17 points more likely than Democrats to say people like them have no say in what government does. In 2024, 88% of working-class voters and 75% of Democrats said government is run by a few big interests. Both groups agree the system is captured.

Yet the Democratic policy response, invariably, is to expand the system.

On support for expanding government – from healthcare to jobs to environmental programs – Democrats and working-class voters have diverged dramatically since the 1980s. By 2024, there were approval gaps of between 20 and 30 points on providing government health insurance, environmental spending and a guaranteed jobs program.

On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.

Not all class war

Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn’t hear them. Democrats, over the same period, have grown more comfortable with the institutions working-class voters have increasingly less faith in.

This distrust is the accumulated residue of specific experiences: deindustrialization that happened on government’s watch, trade deals that economists endorsed and workers paid for, a 2008 financial crisis response that saved the banks and foreclosed on their homes, an opioid epidemic that regulators missed entirely.

To be fair, this is precisely what the new crop of reform candidates say they want to fix. The argument that the right candidate can move the needle is not crazy. Candidate quality matters. Personal trust can substitute for institutional trust, at least at the margins.

But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change.

Reducing that to class war jams working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are actually saying.

Nicholas Jacobs, Goldfarb Family Distinguished Chair in American Government, Colby College; Institute for Humane Studies

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The agency cut more than 7,100 jobs – more than 13% of its workforce and its largest staffing cut ever. It closed six of its 10 regional offices, moved more services online and expanded the use of automated and artificial intelligence systems on its public phone lines.

Some rules changed and changed back again. For instance, Social Security officials announced in March 2025 that people would no longer be able to apply for benefits on the phone, only to reverse course a month later.

We’re social work professors at California State University, Sacramento, Binghamton University in New York and the University of Wisconsin-Madison who study these programs. And we have each independently found that even before 2025, it was hard to get disability benefits.

Now, we’ve found that the process has become even harder.

Missing metrics

In June 2025, the agency removed key customer service metrics, such as phone wait times and disability claim processing times, from its website. This data had provided the public with critical transparency about the agency’s performance.

Lacking insight into the impacts of the many changes underway, we launched a project to study how they were affecting access to disability benefits. We interviewed benefits representatives – lawyers, social workers and other kinds of advocates who help applicants and beneficiaries navigate Social Security systems.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 52 advocates at 32 nonprofits, such as legal aid agencies and disability organizations. These organizations collectively assist over 8,000 people every year.

We’re referring to these advocates by pseudonyms to maintain their privacy. Many insisted that neither they nor their employers be identified due to fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.

We published our findings in collaboration with two national disability advocacy organizations, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and the American Association of People with Disabilities, in March 2026. We took the step of publishing with these organizations before submitting our work to academic journals because we wanted to share these findings with the public as soon as possible.

16 million people get these benefits

The Social Security Administration is a federal agency that runs some of the country’s biggest social safety net programs, including benefits for more than 60 million retired workers, as well as survivor benefits for the spouses of workers who have died and their children who are under 18.

In addition, the agency administers two kinds of disability benefits to a total of 16 million people.

Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, is a public assistance program for low-income older adults and people with disabilities under age 65. In 2026, it provides a maximum of US$994 per month for any one person getting benefits.

Social Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI, provides a limited pension for those who have worked long enough to qualify and now have disabilities that prevent them from working any longer. Payments vary based on one’s past wages, but the monthly average in 2026 is about $1,634.

To receive either kind of benefits, Americans must meet the Social Security Administration’s strict definition of disability, which considers health status, past education and employment and age to determine if a physical or mental disability makes someone unable to work.

There are no time limits on how long you can receive SSI benefits. But children and adults under age 65 are subject to periodic assessments of their eligibility and must adhere to the program’s rigid rules. For example, they can’t have more than $2,000 in assets at any time while receiving benefits, must submit their pay stubs for any earned income monthly, and must report any changes in their living situation, marital status or bank accounts.

Encountering long wait times and chatbots

The Trump administration made no formal changes to eligibility criteria for SSI or SSDI, despite considering proposals that could have narrowed eligibility rules and potentially excluded millions who qualify for these benefits today or reduced the size of benefits payments for many people with disabilities.

But when the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research center, analyzed state-level data from the first half of 2025, it found that 7% fewer claims for disability benefits were submitted to the Social Security Administration than during the same period a year earlier.

We got more insight into these changes during our interviews.

We heard that with fewer employees, the agency had fewer people available to answer phone calls, contributing to long waits. Customer service protocols also changed so that phone calls to the Social Security Administration were routed to field offices the callers hadn’t dialed, where staff couldn’t help them.

Other benefits representatives encountered AI chatbots that did not answer their questions, or found that staffers with specialized knowledge had been reassigned to perform other tasks.

“I just have so many cases that are stuck in purgatory because they don’t have enough workers to work them,” said Jane, a paralegal we interviewed in Social Security’s Kansas City region. “They don’t have enough workers to answer the phone to tell me what’s happening to them.”

Field office frustrations

Another source of friction emerged around visits to Social Security Administration field offices.

The agency has more than 1,200 field offices across the nation where people can seek services. Shortly before Trump took office in 2025, the agency began moving from walk-in services to requiring appointments. But the Social Security Administration had promised in 2024 that it would “not turn people away” if they couldn’t or didn’t want to make an appointment.

And yet benefits representatives told us in 2025 that many field offices did require appointments, and turned people away if they arrived without them.

This was especially frustrating because it was hard to make those appointments over the phone anymore, said Freddie, a benefits representative in the Denver region. “Now, we can’t reach anybody at Social Security,” she told us. “We can’t get through to make an appointment.”

As of May 2026, 10 offices in nine states are either open on an appointment-only basis or closed to the public until further notice.

Obstacles online and in person

The Social Security Administration’s push to conduct business online assumed that everyone could easily use digital platforms. But that’s simply not true for many of the most vulnerable low-income people with disabilities who have or are applying for SSI and SSDI benefits.

As Michael, an attorney in the Atlanta region, explained, it’s not reasonable to assume that “someone who’s in their 20s, but unhoused” or “someone in their 70s and having issues with memory loss” can handle an online application process.

Another challenge is the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, which has now extended to people who are authorized to live in the United States. Many immigrants who get disability benefits, or who support their relatives with SSI and SSDI benefits, are no longer sure it’s safe for them to visit Social Security offices.

Those fears were reinforced in February 2026, as reports emerged that some Social Security workers had been told to share appointment data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Several benefits specialists told us they no longer know how to advise such clients about the potential risks of interacting with the Social Security Administration, including whether it was safe to visit field offices or whether the agency might share their information with immigration authorities.

Dying while waiting

Staff cuts meant that the problem-solvers who advocates had once turned to had left, taking years of expertise with them. The agency’s remaining staff members were harder to reach than ever. Some were less familiar with the intricacies of the Social Security Administration’s policies and procedures than their senior colleagues who had left.

As disability benefits have become harder to obtain, many people are suffering. We heard multiple accounts of terminally ill clients dying before receiving benefits for which they were eligible.

For example, Anne, an attorney in the agency’s Philadelphia region, described the case of a homeless, seriously ill client who couldn’t move forward because Social Security Administration staff told her that they couldn’t locate paperwork she had submitted three years earlier.

“This woman is dying,” Anne said. “All you have to do is push a little button to get this moving, and you’re telling me you can’t.”

Miranda, an attorney in the Philadelphia region, explained that in the past, she advocated for clients over complex legal issues. During the second Trump administration, that’s changed.

Now, her clients may find that they need an attorney simply “to make sure something gets off someone’s desk and then faxed into the system.”

Faxing, rarely necessary for most everyday business transactions, is commonly used during the disability benefits application process.

“It is taking more of my time to do the same amount of work, which then means we’re not able to take as many cases” said Megan, a paralegal in the Boston region.

Suggesting possible improvements

Our report includes recommendations for improving how the Social Security Administration responds to applications for disability benefits.

In our view, the agency should employ enough people to handle all applications and appeals in a timely and accurate manner while protecting the data privacy and accessibility for all applicants – including those from immigrant families.

We also believe that the agency’s leaders would be wise to listen seriously to feedback from professional benefits representatives who help people with disabilities apply for SSI and SSDI benefits, such as those we interviewed, and their clients.

Katie Savin, Assistant Professor of Social Work, California State University, Sacramento; Callie Freitag, Assistant Professor of Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Matthew Borus, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But the US midterm elections – where all the seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are on the ballot – are always a referendum on the president and his party in Congress.

So, given US President Donald Trump’s current popularity, what does this mean for the Republicans’ chances in November?

Struggling with key demographics

In short, Trump is in terrible shape politically at the moment. His net-approval rate is in negative territory in 44 of the 50 states in the country. His national approval rating is also well below 40%, and is heading lower.

Polling consistently shows most voters do not approve of Trump’s management of major issues, including the economy, inflation, jobs, health care, immigration and foreign policy. His decision to launch the Iran war in late February had the lowest approval of any war in American history. It remains among the most unpopular wars.

Inflation is accelerating in the US. Credit card delinquencies are at a 15-year high. With no end to the war in sight, and petrol so expensive, consumer sentiment has crashed to historic lows.

While Trump has broadly retained support among Republicans, his approval rating has declined among independent and Latino voters – two key demographic groups that were crucial to Trump’s election two years ago.

A clear path in the House

Does this mean the Democrats will stroll to victory in the midterms? It’s not quite that simple. US politics is extremely volatile, and there are fewer and fewer seats that are truly contestable.

To control the House, the Democrats need a net gain of three seats, and in the Senate, four seats. Based on my calculations of the six midterm elections this century, the president’s party has lost an average of 27 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate.

The only president to buck the trend was George H.W. Bush in 2002. Bush’s approval rating was still extremely high – 65% – one year after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The US invasion of Iraq, which would prove deeply unpopular, was still six months away. The Republicans gained eight seats in the House and two in the Senate in those midterms.

This year, the Republicans are more vulnerable in the House than they are in the Senate.

To protect their tiny majority in the House, Trump and the Republicans have launched a war to gerrymander congressional districts in several Republican-controlled states to boost the number of seats they can win this year. Democrats countered by redrawing the maps to favour their party in California.

And last month, the conservative US Supreme Court gave the Republicans another edge when it ruled that protections under the Voting Rights Act to help ensure Black-held seats in the South were unconstitutional. This could threaten up to six black Democratic members in November.

But several Republicans are expected to be ousted from their marginal seats across the country. Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report predicts:

It’s more likely than not that almost all of the closest races break toward the party out of power (in this case, the Democrats). So winning 60 to 70 percent of the closest races is not a huge lift [to capture the House].

Senate up for grabs?

By contrast, the Republicans have been relatively confident of their position to retain control of the Senate.

The seats up for election this year are mostly in states that voted for Trump. That gives Democrats a very narrow path towards winning control of the Senate through states like Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Maine and North Carolina.

In both Ohio and North Carolina, the Democratic candidates are both popular politicians – former Senator Sherrod Brown and former Governor Roy Cooper – and are doing well in the polls. In Alaska, Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan is facing a very well-regarded former House member, Mary Peltola.

Republican Senator Susan Collins is also looking very vulnerable in Democratic-leaning Maine, though the presumptive Democratic candidate, Graham Platner, has been dogged by some controversies lately.

The race that could decide the Senate, however, is in suddenly competitive Texas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in 38 years.

Trump successfully urged Republicans to support the controversial former attorney general, Ken Paxton, over veteran incumbent John Cornyn in last week’s primary. Paxton, who has previously been indicted on felony securities fraud charges and impeached by the Texas legislature, will now face the rising political star James Talarico, a progressive Christian Democrat. Talarico is leading in some polls.

The Democrats probably have to worry about one seat in Michigan. The Republican candidate, former House member Mike Rogers, is running his second campaign for the Senate there after losing by less than 20,000 votes two years ago. The Democratic candidate will be decided in an August primary. This is a true tossup that could take away a Democratic seat.

Republicans can afford to lose four seats and still keep control of the Senate with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President JD Vance.

What does this mean for 2027 and beyond?

There is a stark difference between Democrats winning just the House versus the entire Congress.

If Democrats take control of the House, they will put a check on Trump through greater oversight and investigations of his actions. He may well be impeached – for a remarkable third time. This is exactly what happened to Trump after the Democrats won the House in the 2018 midterm elections.

If Democrats are in charge of both chambers, however, they will be able to pass bill after bill that Trump will likely veto. This would further weaken Trump’s political strength – as well as the Republicans – in advance of the 2028 presidential and congressional elections.

Under either scenario, Trump’s legislative agenda will be dead.

After two years of acquiescing to the president by the Republican-held Congress, the midterms will offer a chance to shift the balance of power. If Democrats win the House, Congress will gain a voice again. And the guardrails that have been missing for two years will again be in place to safeguard American democracy.

Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This sporting spectacle – the largest ever World Cup, with 48 teams – will generate many memorable moments.

Mexico will get the tournament underway in its capital city on June 12, hosting South Africa.

Apart from the on-field action, much attention will be paid to the politics of the World Cup and to two major political players – US President Donald Trump and his FIFA counterpart Gianni Infantino.

But before a ball is kicked, an earlier media encounter is stubbornly lodged in the mind which sheds light on the cosy relationship between two presidents with much in common.

An increasingly close relationship

This is the bizarre sight of Trump receiving the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA)’s inaugural Peace Prize from Infantino in December 2025:

After Trump failed to receive his much-coveted and unashamedly demanded Nobel Peace Prize, Infantino jumped into the breach.

The two presidents make an odd couple in some respects.

Character assessments of Trump are, as he might put it, a dime a dozen. Outside his lovestruck MAGA support base, a survey of world opinion in his first presidency found him much disliked as the quintessential “ugly American”.

It has arguably become worse since, in view of his violent language and apparent narcissistic God complex.

By contrast, Infantino is a suave multilingual Swiss-Italian lawyer following in the footsteps of compatriot Joseph Sepp Blatter – his former, more flamboyant FIFA boss.

Blatter resigned shortly after re-election as FIFA president under pressure after the infamous dawn raid by FBI agents in Zurich during the 2015 FIFA Congress.

Seven high-ranking FIFA officials were arrested, and a further seven elsewhere, in a grand exposure of FIFA’s alleged corruption.

Just as Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of the US establishment, Infantino sold himself publicly as the cleanskin reform candidate ready to take on internal corruption and clean up FIFA.

But both Trump and Infantino have used the power of their presidencies to make major decisions with minimal consultation, while spreading considerable largesse around those who help keep them in their respective offices.

How the relationship blossomed

Infantino turned up the dial on the approach first adopted by world leaders – though now noticeably muted – of flattering and appeasing Trump.

Regularly attending the White House and other spaces around the world alongside Trump, in February 2026 Infantino committed FIFA to a strategic partnership with Trump’s United Nations-supplanting Board of Peace.

During the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup held in the US, Infantino watched with almost parental indulgence as Trump gatecrashed the on-field celebrations of winners Chelsea.

Infantino no doubt believes he must stick to his erratic primary host like glue for the World Cup to succeed.

It certainly has many potential flashpoints: Trump has declared co-host Canada should be incorporated as the 51st state of the US and insulted the other host, Mexico, as a land of criminals and rapists.

Trump’s administration has banned or imposed visa restrictions on fans from four participating nations and another 15 countries.

He previously threatened to move games from Democrat cities that he deems dangerous, and there are concerns about cost inflation for fans and the intimidating presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in and around stadiums.

These problems were compounded when, three months out from the World Cup, the US and Israel attacked Iran, prompting the Iranian team’s threatened withdrawal.

Apart from the resultant greater security threat to the tournament, already difficult and expensive international travel to the US became more so.

Infantino’s illiberal friends

Receding democracy in Trump’s America is, though, familiar terrain for Infantino.

Since Infantino’s election in February 2016, soon after Trump’s first inauguration, he has overseen men’s World Cups hosted by a succession of illiberal nations.

After the 2018 edition in Russia, President Vladimir Putin presented him with that country’s Order of Friendship medal after Infantino called it “the best World Cup ever”.

Infantino lived in Qatar in the lead-up to its 2022 tournament, cultivating his relationship with that country’s Emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. He fended off as hypocritical Western criticisms of the conditions and deaths of the migrant workers who built the stadiums.

In a notorious speech on the eve of the tournament that had echoes of Trumpian megalomania, Infantino likened his own experience of minority discrimination to that of people who are Qatari, Arabic, African, gay, disabled, or migrant workers.

Infantino then engineered the future hosting of the tournament in three confederations in 2030 – Europe, Africa and South America. This enabled an early return to the Middle East in 2034 in another illiberal nation, Saudi Arabia, where he has built a close relationship with its ruler Mohammed bin Salman.

In light of these developments, the Trump-Infantino alliance seems less remarkable.It appears Infantino is dealing with Trump as just another king-like authoritarian leader from an affluent country keen to host FIFA’s most lucrative event.

Although often criticised as sportswashing, it is important not to underplay the naked economic interests at play.

Behind their mutual love of pomp, ceremony and personal awards, the tight embrace of Trump and Infantino is supercharged by soccer’s financial goalscoring record.

Both were elected with the promise of making other people richer. They have certainly done well for themselves, but the 2026 World Cup is likely to reveal a deeper ethical poverty at the heart of the world game.

David Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But what was meant to be an operation which would be all over within days has now lasted three months. And, during that time, truth – and at points, reality itself – has come in for a thorough beating from all sides.

This week we’ve heard from Iranian state TV, which announced it had obtained a copy of an “unofficial framework for a memorandum of understanding” of how to end the conflict. The main points, which included a plan for Iran to control traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in partnership with Oman and giving Tehran access to billions of dollars of frozen assets, come across as highly improbable to say the least.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump immediately dismissed this as “a complete fabrication”, going on to threaten to bomb Oman if it turned out to be true. “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up”, he told a reporter on Wednesday. “They understand that. They’ll be fine,” he added.

The US president followed this up with a post on TruthSocial in which he said it should be mandatory for an array of Arab and Muslim countries across the region to sign up to the Abraham accords and normalise relations with Israel. Trump sees this as the landmark achievement of his first term of office. But after signing up Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020 and Kazakhstan in 2025, there have been no other takers and the agreement is now seen by many experts as dead in the water.

Saudi Arabia, which was always high on the US president’s target list, said the only way it would contemplate joining was if Israel recognised Palestinian statehood. So this plan is also a non-starter, writes Simon Mabon, an expert in Middle East and Gulf politics. And the idea, also floated by Trump, that even Tehran would see the light and sign up to the accords, normalising relations with Israel, stretches the bounds of reality even further.

Mabon examines how improbable the whole scenario is, given the seething tensions churning through the Middle East.

Meanwhile Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Professor of International Law at La Trobe University in Australia, explains the background to the accords and why many countries in the region are more likely to find their own path to stability.

And so it is, after another week of claim and counterclaim, that the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed to traffic. A great deal has rightly been made about the shock this has caused to the global economy and energy prices. But, as Farhang Morady, an expert in International Development at the University of Westminster notes, the closure of the strait has also shut down a number of other key Iranian exports.

Before the war, Iran was the world’s second-largest exporter of methanol after China, shipping roughly 10 million tonnes each year. The war has removed over 30% of the global seaborne methanol supply from the market. Then there are pistachios, of which Iran is once again second-largest exporters after the US. And cement, of which Iran ships 70 million tonnes, mainly to its neighbours.

This is clearly going to have a seriously deleterious effect in Iran’s already parlous economy. But as Morady points out, Iran is involved in supply chains all over the world, which are all now under serious strain.

Greater Israel

Meanwhile Israel’s assault on southern Lebanon continues unabated, with the casualty count well into the thousands as well as millions of people displaced. Israel now occupies the land south of a “yellow line”, which it says it intends to keep. It also occupies significant chunks of territory in southern Syria.

At this point it wouldn’t help to be drawn into the merits of Israel’s argument that it has to have control over this territory to prevent attacks from hostile elements operating close to its northern borders.

But there appears little if any justification for the rapid spread of settlements on the West Bank on land which was intended under the agreement struck in 1993 between Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as land earmarked for a future Palestinian state.

The settler land grab – and accompanying violence – led the EU earlier this month to sanction various settler groups and individuals.

Ambra Suriano has tracked the development of settler ideology from its earliest – largely secular – development to the almost messianic fervour to restore Israel to its biblical greatness in the era of kings David and Solomon.

It’s a movement that has gone from existing on the fringes of Israeli politics to command a huge amount of influence and political clout thanks to the inclusion of two extreme pro-settler ministers in the Netanyahu government since 2022.

Colourful primaries

The action is really hotting up in the run-up to November’s midterm elections in the US. It’s primary season, where the two main parties ask their registered members to choose the candidates going forward for election in the 33 Senate seats and 435 districts in the House of Representatives that are up for grabs.

Popular wisdom is that with the US president’s approval rating hitting all-time lows in various polls and with his administration being blamed for a hugely unpopular war, the Republicans are likely to face a backlash and could lose their majority in both House and Senate.

Many Republicans are concerned that Trump’s decision to oust incumbents he dislikes in favour of true believers won’t help matters. Clodagh Harrington, an expert in US politics at University College Cork, has the story.

Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The charges came after Comey, the former FBI director, posted an image of seashells on a North Carolina beach, arranged in the form of the numerals “86” and “47.” Forty-seven was an ostensible reference to Trump, the 47th U.S. president, and 86 to a colloquial expression conveying a sense of “getting rid of” or “casting aside.”

But is “86 47” really a threat? And if so, is it a criminal one amounting to a threat to assassinate the president, as prosecutors have suggested?

In contrast to crimes such as murder or arson, which can be committed without uttering – or writing – a single word, threats are inherently crimes of language. They don’t exist without the linguistic symbols used to convey them.

Linguists like me who work in the field of language and the law understand these types of crimes to be “speech acts,” utterances that perform the action they name. What is a promise if not the words “I promise” or an apology if not the words “I’m sorry”?

The law is full of speech acts. Rulings, verdicts and arrests are all speech acts. So, too, are the crimes of language: solicitation, perjury, bribery and threats.

What is a threat?

Threats are language that states or implies the intent to intimidate or create harm. As a speech act, they need not be direct but often are.

In December 1984, the White House mail room received a letter with the message, “Ronnie, Listen Chump! Resign or You’ll Get Your Brains Blown Out,” referring to President Ronald Reagan. Below these words was a drawing of a pistol with a bullet being ejected from the barrel.

The Secret Service conducted a handwriting comparison analysis of the words, which led to the arrest of David Hoffman. He stated that “he didn’t know it was against the law to threaten the President.”

But Hoffman did commit a language crime. Although he didn’t use the words “I threaten to blow your brains out if you don’t resign,” the passive construction “you’ll get your brains blown out” accompanied by a drawing of a pistol constituted a direct threat that expressed a clear intent to intimidate and harm the president.

The scientific process of dictionaries

This brings us to the Comey case. Can a photo of 38 seashells arranged in the numerals “86” and “47,” and broadcast over Instagram, constitute a threat against Trump?

In theory, “86 47” could be an indirect threat, but the interpretation of Comey’s message really hinges on the meaning of “86” when used as a verb.

This is where tools of forensic linguistics, which helps solve crime and resolve matters of language and the law, can help.

The first tool is lexicography, the academic study of creating dictionaries. A classic maxim of lexicography is that dictionaries are out of date before they are printed. It’s a nod to the fact that words’ meanings change and new words enter the language quickly.

Although dictionaries are imperfect, their definitions are the result of the rigorous study of word meaning and adherence to the scientific process of lexicography, the practice of writing and editing dictionaries and other reference materials.

In the Comey case, we would expect to find “86” listed as a noun. But the inclusion of the nonstandard verb form – “to 86” – would tell us that what may seem mysterious and cryptic actually has a conventionalized and well-recognized meaning.

Of the five major dictionaries of contemporary English I consulted, all had entries for “86” as a verb. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, includes: “to eject or debar (a person) from premises; to reject or abandon; (in earliest use) to refuse to serve (a customer).”

Oxford also offers this second entry: “In restaurants and bars, an expression indicating that the supply of an item is exhausted.” This may explain why many restaurant workers across the country have strong reactions to the Comey indictment.

The American Heritage Dictionary definition includes “to refuse to serve (an unwelcome customer) at a bar or restaurant; to throw out, eject; to throw away, discard.” Merriam-Webster provides a similar definition: “to refuse to serve (a customer); to eject or ban (a customer); broadly, to eject, dismiss or remove (someone).”

Collins Dictionary offers two entries, the first in line with the others – “ to reject from, or to refuse to serve at” – and the second: “to cut off, eject, cancel, eliminate, kill, etc.”

The dictionary evidence is therefore mixed: Most definitions convey a sense of “kicking out” or “refusing service,” but Collins does include “kill” as a secondary definition.

How ordinary speakers of English use ‘86’

More evidence is needed, so I turned to the second tool: linguistic corpora. A corpus – plural: corpora – is a collection of texts chosen to represent language as it is actually produced by speakers and writers across genres and time periods. Linguistic corpora are useful because they show us usage in context, while providing enough data to conduct quantitative analysis of word meaning.

With over 1 billion words, the Corpus of Contemporary American English is the largest corpus of spoken and written American English available today. I analyzed usage of the word “86” in the corpus and found 372 attestations in full form – “eighty-six,” not “86.”

The vast majority of the attestations had nothing to do with “ejecting.” But in a random sample of 100 cases of “eighty-six,” 20% were the verb form conveying the sense of “discard” or “eject.” Of those, two attestations meant “to kill,” and both came from fictional television and film. Far more common were expressions such as “Definitely 86 the coat, it sends the wrong message” and “Can we 86 the flags, please?”

When the direct object of the verb was a human subject, “86” still overwhelmingly meant “to discard” or “eject,” including this example when the subject was another sitting U.S. president: “Obama’s going to lose this election … they will blame his one term on a homophobic electorate who chose to eighty-six him because of his SSM stance,” in reference to his support for gay marriage.

In the Obama case, “86” clearly meant “vote him out.”

User-generated dictionaries are a third tool linguists use to analyze word meaning in the context of language crimes. They are less reliable than dictionaries written by professional lexicographers, but – like corpora – they give us a sense of the pulse of the language as it’s happening now.

Although they often contain factual errors, they tell us what English speakers think they know about the origins and meanings of words – a useful tool for analyzing language crimes.

I studied the entries provided by users for “86” on Urban Dictionary, where the highest-ranked definition is “to remove, end usage, or take away.” Of the 63 entries, only seven mention killing, one of those in reference to the Comey seashells. The vast majority of other entries align with the dictionary evidence: 86 means to get rid of something, or to have run out of a key ingredient.

The Comey indictment states that “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” Comey’s post “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.”

Looking across dictionaries, linguistic corpora and user-generated dictionaries, “eighty-six” could mean to kill but probably doesn’t. A general speaker of contemporary American English would interpret Comey’s post as an expression of opinion, a desire to “eject” the president from office.

Phillip M. Carter, Professor of Linguistics and English, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Massie subsequently lost the primary to a political newcomer with no prior office-holding experience. Ed Gallrein’s not-so-secret weapon was that he had the backing of the US president.

Just over a week later, Texas voters were asked to decide whether 22-year Senate veteran John Cornyn should be ousted in favour of the state’s attorney-general, Ken Paxton – who was also endorsed by Trump. Despite all the baggage Paxton carried into the race: an indictment for fraud (charges were later dropped) and an impeachment for bribery, which he denied before being acquitted in the state senate. He has also gone through an acrimonious divorce accompanied by accusations of adultery (which he has also denied), Paxton won the May 26 primary handsomely with more than 60% of the vote.

Trump has long threatened to “primary” – back a rival candidate in the upcoming primary election – Republicans who displease him in some way. But with the midterm elections looming in November, we’re seeing this put into practice. And it’s making the conservative “old Republican” wing of his party very nervous.

America’s high-profile November elections involve straightforward contests between the nominees of the main parties. But before a candidate can represent their party, they must first win an internal election. These primaries are open to registered party voters (and, in some states, independents)

American political parties have no centralised power to simply appoint or protect their candidates. The process is genuinely competitive and, as the current cycle is demonstrating, potentially dangerous for incumbents.

For the president to mount a primary challenge is to use a particularly powerful weapon in American political life – it can end a career without the opposing party winning a single vote. On one level, the 2026 GOP primaries are rolling out in the usual manner. However, who is orchestrating them, and why, is worthy of note.

According to the Brookings Institute, Thomas Massie drew Trump’s ire not for any ideological deviation from the GOP line, but for opposing a short-term funding bill and for joining a Democrat in calling for the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.

The Texas case has a similar logic. Prior to his decades in the Senate, John Cornyn served as Texas attorney general and sat on the Texas Supreme Court. He is a stalwart conservative by any conventional measure. However, he was associated with a bipartisan gun safety bill in 2022, and he has at times been willing to work across the aisle. His challenger, Ken Paxton, is a Maga true believer who survived a bipartisan impeachment attempt in the Texas senate, largely on the strength of Trump’s support.

The pattern extends well beyond these two cases. In one state alone, Trump endorsed challengers to eight GOP state senators who had voted against a redistricting bill, with his allies spending millions in an effort to remove them. The message is clear: vote against the president’s wishes, and he will come for your seat.

Electoral gamble

This strategy is inevitably unnerving for the more traditional wing of the Republican Party. Democrats are confident, and Republicans concerned, that a Paxton nomination in Texas will make it harder for Republicans to hold the seat in November. The Democratic nominee, state representative James Talarico, raised a staggering US$27 million (£21 million) in the first three months of the year alone.

There is some Trumpian precedent for all of this. In 2017, the 45th president endorsed Luther Strange in an Alabama senate primary. Strange lost to Roy Moore, who then lost the general election to Democrat candidate Doug Jones. The lesson that a rock-solid Republican seat can be lost was clear, although apparently unlearned.

Republicans are defending slim majorities in both the House and Senate in 2026. They can afford few losses. Replacing electable incumbents with ideologically pure but extreme and therefore electorally risky challengers, is a strategy that appears to prioritise control over the party above control of Congress.

The effect on Capitol Hill

Even where Trump’s candidates win, the consequences may be destabilising. Some Republicans have acknowledged that Trump’s aggressive involvement in primaries could create complications, not least for members who are no longer worried about reelection. Senators in their final term, for example, might be emboldened to act independently knowing there is no electoral sword hanging over them.

But the more immediate effect is silence. Had Massie or Cornyn survived their primary challenge, more members of Congress might have been willing to vote against Trump’s interests. Their defeat sends the reverse signal. When a solid incumbent with a strong conservative record can be unseated for insufficient loyalty, other Republicans in Congress will be watching and calculating.

This is how party discipline can slide into something more troubling. It is one thing for a party leader to want to manage unwieldy factions but enforcing one’s authority via electoral intimidation is another matter.

What is being challenged in these primaries are the remnants of what the Republican Party once was. This included a coalition of business conservatives, foreign policy hawks, libertarian-leaning figures and traditional social conservatives. Massie represented one strand of that tradition. Cornyn represented another. They have now been treated as enemies of the Maga agenda.

Historically, US election scholarship has suggested there may be a tendency in primaries to swing towards the party’s base, and then back in the direction of the median voter for the general election. In this new incarnation of the GOP, the pendulum appears stuck to the right.

During primary season, this may be an attractive Maga trait. But come November, not every GOP voter may cast their ballot for a cult of loyalty.

Clodagh Harrington, Lecturer in American Politics, University College Cork

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There are reasons for this. The US and Israel are militarily, strategically and economically weaker than they were on the eve of launching “Operation Epic Fury”, their joint military operation against Iran, in late February.

Their carefully built-up alliances with Persian Gulf countries are now being reevaluated, given these ties didn’t prevent Gulf states from being attacked by Iran. And Iran – despite losing many political and military leaders in months of devastating strikes – seems more powerful than ever.

In this context, both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu desperately need a symbolic victory they can sell to their respective electorates before the US midterm elections and Knesset elections later this year.

This partially explains why Trump is trying to re-invigorate the Abraham Accords, which he has long touted as one of the biggest foreign policy successes of his first term in office.

In a phone call over the weekend with regional partners, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, he insisted their inclusion in any Iran deal depended on all joining the accords. This means establishing diplomatic ties with Israel.

What are the Abraham Accords?

The Abraham Accords were part of a package of diplomatic initiatives overseen by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during Trump’s first term. The accords were an attempt to “solve” the long-running Palestinian-Israeli and broader Arab-Israeli conflicts.

Since the first Arab-Israeli War and Israel’s creation in the 1940s, the question of Palestine has plagued the Arab world. It remains the most important political concern of the public in Arab countries today, despite growing disinterest from many Arab leaders.

With the assistance of the US, Israel has, over the decades, slowly chipped away at the collective Arab opposition to its illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territories. This started with its peace agreements with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 and continued with the Abraham Accords.

Before the accords were signed in 2020, the Trump administration moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, closed the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Washington office and declared that the US no longer viewed Israeli West Bank settlements as illegal.

Then, in 2020, Trump and Netanyahu launched the Peace to Prosperity Plan. While past peace efforts had at least gestured towards Palestinian participation, this one promised economic development at the expense of Palestinian statehood.

The UAE and Bahrain then signed onto the Abraham Accords in September 2020, followed by Morocco in December 2020, Sudan in January 2021 and then Kazakhstan in November 2025.

There were many carrots offered to these countries in exchange for recognising Israel, largely economic, military and diplomatic agreements. For example, the UAE secured advanced weapons and military technology from the US. And Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara was recognised by the US and Israel.

Would any countries join now?

The jewel in the crown, however, has always been Saudi Arabia. This was purportedly a key driver behind the timing of Hamas’ attacks on Israel in October 2023. The group was desperate to derail normalisation talks between the two.

Since Israel’s devastating retaliatory war on Gaza began, Saudi Arabia has been a prominent advocate of Palestinian statehood. It has publicly refused to sign the accords without firm guarantees of Palestinian self-determination.

The remaining regional powers, such as Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey, must take account of their restive populations, who are overwhelmingly supportive of Palestinian self-determination. The US would have to apply significant pressure and offer large carrots for any of them to be persuaded to change course.

Pakistan, in fact, has already rejected Trump’s demands and Saudi Arabia is likely to follow.

So, while it might make sense to link Iran and Palestine together through a regional peace agreement, the Abraham Accords are simply too toxic in their current form for most countries to entertain.

The region is looking for its own solutions

But this won’t stop Trump and Netanyahu from trying to press their case.

If Israel can get other nations on board, Netanyahu can craft a narrative around closer regional ties as he continues Israel’s destruction and occupation of southern Lebanon in its fight against Hezbollah.

This would still be a paltry prize compared to its long-desired aim of removing the Iranian threat altogether. And it may not alleviate the growing pushback he is facing from an increasingly overstretched army.

Closer ties with Arab countries would also not offset the rapid erosion of regional public opinion against Israel. Such negative views are now widely entertained even among Trump’s MAGA base.

The Trump Administration also needs a win. It is reeling from its latest Middle East misadventure:

• its weapons stocks are massively depleted
• the global energy shock is fuelling domestic discontent
• its Gulf allies are questioning the US security umbrella
• and it faces Israeli reluctance to any Iran peace deal.

But in a region undergoing a dramatic strategic reconfiguration, the Abraham Accords are increasingly seen as a US-imposed framework. Some countries are trying to reshape the region in ways that would benefit them instead.

Most notably, Saudi Arabia has reportedly floated a regional non-aggression pact (including Iran) along the lines of Europe’s Helsinki Accords that aimed to ease Cold War tensions in Europe.

Perhaps Trump is trying to re-invigorate the Abraham Accords as a way to counter the Saudi move. Undoubtedly, he is also trying to appease Netanyahu. The silence his demand has received, however, may indicate the region is no longer amenable to US persuasion, no matter how big the carrots are.

Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Professor of International Law, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In fact, it appears much more negotiation is still required between Iran and the U.S.

The confusion likely stems from one of Trump’s fixations: that the U.S. is winning the conflict, an assertion that’s at odds with the actual evidence.

Insisting the U.S. is winning

Trump, in his various statements on the Iran conflict, has become increasingly adamant that the U.S. has defeated Iran. He’s even accused reporters critical of the American war effort of treason.

Regardless of Trump’s threats, it’s clear that the U.S. is in a worse strategic position than it was before the war.

The conflict has further alienated key American allies, both within the region and globally. It’s also having a devastating impact on the American economy.

Trump’s attacks on his opponents and the media are of course nothing new. That makes it easy to dismiss those attacks as just more of the same.

The president, however, does not always develop his ideas in isolation. His claim that the U.S. is winning the war with Iran overlooks how the conflict has left the country in a weaker strategic position — and is a recurring flaw in current American strategic thinking.

Myriad justifications for war

The United States, without consulting allies, launched major military operations against Iran in late February 2026.

Trump has provided multiple justifications and explanations for the war. While these pivots make a proper assessment difficult, one constant is that Trump expected the Iranian government to collapse.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the Iranian government it appears to have consolidated around its most radical elements: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has marginalized or imprisoned the moderates with whom Trump wished to negotiate.

This development was hardly shocking; it was predictable.

Instead of acquiescing, the hardliners in Iran — like Trump — believe they cannot win over their domestic audience without a victory.

The Iranian government’s need for a victory caused it to examine areas where it could escalate the conflict while increasing pressure on the U.S. The answer to where Iran could inflict the most damage on the U.S. was obvious: the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz

It wasn’t surprising that Iran seized control of the strait. For decades, war games into a major conflict between the U.S. and Iran predicted that Iran would do so early on.

Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz has created considerable pressure on both the American and global economy. While international attention has focused on the disruption of oil, other goods like urea and aluminium — both critical to the global economy — have also been disrupted.

Trump frequently emphasizes that the U.S. has the world’s strongest military. This contention isn’t up for debate.

But there are nonetheless limitations to what the U.S. military can accomplish. This is particularly true during unpopular wars, like Vietnam, because casualties must be avoided to a greater degree than in conflicts with popular support.

This reality considerably limits America’s strategic options, because the U.S. cannot enter the Strait of Hormuz without a significant risk of casualties, despite its military superiority.

This conundrum is the dilemma that confronts Trump as he attempts to end the war. His faith in the precision-strike capabilities of the American military has caused him to ignore the limitations.

No easy solutions

To be fair to Trump, he isn’t the only American leader to fall prey to the allure of military might. Since the end of the Second World War, American leaders have found themselves in strategically unpalatable situations due to their faith in military might.

The Vietnam and Iraq war are two prominent examples of how faith in overwhelming military power can lead to prolonged conflict. In both cases, the U.S. entered wars it was poorly prepared for and paid a steep price — not only financially, but also in terms of its broader strategic position.

While this has long been a problem in American strategic thinking and policy, Trump magnifies these problems. His belief in his personal superiority means he is unwilling to see that he and his advisers are caught by the same flaw in strategic thinking.

Furthermore, Trump’s lack of focus means that unlike other presidents who at least attempted to solve the crises they created, he’s already pivoting to focus on Cuba.

The result is that while Trump may claim the Iran conflict has been resolved on terms favourable to the U.S., the war has ultimately left both him and the country in a weaker strategic position than before.

James Horncastle, Assistant Professor and Edward and Emily McWhinney Professor in International Relations, Simon Fraser University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The fund, the result of a settlement of legal claims by Donald Trump and his family against the IRS, aims to compensate those who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of the federal government. It has already been called a “slush fund” by the New York Times editorial board, which noted – as many have – that it’s likely to pay much of its US$1.8 billion funding to Trump allies who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The money comes from what’s called the Judgment Fund, set up in the Department of Treasury by Congress in the 1950s to pay legal judgments and settlements involving the federal government. In doing so, Congress gave away a portion of its foundational, constitutional role: The power to control government spending. Figley, who worked at the Department of Justice and is also an emeritus professor of legal rhetoric at American University Washington College of Law, has warned Congress and others that by putting decisions about such huge payouts in the hands of the executive branch, the fund would inevitably be hijacked for political purposes. Naomi Schalit, The Conversation’s politics and legal affairs editor, spoke with Figley.

What is the Judgment Fund, and why was it created?

The Judgment Fund is a permanent, indefinite appropriation that Congress established to pay most judgments and settlements against the federal government. Prior to 1956, whenever a judgment or settlement was agreed upon or finalized, Congress would have to appropriate money to pay it. That meant the administration and Congress would have to go through kind of a karaoke: “Here’s a new settlement, here’s why it should be approved.” “OK, we approve it.” And it took up a lot of time and didn’t produce much good effect.

So the old General Accounting Office recommended that Congress set up a system that would pay some claims automatically, and in 1956, Congress established the Judgment Fund. It allows payment of settlements and judgments if those payments were final and not authorized or provided for by some other legally available appropriation.

Congress essentially handed over responsibility for paying for settlements and judgments, which was taking up a lot of time, to the executive branch?

Yes, the Department of Justice would do the paperwork and say this is final, or this is an appropriate settlement, send that to Treasury, Treasury then certifies that it was properly documented, and then orders the payment.

From the constitutional perspective, it appears that Congress was getting rid of an annoying thing that it had to do, but wasn’t it also giving away its power of the purse?

Yes, but only in a limited way to begin with. When the Judgment Fund was first established, any settlement or judgment that could go through the process had to be less than US$100,000. That worked so well that Congress increased the amount a couple of times, and then ultimately in 1977 said there’s no cap. It’s a permanent indefinite appropriation, and once it was established, nobody ever has to go back to Congress to ask that it be updated or refilled. It works automatically.

You’ve written and given testimony about concerns you have with the Judgment Fund, over quite a few years and spanning several administrations. What are those concerns?

The concern is that under our system, Congress should be responsible for – and is responsible for – appropriating money.

Are you worried that this fund can be abused?

It has been. For many, many years, it wasn’t abused very often. Occasionally, it was used for political purposes in the foreign policy context. President George H. W. Bush used it in 1991 to settle a claim with Iran for arms that had not been delivered. The Clinton administration used it to settle a similar claim with Pakistan in 1998. The Obama administration secretly paid Iran $1.7 billion for arms that the U.S. had not delivered, and $1.3 billion of that came from the Judgment Fund. Those all had a political context, and while they were arguably good decisions, they were decisions that, absent the Judgment Fund, would have had to go through Congress and have money appropriated after, perhaps, debate and discussion.

The Obama administration also went much further in litigation involving claims of civil rights violations by the Department of Agriculture.

The Obama administration’s use of the Judgment Fund in class action suits for discrimination in Department of Agriculture civil loan programs struck me as really bad policy. After class action suits by Hispanic and female farmers had largely failed, the Obama administration announced that it had created a new program, the Hispanic or women farmers and ranchers claims process. This new program was funded with $1.3 billion from the Judgment Fund and open to people who had not been involved in the litigation. It was unilaterally created without congressional input or an appropriation. It wasn’t illegal, but it was using the Judgment Fund in a way that Congress had certainly never anticipated.

When that happened, my antenna went up, because for many years I was at the Department of Justice defending cases involving the Judgment Fund in cases alleging wrongful acts or omissions by federal employees. I defended suits brought against the government for auto accidents, medical malpractice, flood cases, wild animals, a wide range of things. Seeing the potential for abuse, I started suggesting that Congress amend the Judgment Fund to cap any settlement at $500 million. Above that cap, you’d have to go to Congress.

That hasn’t happened.

What did you think when you first heard about the establishment of this $1.776 billion pot, using the Judgment Fund, to compensate the so-called victims of lawfare?

I was surprised. I always expected someone would do this kind of a thing again, but I had not foreseen this one coming. And then I thought I was right: We should have amended the Judgment Fund.

The Obama administration had manipulated the fund to create the Women and Hispanic Farmers and Ranchers Claims Process without congressional input or approval. Having seen that blueprint, the Trump administration has similarly manipulated the fund to create the Anti-Weaponization Fund without congressional input or approval.

In each case, the administration believes that the people that are being compensated are worthy and should get compensation, even though they would have a lot more difficulty getting it without the creation of such a thing.

Now that it’s been used twice, unless Congress steps in, I have no doubt this scheme will be used again by another administration. It’s bad government; it’s not how our system was set up. Congress has the power of the purse. Congress, rather than the executive, has the authority to create and fund programs. The executive branch should not have it own source of funds. The Judgment Fund should not be used as an executive branch piggy bank.

Has it occurred to you to say I told you so?

Yes. I called my daughter – she appreciates certain gallows humor – and I told her that just what I’d predicted had happened. She said, “Well, aren’t you happy about that?” and I said, “Well, I’m not happy that it happened, but I’m happy that I saw it and have been out preaching about it – with remarkable lack of success.”

Paul Figley, Emeritus Professor of Legal Rhetoric, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A one-day sports competition showcasing just three disciplines, the Enhanced Games openly embrace the use of legal performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and technological advances that maximise human potential.

Conceived by London-based entrepreneur Aron D’Souza and backed financially by billionaires Peter Thiel, Christian Angermayer and Donald Trump junior, the one-day extravaganza will see 42 athletes competing in swimming, track athletics and weightlifting.

With substantial appearance fees and an unprecedented US$25 million (£18.6 million) in prize money – including US$1 million bonuses for breaking world records – the lucrative payouts have attracted some big names. These include Olympic medallists Cody Miller and Ben Proud for swimming; Olympic medallist Fred Kerley for track; and record-breaking weightlifter Thor Björnsson.

The Enhanced Games has drawn widespread criticism from international and Olympic sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has labelled them a “dangerous and irresponsible concept”, threatening to test athletes involved to “protect the integrity of legitimate sport” – despite the majority being retired from traditional sport. Wada also urged US authorities to shut down the games – which evidently didn’t happen.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also issued a formal statement calling the games “utterly irresponsible and immoral … a betrayal of everything we stand for”. Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency dismissed the Enhanced Games as “a dangerous clown show”.

In response, D’Souza argues that Wada is hypocritical and points to Olympic corruption scandals, claiming the Olympics are no longer fit for purpose. Other supporters have also promoted the idea of self-determination, and the need to break free of the IOC’s rules and regulations.

As sport researchers, we might be tempted to dismiss the event as a publicity stunt. However, based on our ongoing research into Olympic swimmers and coaches’ perceptions of the Enhanced Games (we have spoken to more than 20 so far), we believe the event is symptomatic of bigger issues. It represents a critical inflection point, and a unique opportunity to reflect upon the current shortcomings of traditional sport.

Sport’s ideological war

Deeply entrenched battlelines have been drawn on both sides of this complex debate. Recent events, such as Enhanced Games swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev breaking the former 50m freestyle world record, the games’ filing of an US$800 million anti-trust lawsuit against Wada, World Aquatics and US Swimming, and the Enhanced Group’s recent floating on the New York Stock Exchange are telling. They all appear to be the first shots fired in a potentially long and protracted ideological war over the future of sport.

Proponents argue that permitting PEDs such as testosterone, anabolic steroids, growth hormones, peptide hormones and stimulants could potentially unlock unprecedented human potential, allowing athletes to transcend current biological limits. Here, the Enhanced Games and the Olympic Games share a common goal of maximising human potential; the difference lies in precisely how it should be achieved and the transparency surrounding those methods.Supporters of the Enhanced Games also argue that a regulated approach to using PEDs under strict medical supervision is safer for athletes, transforming what is currently an illicit, underground practice into a controlled medical environment, akin to legalising substances like cannabis.

Conversely, defenders of traditional sport argue that this approach contradicts the fundamental integrity of sport. They assert that Olympism is based on natural talent, dedication and rigorous training, free from artificial advantages. Concerns have also been raised about the long-term health consequences for athletes who use PEDs, and the negative role modelling for young athletes who may see drug use as a shortcut to success.

Threat or revolution for sport?

Another critical battleline relates to whether the Enhanced Games exacerbate or alleviate existing issues of integrity within traditional Olympic sport. Proponents of the Enhanced Games – including many of the Olympians that we interviewed – argue that the current system is fundamentally flawed.

These athletes cite what they see as the rampant and pervasive use of PEDs (meaning it’s an open-secret), the misuse of therapeutic use exemptions, the ineffectiveness and erosion of trust in anti-doping authorities, and the need to better compensate athletes for their contribution to sport.

Many people within traditional sport view the Enhanced Games as a profound existential threat to the moral legitimacy of Olympism. However, far from being a circus sideshow, its emergence is symptomatic of deep-rooted, longstanding issues and continued failings that need to be resolved within traditional sport.

Instead of perceiving the Enhanced Games as a rival or threat to the Olympic Games – which we do not believe it is – its emergence should be viewed as a wake-up call. Traditional sport needs to direct efforts to solve these fundamental problems and reflect upon the true value of sport and its role in society.

In this light, we see the emergence of the inaugural Enhanced Games as a window of opportunity for much-needed conversations within international and Olympic sport.

Mathew Dowling, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University; Alex Thurston, Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University, and Jinsu Byun, Assistant Professor of Sport Management, Yonsei University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.