The Conversation

Trump is powerless to stop the one thing killing him at the ballot box

If you think your energy costs are high now, the situation may be about to get a whole lot worse.

With traffic in the Strait of Hormuz – normally the primary route for oil leaving the Middle East – hovering below 15% of prewar levels, oil prices have increased from US$65 a barrel before the conflict in Iran began in February 2026 to more than $100 a barrel in mid-September.

When the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran, analysts feared prices would soon reach $150 or even $200 a barrel. That hasn’t happened yet. But seven months into the conflict, with no clear end in sight, the global oil market has now largely exhausted the safety measures that exist to keep a lid on petroleum prices.

As researchers who study the relationship between energy and national security, we have been following these dynamics throughout the conflict, and the oil market is now showing signs that significant price hikes – and perhaps even shortages – may be on the way.

The squeeze tightens

Some oil has been able to make it out of the Persian Gulf despite the closure of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia increased output via its East-West pipeline, which runs from Abqaiq on the Persian Gulf overland to Yanbu on the coast of the Red Sea. At full capacity, that pipeline can carry as much as 7 million barrels per day, although only about 4 million to 5 million barrels per day are typically exported.

But attacks on the pipeline in mid-September that Saudi Arabia blames on Iran-backed militias based in Iraq forced the Saudis to temporarily halt oil shipments through that pipeline. The pipeline has now restarted operations at very low volumes, but it will likely take at least six to eight weeks to regain full capacity. Even this short cessation has tightened already constrained oil markets, and the threat of further Houthi attacks on Red Sea oil exports will only add to inflationary pressures.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Ukrainian drone attacks have damaged refineries, reducing Russian production of diesel fuel and prompting the country to ban exports of it. That has removed another 3% of the global daily supply of diesel, an important fuel for trucking and shipping. When diesel costs go up, the result is inflation in the cost of goods across the global economy.

Feeling the pinch

In the U.S., 47 states experienced record-high diesel prices on Sept. 22, with the national average reaching $6.52 per gallon.

The high prices prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to ban diesel exports, a move analysts suggest would make matters worse by accentuating global supply shortages and driving world prices upward.

Beyond diesel, motor oil prices have quadrupled, and supply shortages are starting to take hold. For instance, Costco has almost doubled its prices for motor oil and has limited the amount customers can buy.

The upshot from all this is that Americans are spending a lot more on fuel in 2026 as compared to 2025. Between March 1 and late September, Americans spent an additional $72 billion on gasoline compared to the same period a year ago, as well as $45 billion more on diesel. That’s $117 billion in additional fuel costs, above and beyond the costs of the war itself, which the Pentagon estimated at $45 billion as of early September.

These shocks are even more acute outside the United States, which is the world’s largest energy producer. South and Southeast Asian countries, which were more reliant on imports from the Persian Gulf than the United States, were hit hard soon after the war broke out. Some of them have had to ration fuel, while others enacted emergency measures like shortening the work or school week to reduce fuel use.

These challenges are now hitting Europe hard as well. On Sept. 20, some 15% of French service stations had reportedly run out of either diesel or gas.

Limited tools left

The international community has already taken most of the measures available to curb oil demand and boost its supply. Those moves have reduced the scale of oil price increases, but they did not prevent them entirely. Now, the toolbox is largely empty, leaving prices on the brink of spiking again.

In March 2026, a coordinated effort among 32 countries released more than 400 million barrels of oil into the global market from those countries’ strategic reserves. Those stockpiles are now substantially depleted, and it is not clear how much additional oil that countries will be willing or even able to release as the war continues.

Since the war began, the United States alone has released 130 million barrels, leaving its reserves at a 40-year low. The U.S. may not be able to release much more without compromising the structural integrity of the salt caverns where the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is stored.

The role of China

China has played the largest role in containing global oil prices to date by releasing official reserves as well as what now seem to be massive additional reserves not previously disclosed to the public. The country reduced its crude oil imports by nearly 50% between February and June 2026.

The increased electrification of the Chinese economy played a key role in reducing Chinese demand for oil during this period. More than 60% of new passenger car sales in China are electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids, and 30% of its heavy truck sales are now electric.

Overall, China’s electrification of its transport sector allowed it to reduce oil consumption by 1.35 million barrels per day in the first half of 2026.

Other countries are looking to China for help as well. The country’s international sales of electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels have skyrocketed, as other countries seek to insulate themselves from oil market shocks.

Less encouragingly when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, China has used more coal to offset oil demand and as an alternative means of petrochemical production as well.

Of perhaps more immediate concern, China’s oil demand is now starting to creep up again, with crude imports rising 6.2% in August 2026 as compared with the previous month. Even if its imports don’t reach prewar levels any time soon, increased Chinese demand, coupled with a tighter oil market, may result in additional price hikes over the next few weeks.

China still has about four to six months of stockpiles, including commercial and strategic reserves, but Beijing may soon seek to gradually restock its inventories, although the Chinese may postpone these purchases if prices continue to soar.

A look ahead

Sustained conflict in Iran – itself a major oil producer – continued disruptions of oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran-linked militias’ disruptions to shipping in the Red Sea could mean the reemergence of the nightmare scenarios analysts envisioned when the fighting began.

It’s not clear if that would translate into simply much higher prices at the pump or turn into 1970s-style shortages, where there’s not enough fuel available at any price and lines stretch around the block at gas stations.

With the 2026 midterm elections looming, the White House will want to avoid that scenario at all costs. But the Trump administration has already released large amounts from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and has rejected policies that would have reduced oil demand, such as stricter fuel economy standards or incentives for electric vehicle adoption.

At this point, Trump has relatively few options available to blunt new price shocks, the effects of which may be visible not just at the pump but also at the ballot box.The Conversation

Joshua Busby, Professor of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin and Greg Pollock, Adjunct Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

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

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Trump races to stop November 10 time bomb

Look around you, and you’ll see rare earth elements at work. A phone vibrates because a magnet moves a weight. Its screen was polished with cerium powder. Its connection to the rest of the world crosses oceans on cables amplified with erbium. If you drove today, a rare earth magnet helped you steer, and a cerium compound scrubbed the exhaust.

All of these devices function because of 17 metals collectively known as rare earth elements. The scientists who gave the group that name in 1794 created a misnomer. Cerium alone is about as common in the Earth’s crust as copper.

However, separating rare earth minerals from one another and from raw ore is intensely difficult. As a result, countries that control the processing of rare earth minerals have a lot of political leverage.

China processes most of the rare earth minerals used around the world, and it isn’t just consumer electronics that depend on Chinese exports. The U.S. military’s F-35 fighter jets and Virginia-class submarines need rare earths too.

I spent years adjudicating war games for the U.S. Navy. War games force players to identify the hidden constraints that render a beautiful plan untenable. Rare earth processing is exactly such a constraint.

China showcased the power of its rare earths leverage with a series of export controls issued in 2025 that it agreed to suspend – at least until Nov. 10, 2026. Controlling the supply enables a government to slow a rival’s growth, or halt it. China’s ability to extend the suspension of its export controls or let them go into effect gives it leverage on the geopolitical stage. In the parlance of Theodore Roosevelt, it’s a very big stick.

How China took the lead

California’s Mountain Pass mine led world production of rare earths until the late 1980s. Multiple instances of radioactive wastewater spilling from the mine into the Mojave Desert made it hard to keep domestic production running.

When China expanded its own mining and sold the processed materials for less, the logic of switching rare earth suppliers was easy.

Mountain Pass’ separation plant closed in 1998, and the mine itself stopped in 2002. MP Materials restarted mining there in 2017 as concern about access to rare earth minerals rose, but the U.S. still imported more than two-thirds of the rare earth elements it used as recently as 2025.

China, which mined about 60% of the world’s rare earth elements used in magnets in 2024, handled about 91% of separation and refining.

Buyers using processing in China got material below the cost of making it themselves, and none of the cleanup bills or the bad press. But they ceded leverage to the processor in exchange. The trade was understood. It just didn’t look as threatening at first from a China that was still rising.

Why rebuilding is slow

The U.S. Government Accountability Office cited estimates in 2010 that rebuilding a domestic supply chain including mining, separation and magnet manufacturing would take as long as 15 years. Actually rebuilding that supply chain has been slow for several reasons.

China runs its plants with thousands of experienced engineers; the U.S. has far fewer experts. Today’s industrial-scale cutting-edge technologies were developed in China, and the government there has no reason to share. Beijing also banned exports of the separation technology itself in December 2023. The Pentagon bought $400 million of preferred stock in rare earth producer MP Materials in 2025, giving it 15% ownership of the company. MP Materials expects its next magnet plant to begin testing the equipment in 2028.

The Commerce Department also signed a letter of intent in 2026 to give a magnet maker, USA Rare Earth, $277 million in direct funding and a $1.3 billion loan, both aimed at developing facilities in Texas and Oklahoma.

But export roadblocks put up by China are making rebuilding that supply chain more difficult.

What happens on Nov. 10

On Oct. 9, 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced six wide-ranging export control measures. One, Announcement No. 61, affects what even factories abroad can export. A factory in Germany or Japan would need a Chinese license to export a product if Chinese-origin rare earths made up 0.1% or more of its value, or if it used Chinese rare earth technology.

After President Donald Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping that month, Beijing suspended six export controls until Nov. 10, 2026, in exchange for Washington pausing its “affiliates rule,” which imposes restrictions on companies that are majority-owned by certain blacklisted firms, for one year.

Both controls snap back into place automatically unless both governments extend their pauses.

What stays in place

Some of the export rules were never suspended, including licensing imposed by China in April 2025 on exports of seven of the heavier rare earths.

Automaker Ford saw how the export controls can affect a company when it had to idle its Chicago assembly plant for a week in May 2025 for want of magnets – critical to speakers and electrical motors – because of the export rules. Ford CEO Jim Farley described his supply as “day to day” because he had no alternate source. Ford was able to resume production only with Beijing’s approval.

On June 22, 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce put 10 U.S. companies on its export control list. Neither Chinese nor foreign firms can sell those companies any goods that have both civilian and military uses. Most of them build drones, radar, aerospace systems and military vehicles. Two of them – MP Materials and USA Rare Earth – are the federally backed American companies furthest along in building a mine-to-magnet chain.

Beijing said its move was a response to a similar move by the Pentagon. My interpretation is that China picked MP Materials and USA Rare Earth because they are best placed to reduce America’s need for Chinese processing.

An extension of the pause on Nov. 10 would honor the truce, but the heavy rare earth licenses and the June 22 ban on the targeted firms would still apply. The truce means both parties get to play nice. It doesn’t mean they are being nice.

Three paths

For the U.S., leaving processing in China is the fastest and cheapest solution, but that leaves it exposed to Beijing’s restrictions.

Rebuilding a U.S. rare earths supply chain would remove most U.S. dependence on China for rare earths and the political leverage it implies. But it would take longer, startup costs run to the billions of dollars and separation produces acidic, and sometimes radioactive, residues.

Building a supply chain with allies such as Australia or Japan, both of which have started to build capacity, would lower the risk of the U.S. being cut off unilaterally. Japan has run this play with some success, but the suspended Chinese rules affect any use of their technology abroad.

President Xi’s Sept. 24, 2026, meeting with Trump may help determine the status of the Nov. 10 restrictions, but the larger conflict over leverage will continue.The Conversation

Charles Edward Gehrke, Sloan Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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

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Three Ts will dominate the Trump‑Xi summit –but don't expect much movement

When Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping last sat down in May 2026, talk was centered on three Ts: trade, technology and Taiwan.

The latest summit, due to begin in the United States on Sept. 24, looks set to focus on the same set of issues again. The main difference will be that the technology element has been given added urgency by the sudden and rapid shift in developments in artificial intelligence.

What’s less clear is whether the two sides will be able to come to any sort of transformative agreement on that, or any other issue.

Tweaks to trade?

The most urgent issue, but also the simplest to solve, will be on trade.

Nearly a year ago at Busan in South Korea, Trump and Xi hammered out an agreement whereby the U.S. agreed to lift some export controls on high-end technology and to reduce the then three-figure tariffs on Chinese goods. For its part, China agreed not to restrict the flow of critical minerals and rare earths to U.S. users.

That pact is now up for renewal. Both sides are likely to want a continuation of the current arrangement, and while there may be some tweaking on the side, the new deal will probably be similar to the old one.

Each side has proposed in previous meetings that there should be a new instrument, a Board of Trade, that will assess non-sensitive U.S.-China business interests.

However, details about the institution remains vague. Some announcements are likely during the summit, but business leaders will want to know how comprehensive and lasting the arrangements for the board will be.

There is still less information on a proposed Board of Investment, which remains on the drawing board. The Chinese side has proposed bringing major Chinese CEOs to the summit to match the likes of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk – both of whom accompanied Trump on the Beijing trip.

But the choice of business leaders is likely to turn on which aspects of trade China thinks are likely to develop most effectively in the short term.

The always thorny issue of Taiwan

Taiwan is a much harder issue to solve, but it’s unlikely that much that is discussed on Xi’s visit will determine its outcome.

Trump has been less willing than his predecessor to commit the U.S. to defending the island should Beijing invade, instead reasserting Washington’s long-held position of strategic ambiguity.

And although the U.S. is currently distracted from East Asia by the Iran conflict, China still prefers to find methods short of war to bring the island under Beijing’s control.

The island’s January 2028 presidential election is likely to be a more crucial moment for Taiwan’s future, particularly if the opposition — and more China-friendly — Kuomintang party wins the presidency, or indeed if an isolationist candidate becomes U.S. president later that year. If the next U.S. president opted to change course by taking a less active involvement in overseas issues — as has been floated by early contenders on both the left and right — that would change things all the more.

For now, Beijing will continue to build the People’s Liberation Army’s naval capacity to have the option of military action against the island. But its preference will be to take advantage of changes within Taiwan’s internal politics while combining economic incentives and coercion, squeezing Taipei’s international footprint and hoping for a slackening of U.S. interest in the western Pacific.

Other international issues are likely to gain less attention. China is expected to make clear its unhappiness about the war on Iran, and the U.S. may remind China that it has passed new legislation allowing sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil – of which, China is the largest purchaser. However, neither issue is likely to lead to any major change in practice.

Turning to tech

It’s really in the area of tech, and AI in particular, where both sides will be trying to make diplomacy catch up with reality. The May summit surprised many because the question of mutual agreement on regulation of AI came up in a way that had not been on the agenda for the first year of the Trump administration.

However, both sides agreed that talks in principle about regulation might be possible and even desirable because of the growth in the importance, but also unpredictability, of AI. And on Sept, 20, the U.S. and China mooted the idea of a “hotline” to notify the other over AI national security risks.

Between the May and September summits, fears about AI in the U.S have created an increasingly unfriendly atmosphere toward unregulated AI.

In China, public sentiment about AI is less openly hostile and some of its major benefits in areas such as healthcare have softened people’s attitudes. Yet there are still plenty of concerns expressed in private about whether China’s troubled economy will definitively benefit from the AI boom. Although many argue it has created new opportunities for consumers, others point to the relatively few jobs that have been created for a workforce that finds itself buffeted by wide-scale job elimination.

Both the U.S. and China have reasons to talk about AI regulation. The alarming prospect of rogue AI companies causing intense social disruptions through their business choices is clearly one such reason, and in the U.S., voters’ more immediate concerns about data centers are another.

There are also China-specific reasons that Beijing may seek restraint. One of the most common concerns about AI is that it may well run out of control. And “out of control” is a kryptonite phrase for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s particularly true of Xi who, as a youth, spent years in rural exile after his father fell to a purge just before the Cultural Revolution – an upheaval during which China’s politics turned to anarchy. It was a formative experience for Xi, which has no doubt influenced his tendencies as a leader toward exercising as much control as possible.

AI that undermines the unchallengeable leadership of the Communist Party would be an unwelcome guest in China’s cyberspace, and regulation that solves that problem would not be rejected out of hand.

However, this recognition of mutual concern about AI – albeit for very different reasons – is still not likely to see much progress in the short term. The competition between the U.S. and China on AI is real, and neither governments nor private sector actors in either country are willing to make concessions that could advantage the other side.

Levels of trust between Washington and Beijing remain very low on the issue. Talks about talks seem the most likely public outcome, though what happens behind the scenes may be pursued more discreetly.

It’s good to talk

The Trump-Xi summit is less important in terms of any major change in policy on either side, and more because it marks part of a commitment to maintain some form of dialogue between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries. The leaders may well meet twice more in the near future, at the G20 and APEC summits.

To meet four times in just over half a year is a good sign; refusal to meet would be much more worrying.

But the underlying difficulties of the three Ts, where the leaders seem to have fundamentally incompatible agendas, remain the thread beneath the ostensibly polite and occasionally amiable conversations.The Conversation

Rana Mitter, Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School

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

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The 1977 legal precedent set to tank the White House crackdown

The president is going after the press again.

On Sept. 19, 2026, journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were denied access to the White House after President Donald Trump revoked their credentials, citing “their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” On social media, Trump posted, “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President.”

This is not Trump’s first attempt at banning journalists from the White House. During his first term, he sought to ban CNN’s Jim Acosta by revoking his credentials following a contentious news conference about the 2018 midterm elections.

In that conflict, CNN quickly filed a lawsuit, arguing that, “If left unchallenged, the actions of the White House would create a dangerous chilling effect for any journalist who covers our elected officials.”

Journalism organizations also responded. The Committee to Protect Journalists, the Radio Television Digital News Association and even Acosta’s peers at The Daily Caller – a right-leaning news outlet – condemned the White House ban.

A federal court granted CNN a temporary injunction – reinstating Acosta’s press pass. The Trump administration later restored Acosta’s credentials, and CNN dropped its lawsuit.

Many commentators and members of the press have called Trump’s latest ban on the three news organizations a violation of the First Amendment.

White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich said on X, “Today’s action revoking access for journalists from CNN, POLITICO, and MSNOW violates the First Amendment.”

Even George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who staunchly supports Republicans and frequently criticizes the press, said on X that the ban “would be an assault on long-honored principles of a free press.”

As Turley and many others have argued over the weekend, Trump’s ban is almost certainly unconstitutional under the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Media law professor Frank LoMonte argued in 2018, “The First Amendment guarantees all Americans freedom to speak and publish without government interference.”

But they may be missing a crucial point. In fact, there’s more than one constitutional right involved in such a case. The judge who restored Acosta’s press pass in 2018 primarily based his ruling on the reporter’s Fifth Amendment rights to due process, not on the First Amendment.

And in my view as a constitutional law professor, it is less clear whether the press has a constitutional right of access to the White House even though past presidents have honored and respected the press’s access to the executive branch.

While several Supreme Court cases, such as Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia, unequivocally provide the press with a right of access to criminal trials, there is no Supreme Court precedent that specifically provides a clear constitutional right of access to the White House.

Make that two constitutional rights

In one case from 1977, Sherrill v. Knight, Robert Sherrill, the Washington correspondent for The Nation, was – after holding press passes over several years – denied a press pass because the Secret Service advised he should not be given one. The Secret Service refused to disclose their justification.

Sherrill sued, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the Secret Service cannot deny a White House press pass absent “narrow and specific standards by which applications are to be judged.”

The court required the White House to provide the press with “notice of the factual bases for denial, an opportunity for (them) to respond to these, and a final written statement of the reasons for denial (of a press pass).”

In the court’s view, these requirements – notice and an opportunity to rebut the bases for the denial of a press pass – are protected by two constitutional guarantees working together, the press protections in the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s protections from arbitrary deprivations of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

In other words, before the federal government can deprive an individual of their life, liberty or property, the federal government must provide that individual with due process, whose purpose is widely accepted as preventing “arbitrary governmental actions.”

Due process is key

There are a number of Supreme Court decisions that could be key in the current journalists’ lawsuit, which was filed on Sept. 21, 2026.

Among them is Mathews v. Eldridge from 1976, in which the Supreme Court stated that due process is flexible depending on the extent of the liberty or property interest at stake. But in general, the justices said, due process requires the government to provide notice to the individual and an opportunity for the individual to present their case before the deprivation occurs.

In Sherrill v. Knight from 1977, the court ruled that the denial of a press pass implicated a First Amendment liberty interest. That interest, the court wrote, “undoubtedly qualifies as liberty which may not be denied without due process of law under the fifth amendment.”

This nuance – the First and Fifth Amendment working in tandem – is what most commentators and critics are missing in their response to the recent ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico. In fact, these outlets collectively lead with their claim that the Trump administration violated their Fifth Amendment right to due process in their lawsuit to block Trump’s ban.

“Even if attending a White House event is not a constitutionally guaranteed right, that doesn’t mean the government is free to take it away as punishment,” LoMonte argued in 2018.

Based on public reporting, it is clear that the Trump administration did not provide CNN, MS NOW or Politico with clear written notice stating the reasons for the revocation of their press passes. It certainly did not provide the outlets with an opportunity to rebut Trump’s unsupported claim that they report “FICTION and LIES.”

The same Trump-appointed judge who decided the CNN Acosta case has been assigned to the latest press ban case. So, if the CNN Acosta case is any indication, I expect the federal judge to promptly, but temporarily, reinstate the news outlets’ press passes while Trump tries to argue that his actions are constitutional, which in my view, they are not.The Conversation

Wayne Unger, Associate Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University

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

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Whispers of the Nerd Reich: Inside Trump’s impending 'moment of reckoning'

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” reads a recent recruitment ad for Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm that increasingly provides data-driven “intelligence” for intelligence, police and military agencies – as well as blue-chip corporations and non-profits. “On the factory floor, in the operating room, across the battlefield,” the ad intones, “we build to dominate.”

How do we make sense of this convergence between advanced technologies and unapologetic violence, between “rational” AI and a primordial view of the world that seems to revert to a language of blood and soil, friends and enemies, “us” and “them”? In op-eds, talk shows, and political analyses, a single word has risen to prominence: fascism.

As a term, “fascism” is highly provocative, but seemingly untimely. It conjures up powerful images of jackbooted throngs of followers repeating chants and salutes, visions of black-lettered and blood-red banners. Yet these images are typically associated with political orders from a century ago in interwar Europe, a dusty relic from a previous age where “evil” was identified and annihilated.

So what is fascism in the present? How can it help explain contemporary technological, social and political dynamics? Two recent books attempt to diagnose these conditions: End Times Fascism And the Fight for the Living World by writer Naomi Klein and filmmaker Astra Taylor, and The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by journalist Gil Durán.

End times fascism

For Klein and Taylor, what we see now is not a repetition but an evolution. Fascist ideologies have been injected into a broader apocalyptic vision.

“End times fascism is a fascism embedded in an understanding that something immense is ending, and it responds to this discomfiting truth with unabashed cruelty,” they write.

In this vision, it is taken for granted that our economic, institutional and environmental systems are collapsing. Financial inequality is surging, with unaffordable houses and skyrocketing cost-of-living. Ecologies are crumbling, with earth systems hitting planetary limits. And that’s just a few of these stacked crises.

But an apocalyptic mindset, grounded in fundamentalist religion, stresses that crisis is not to be fixed, but fast tracked. Dysfunction and disorder are necessary to arrive at something more glorious, the labour pains to a great rebirth. Here, apocalyptic religion and political fascism agree: the current world is corrupt and cannot be saved; it must be burned to the ground and remade from scratch – or escaped altogether, for a greater paradise.

For its proponents, the end times are here — and only by embracing and accelerating this winner-takes-all transition will the chosen elite assure they can survive and even thrive.

Klein and Taylor follow this thread across three core sections.

Messianic Dreams traces the birth and rise of the Zionist dream, through to its present vision of genocidal reset in Gaza – where the glorious next stage of one society is built on the ashes of another. The authors explain these moves are not just about “righteous revenge” or “national security”, but have a distinct cosmological goal: to “move us all significantly closer to the prophesied end of times.”

Escape to the Cloud unpacks big tech’s fervent faith in AI superintelligence and the double-edged utopia or dystopia it would usher in. Here, claims of existential risk resulting from “the singularity” – where AI becomes sentient and human/machine norms break down – are essentially self-serving, directing investment and attention to tech development. They prop up the power of the already powerful.

(These claims of existential risk, which have been around for a long time, have been big news recently, with warnings from everyone from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to former AI staff and the “Godfather of AI”.)

And Prepper Nation steps through the push to bunker the United States against future threats and deport the alien others who are corrupting its purity. Here, elites ride out the apocalypse by establishing their own tech infrastructures, ethnostates, finance streams, and even their own (literal) bunkers.

For Klein and Taylor, fighting end times fascism starts with fighting its core premise that the world is doomed: a sinking ship beyond saving. They locate hope in embracing “hereness” and “staying”, rather than leaving. Their plea is to embrace our broken reality and engage in the slow, messy work of improving it – rather than abandoning it (and democracy) to a scorched earth authoritarian order.

Zohran Mamdani – the progressive mayor of New York City, who pulled off a remarkable grassroots campaign and embraces the city’s diverse foods, festivals and communities – is held up as a champion of this “here and now” mentality.

End Times Fascism is a thoughtful and engaging read that deftly weaves journalism into a cohesive premise about our current political condition.

The authors deserve particular praise for making careful distinctions between the distorted versions of Judeo–Christianity weaponised by fascist entrepreneurs – a blend of Holy war and culture war fought by the Chosen – and mainstream understandings of doctrine.

Indeed, as the book explains, it was longstanding Christian injunctions to love thy neighbour – including the migrant – that partially motivated Minnesota’s antifascist pushback to ICE deportations. Churches and faith organisations took part in protests, set up community kitchens and offered aid. Far-right fundamentalists, by contrast, cherry-pick the Bible passages they like, while ignoring core injunctions to “act justly, walk humbly, and love mercy” (Micah 6:8): to embrace the stranger, rather than expel them as Other.

Yet if the book represents the best of popular journalism, it also comes with its limitations. Klein and Taylor are resolutely focused on people, places and events, rather than attempting to unpack their ideologies in a more systemic way. The result is that end times fascism becomes linked to the actions of egotistical and powerful men, from politicians to tech titans. US President Donald Trump in particular is the common thread, appearing over and over again throughout.

So when Klein and Taylor suggest, at the end of the book, that end times fascism is not about Trump, and will continue when these men disappear, their claim runs against the book’s premise. Place powerful elites to one side, and end times fascism becomes difficult to envision. What does it look like when it moves off the front page and out of elite hands in everyday contexts?

Nerd Reich

In Nerd Reich, reporter Gil Durán, a longtime San Francisco resident, looks to Silicon Valley. He focuses on how “the world’s richest men are building a new political order.” Durán’s primary antagonist is Peter Thiel (who also appears in End Times Fascism), the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir: “a man fusing business, politics and religion into one terrifying bundle of power”.

For Durán and others, Thiel is the lynchpin for a new breed of Silicon Valley-driven fascism, whether concretely (through donations) or ideologically (through his books and speeches). Thiel has increasingly moved beyond the tech world to offer political diagnoses and future visions that find sympathetic ears in elite circles.

Where do these ideas come from? Durán suggests they can be traced back to the Sovereign Individual, a 1997 book of future predictions based on the transition to the information age, by former Times (UK) editor William Rees-Mogg and financial advisor James Dale Davidson. Strangely, Durán never really carries out a close reading of this book he regards as an ur-text. Instead, he chooses to highlight some key claims and its general reception.

Durán’s circle of rich fascists ranges from technologists to politicians. It includes well-known figures like Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. But it also features lesser-known figures, like cryptocurrency entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who wants Silicon Valley to carry out an “ultimate exit” from the US altogether, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who elevates the acceleration of “techno-capital” and denigrates democracy.

Each of them, in their own way, has leveraged wealth from the finance and tech industry to grab political and social influence and push forward their vision of society and the state.

What exactly is fascist about these individuals and their ideas? For Durán, tech fascism “bundles powerful technologies” like AI, crypto and social media “towards authoritarian goals” that benefit a “small, interconnected group of oligarchs”. They wish to privatise what is public and “eliminate democracy”, he writes.

And yet the book lacks a deeper or more systemic unpacking of tech fascism. What are its core values? How do these technologies actually carry out authoritarian goals? And what might this mean beyond power games in a US bubble?

The closest we get to answers is two breezy paragraphs on page 240. They tell us tech fascism “updates this ideology for the AI age” by controlling “reality through algorithms” and launching the “next generation of killer robot drones”. And it’s all driven by a venture capital system that has “run out of unicorns and must now hunt Antichrists to meet its unquenchable thirst for acceleration”.

The strength and weakness of Nerd Reich, then, rests on its journalistic approach. Drawing on a decade of newsroom experience, Durán weaves in insider knowledge of Silicon Valley.

He provides a play-by-play of San Francisco City Council election manipulation, for instance, where a flood of Big Tech money aimed to flip local politics from progressive to conservative. And he serves it all up with visceral language — like “an image dripping in fascist cosplay” — that leaves no doubt as to how he views these men and their manoeuvrings.

The downside of this approach is that chapters fragment into dozens of “human interest” style vignettes, with only a gossamer-thin thread to connect them.

The reader wades through a whirlwind tour of names, dates and places. Garry Tan, CEO of venture capital incubator Y Combinator. Sam Bankman-Fried and his fraudulent FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Michelle Stephens and her Acts 17 organisation, which hosts events hoping to bridge technology and Christianity. Bryan Johnson, who believes he can live forever via products like his own bespoke “snake oil” elixir. And Curtis Yarvin, the political blogger whose illiberal ideas have found traction in Washington.

In each case, we get titbits without a deeper throughline. How exactly does a long backstory on Yarvin — including his love life and use of psychedelics — shed light on his increasingly influential ideas about remaking the state as a startup? The reader must draw their own conclusions.

Technofascism and everyday people

In both these books, the lens could be described as the Big Man – the powerful politician, swaggering tech founder, or deep-pocketed venture capitalist who can leverage their immense resources to transform their visions into fascistic realities. This cast of strong antagonists lends itself to strong storytelling — concrete people who can be pointed to and called out.

But this focus on unsavoury elites leaves some key questions unanswered. Where did these fascist energies originate? How have they been updated? What are the grievances and desires at the heart of this ideology? And how are these values packaged, narrated and circulated in ways that make them compelling to everyday people?

Today, we are surrounded by platforms, models and algorithms that hold up a vision of reason and rationality. Yet politically, we see a return to myth, bigotry and barbarism. These twin forces are not a paradox but a program. Technofascism leverages advanced technology to bolster authoritarian ideals and regressive values that carve up the world along bloodlines, gender lines and borderlines.

But how do these twin forces prop each other up? What role does the “techno” in technofascism play? I see three core functions.

Technology augments, providing a practical outworking of fascist visions by operationalising difference and domination. Palantir’s data-driven deportation partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a perfect recent example of transforming fascist ideals into a concrete program of platforms, software and servers that can be leased and run.

Secondly, technology alienates. It creates a vacuum of meaning that is filled by powerful mythologies that address grievances and reimpose order on the world. Meta-narratives like the Great Replacement Theory, suggesting non-white immigrants are replacing white populations, translate complex crises into tangible figures. Anti-immigration marches in Australia were a recent troubling example. They transformed a complex set of pressures — from rising costs of living to climate anxieties — into a powerful myth with a single scapegoat: the migrant.

Finally, technology manipulates. It creates environments that leverage desire while cultivating fascist ideologies over time. Manosphere influencers translate misogyny, insecurity and xenophobia into viral packages of content. Ex-radicals describe a pipeline effect where media played a key role in nudging them towards more right-wing stances. Eventually, they arrived at violent, dehumanising visions that can only be described as fascist.

Together, these books shed light on the fascistic energies that increasingly seem to permeate our present moment. This is not a problem for other places and times, but one that confronts us here and now.

As one scholar stressed after three decades of researching authoritarian personalities: “I study normal folks, not Nazis.” Grasping the core logic of this fascist phenomenon is the first step in combating and countering it.The Conversation

Luke Munn, Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland

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

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The real reason the Supreme Court blocked Trump and the Postal Service

Mail voting in the 2026 midterm elections will go on as usual – now that the Trump administration’s major efforts to disrupt how Americans vote by mail have been blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Postal Service had recently implemented new rules placing unprecedented restrictions on the practice of mail voting in federal elections. State officials and voting rights organizations immediately challenged these rules, arguing that the executive agency has no authority under the U.S. Constitution to unilaterally regulate election practices.

On Sept. 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court signaled agreement with these claims, voting 7-2 to uphold a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the new rules that will likely remain in place through the November midterm elections.

The controversy began in March 2026, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order designed to ensure “integrity in federal elections.” The executive order — among other things — mandates that the U.S. Postal Service, or USPS, implement uniform ballot and envelope requirements for mail and absentee ballots used in federal elections.

The order also required states to provide the Postal Service, 60 days prior to Election Day, with lists of all voters eligible to vote by mail or absentee. If a ballot sent via mail didn’t comply with the USPS’ requirements, or was sent by somebody not on a state-provided list, the order instructed the USPS to not deliver the ballot, effectively canceling that vote.

Two lawsuits challenging the executive order were immediately filed in federal court, one by state officials and the other by voting rights organizations.

Their arguments were straightforward: The president does not possess unilateral authority to alter the methods of voting in federal elections. Rather, the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution vests the authority to regulate the “time, place, and manner” of federal elections in the states and, if it chooses to act, Congress.Federal judge rules against administration

The two lawsuits were heard by the same federal district court judge in Boston, who ultimately agreed with the plaintiffs and issued injunctions against the federal government. Those injunctions forbade the president and all relevant federal officials and agencies, including the USPS, from carrying out any aspects of the executive order regarding mail and absentee voting.

The lawsuit led by state officials ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court, which on Aug. 24 voted 6-3 along ideological lines in favor of the Trump administration. The court did not decide on the constitutional issues raised in the case but instead found that the states lacked the injury necessary to have standing to bring the case. The court reasoned that because the USPS had yet to implement the executive order, the states were not yet affected by it.

At the same time, the USPS began writing the rules and processes governing how it would carry out the executive order. These steps blatantly violated the remaining injunction in the voting rights organizations’ lawsuit. But the district court judge ended up dissolving that injunction on Aug. 26 in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in the other case.

That same day, the USPS officially published its new rules for mail ballots.

Widespread confusion

The USPS rules contained three key provisions.

First, states must design their ballot envelopes in accordance with USPS requirements, and the envelopes must be submitted to the USPS for final approval. Second, state and local election officials must input voters qualified to vote by mail or absentee into a USPS-run electronic portal at least 30 days before the date of a federal election. Lastly, any mailed ballot that does not adhere to the design requirements, or that is sent by somebody not on the USPS’ electronic portal, “will not be accepted” by the USPS.

These rules led to widespread confusion among election officials, who remained uncertain about how to apply them to the 2026 midterm elections. For one, the rules laid out no clear deadline for USPS approval of envelope designs. Moreover, the electronic portal’s 30-day deadline conflicted with state voter registration deadlines, with all states allowing individuals to register to vote at some point within 30 days of Election Day, and many far later.

Election officials were also left wondering how to adhere to these rules under such short notice. Some states, such as North Carolina, have already distributed mail ballots to voters. Election officials in Utah were meanwhile considering setting up their own distribution centers to bypass the USPS rules.

Following the USPS rules’ enactment, the plaintiffs from the original two lawsuits renewed their constitutional challenge, arguing that they now had standing to sue.

On Sept. 4, the federal district court issued a new preliminary injunction pausing the implementation or enforcement of the USPS rules. The court, in short, found that the USPS likely infringed upon Congress’ and the states’ Elections Clause powers.

On Sept. 6, the federal government petitioned to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a stay – or pause – on the preliminary injunction.

In its petition, the government contended that the USPS rules do not unduly impede states’ administration of elections but rather “impose reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.” The petition elicited 20 amicus briefs, largely in opposition to the USPS, including one signed by seven Republican chief election officials detailing the impracticality of the USPS rules.

On Sept. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately voted to uphold the preliminary injunction, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting.

In one brief paragraph, the court stated that the federal government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge,” suggesting that a supermajority of the court believes the USPS exceeded its constitutional authority. Given that the litigation is still ongoing in district court, though, the Supreme Court did not issue any final decision on the merits of the parties’ claims.

Practically speaking, this ruling likely settles the question of whether the USPS rules will have any impact on the midterm elections in November.

With less than two months until Election Day, and a preliminary injunction remaining in effect with the Supreme Court’s endorsement, the federal government’s hands are tied until the litigation over the issue fully plays out in the federal district court.

By the time that happens, the country may already be looking ahead toward the 2028 presidential election.The Conversation

John J. Martin, Assistant Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University

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The one issue single-handedly crushing the GOP's hopes of keeping Congress

In Nate Silver’s forecast model, Democrats are more likely than not to gain control of the US federal Senate at November 3 midterm elections, and strongly favored to gain control of the House of Representatives. Donald Trump’s net approval is close to -20.

If disruption caused by the Iran war continues until the midterm elections, with increased petrol prices and inflation, Republicans are likely to lose control of both the House and the Senate, possibly with huge losses.

However, if the disruption eases again and petrol prices fall back, I believe Republicans will do better than they are now and would be favourites to retain control of the Senate.

I can say this because Trump’s net approval and the generic ballot were better for Republicans in early September, before the current fighting began.

Trump’s ratings

In analyst Nate Silver’s aggregate of US national polls, Trump’s net approval is -19.7. Currently, 58.2% disapprove of his performance and 38.5% approve.

Trump’s net approval was -20.4 in my August 12 article. It had improved to -18.7 on September 4 before falling back.

Trump’s net approval is below what any past president since Harry Truman had at this point in their term, with Trump’s first term the closest at -13.1.

On four issues tracked by Silver, Trump’s net approval is -12.2 on immigration, -26.1 on trade, -30.8 on the economy and -46.4 on inflation. Since my August 12 article, Trump’s net approval on trade and inflation have dropped 2–4 points, while his net approval on immigration has been relatively stable. His ratings on the economy had improved before another slump.

Silver also has an aggregate of US support for the Iran war. Currently, 55.7% are opposed to the Iran war while 35.6% support it, for a net support of -20.1, down slightly from -19.6 in my August 12 article.

Midterm elections on November 3

All 435 federal House of Representatives seats and 35 of the 100 senators will be up for election at November 3 midterm elections.

In 2024 elections, Republicans won the House by 220–215 over Democrats and the Senate by 53–47. Owing to Vice President JD Vance’s potential tie-breaking vote, Democrats need at least a four-seat gain to win Senate control.

I previously wrote that, owing to Republican gerrymandering, Democrats need at least a four-point margin in the generic ballot to have a good chance to win the House majority. The Senate is more skewed to Republicans as every state has two senators. Democrats need a double-digit margin in the generic ballot to win the Senate on a uniform swing.

In Silver’s midterm election forecast model, the generic ballot gives Democrats a 50.8–42.7 lead over Republicans, an 8.2-point margin (8.1 points in my August 12 article). Democrats’ lead had dropped to 7.4 points on September 4.

Polls that screen for likely voters usually give Democrats larger leads than polls that ask registered voters. Democrats are more likely to vote at lower turnout elections like the midterms than Republicans, when Trump is not on the ballot.

Silver’s model gives Democrats a 57% chance to win the Senate and an 86% chance to win the House, the same chances as on August 12. Democratic chances to win the Senate had fallen to a low of 50% on September 7, and their chances of winning the House had dropped to 81% on September 3.

While uniform swing indicates that Democrats need a double-digit margin in the generic ballot to win control of the Senate, Silver’s model has Democrats as the favourites to win with a 6–7 point margin in the generic ballot. In the House, Democrats are favourites if they win by 3–4 points.

Democrats have effectively gained a House seat in Missouri after courts annulled a Republican gerrymander. That gerrymander had given Republicans a 7–1 advantage from Missouri’s eight House districts, but Republicans now only have a 6–2 advantage.

Democrats have leads of one to four points in Senate contests in Texas, Ohio and Alaska and are tied at 45.8% each with Republicans in Iowa. Trump won all these states by double-digit margins in 2024. This explains why Democrats are the slight favourites to gain control of the Senate.

In Democratic-held Michigan, left-wing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed trailed Republican Mike Rogers by 1.6 points in my August 12 article, but he now leads by 2.9 points.

The two key items that could go wrong for Democrats are a markedly improved economy by November for most Americans – not just the stock market – and a systematic error in which Republicans overperform the polls.

Economic data

The US August jobs report (released September 4) was good news for Trump. In the establishment survey, 162,000 jobs were added, and June and July numbers were revised up a combined 55,000, turning July from 23,000 jobs lost to 21,000 gained.

In the household survey, the unemployment rate was unchanged since July at 4.1%, but both the participation rate and employment population ratio were up 0.2%, to 61.6% and 59.1% respectively. In July, the employment population ratio had dropped to its lowest since September 2021.

While August was an improvement, the US employment population ratio is still far lower than in Australia, where it was 63.9% in July.

In the August inflation report (released last Friday), overall inflation increased 0.4% and core inflation increased 0.3%, compared with 0.1% and 0.2% increases respectively in July. Annual inflation rates were respectively 3.4% and 2.4%.

Real hourly wages decreased 0.1% in August, but real weekly wages were up 0.2% owing to an increase in weekly hours. In the last year, real hourly wages are down 0.3%, but real weekly wages are up 0.3%.

July was the first month since January where personal income exceeded expenditure, mainly due to a drop in expenditure. The personal savings rate increased 0.3% since June to 3.0% after falling in every month from February to June.

The benchmark US S&P stock market index was up 0.9% in last Friday’s session, breaking a run of four straight losing sessions. The S&P is down 1.8% from its August 13 peak, but up 10.2% from its peak in the week before the Iran war began in late February. It’s up 16.2% from its worst point in the Iran war in late March.The Conversation

Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

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The unanimous Supreme Court precedent keeping Trump out of jail

In his keynote address to the Republican midterm convention on Sept. 9, 2026, President Donald Trump promised that if Republicans retain control of Congress in November, he would authorize a US$5,000 payment to every American adult.

Trump’s offer seems to run afoul of federal laws, which make it a crime to pay for votes.

After Trump’s speech, political commentator Sam Stein posted on X: “trump openly bribing people to vote for republicans. $5k per person if republicans hold the house and the senate?”

Stein was not alone in referencing bribery. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, issued the following statement after Trump’s speech: “Trump knows he can’t do this, and yet he’s attempting to bribe voters with the false promise of cash to help his party win an election.”

But as a scholar of political and legal rhetoric, I think it’s worth further examining what the president said and whether his promise violated any law.

An American tradition

Paying voters to support a particular candidate, or promising government jobs in exchange for votes, has a long history in the United States. It was a staple of machine politics in big cities starting in the late 19th century.

The political scholar Simeon Nichter argues that it would be better to describe these practices as examples of “turnout buying.” He notes that “observers in various U.S. cities have complained that some politicians use ‘street money’ – small, unreported cash payments ostensibly used for legal get-out-the-vote efforts such as canvassing and transporting voters – as direct payments for turnout.”

What Nichter describes has made a comeback in our era.

Recall Elon Musk’s effort to ensure a Republican victory in a 2025 state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. He spent millions in that effort and, as The Associated Press reported, offered “$1 million to people who voted in the Supreme Court election” to encourage them to vote.

In July 2026, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found enough evidence to refer citizen complaints about Musk’s behavior to a district attorney, “which can choose,” as the AP notes, “to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery.”

A month later, a state prosecutor said he could not prove Musk’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and would not bring charges.

Federal law

Because state and federal laws differ, we can’t extrapolate from the Wisconsin decision to Trump’s $5,000 promise.

Two provisions of federal law relating to vote buying were adopted by Congress and became law in 1948. Both treated that practice as a form of election interference.

The first reads as follows: “Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote; Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned … or both.”

The second prohibits offering government benefits “to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any … election to any political office.”

Both provisions focus on the use of money or the promise of benefits to get individuals to vote in a particular way.

But Trump did not make his offer to any particular voter or set of voters. And, unlike Musk, he was acting as a public figure. The president’s promise was directed to all voters, not just to those who vote Republican.

John Day, a former federal prosecutor, compared Trump’s “dividend” to a pledge to deliver a tax break. “A promise to lower taxes also gives voters a financial reason to support a candidate, but that does not, by itself, make the promise a bribe,” Day told The New York Times.

Supreme Court precedent

In 1982, in Brown v. Hartlage, the Supreme Court weighed in on the legality of political figures promising financial benefits to voters. It found nothing wrong with the practice so long as the benefit was not offered as a quid pro quo to a particular voter.

Writing for a unanimous court, Justice William Brennan said that a political candidate “no less than any other person, has a First Amendment right to engage in the discussion of public issues and vigorously and tirelessly to advocate his own election and the election of other candidates.”

In his view, that right includes making statements about financial gains voters might receive if a candidate or a party wins an election, as long as they were “made openly and were subject to the criticism of his political opponent and to the scrutiny of the voters.” Such statements, Brennan added, were different from “corrupting private agreements and solicitations historically recognized as unprotected by the First Amendment.”

The Hartlage decision remains the applicable precedent today.

A year after the court’s decision, however, legal scholars Peter Aranson and Kenneth Shepsle argued that the Supreme Court decision countered several lower court decisions that had treated promises of the kind the high court approved “as analogous to bribes, which would turn the citizenry’s attention away from ‘proper’ public policy issues.”

Trump may view the question of whether Republicans retain control of Congress as just such an issue.

Beyond legality

Whatever Trump’s view, commentators have observed that in Trump’s world, relationships are transactional. It is the deal that counts, not the values it promotes or undermines. So, the importance of Trump’s cash offer goes beyond the legal question of whether it is bribery, vote buying or a legitimate political promise.

It’s worth focusing attention on the virtues and vices of the transactional approach to politics, what it does to the character of U.S. political life and to the way Americans see the world.

One of Trump’s critics, the former presidential speechwriter Peter Wehner, describes what he calls “the great civic danger posed by Donald Trump” this way: “that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts: that his code of conduct becomes ours.”

Whether or not he is right, Wehner points Americans to a domain beyond law as the right place to assess the president’s promise of a “Trump Dividend.”The Conversation

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

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Plato warned us about tyrants —and Trump is following the script perfectly

Despite being divided on most issues, an overwhelming majority of Americans agree that their democracy is in a state of crisis or facing serious challenges.

A few of the symptoms of the problem: Close allies see the U.S. as a threat to peace. Immigration raids by poorly trained federal agents have terrorized cities. President Donald Trump claims that only his own sense of morality limits his power. The Trump administration has politicized the Justice Department, and many of Trump’s political nominees refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

Plato warned that an unhealthy democracy can easily fall prey to a tyrant. As a scholar of American government, I see dishonest leaders, an environment of declining trust and a cultural penchant for violence as symptoms of Plato’s scenario.

The courts, which research suggests are ineffective at instituting significant political change, cannot adequately counter today’s democratic crisis. So what can?

One thing I’ve learned over two decades is that when it comes to the fundamentals of democracy, political science is not rocket science. A healthy democracy requires educated citizens, including a free press and an engaged public.

A decline in reason

American government is supposed to be run by the people with what Founding Father James Madison called their “cool and deliberate” sense in charge. This ideal vision of democracy requires that citizens consider various sides of an argument before coming to a decision.

But the modern era is one of misinformation and so-called alternative facts. Only 1 in 5 Americans think Republicans and Democrats can agree on basic facts.

The American experiment tested whether a government could be founded on reason. But that requires a common understanding of an objective reality.

A decline in trust

Trust in government has fallen. Only 17% of Americans now trust Washington to do what is right most of the time, among the lowest readings since polling began in 1958, when 73% said they did.

That matters because, according to the Pew Research Center, “trust is associated with better-functioning democratic institutions” – and it’s not just trust in the government that’s declining.

Americans’ trust in the media to report “fully, accurately and fairly” is at an all-time low, with only 28% expressing a great deal or fair amount of trust in newspapers, television and radio. In fact, adults under 30 years old now trust social media as much as they trust national news organizations.

Americans have not only lost trust in fundamental institutions of democracy but also each other: Only 34% of adults believe “most people can be trusted,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Meanwhile, 83% of Americans say the country has turned away from its founding ideals, and 37% believe violence may be necessary “to get the nation back on track,” according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.

In times of turmoil, it is tempting to seek change in what Abraham Lincoln called the “mobocratic spirit,” through which mobs would “throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure.” His remedy, however – as someone who had received minimal formal schooling – was a better educated citizenry that followed facts and reason instead of their base passions.

A more informed voter

Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in part because he believed only educated citizens could make self-government succeed.

Political behavior scholarship typically measures education by a person’s level of formal schooling. By that measure, education is the most consistent predictor of political knowledge, and people with more of it are more likely to vote. In 2024, turnout for those with an undergraduate degree was 77%, compared with 53% for high school graduates.

Conversely, lower education levels are linked to belief in conspiracy theories and less esteem for journalists.

The media under threat

The media is itself a source of education. Journalists report on governmental affairs and act as watchdogs, exposing abuse and corruption.

Today, though, the press is under siege.

Trump has called the press an enemy of the people. Since 2017, there have been more than 1,400 incidents of physical violence against journalists, most of them committed by law enforcement. The Justice Department has subpoenaed journalists and pushed them to testify about their newsgathering, a move First Amendment advocates say chills reporting.

Americans trust local news outlets more than national organizations, but local newspapers are dying at alarming rates.

As more people get their news from social media instead of professional reporters, and as local news outlets close or consolidate with larger organizations, I believe political polarization will increase.

The true corrective

Ultimately, Americans get the government they deserve, as politicians tend to represent what voters want.

The 47th speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, once said, “All politics is local,” by which he meant things get done wherever the people are. That too is where I believe the corrective starts: a voter informed enough to think critically and to argue with opponents on the merits of public policy rather than attack them.

In 1820, replying to an argument that courts were the ultimate check on abuses of constitutional power, Jefferson wrote there is “no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.” Education, he explained, is the “true corrective.”

What’s next?

To be sure, if education is the solution, then a conversation about what it means to be educated has to come first – and that is not a simple problem to solve.

Whether – and where – someone went to college has become a partisan marker. There is currently a diploma divide in the U.S.: White voters without a college degree mostly support Republicans, while those with one mostly support Democrats. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of Republican representatives and senators who attended elite institutions fell from 40% to 15%, and from 55% to 35%, respectively.

But facts are the same at an Ivy League school, a public university or the local pub. Whatever being educated means – and it does not necessarily mean simply going to college – it must include the ability to distinguish between one’s personal ideological passions and objective facts.

“Passion has helped us; but can do so no more,” Lincoln warned before the Civil War. “It will in future be our enemy.”The Conversation

Kenneth Michael White, Associate Professor of Political Science & Criminal Justice, Kennesaw State University

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The voting battle's explosive twist: Legal maneuver gridlocks Trump's plan

The Trump administration’s proposal to crack down on voting by mail in federal elections – articulated in a March 2026 executive order – faces its toughest legal test so far, as the Supreme Court decides whether to allow the measure to go ahead, or maintains a lower court’s block on its implementation.

Despite offering no evidence of widespread fraud, the White House has said the many measures it wants to put in place will “enhance election integrity via the United States Mail.” Those measures include using the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Justice to vet the eligibility of voters, establish new standards for mail ballots and who can use them, and investigate and prosecute any state and local officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters, including noncitizens.

Two major lawsuits were filed to stop the administration from carrying out plans related to the Postal Service. The lawsuits say the plans would result in widespread disenfranchisement and that the administration had no constitutionally granted authority to interfere in how states run elections.

The cases have worked their way through lower courts, and now the Supreme Court is considering the plans for the second time, having allowed them on Aug. 24, 2026, to go ahead in a technical decision that did not deal with the substance of the administration’s plans. A federal court then issued an injunction to stop the rollout of the Postal Service plans, and after the Trump administration appealed that injunction, the Supreme Court is now, finally, considering whether the injunction should be lifted and the administration’s plan regarding new mail-in ballot rules can be carried out. The Conversation U.S. Politics and Legal Affairs Editor Naomi Schalit spoke about the importance of the legal battle with John E. Jones III, the president of Dickinson College, who served for almost two decades as a federal court judge.

Schalit: I’d like to talk less about the legal issues and more with you about the importance of this case. I thought I’d start with a really obnoxious kind of question that I have never asked before in my whole career: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most important and 1 being the least, how important is this?

Jones: Ultimately, the decision in this case is at least a 9, if not a 10. It has the potential, if decided in a certain way, to interfere with the franchise of voting in a way that the federal government has never attempted to do, and certainly the president has never attempted to do before. It literally could disenfranchise thousands and thousands of voters, depending on where the decision lands.

Has it happened before that such a momentous case with potential ramifications for voting has come to the Supreme Court this close to an election? The midterms are less than 60 days away.

I can’t think of any historical analog to this case. My overarching sense from a process standpoint is that it didn’t have to be this way. The Supreme Court could have decided it on the first go-round, when it rendered the decision that allowed the order to go ahead by staying the injunction from the lower court and would not address the merits of the challenger’s claims.

You’re a former federal judge. You understand the culture, how things work. How will the justices approach consideration of this case?

The Supreme Court doesn’t convene its term until October. It is not uncommon for the justices to sort of scatter and do different things. Some teach, some lecture, some write books, some probably relax during the break. That creates some logistical difficulties when there needs to be a coalescing of the members of the court.

The briefs are immediately due, and it does not appear that they’re going to have oral argument, since this is coming off the so-called shadow or emergency docket.

Given all those things, and the urgency with which some resolution is required in light of the upcoming election, I am going to go out on a judicial limb and say that I think what the court will likely do is engage in an exercise in balancing. We call it a balancing of the equities. To determine whether one side or the other will suffer irreparable harm.

In other words, who is harmed more? That’s what happens when you enter an injunction. You have to weigh the equities. That’s what courts do.

So it would be easy to see that the justices could say that, because of state elections apparatus, the states stand to be harmed more than the administration if this kind of patched-together regime is implemented by the Postal Service. They could say, in fact, it may be impossible to implement it in time for the midterm elections.

I think it is highly possible that they will deny a stay of the lower court’s injunction and not allow the executive order to be implemented, at least the part involving the U.S. Postal Service, which is the problematic part in terms of this election. And they may not rule on the constitutionality of the executive order until sometime after the election, perhaps after they conduct oral argument and they have an opportunity to more thoroughly consider the case.

So instead of entering this discussion thinking about whether the executive order was constitutional, they would be beginning their consideration by looking at the very immediate problems that may be caused by it, and asking, “Where’s the greatest damage going to be done if we let this go on or if we stop it?”

That’s precisely correct. An injunction or a temporary restraining order is not a decision on the merits of a case. When a court enters an injunction or vacates an injunction, the court has got to look at where the greater harm occurs if it acts and when it acts.

The government’s argument, which is that the greater harm is to our democracy because of the potential for fraud and for noncitizens to vote, is not supported by the record in this case.

From the standpoint of the challengers, they assert the almost sheer impossibility of implementing this. In fact, there are major logistical problems. It appears that the Postal Service is cobbling the process together on the run, so to speak.

I think the court might say that the public interest and equities lead us to say that we’re just going to deny the stay and thus keep the injunction in place. It’s not workable for this election. But we will reserve for another day – another election, so to speak – whether in fact the executive order is unconstitutional.The Conversation

John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

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

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Trump targets the 60-year 'Star Trek' legacy that built modern NASA

“Star Trek” began as a television series but grew into a cultural phenomenon.

When it premiered in 1966, no one could have predicted that it would lead to more than a dozen spinoff shows, more than a dozen movies and one of the most enduring fandoms in popular culture.

“Star Trek” is also unusual for its close connections to NASA, both in its storylines and in the real world. Decades of “Star Trek” adventures have ignited a love of spaceflight across generations, inspiring many who now work as space professionals.

I’m a cultural anthropologist who studies why people work in space exploration. I’ve interviewed astronomers, engineers, flight surgeons and astronauts. Although I focus more on science fact than science fiction, I’ve noticed in my interviews how much the two threads intertwine.

Because of this, I found myself at a “Star Trek” convention in early August 2026, just ahead of the show’s 60th anniversary on Sept. 8. The convention participants included people of widely different ages, appearances and identities. I was struck by just how much those gathered reflected the series’ values.

When NASA met Star Trek

In the original series, the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, came up with a philosophy held by the Vulcan people. He called it IDIC: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It suggests that an ideal society is made up of many different types, all working together.

It represented Roddenberry’s rejection of conformity. It also explained why the Enterprise crew included a Russian alongside Americans, and Black, Japanese and female characters all in positions of responsibility and authority. While many ordinary viewers absorbed “Star Trek’s” lessons of camaraderie and acceptance, those involved in real space exploration also took notice.

A black-and-white photo of four characters wearing Starfleet uniforms, including two white men, an Asian man and a Black woman. The cast of ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’ included a diverse crew of characters. Walters Art Museum

Roddenberry established relationships with NASA personnel in the early days of his series. NASA provided photographs of planetary bodies and advice about the realities of spaceflight, as well as stock footage and access to certain NASA facilities.

Leonard Nimoy, who played the popular character Mr. Spock, was even brought to the National Space Club’s Goddard Memorial Dinner in 1967 as a special guest. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey gave the keynote speech. Afterward, though, it was Nimoy, not Humphrey, who found himself surrounded by the club’s members, including NASA employees, aerospace engineers, members of the military and government officials, all eager to meet the actor portraying the starship Enterprise’s first officer.

The relationship between NASA and “Star Trek” benefited the show by legitimizing the series. It also helped NASA by publicizing its work and depicting a positive future where its efforts to land on the Moon would eventually lead to visits to distant worlds – and amazing scientific advances like the show’s transporter and warp drive.

The connection between the space show and space agency was reflected in NASA’s decision to name its first space shuttle Enterprise, after some encouragement from the “Star Trek” fan community.

Inspiring astronauts

In 1977, actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Uhura, was hired to recruit for NASA. The space agency had expanded its pool of astronauts to include scientists and other “mission specialists.” For the first time, an astronaut no longer needed to be a pilot to participate in a space mission.

NASA selected its first Black astronaut candidates and its first female astronaut candidates in 1978. While this move toward inclusivity may not have been directly influenced by infinite diversity in infinite combinations, it was compatible with it. “Star Trek” inspired many of NASA’s future employees. In interviews for my book “The Ultraview Effect,” a quarter of the space professionals I spoke with mentioned “Star Trek” as an influence.

A woman wearing a blue jumpsuit sitting in the pilot's chair in a space shuttle cockpit simulator Nichelle Nichols sits in the space shuttle simulator at the Johnson Space Center in March 1977. NASA

An Apollo astronaut I interviewed, for instance, said he believed humans would eventually “be able to go anywhere in the universe, just like ‘Star Trek.’”

A young engineer who had grown up in the 1990s told me his motivation came from the “opening line of ‘Star Trek’… to explore strange new worlds.”

A space shuttle mission specialist emphasized Roddenberry’s decision to make the starship crew multicultural, explaining: “Today I look at the diversity of it … he was setting the stage back when it wasn’t acceptable [in order] to be acceptable!”

A changing future

That influence has accompanied a changing astronaut corps.

Both the 2025 astronaut class, which for the first time included more women than men, and the crew of Artemis II, which sent the first woman, first Black astronaut and first Canadian on a lunar mission, resemble the future that “Star Trek” imagined.

The “Star Trek” fans at the convention I attended were even more diverse. It was clear to me that Roddenberry’s “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” isn’t just a concept from the series, but something that has become a defining value of contemporary Trek fandom.

A photo of space, with some bright spots representing nebulae, including a bright spot that looks like the disc-shaped hull of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured a region of the galaxy that looks a little like the USS Enterprise, which NASA highlighted in a news release in 2016. NASA/JPL-Caltech

One such fan, Bjo Trimble, holds special status. She is credited with “saving ‘Star Trek’” when the series was almost canceled in 1968 after two seasons. Wearing a rainbow “IDIC” pin, she signed autographs at the SyFy Sistas booth, where T-shirts featuring Black “Star Trek” icons such as Uhura and Benjamin Sisko were on display.

However, with the Trump administration’s recent orders to dismantle all of NASA’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs and policies, institutional support for “Star Trek’s” vision of acceptance and inclusivity, which flourishes in its fan base, is being undone. This rollback occurred just as NASA’s crews were reaching new milestones in representing the diverse future that “Star Trek” has encouraged for decades.

Sixty years later, some of the diverse future that “Star Trek” imagined has become part of everyday spaceflight. Other parts of that ideal remain unfinished.The Conversation

Deana L. Weibel, Professor of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University

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

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'Blue-collar rage' threatens to cost Trump the midterms

When union workers and their families gather this Labor Day, some may ponder Ronald Reagan’s memorable refrain, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

All workers – unionized or not – are dealing with higher prices for food and gasoline.

For America’s unionized workforce, the overall state of the economy is bleak. Threats from AI and robotics abound. Pledges by U.S. and international corporations to invest in new plants remain largely pledges. The roughly 400,000 federal job cuts during President Donald Trump’s second term have disrupted lives. Many of these jobs were previously represented by labor unions.

As a labor studies scholar, I believe weariness and wariness will accompany blue-collar voters to the polls in November. As such, the candidates who have practical ideas for turning the economy around and exhibit empathy for Americans worried about how to pay their bills could receive the bulk of the union vote.

The union vote

Over generations, the majority of union members have sided with Democratic candidates, even if that support has wavered since the 1970s.

The 2024 presidential campaign was no exception. The majority of union members voted for Democratic candidates, but at a far lower rate than in the 1960s.

Why does this matter in 2026?

Union voters play a bigger role in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, three swing states where the share of voters who belong to unions is above the national average of 10%. In closely contested House and Senate races, even a small shift in union votes could influence the outcome.

What’s in store this November?

How large is the union vote?

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that the percentage of U.S. unionized workers has fallen over the past four decades.

In 1983, 20.1% of U.S. workers were represented by a union. In 2025, the rate was 10.0%, or 14.7 million people. Union membership among public sector workers (32.9%) is more than five times higher than that of private sector workers (5.9%). In close elections, the volatility of these voting blocs matters.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to reduce consumer prices, bring back manufacturing jobs and respect workers’ rights.

As the midterm elections approach, I believe the president’s performance on these issues in the eyes of union voters will determine which party controls the House and Senate. And the signs are not promising for Trump, with recent polls indicating the president’s support among union households is eroding.

Manufacturing jobs and inflation

The U.S. economy has lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025, a 0.6% decline. These jobs have steadily declined since the 1980s, so Trump’s policies are not solely to blame.

Furthermore, Trump’s off-again, on-again tariffs may help some U.S. manufacturers. That’s because tariffs can erase the advantages of low-cost overseas labor. As economist Laura Veldkamp noted in July 2026, Trump’s tariffs “made it more profitable for American manufacturers to set up and produce here.”

The bigger problem, though, is that even if some manufacturing returns to the U.S., the work will likely be done with the latest manufacturing technologies, which tend to reduce the need for workers. That does not bode well for significant job creation.

In July 2026, Moody’s financial analyst Mark Zandi told Marketplace that more manufacturing output “doesn’t translate into jobs.” He explained that there has been more activity in the tech sector and in the defense-aerospace industries, but “these factories just don’t employ a lot of people.”

Additionally, Trump has not established a clear plan to lower inflation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that food prices in July 2026 were up 3.0% from July 2025. This increase is slightly above the historical average.

There’s one more factor to consider. Many older blue-collar workers – many of them former union members – across New England, the Great Lakes, Ohio and western Pennsylvania remain angry about the epic industrial collapse of the 1970s and 1980s.

This kind of generational suffering can show up in the voting booth in a big way. And I don’t think voter surveys and polls are able to measure the depths of this rage.

Union representation

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 allowed government workers to unionize. But a March 2025 White House announcement said the legislation had enabled “hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”

Through an executive order and mass layoffs across the federal workforce in 2025, Trump has presided over a dramatic change in public sector collective bargaining in Washington, D.C.

Offering guidance on the 2025 executive order, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management directed federal agencies to end their collective bargaining agreement.

In response, the American Federation of Government Employees condemned the action in an email to its members, saying the Trump administration was “illegally strip(ping) collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers.”

Federal unions have challenged the White House’s March 2025 executive order. In 2026, independent arbitrators have also ruled against the administration’s efforts to circumvent labor agreements with some federal workers. And in June 2026, a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down an effort by the Trump administration to exercise control over union elections at federal agencies.

Whether unionized industrial workers support their public sector counterparts remains to be seen.The Conversation

Robert Forrant, Professor of U.S. History and Labor Studies, UMass Lowell

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

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The surreal feeling of watching a generational trauma fade into the past

For much of the past 25 years, each anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has arrived with signs and stickers reminding people to “never forget.”

I have always felt unsure about what those words mean. For those of us who were alive in 2001, forgetting the day itself is almost impossible.

I remember the shock and fear, the replays of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, and the moment the second tower fell. I remember seeing on television the missing-person photographs that covered New York and the awful recognition that very few of those people were likely to be found alive. I remember the bravery of the New York firefighters and police.

My college students have no such memories or feelings. Most were born years after Sept. 11, 2001.

They encounter what happened through photographs, documentaries, memorials, classroom lessons and stories told by people who were alive on that day. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum estimates that about 100 million Americans have been born since the attacks.

The shift is ordinary and still somehow startling. An event that once felt like it had split time into a permanent before and after is fading into history itself.

In my work as a professor of politics and public affairs, I pay close attention to the stories Americans tell about their past and the ways those stories shape civic identity in the present. The 25th anniversary of 9/11 is especially interesting to me because it marks a moment when an event once experienced as immediate and world-changing is increasingly being carried forward through memory, ritual and interpretation.

Understanding history includes forgetting

Scholars of collective memory, also called public memory, have long argued that societies do not remember the past simply by preserving it.

Public memory describes how collective meaning gets made and remade through stories, institutions, rituals and political arguments. For example, the Department of Homeland Security was created in response to 9/11. Many Americans understand DHS as a structural and cultural reform made to fix the intelligence failures that the attacks made evident.

Forgetting is part of the process, too. As memory scholar Paul Connerton has argued, some forms of forgetting are not failures but necessary parts of social life.

No individual, school or nation can keep everything equally present forever. History accumulates faster than collective memory can accommodate it. The question, then, is not whether Americans will forget parts of 9/11. They will. The more interesting question is what remains after that forgetting takes place.

From the first anniversary, commemorating the attacks has carried a careful choreography. There is the annual reading of the names of those who died, the memorial lights and the stories of first responders, each of which keeps the human loss and courage of the day in view.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, 76% of Americans named 9/11 as one of the 10 most consequential events of their lifetimes. Nearly 1 in 5 said the nation’s immediate response to the attacks was the moment when they felt most proud of the United States.

I understand those points of view. Some of what I most want preserved about Sept. 11 is the shared grief of those first days and the ways ordinary people revealed their humanity under unimaginable circumstances.

Firefighters climbed stairs and ran toward mortal danger, while a cascade of people tried as hard as they could to get down. Office workers helped colleagues and strangers. Families searched for missing loved ones long after hope had become terribly thin. And passengers on United Flight 93 fought back and forced the plane they were on to crash in a field in the middle of Pennsylvania, sacrificing themselves in the hopes of saving others.

Before 9/11 became a justification, a policy, a war or a political symbol, it was an experience of shared human vulnerability.

Politics and its consequences

No event remains sealed inside its original meaning. Sept. 11 became the starting point for a series of political choices that reshaped American life and, in turn, reshaped the memory of the day itself.

The attacks led to the war in Afghanistan, which lasted for 20 years after the invasion’s initial success in dismantling al-Qaida and removing the Taliban government.

Next was the invasion of Iraq, even though Saddam Hussein’s regime had no role in 9/11.

And the aftermath of the attacks helped create an atmosphere that allowed for expanding government surveillance, enlarging presidential power and narrowing the space for dissent. Muslim Americans found themselves subjected to new suspicion and hostility.

Those consequences now compete with the original experience of Sept. 11 for a place in its meaning.

For some Americans, the attacks have become inseparable from the wars and broader official willingness to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of security that followed. From this perspective, 9/11 is remembered not only as a national trauma but also as a warning about how fear and grief can make policies that once seemed unthinkable appear necessary.

For others, the day – and its aftermath – represent restored American pride and military perseverance.

For still others, 9/11 remains most powerfully a story about innocent lives lost and ordinary people behaving with extraordinary courage.

Each way of remembering draws a boundary around the terrorism the nation experienced, deciding how far beyond that September morning its meaning should extend.

Even events once regarded as world-defining eventually have to share the historical landscape with everything that follows. Since 2001, Americans have experienced Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, the election of the first Black president, the rise of Donald Trump, the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and a global pandemic.

Sept. 11 has not become unimportant because those things happened. Its place in the story has changed because life – because the world – kept going.

For people who were alive during the attacks, there is something sad about watching that distance and diminishment happen. When an event once remembered in minute detail becomes a date others know only from history, the passage of one’s own life becomes newly visible. There is a strange nostalgia in realizing that something once so immediate now belongs increasingly to people who know it only as the past.

What are we to remember?

Maybe this is why “never forget” feels both moving and impossible.

What is supposed to be the subject of our remembering? The people who died? The courage? The grief? The fear? The wars that followed? The mistakes? The unexpected decency of people thrown together on an unbearable day?

A society cannot keep all of those things equally vivid forever. Nor should its members confuse remembering everything with understanding anything. The task of collective memory is inevitably one of selection.

For me, one part of the memory seems especially important to preserve. Before Sept. 11 became an argument about war, security, patriotism or political allegiance, it was an encounter with human vulnerability and then human resilience. The solidarity of Sept. 11 and the political choices made in its aftermath were not the same thing, even if they have become intertwined in our memory of the period.

If the ongoing march of history means Sept. 11 cannot always carry the emotional weight it does for people who were alive when it happened, perhaps the best outcome would be to focus on the collective grief, along with the extraordinary human response that grief engendered.

Doing so would not erase any of what followed. But it might help preserve the understanding that the day was one of imaginable horror and tragedy before it became a political inheritance.

This article has been corrected with the location where UA93 crashed.The Conversation

Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin, Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs, Boise State University

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

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His worst nightmare: A fearless bloc is ready to tear down Trump's agenda

The Democratic Party’s coalition headed into the 2026 midterms is as broad as it’s been in years. That seems likely to help them pick up dozens of seats in Congress and win majorities back from Republicans in either or both chambers.

One notable and attention-getting portion of that coalition is a group of progressive political newcomers who affiliate with the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. This growing left-wing organization had a hand in the 2025 election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has high-profile allies in Congress, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont.

In the 2026 election cycle, DSA-affiliated candidates have won a handful of Democratic primaries. Most did so in districts that Democrats are very likely to win in November. As a result, at least a half-dozen DSA-affiliated candidates are all but guaranteed a seat in the next Congress.

But history tells us that a “big tent” party is also likely to face big divisions and even bigger challenges when putting together a governing coalition in Congress. Depending on the size of the Democrats’ possible majorities, the DSA-affiliated lawmakers’ reach and power, despite their small numbers, could extend beyond elections and deep into the process of legislating.

The challenge of selecting a leader

Before any policy can even be debated, Congress has to elect its leadership. In the Senate, the party with the most seats selects the “majority leader” and the other party the “minority leader.” This vote is fully internal to each party: Democratic senators will vote on their leader and Republicans on theirs. But in the House, this vote is on full display. Per the Constitution, the full House must select the speaker of the House. Because only a simple majority is required to win, the majority party typically dominates the speaker selection process.

While these processes seem simple on paper, they may be a hurdle for relatively unpopular Democratic leaders facing an ideologically divided caucus and slim margins of control. This is particularly true in the House, where a public, on-the-record roll call vote may pressure some members to rebel against the Democrats’ current House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is largely presumed to be the next Democratic speaker.

For evidence of this potential, look no further than the 118th Congress: Following the election of a new Republican majority in 2023, then-leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, faced a grueling 15 rounds of ballots before finally being elected speaker. The culprit? The ideologically extreme, far-right members of the Republican Party that didn’t want to support him.

Who the speaker is, and to whom they are beholden in their caucus, matters greatly for the policy goals of the upcoming 120th Congress.

Costs of compromise

The speaker controls House floor proceedings, shepherding legislation to the floor or preventing it from ever seeing a vote. They also head the steering committee, which determines committee assignments, manages a large and powerful staff, and controls the messaging of constituent communication.

For a speaker faced with managing an ideologically diverse coalition, these procedural advantages can be tools to protect their party from tough votes or, perhaps, to appease ideological extremists.

But as leaders of both their party and the entire chamber, balancing the demands of partisan peers can come into conflict with the necessities of lawmaking.

For instance, despite making policy and procedural deals with conservative members in his leadership bid, Speaker McCarthy was ultimately removed from office by his own party less than 10 months later for the transgression of compromising with moderate Democratic members to prevent a government shutdown.

While compromise may be necessary for a functioning government, it’s also antithetical to the goals of the conservative movement.

The man who took over the GOP leader’s job, current Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, appears to have learned from this lesson: In the 119th Congress, his leadership has been defined by his deference to President Donald Trump and party conservatives, rather than trying to find the moderate middle between the two parties.

As Democratic leaders look to the upcoming 120th Congress, this same policymaking challenge will likely await them as well, regardless of which Democrat wins control of the speaker’s gavel.

Advantages of size and discipline

Yet ideological alignment alone is not enough to accelerate chamber action. Key to the success of any group seeking power in Congress is the size of its party’s advantage over the minority and the ability of ideological groups to organize.

That’s because narrow margins between the two parties force the majority’s leaders to pay attention to the demands of every member of their caucus in any effort to pass legislation.

Large majorities, meanwhile, can allow errant members to wander, with little risk to the majority party’s policy goals. And in 2026, with the median prediction in some models giving Democrats control of the House by as many as 30 seats, the half-dozen or so DSA-affiliated members may not always be essential to passing legislation.

Yet margin size alone does not guarantee clout. Groups must also be organized and cohesive.

In order for any ideological group to have a say in policymaking, it must not only be unified in policy goals but prepared to act as a voting bloc in the face of leadership. A potential DSA insurgency could take heed of the lessons of the conservative – and effective – Freedom Caucus before it, just one recent example from a long history of ideological rebellions in Congress.

But when ideological groups are disorganized, they don’t have much power to influence policy. So the ample resources and processes available to party leaders present an opportunity for the leader-driven lawmaking that has defined much of the modern congressional era.

The realities of effective lawmaking

Even the most organized, ideologically driven coalitions face a few underlying realities of lawmaking that political science tells us remain true.

For one thing, despite its reported demise as a victim of polarization and more recent bare-knuckle partisanship, bipartisanship still produces many significant legislative agreements in Congress. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act to increase access to affordable housing, the CHIPS and Science Act to encourage domestic technological development, and the First Step Act to reduce rising prison populations are recent examples of major bipartisanship policy solutions. And research has shown that members who attract more bipartisan co-sponsors tend to be more successful legislators.

Furthermore, most of these likely-to-be-elected DSA members are either political newcomers or have been successful only outside of the traditional Democratic establishment. This may have been a selling point in their primary campaigns, but these new members’ lack of experience and lack of experienced staff could limit their ability to maneuver in a Congress that even today is heavily structured by rules and norms, many of which are dictated by party leadership.

Leadership also has key institutional advantages that even the most fiery new members of Congress may find themselves unable to overcome.

Evidence since the 1970s demonstrates the deteriorating lawmaking capacity of individual members, particularly compared to party leaders. That makes it difficult for any member of Congress – particularly new, inexperienced members – to direct floor activity or get consideration of their biggest policy priorities.

DSA-affiliated members may be able to enhance their power by forming coalitions with other younger, establishment-skeptical new members, or with more experienced progressives such as Democrats Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts or Maxwell Frost from Florida. These members may share many of the DSA’s values but do not specifically affiliate with their political movement.

As leaders of both their chambers and their parties, speakers and majority leaders have a responsibility to pass necessary legislation. But in cases of tight margins and well-organized ideological caucuses, the job of negotiating often comes within their own membership.The Conversation

SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics, University of Virginia and 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.

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Why allies are giving in to Trump’s demands — and Canada and China are not

For Canadians still reliving the Toronto Blue Jays’ emotional 2025 World Series run, Donald Trump’s latest attacks have supplied hits of high drama and true patriot love.

And just as baseball is 90 per cent mental (the other half physical, according to malapropism icon Yogi Berra), trade wars aren’t purely economic. In only the past two weeks, the U.S. president has torpedoed a trade deal, threatened Canada’s economic and cultural sovereignty, called Canada’s leadership dishonest (and worse) and ordered a change to the name of a lake that’s older than America itself.

These sudden developments make the world seem dangerous and unpredictable. Yet while the Trump administration continues to attack science by cutting research funds and promoting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine lies, it’s nonetheless science that helps us understand the unconscious motivations driving Trump’s erratic behaviour — and how to respond.

Why have other countries given in?

It’s important to delve into why only Canada and China have so far stood up to the Trump administration’s bullying.

Two principles can explain this seemingly irrational passivity.

The first is what’s known as loss aversion. Although the monetary value is the same, studies show that people fear losing a dollar more than they like gaining a dollar. Psychologically, losing something feels twice as painful as gaining the exact same thing.

The threatened loss of jobs becomes unacceptable, so countries settle for less punitive tariffs: although the current American administration is an unreliable partner in terms of trade deals, a 25 per cent tariff is bad while a 50 per cent one is worse.

If all of this seems chaotic, it’s by design. While I’m not suggesting the Trump administration is intentionally random in its attacks on allies like Canada and the European Union, unpredictability itself is a weapon — and a second reason so many countries have acquiesced to Trump’s demands.

Animals that are shocked randomly have higher stress hormone levels than those who learn to control the shocks. They give up and stop searching for ways to avoid pain.

Similarly, bullies exert power not through constant aggression, but rather the imminent threat of aggression. The unrelenting possibility of being economically shoved into a locker with punishing new tariffs keeps trading partners on edge and uncertain, further empowering the bully.

How should Canada respond?

So, what’s a nice middle-power democracy to do? Should Canada allow American liquor on the shelves? Or should it threaten to withhold energy and critical minerals? Game theory says neither.

In computer simulations, the tit-for-tat strategy and its slight variations beat more complicated strategies. Simply put, one starts with co-operation and responds in kind to the actions of the other party.

Peace begets peace and aggression is met quickly and at the same level. There is forgiveness and reciprocity. Tariffs are met with a same-value response.

In real life, Trump has threatened to escalate the conflict in January 2027 with further tariffs. In response, the message must be clear: Canada wants peace and will forgive past transgressions, but it will not tolerate future attacks.

The fallout

No matter the response, there will be pain, even if it’s less intense and for a shorter period of time than if a bad deal had been accepted.

While holding the line and encouraging Canadians to choose Canadian products, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government must also instil optimism in the domestic economy — and can leverage tribalism to do so.

We naturally categorize ourselves into groups with those who look and think like us. In fact, for all of Canada’s cultural and political diversity, many Canadians define themselves as “not Americans” and are united through indignation at the Trump administration’s behaviour.

Trump himself is wildly unpopular in Canada. There is a petition to remove his confrontational ambassador, Pete Hoekstra. Elbows Up and Never 51 are rallying cries.

Carney has been rightfully steadfast in his protection of Canada’s sovereignty; he enjoys high approval ratings and support for pausing trade talks with the Trump administration. Even politicians from other parties are pulling together to support the nation.

While there are lingering questions about who Canadians are, they are currently united by what they’re not; such unity strengthens Carney’s negotiating power.

More attacks to come

Given the longstanding pattern of Trump’s behaviour, Canada and other historical allies can continue to expect erratic and spiteful attacks.

As uncertain as this new world order is, science explains the effects of this aggression and how to respond to it.

And for those who need a break from political chaos, the Blue Jays are again racing towards the playoffs.The Conversation

Eric Cadesky, Clinical Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia

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Trump's war on Canada has nothing to do with the economy

A seismic shift in American geopolitics explains the breakdown in United States-Canada trade relations. Understanding U.S. security policy is critical as Canada faces stark choices.

The Donald Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) appears to mark a sharp break in U.S. foreign policy. It explicitly rejects the U.S.-enforced, rules-based international order and liberalized trade regime that has guided American foreign policy since 1945.

It resurrects, instead, longstanding and deeply rooted isolationist and protectionist ideologies that have shaped much of the history of American foreign policy. But, it also asserts the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

The legacy of the Monroe Doctrine

Since its creation by President James Monroe in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine has been a mainstay of American foreign policy. It asserts the exclusive right of the U.S. to expel any perceived foreign threats from the Western Hemisphere. But it also claims the right to intervene in any hemispheric country whose domestic affairs present a threat to American security interests.

The 2026 capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is ostensibly the most recent example, as far as the Trump administration is concerned. But the list is long.

In its application of the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. has always looked south; now, it’s looking north too. This is a seismic shift.

American international relations over the past 80 years were hardly perfect. The U.S. often violated its own rules of the game. There was, however, strong political and economic co-operation among OECD and NATO countries.

For Canada and the U.S., this was a period of deepening integration through NORAD (1957), the 1965 Auto Pact, the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade, and the 1991 Canada-U.S. Air Quality Agreement, known as the acid rain treaty. This era is vanishing rapidly.

The world is now entering an era in which hegemonic nations strive to assert domination in their respective spheres of influence. As the 2025 NSS argues:

“The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.”

The U.S. has made clear it no longer plans to conduct its affairs with allies as first-among-equals. Instead, might makes right.

History of expansionism

The Trump Corollary should concern Canada given the importance of energy and mineral resources. The 2025 NSS expressly references the need for “expanding American access to critical minerals and materials.”

The Trump administration also sees hemispheric resources as geopolitical assets for the U.S. to own and control: “Strengthening critical supply chains in this hemisphere will reduce dependencies and increase American economic resilience.”

The recent agreement that gives the U.S. controlling ownership of billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil production is a case in point.

It’s important to remember that the territorial expansion of the U.S. is the history of land purchases and conquest. The Louisiana Purchase and the Alaska Purchase are famous. So, too, is the Mexican Cession, the relinquishment of more than half of Mexico’s territory to the U.S. in 1848.

The U.S. continued to acquire more territory in the 20th century, including the 1917 purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark. The American effort to purchase Greenland from Denmark in 2026 is consistent with historical U.S. expansionism.

Economic warfare

Canada and Greenland are both integral parts of the Western Hemisphere. Both have significant energy and mineral resources the U.S. needs and wants. The constant references to Canada as the 51st state and to the Canada-U.S. border as “artificial” are not bluster. Canada and Greenland are both in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

The U.S. is fully aware, however, that these ambitions aren’t possible to achieve immediately. Therefore, it’s weaponized tariffs against Canada for the purpose of breaking the country economically in the short term. Canada as the 51st state is the desired option; Canada as a “Venezuela North” is the acceptable second choice. Economic warfare, therefore, is the continuation of American geopolitics by other means.

Concluding a fair trade deal with Canada was never on offer from the U.S. While the 2025 NSS speaks to “fair, reciprocal trade deals,” it makes clear that “our priorities must and will be our own workers, our own industries, and our own national security.”

The goal to “re-shore industrial production” is a national security imperative, not an economic preference.

This is why Trump is weaponizing tariffs. It’s the tactic of choice to kill the auto industry and wound other key sectors in the Canadian economy. The geopolitical goal is clear.

Those who place hope in the November mid-term elections or a future Democratic presidency will be disappointed. Let’s not forget the Joe Biden administration actually doubled the Trump tariff rate for Canadian softwood lumber.

How Canada must fight back

Canada is now on war footing, so it’s taking steps to buttress the economy against a potentially long economic war.

Geopolitics has implications beyond trade. Interdependence in trade with the U.S. has placed Canada in an extremely precarious position; military co-operation is no less fraught. In February 2026, the U.S. paused participation in the U.S.–Canada Permanent Joint Board on Defence, which had operated uninterrupted since 1940. Even NORAD looks increasingly untenable.

Realistically, fighter aircraft, submarines, naval vessels and armaments need to be produced in Canada or purchased from — or jointly produced with — Nordic, European and Korean allies and reliable partners.

Norway and Finland have learned to live beside Russia. Canada will now have to live “with clear eyes” beside a hegemonic United States.The Conversation

Greg Poelzer, Professor of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan

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

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Trump just ripped up the rulebook — and left Canada with only one choice

Every negotiation assumes that both sides will honour what they agreed to, or that someone else — a court, a regulator, a contracting authority — can compel them to make good on their commitments. That assumption breaks down more often than we’d like: an employer who reneges on a deal, a supplier who renegotiates after every delivery, a government that reopens a signed agreement.

The challenge grows when the unreliable partner is indispensable — someone you cannot compel but must do business with.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing exactly this situation in his relationship with United States President Donald Trump. The U.S., Canada’s main trading partner, is indispensable but the rules of the game have become much less predictable. Even though the the Canada-U.S.-Mexico (CUSMA) trade deal is already in force, Trump imposed new tariffs on Canadian goods.

Negotiations on those new tariffs broke down even though both sides appeared to be close to a deal. According to Canadian negotiators, the Trump administration presented additional conditions at the very end of the talks. The Canadian government suspended the talks rather than accept the proposed terms.

When trust disappears

This raises a direct question for Canada: why enter into an agreement if there’s a sense the other party could go back on its word at any moment?

This situation also arises in other sectors and situations. How can a company manage a dispute when it depends on a dominant supplier? How can a parent negotiate a curfew with a defiant teenager?

When faced with such unreliable negotiators, our instinctive reaction tends to be a moral one: “He lacks credibility,” “It’s hard to trust him,” or “He’s negotiating in bad faith.” These judgments may be fair, but they’re of little help. You can’t force anyone to become trustworthy.

The useful question then becomes: Why would this person keep their word if the cost of breaking it is practically zero? Instead of wondering why the other person isn’t keeping their word, we can ask how to create incentives that will motivate them to do so.

Research in game theory and self-enforcing agreements shows that without trust, a partner’s promise matters far less than the threat of real consequences if they break it — especially when no outside authority exists to enforce the deal.

Here are three says to manage the type of situation Carney and Canada are facing:

1) Reduce dependence

The BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) was popularized in 1981 by Americans Roger Fisher, a Harvard law professor and pioneer in negotiation research, and William Ury, an anthropologist and negotiation specialist, in Getting to Yes.

Put simply, this means having a Plan B during negotiations. The better the alternative is, the more power you have in the negotiation, since you can reject a bad offer without much risk.

Take this concrete example that will sound familiar: A company that depends on a single large neighbouring market feels the full brunt of every tax or policy change for lack of other markets. The company’s partner has little to gain by moderating its stance. But that changes if the company also develops markets in Europe or Asia: the partner knows it could lose some of that business to a foreign competitor.

This is precisely the point of BATNA: we first seek to address our own vulnerabilities, not to harm our counterpart. Once you have a genuine alternative, the other party’s failure to comply will eventually cost them something, without you having to say so outright. You can simply look elsewhere, and they risk losing you if they go too far.

2) Limit risks

The second tactic addresses risk. Research has shown that co-operation can emerge and be sustained in repeated interactions, even in the absence of an external authority. In particular, repetition allows the parties to adjust their behaviour based on what they’ve come to know about each other.

The principle of “starting small” extends this logic. When a partner’s reliability is uncertain, you begin with a limited commitment and gradually increase it as the partner’s reliability is confirmed. So instead of one large agreement, break it into stages. Access to subsequent stages depends on compliance with the previous ones.

Say two countries are negotiating the removal of tariffs. They proceed in stages: steel first, then automobiles, then other sectors. Each country must fulfil its commitments from the previous stage to move on to the next. If one of the countries quickly goes back on its word, the other loses only access to the subsequent stages, which are often the most advantageous.

The risk changes. The defector isn’t necessarily punished, but their gains are limited. Their calculation becomes less attractive: it’s no longer “I can get a big advantage, then back out,” but “if I back out now, I’m giving up the even greater gains that would come later.”

This isn’t as much of a deterrent as an actual penalty, but it reduces the incentive to breach the agreement and, above all, protects the other party.

3) Attaching a cost to the breach

The third tactic goes a step further: it directly links future benefits to compliance with current commitments. It’s rooted in the literature on self-enforcing agreements. You may choose to honour an agreement not out of fear of legal sanctions, but because breaking it today results in the loss of future benefits from the relationship.

In practice, adhering to the agreement grants access to a tangible benefit — a preferential rate, privileged access or favourable terms — which is automatically renewed at short intervals, such as monthly or quarterly. If there is a breach, those benefits are simply not extended.

The key is that the benefit is linked to, but separate from, the core agreement. This makes the tactic proportionate and reversible: the perk can be withdrawn after a breach and restored once compliance resumes. Two conditions still matter: the benefit must outweigh the gains from cheating, and breaches must be observable before renewal.

Nevertheless, this consequence must be credible. Threatening a trading partner with a measure you have no interest in enforcing is likely to have little effect. You need a legitimate consequence that’s known in advance, but also realistic enough and inexpensive enough to implement so that the partner wants to uphold their end of the deal.

Consequences, not punishments

These three measures don’t work in the same way: the first gives us a better way out, the second limits what we stand to lose, and the third makes future benefits contingent on fulfilling commitments. What unites them? Each ensures that failing to honour a commitment ultimately leads to concrete consequences.

When dealing with a dominant party, their effects are real but marginal. They do not reverse the balance of power. They simply alter the cost-benefit analysis of a breach. Introducing a real consequence doesn’t eliminate the power imbalance, but it makes it less overwhelming.

Nor does this approach transform an unreliable partner into a loyal ally. Rather, it allows negotiations to continue when trust, legal enforcement or viable alternatives are lacking. In short, these are survival strategies for a relationship that cannot be left or repaired.

When dealing with a partner whose word is no longer reliable, the goal isn’t a better promise. It’s building a relationship in which keeping promises is the best option.The Conversation

Jean Poitras, Professeur titulaire en gestion de conflits, HEC Montréal

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

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Shockwaves ripple through the GOP after voters flip on key issues

The official campaign for the US midterm elections usually begins after America celebrates Labor Day on September 7. But over the summer, the battle for votes has intensified between Donald Trump’s Republican party and a freshly emboldened Democratic party.

In November’s elections, all the seats in the House of Representatives will be contested, as will one-third of the Senate. Throughout the year, Republican and Democratic hopefuls have been engaged in the primary election process.

These are now nearing a conclusion. Primaries have now been held across the country for gubernatorial, Senate and House contests. Following the August 18 primaries, polling showed the Democrats with a six-point lead.

The Democratic party has also been buoyed by data from earlier in the month from a Reuters/Ipsos poll that revealed for the first time in nearly a decade that voters prefer the party’s approach to the economy. This could be a decisive factor come election day on November 3.

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a thinktank, has asserted that in America’s current bitterly divided political climate “where more congressional districts than ever before are considered ‘safe’ for one party or the other, real change plays out in congressional primaries”.

Results from the August 18 primaries in Florida, Alaska and Wyoming have underlined the current shifts in voting preferences among both Republican and Democratic supporters.

On the Democrat side, there appears to be a developing trend of candidates on the party’s left defeating centrist hopefuls. In Florida, democratic socialist Angie Nixon defeated her moderate Democrat opponent, Alex Vindman.

The result was striking for two reasons. First, the contrast in campaign spending by both candidates. Nixon raised US$975,000 (£716,000) compared to Vindman’s war chest of over US$16.3 million.

The other noteworthy point was Nixon’s robust position on Israel. She advocated stripping the country of US aid, something that is politically risky in a state that contains America’s third-largest Jewish population.

This was by no means uniform – other candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) lost out to more established Democratic candidates. But Nixon’s victory represented another progressive outsider advancing to November’s elections – something already witnessed in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan.

DSA figures have been able to tap into significant frustration among the Democratic voter base that has become increasingly vexed by cost-of-living issues as well as growing discontent towards their party establishment.

Trump ticket no longer golden

Democrats are now beginning to feel increasingly optimistic about their chances to take back control of the US Senate after November. This would require a net gain of four seats.

An emerging trend from recent Republican results suggests that the once hugely sought-after Trump endorsement is no longer the guarantee of victory it once was. The president’s first choice in Florida’s 19th congressional district, Catalina Lauf, lost out to Jim Schwartzel. Similarly, in Wyoming’s Republican primary for governor the sitting state senator Eric Barlow defeated the Trump-backed candidate Megan Degenfelder.

In South Carolina, Darline Graham – who replaced her brother Lindsay Graham as senator when he died in July – won a run-off primary with the strong backing of the president. But given the late Senator Graham’s prominent profile, she is perhaps best seen as a continuity candidate, winning on name recognition as much as on the Trump endorsement.

This apparent defiance against the 47th president among registered Republican voters seems to be increasingly common, with the president’s preferences in Iowa, Georgia and South Carolina’s gubernatorial races all losing.

Trump’s job approval ratings remain in negative territory. A recent RealClearPolitics polling average had the president’s approval rating at 39.2% with 58.4% of respondents saying they disapprove of his performance.

The war in Iran is having a daily impact on the lives of ordinary Americans through rising fuel prices. The survey also revealed that just three out of ten voters approved of Trump’s management of the conflict. This may explain why some Republican voters are prepared to reject the president’s endorsement.

Rural voters

Rural voters are emerging as a key demographic that appears to be turning away from Trump. Sharp rises in fuel and fertiliser costs are hitting grain producers particularly hard, while Trump’s tariff regime is hurting agricultural exports.

A recent Fox News analysis found that among rural voters, Trump’s net job approval fell from +20 in early 2025 to -14 in May 2026. A recent article by Brookings senior fellow, William A. Galston, pointed to the fact that Trump carried 64% of the rural vote to Kamala Harris’s 34% in 2024. He believes that in November, while Republican voters may not choose to cast their ballot for Democratic candidates, there’s a strong possibility more will choose not to vote at all.

There was further bad news for the Republicans in a Pew Research study from July which found that, despite Trump himself not being on the ballot, nearly twice as many voters – 42% – will use their ballot to vote against him as those who will use it to vote for him.

But all might not be lost just yet for the GOP. It may look as if the Democrats are on course to retake the House of Representatives – and potentially also the Senate – in November. But we have yet to discover the impact of significant redistricting by various states under the administration of both parties.

Redistricting is when a state redraws the boundaries of its electoral seats to better reflect the state’s demographics. This happens automatically every ten years. But a number of states have redrawn their boundaries since July 2025 outside this automatic process. Analysis shows that out of the ten states to have engaged in a voluntary redistricting process, the new electoral maps of eight favour Republicans.

So while Democrats have a clear polling edge and obvious momentum, the results of the midterms are still far from certain.The Conversation

Richard Hargy, Lecturer in International Studies and Politics, Ulster University; Queen's University Belfast

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

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Democrats are weaponizing an everyday word to quietly reshape the midterms

If you have seen campaign ads for the midterm elections, you have likely noticed that a major theme this year is corruption.

New Hampshire congressman and Senate candidate Chris Pappas has framed his campaign around his anti-corruption efforts in Congress, claiming that his anti-corruption record includes the fact that he “doesn’t take a dime of corporate PAC money,” opposes congressional stock trading, and wants to ban companies from using AI to set prices based on Americans’ personal data.

A super PAC allied with Pappas’ prospective Republican opponent, John Sununu, has run ads calling Pappas corrupt, alleging that Pappas “serves on a House committee that oversees Uber, where his husband, a former lobbyist, serves in an executive policy role.”

This is one of many races where corruption has a prime role. On her DCinbox Substack, which tracks “how members of Congress communicate with constituents,” Lindsey Cormack shows that Democrats this year are talking about corruption six times as much as they did in 2022 and four times as much as Republicans have this year in their emails to constituents. This suggests that the corruption talk is a part of Democratic Party strategy.

Why?

One possibility might be that there is a lot of corruption happening. Yet a puzzling feature of these advertisements is that few of them mention President Donald Trump, despite plentiful allegations of corrupt acts by Trump and members of his administration.

Another might be that the public is particularly concerned about corruption. Research shows, however, that the public is always a little bit concerned about corruption, and that these worries often do not correspond with particular actions by politicians.

So what is going on, then?

The talk, it turns out, is not really about specific, identifiable corruption. It’s about delegitimizing your opponent.

Choice of those out of power

My recent book, “American Corruption Talk,” co-authored with Molly Brigid McGrath, analyzes the prevalence of what we call “corruption talk” by presidents and presidential candidates since the nation’s founding. We argue that corruption talk is different from talk about real corruption – many Americans identify things as being corrupt even when they do not meet the textbook definition of corruption.

In our book, we identify three types of corruption:

• Transactional corruption is inherent in particular acts – offering or accepting a bribe, for instance.

• Moral corruption is being a rotten person – someone who is corrupt is not trustworthy, even if we cannot identify anything specific that person has done wrong.

• Systemic corruption has to do with the government’s behavior itself. It is not a matter of bad people but bad institutions.

Corruption talk blurs the distinctions between these three distinct things.

In the book, we explore changes over time in how presidents, presidential candidates and party platforms discuss corruption.

We found that parties out of power talk much more about corruption than those who are in power. Corruption talk is popular among politicians who want to avoid taking strong ideological positions or tying themselves closely to their party leaders. They can use it as evidence of bipartisanship, as a way to say they are not career politicians, or to emphasize their competence and integrity.

Corruption is what political scientists call a valence issue – almost everyone thinks corruption is bad, but not everyone agrees about how much of it there is.

Corruption talk, it turns out, is useful for bringing together parties or candidates who want to avoid talking about divisive issues. It is also a way to delegitimize the opposition. If one’s opponents are corrupt, it doesn’t matter what they say. They’re the kind of people who would do corrupt things, even if they haven’t done them yet.

Democrats avoid division

The Democrats’ corruption talk of 2026 checks all of these boxes.

Democrats have internal divisions, from political ideology to policy on Israel, which they may wish to avoid talking about.

Talking about things Trump has done requires too much explanation – it’s hard to describe the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause in a 30-second ad. That clause bars the president from accepting “‘any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever’ from a foreign government unless Congress consents,” and Trump has been accused of violating it.

But talking about corruption in a moral or systemic sense – observing that the country is in decline, or that elites are out of touch – can be effective.

“To every Utahn tired of chaos and corruption, there’s a place for you on this campaign,” Ben McAdams, a former Democratic congressman from Utah and current candidate for the House, declared in a July 2026 Instagram post.

So talking about corruption is a way to talk about Trump and the Trump administration without mentioning them directly. Voters unhappy with Trump will assume corruption talk is an indictment of Trump, while Trump supporters may assume the corruption is elsewhere – after all, Trump won the 2016 election, in part, by promising to take on the corrupt establishment.

These distinctions – real corruption vs. corruption talk – go back at least to the country’s founding, if not beyond. Historically, corruption talk has stood in for other things.

For instance, the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when activists in both parties worked together to pursue reforms in government, economic policy and social policy, was the era in which we find that corruption talk was most prevalent in American politicians’ rhetoric. It was also a moment when America was almost as polarized and economically unequal as it is today, and many Americans saw this inequality as a symptom of corruption.

None of this is to deny that the U.S. currently has a president who has engaged in more overt acts of corruption than any other. Trump’s actions – from his family’s documented cryptocurrency profiteering to his appointment of a Cabinet full of conflicts of interest (such as stock ownership in companies regulated by their agencies, or a history of lobbying the very agencies they now run), to his alleged ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein – no doubt have catalyzed this discussion.

Yet it is perhaps fitting that the nation’s 250th anniversary has been characterized by a return to a classic American preoccupation: the traditional American pastime of corruption talk.The Conversation

Robert Boatright, Professor of Political Science, Clark University; Institute for Humane Studies

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A dark conspiracy shaped MAGA — and still haunts Trump’s America

On Election Day in 2024, as voters cast their ballots, Elon Musk posted a campaign music video supporting Donald Trump’s bid for president.

Set to Van Halen’s “Jump,” with a montage of 1980s cultural references and images of Trump in various strongman poses, the video includes a line about “PATRIOTS” in which the “O” turns into a “Q,” a reference to the online conspiracy theory QAnon.

Started on the online forum website 4chan in 2017, QAnon spread false, far-right theories on social media about a shadowy cabal of satanic pedophiles among the political elite, which Trump was purportedly fighting alongside a mysterious ally named “Q.”

As a scholar of conspiracy theories and extremism, I’ve watched QAnon seep from the margins into mainstream American politics over the past decade. While Q stopped posting in 2022, the movement did not disappear. As we near the 10-year anniversary of QAnon, these theories continue to haunt America’s politics.

The afterlife of QAnon

Building on the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which claimed Democrats were trafficking children in the basement of a pizza restaurant based on interpretations of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails, QAnon appeared on 4chan in October 2017 with claims that Clinton was about to be arrested.

That’s when someone calling himself Q claimed to be an intelligence operator trying to expose the “deep state,” a purported shadow government secretly controlling global events in pursuit of a satanic agenda. QAnon invited users to build the theory by decoding messages on social media. That work, Q claimed, would expose a satanic cabal of pedophiles among the elites.

The theory is an example of what author Naomi Klein has called a “conspiracy smoothie,” mixing existing theories into a vast conspiracy map, which absorbs existing conspiracy theories about events such as 9/11 or the JFK assassination into itself. The result is a sprawling theory combining paranoid interpretations of current events with historical conspiracies.

Polls suggest that 20% of Americans had favorable views of QAnon as late as 2022.

Many of Trump’s nominations for high-ranking posts were figures who had previously been considered on the fringes of national politics. Some of them have brought conspiracy theories into the highest echelons of government.

FBI Director Kash Patel, for example, has been sympathetic to QAnon. He appeared on a show hosted by a QAnon influencer before being selected to run the agency. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has advocated anti-vaccination conspiracy theories also shared by QAnon.

QAnon haunts Washington

I’m particularly fascinated by the ghost of QAnon – how the theory continues to haunt politics today. Philosophers call this tendency “hauntology”: Political ideas and movements may die, but they continue to haunt our present.

Q’s ideas have not dissipated. It’s what I call QAnon’s afterlife, or the transformation of QAnon from a conspiracy theory to a political vocabulary. In fact, the movement’s vocabulary quickly began to appear in official government circles at the start of Trump’s second term.

In March 2026, for example, the official X account for the White House posted a photo of a mustachioed fighter pilot with the QAnon tagline “Patriots are in Control.” While the phrase may pass as mundane, I believe it is a clear reference to QAnon language, first used by Q in October 2017.

The U.S. Department of Labor posted the same phrase over an image of Trump in January 2026. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who has publicly advocated deep state conspiracies, ran the department until she resigned on April 20, 2026.

And Musk, the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, celebrated America’s 250th birthday with an AI-generated video called “Sweet Land.” This post generated buzz because it referenced QAnon and prompted an online scavenger hunt for Q symbols.

QAnon goes to war

Amid the U.S. war with Iran, some government officials have turned to QAnon for inspiration.

The official account for the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, has posted propaganda using Q catchphrases as military slogans. For example, the department posted a picture of a Marine saluting Trump with the phrase “Trust the Plan.”

On Truth Social, Trump posted a meme of himself on the deck of a battleship with the words “It was the Calm Before the Storm,” a cryptic phrase first used by Trump while meeting with military leaders in October 2017. Almost exactly one month later, the phrase appeared as a central QAnon concept.

The use of Q phrases by government agencies during wartime has excited online conspiracy theorists. They see it as an official endorsement that “the storm” will soon be upon us, a time of upheaval and punishment of the shadowy deep state. For these conspiracy theorists, Trump and Q will bring about “the storm,” to be followed by a golden age.

The QAnon style of American politics

Whether or not these references to Q posts by official government accounts are truly ideological or simply trolling is less relevant than the effect they have.

Official uses of Q language have invigorated conspiracy theorists to advance new theories, undermining public health, governance and civil society.

And the Jeffrey Epstein files, which have exposed the late financier’s private network and financial dealings, have only lent credence to QAnon theories among believers. That’s because Q referenced Epstein Island in drops of information on 8chan and other message boards.

I believe these ghostly eruptions of QAnon conspiracy theories into the public will only continue to divide Americans at a time of social and economic crisis.The Conversation

Matthew N. Hannah, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Politics and Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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There’s a legal time bomb hidden in the Supreme Court’s new decision

The conservative justices’ decision in the 6-3 ruling to lift a block on implementation of President Donald Trump’s March 2026 executive order imposing restrictions on mail voting had voting rights advocates and many state officials angry and alarmed. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the ruling, saying it would spark a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

The Conversation’s politics and legal affairs editor Naomi Schalit talked with Quinnipiac University election law scholar John J. Martin about the ruling and what it signals may be ahead.

What’s the background to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Aug. 24?

Back in March, President Trump issued an executive order that was meant to, in his words, maintain “public confidence in election outcomes” and “enhance election integrity” in mail and absentee voting in federal elections. There are a few provisions that were included in that executive order.

The first would require the Department of Homeland Security to maintain a state citizenship list of residents in those states who are U.S. citizens, above the age of 18, and therefore eligible to vote in federal elections. The Department of Homeland Security would share these lists with each state at least 60 days prior to each federal election.

The next provision orders the U.S. attorney general to prioritize the investigation and the prosecution of state and local election officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters, such as noncitizens.Next, Trump ordered the U.S. Postal Service to devise rules that could substantially alter the ability for states to use mail and absentee ballots in federal elections. What this could look like is, for example, a requirement that a mail ballot being used in a federal election has to look a particular way.

The executive order also gives states the option to provide the Postal Service at least 60 days before a federal election a list of voters entitled to vote by mail or by absentee ballot. But that deadline conflicts with a federal rule that states must give voters the opportunity to register to vote at least 30 days prior to an election. So states might not even know 60 days prior to an election who was entitled to use an absentee or mail ballot.

Finally, the big one is that the executive order directs the U.S. Postal Service to not transmit any mail or absentee ballots from voters in federal elections who do not appear on a mail-in or absentee voter list compiled by the service, presumably based on the list being provided to it by the states, although the executive order isn’t fully clear on this.

So, if a voter isn’t on that list, the Postal Service can just ditch that person’s ballot?

The executive order tells the Postal Service that it should not transmit that ballot over mail.

But the Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of the executive order, did it?

No. A number of states sued the Trump administration pretty quickly after this executive order was issued, arguing that the president simply doesn’t have the authority to implement these policies. The states specifically asked for a preliminary injunction in federal court, which allows the court to pause the government’s actions before the case is fully resolved. The lower court ultimately issued the preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the implementation of the executive order.

The Trump administration argued the states lacked something called standing, which requires a plaintiff to suffer an actual or imminent injury in order to bring a case in federal court. Accordingly, the preliminary injunction should not have been issued.

The Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the Trump administration and contended that because a lot of the executive order either required the states to do nothing, or had yet to be fully realized, the states’ case here was premature. They had yet to suffer an injury.

But it’s not permanent that the states do not have standing. It’s that they did not have standing at this moment until the rules to come out of this executive order had been put into effect. Is that correct?

That’s correct. So, theoretically, if the Postal Service were to propose a rule that would forbid the transmission of ballots that don’t meet their standards, and then that rule is ultimately adopted, then the states would have standing to bring this case.

The Constitution gives the states the power to administer elections. What power is the president asserting here that would legitimately allow him, or the executive, to demand these changes?

The U.S. Constitution certainly makes states the default administrators of elections, and that includes federal, state and local elections. The federal government plays some roles in regulating elections, with the Constitution allowing Congress the ability to override states’ regulations of the procedural aspects of congressional elections.

The Supreme Court has also found that Congress has some authority to regulate certain aspects of presidential elections, such as in the area of campaign finance. And under the 14th and 15th amendments, Congress has the ability to implement laws that fulfill the equal protection clause or the 15th Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination in elections. That’s how we get something like the Voting Rights Act. And that can apply to federal, state and local elections.

But states still remain the predominant administrator of elections.

And the president’s role in elections?

It’s hard to find any constitutional source that backs up the idea that the president has unilateral authority to decide how elections are run, even federal elections.

Maybe the strongest argument you can make in this case is that the president has authority over officers in the executive branch of the federal government. So the president could certainly direct executive officers, such as the postmaster general, to do things or not do things. But it doesn’t mean that the president can tell these officers to just do whatever the president wants in violation of the Constitution.

This is a very long way to say that the president really doesn’t seem to have authority to be doing what he’s doing right now.

So this was a procedural decision by the Supreme Court; there’s also a similar case brought by voting rights groups that they may consider. In the end, is everybody just playing a waiting game for the substance of this executive order to get to the Supreme Court to have the Supreme Court say sorry, President Trump, you can’t do it, case closed?

The Supreme Court cannot avoid deciding this on the merits of the case.

Regardless of how and when this all proceeds, will it have an effect on upcoming midterms?

Election officials need to know how they’re supposed to manage their elections, and they need to know this months in advance. They want to know: Are we actually able to implement mail voting, or absentee voting, the way that we’ve always done it? Or is this executive order going to completely throw a monkey wrench into the process, and now we have to rethink everything, and we have to wait until we receive a list from the U.S. Postal Service confirming that the voters that we believe are entitled to these ballots are, in fact, entitled to these ballots?

And voters might be fearful that if they try to vote by mail it won’t be counted. That could discourage people from voting through a process that has made it easier and more straightforward to vote for certain segments of the population – and really everyone.The Conversation

John J. Martin, Assistant Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University

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

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Powerless to stop him: The peculiar paradox of Trump’s grip on America

America’s system of government, and the constitution on which it is built, was created in different times and for different circumstances and purposes, and it has changed very little since then.

Many of its components, such as the way elections are conducted, are battered and worn from centuries of use and abuse. So it would not be surprising if America faced a second revolution, 250 years after the first. This may be the best way to understand what is happening today.

Ever since that day in 2015 when Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president, he has been by far the most important figure in American politics. It is a remarkable record.

Since George Washington, no figure in American history has dominated US politics so completely for so long except Franklin D. Roosevelt. But FDR worked his political magic through artful manipulation of Washington’s constitutional machinery and norms. Trump has dominated American politics by flagrantly and gleefully challenging and violating them.

That is what gives his ascendancy the feeling of a second American Revolution.

This revolution is also the product of discontent in the US electorate, fragility in key political institutions and turmoil in American conservative ideology.

But Trump is at the heart of it. His remarkable character is the catalyst that gives those other factors their power and effect. And character is what the Trump phenomenon is all about.

Taking Trump seriously

Trump’s primary concern is not the policy outcomes that flow from his actions – their real-world consequences – but how they make him look.

It is, in a sense, all about performance, as was underlined by a revealing remark Trump made to a journalist early in the Iran war.

“I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?”

It is hard to fathom the frank acknowledgement of irresponsibility implied by these remarks.

Over time, with endless repetition, Trump’s transgressions become familiar and cease to shock. But if we are to understand the world we live in, it is important not to lose our sense of bewilderment and dismay that this person leads, inspires and controls – indeed constitutes – a political movement which has seized control of the key instruments of national power in America and to which the US political system has, it seems, no effective antidote or response.

He defies all we thought we knew about that system, and indeed about the whole way electoral democracies work around the world.

Is there any precedent at any time for a person like Trump being elected and re-elected anywhere in any functioning democracy? Perhaps the closest precedent is Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, but he pales beside Trump. Berlusconi proved to be little more than an ageing party animal. Trump is leading a revolution.

Plainly, Trump has some extraordinary talents. His capacity to intimidate and humiliate is obvious. His ability to charm and disarm those he meets is more surprising but perhaps just as important. Many people who meet him attest to it. Even Kamala Harris, his eventual Democratic rival in the 2024 presidential election, found herself susceptible to his flattery.

But while many politicians depend on the impact they have in person, Trump’s political power seems to flow overwhelmingly from the image of himself he so relentlessly projects, through mass media and social media, to the public at large.

It is hard to imagine a politician who more completely, compellingly and convincingly projects his character and personality to his political audience. He does so with astonishing energy – and energy is always attractive in a public performance. And in a strange way he does it so honestly.

The most beguiling paradox of Trump’s unique political persona is simply that the most brazen and transparent liar in the history of a famously dishonest profession has built his remarkable success on his capacity and willingness to display himself to the world with disconcerting honesty, exactly as he is.

His is perhaps the most exposed personality in history. It is a triumph of titanic self-belief, and a reflection of his sociopathology. He loves to show himself exactly as he is, because he cannot imagine that anyone else would not find him as appealing as he does himself.

Trump defies so completely our conventional ideas of what political leaders are and how they behave that even now it can be hard to take him seriously.

In his first term, his supporters sometimes criticised his opponents for taking him literally, but not seriously. They said the right way to take him was seriously, but not literally.

Now that advice seems out of date. We need to take him both literally and seriously.

Taking Trump literally means recognising that what he offers Americans is nothing less than a revolution in the way the United States is governed and the way it relates to the rest of the world.

Taking him seriously means recognising that he seems to be in a position to achieve that revolution. How can that be so?

A system failing Americans

The more Americans have gotten to know Trump, the more they have been willing to vote for him.

More people voted for him in the 2024 presidential election than in 2020 in over 89% of America’s 3,112 counties. Those people surely knew whom and what they were voting for. They knew what he’d done in his first term, how he’d acted when he lost in 2020, and what he promised and threatened to do if re-elected.

Apparently, it does not matter to his voters that the revolution he offers has no coherent objective. It is conjured entirely from myths and prejudices, with his own personality the only credo. That this seems to appeal to so many Americans tells us how profoundly they are dissatisfied with the old American political order.

That can only mean deep forces are at work – economic and social trends that over decades have undermined Americans’ confidence in and commitment to the old vision of America that long underpinned the policies of both parties.

The economic trends driving that dissatisfaction are clear enough. One is stagnating household income. From 1970 to 2000, median income increased by an average of 1.2% per year. From 2000 to 2018, growth slowed to an average of only 0.3% per year.

The other is growing inequality: between 1989 and 2022, US households in the top 1% gained at least 101 times more wealth than the median household, and at least 987 times more wealth than households in the bottom 20%.

Not surprisingly, this affects the way Americans see themselves. Over the past decade the proportion of Americans who describe themselves as middle class has dropped from 85% to 54%.

It also affects the way they see their country. Most Americans believe the United States is declining in global power and influence, and nearly two-thirds say China’s power now equals or exceeds that of the US.

Trump and his supporters blame all this on the loss of good old-fashioned jobs in manufacturing to lower-cost countries like Mexico and China, which they blame on the old Washington political establishment. The reality is certainly more complex.

A shift in the global distribution of manufacturing jobs was to some degree inevitable as economic development in Asia brought massive new industrial workforces into the global market. But America’s political system has plainly failed to manage the consequences of this and other shifts for most Americans.

Either way, a political system which for two centuries delivered real opportunity to a large majority of Americans now fails to do so. It is not surprising that a lot of them want big changes.

The social trends driving voter dissatisfaction are harder to pin down, but unease with immigration seems a big factor. Behind that lurk age-old anxieties of identity and race, which progressive identity politics, no matter how well-intentioned or morally valid, seems to have only exacerbated.

No doubt his adroit dog whistling to simple racism is part of Trump’s appeal, but strong swings to him in 2024 among Black and Hispanic voters suggests that this is not the whole story. Perhaps the best one can say is that many Americans, for many different reasons, are not comfortable with the makeup of US society today. They blame Washington, and they vote for Trump.

These economic and social trends may coalesce in the long-term decline of Americans’ trust in government. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans who trust their governments to do the right thing all or most of the time has fallen from over 75% in the early 1960s to 17% today.

Most striking is the collapse in trust between 2001 and 2011, from 51% to 15%, with the numbers flat-lining since then.

That is reflected in possibly the most striking feature of Trump’s political success. It is not just a result of the number of Americans who are willing to vote for him; it is also due to the number who cannot be bothered to vote against him in defence of the old political order.

This was clear in 2024, when the key to Trump’s re-election was a huge drop in Democratic voter turnout. While Trump received 2.8 million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, Harris received 6.8 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020.

Of course, Trump is not immune to the tides of political fortune. Like almost all presidents, his standing in the electorate declined over the first year of his current term. But 18 months into his second term, after countless absurdities and disasters, close to 40% of Americans still approve of his presidency. That is only slightly below the approval rating of the ineffective but inoffensive Biden at the same point in his presidency.

And the evidence suggests that what drives negative sentiment about Trump is not his assault on American institutions and values but his failure to deal with bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.

A minority of American voters find Trump inherently repellent. A bigger minority seems to find him compellingly appealing. Between them lies a plurality that seems passively to accept him and his agenda, revolutionary though it is. That is perhaps the strangest thing of all about US politics today.

Return to normal?

Where does it all go from here? We do not know how resilient and robust the institutions of American government will prove to be in resisting and containing Trump’s revolution. It is still possible they will deliver him a decisive check.

But the odds are against it. Ever since Trump’s era began in 2015, most of us have overestimated the capacity of those institutions to contain him.

The Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the states and the media have at times been able to slow or deflect him, but they have been unable to stop his assault on the American state and its constitution and restore some semblance of normality to the conduct of American government.

It therefore seems prudent to expect that in some form or other Trump’s revolution will continue.

We can glimpse what this means by looking ahead to the 2028 presidential election.

By keeping alive the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Trump is preparing the ground to resist any future loss. We saw how far he and his supporters were willing to go in 2020 and 2021, and it is clear he was much better prepared to go even further had he lost in 2024. How much more prepared and more determined will he be in 2028? The stakes then will be much higher.

Republicans will be even more driven to prevent or overturn a loss for fear that a Democratic president will attack them just as Trump has attacked his adversaries. Trump’s “revenge presidency” has set an example they fear victorious Democrats would follow, so they are even more motivated to do whatever it takes to keep them out of office.

What are the chances, then, that Trump’s mysterious and momentous conquest of the American political system will be defeated at the ballot box? It is an extraordinary fate to befall what was one of the most robust and successful political systems the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, Americans suffer from a national government that is both cruel and incompetent.

For the rest of the world, all this implies that we cannot expect America to return to anything like normal – to the America we have known – for a long time, if ever.

This is an edited extract from Hugh White’s new book, Hard New World: Australia’s Post-American Future (Black Inc).The Conversation

Hugh White, Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

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A little-known rule could still stop Trump's ballroom in its tracks

The fate of President Donald Trump’s estimated US$400 million White House ballroom may hinge on the little-known and somewhat surprising rules as to when the federal government and its agencies can accept privately donated funds.

That’s because Trump’s is using the fact that he’s been accepting private donations to pay for at least some of the project’s cost as a justification for not needing Congress’ explicit authorization.

A federal appeals court on Aug. 7, 2026, disagreed and left in place a lower court’s injunction that was slated to halt construction on Aug. 21. But on that same day, before the injunction took effect, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said the Trump administration could continue construction work while the court considers its request.

As a scholar of nonprofit and tax-exempt law who has studied for decades how the law governs deductible charitable contributions, including those to the government, I find that this appeals court decision calls for an explanation of the role that such private donations may play in any federal government project or activity. An intricate statutory dance is required for taxpayers to make donations to particular government agencies or for particular government purposes.

Giving to the government

You may not realize that you can make potentially tax-deductible contributions to the federal government itself. An official website lists almost two dozen programs, including the National Endowment for for the Humanities, the National Arboretum and AmeriCorps, to which U.S. citizens can donate.

But such donations are allowed to government agencies only if Congress has granted the agency statutory authority to receive those funds.

In this context, according to the reasoning of the majority in the appeals court case, that means spending donated funds to preserve the East Wing would have been automatically allowed because it stood on a national park and the National Parks Service is an agency that individuals can donate to; spending those funds to build something new to replace that structure would not be allowed unless Congress had authorized the project.

But the Trump administration has failed so far to obtain congressional authorization and appropriations for the ballroom.

The federal government has accepted donations voluntarily made by Americans since its founding.

What’s more, the Bureau of Fiscal Services – the central bank account and financial manager for the federal government – explains that it “may accept gifts donated to the United States Government” and that the account for such gifts, which dates back to 1843, was established “to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States.” Such gifts, however, are subject to restrictions.

Statutory restrictions

Since 1982, a provision of the United States Code, the official codification of all the nation’s general and permanent federal statutes, has required that these “patriotic” donations be devoted exclusively to reducing the national debt.

By law, federal agencies cannot augment congressional appropriations. The Miscellaneous Receipts Act requires that “an official or agent of the Government receiving money for the Government from any source shall deposit the money in the Treasury as soon as practicable without deduction for any charge or claim.”

Despite this seemingly absolute language, government agencies are permitted to accept gifts of money or other property when – and to the extent – they are given explicit statutory authority.

Agencies with the authority to accept gifts include the Justice Department, the State Department and the Library of Congress.

But any money must be spent only as Congress directed in establishing the agency mission. The mission of the National Park Service is the conservation and preservation of the land and structures under its jurisdiction.

In contrast, the White House does not have this authority. Its own website states that it “is unable to accept cash, checks, bonds … or other monetary equivalents” as gifts from private citizens.

‘No instance in American history’

That’s in part why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held on Aug. 7 that Trump could not build the ballroom on the site of the former East Wing building.

The two judges in the majority concluded that neither the National Park Service, which is the steward for the national park on which the White House stands, nor Trump himself had satisfied all the statutory requirements needed to undertake building of the above-ground ballroom. It did not block work on an underground military bunker the Trump administration began renovating after it demolished the East Wing in October 2025.

That some, most or even all the funding comes from private donations does not protect the administration’s right to proceed with construction of the 90,000 square-foot (8,361 square-meter) ballroom because it has failed so far to obtain congressional authorization and appropriations for this project, the majority explained.

Crucial to this conclusion was a statute declaring, “A building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.”

“We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paidfor,” the majority opinion says. “Until now.”

Satisfying 2 statutes

The Trump administration has pointed to two possible statutes it says provides the necessary authority to do that.

One involves the purposes for which the National Park Service can spend its funds, including privately donated funds. The other grants the president the ability to spend funds for, among other items, “the care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, [and] improvement” of the executive residence at the White House – funds that “are authorized to be appropriated each fiscal year.”

The majority explained that authority for the president to construct the ballroom requires satisfying both of those statutes; neither alone suffices.

And it rejected the reliance on the National Park Service provision alone. That statute limits use of the service’s funds, in the words of the majority, to “the identified purposes of conservation and preservation.”

In particular, the majority ruled, the provision does not authorize the construction of a new building. Further, it held, the National Park Service provision cannot authorize the president to lead the project; only the provision related to the executive residence can do that.

As to the executive residence provision, the majority opinion explains that it “does not expressly grant the President any independent authority.”

Instead, the majority held, the president must rely on “an accompanying appropriation.” The court found no such accompanying appropriation.

Ellen P. Aprill, Senior Scholar in Residence at the UCLA Law School's Lowell Milken Center For Philanthropy And Nonprofit Law, University of California, Los Angeles

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The dark echo chamber fueling a new persecution narrative

Christian nationalism, a worldview that sees the United States as a Christian nation and believes that Christianity should have a privileged role in American civic life, has been shown to be related to a host of social attitudes.

Research shows that people who hold Christian nationalistic beliefs tend to, on average, also show antipathy toward religious minorities and racial and ethnic minorities, as well as have sexist and anti-democratic attitudes.

Our research found that many Christian nationalists endorse religious pluralism, meaning that they value religious diversity – in principle. But we also found that this support for religious pluralism is often drowned out by perceptions of threats to Christians.

How we did the research

For our new research, published in the academic journal Politics & Religion in March 2026, we surveyed 1,500 American Christians in January 2024.

In healthy democracies, most citizens respect the civil liberties of others, including members of social groups they dislike. We asked our respondents which social group they liked the least, such as Christian fundamentalists, environmental activists, President Donald Trump supporters or atheists. We then asked them if they thought members of that group should be able to make public speeches, teach in public schools or run for political office, among others. The responses, taken together, showed respondents’ political tolerance for people who they dislike.

We also asked respondents how much they agreed with a series of statements commonly used to measure support for Christian nationalism, such as whether the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation. On a scale of 0 to 1, the average Christian nationalism score was 0.64, indicating that American Christians tend to support the idea of a Christian America.

To capture ideas that run directly counter to Christian nationalism, we then asked about their support for religious pluralism. Respondents agreed or disagreed with statements such as “nations should not favor one religion over another,” and “we need to advocate the Christian values of loving your neighbor as yourself.” Together, these made up our anti-Christian nationalism measure.

On average, participants rated their agreement with these statements as 0.74, higher than the agreement with Christian nationalist ideas – suggesting that anti-Christian nationalist views were more widely supported by American Christians.

What the research found

Some of the survey questions measuring Christian nationalism and anti-Christian nationalism captured opposite ideas.

Without assigning respondents to any categories, we asked them if they agreed with statements like “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” or “Nations should not favor one religion over another.” We found that people who agreed with one were likely to agree with the other. In other words, respondents who advocated for a Christian nation also affirmed religious freedom for all.

While this might seem surprising, social scientists have long known that people hold lots of conflicting arguments in their heads. American Christians have likely heard both Christian nationalist and anti-Christian nationalist messages through their congregations, media and social networks.

Our statistical models show that religious pluralism is related to tolerance differently depending on views on Christian nationalism. We isolated strong supporters and strong opponents of Christian nationalism. Predictably, among strong opponents of Christian nationalism, anti-Christian nationalism views were associated with increased tolerance. But, surprisingly, strong supporters of Christian nationalism maintained the same level of tolerance.

According to our data, people who agree with anti-Christian nationalist ideas, yet also embrace Christian nationalist ones, tend to have a fear of persecution. We asked respondents if their least-liked social group posed a threat to the American way of life and people’s freedom. Both groups had similar perceptions that the “American way of life” and everyday freedom were threatened.

This perception of threat was lower only among respondents who both strongly rejected Christian nationalism and embraced anti-Christian nationalism. In other words, support for religious pluralism, on its own, isn’t sufficient to reduce the sense of threat among those who hold Christian nationalist views.

Why it matters

Christian nationalism has emerged as a significant challenge to religious pluralism. Efforts to counter it can often be more credible if they came from other Christians. But for those efforts to work, they need to tackle Christian nationalism at its root.

A woman seated on the ground writes, 'Love thy neighbor as yourself' on a poster. Many American Christians prioritize religious pluralism and love of neighbor. Benjamin Hanson/Middle East Images via AFP via Getty images

Our findings indicate that the root of the problem is not a lack of support for religious pluralism or insufficient willingness to love thy neighbor. It is perceptions of threats posed by disliked groups.

We have observed that the Christian media ecosystem is saturated with messages that American Christians are excluded from public life – ostracized from social institutions like higher education, discriminated against in everyday life and only one election away from losing their Bibles or being jailed for their faith. This sense of threat can trigger authoritarian tendencies, including support for taking away civil liberties like the ability to give public speeches or run for political office from disliked others.

What still isn’t known

Political scientists need to know more about the contours of threat: By whom and what do some Christians feel threatened? Social scientists also do not fully understand how that sense of threat can be dialed down, not just in a lab experiment but also in Christians’ experiences.

Improving our understanding of threat could guide the work of faith leaders striving for a more tolerant, pro-democratic role of faith in the public sphere.The Conversation

Brooklyn Walker, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee and Paul Djupe, Director of the Data for Political Research Program, Denison University

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The perilous twist in the DOJ’s newest civil rights case

In April 2026, a federal grand jury returned indictments charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The indictment alleges the SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, secretly funneled more than US$3 million in donated funds to people associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations.

Prosecutors allege that the SPLC secretly paid members of those groups to act as confidential informants without telling donors. Eight informants received the money between 2014 and 2023, according to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The SPLC has denied the charges and seeks their dismissal, with lawyers for the group adding that the charges constitute “vindictive prosecution.” The SPLC’s interim president, Bryan Fair, has stated that the informant program “saved lives” and reflected decades of dangerous civil rights work.

Critics of the prosecution at Lawfare, a media site focused on the U.S. legal system, argued that the indictment is among “the most cynical criminal cases ever brought by the Department of Justice.” They noted that the SPLC had no legal duty to disclose the confidential nature of its informant program to donors.

Within hours of the Justice Department’s indictment, I found that white supremacist influencers on Telegram, Gab and other social platforms were celebrating the arraignment. They portrayed the charges as proof that journalists and civil rights groups documenting extremist movements could no longer be trusted.

The indictment became a rallying point to discredit not only the SPLC but the wider body of research on hate groups and political extremism. I believe that these narratives will be used to help justify increasingly radical and, in some cases, violent responses.

Ideological ammunition

Some conservative advocacy groups and right-wing media outlets – including Moms for Liberty and the Daily Signal – immediately stripped the indictment of its legal context. In online posts, they recast it as established proof that the SPLC had been deliberately creating extremist activity rather than investigating it.

A Telegram search I conducted on May 6 identified 22 posts mentioning the SPLC across at least six white nationalist channels. Most appeared within 72 hours of the indictment. The posts did not engage in sustained discussion. They repeated a small set of claims.

The Super Sincere Alpha GOONMAXXING Aryan Sigma Patriot channel wrote: “The SPLC is a hate group.”

Other channels cited the indictment as proof that the SPLC had been paying sources to manufacture the very extremism it claimed to fight. In the White Lives Matter Official Telegram channel, users were urged to “become an activist for your race” while referencing the SPLC as an opposing force.

The similarity across channels and social media is notable. The same framing appeared repeatedly within a short time window. This suggests rapid circulation of a shared narrative across networks rather than independent commentary.

The neo-Nazi, neo-fascist layer

Comments on the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment by members of the Commander George Lincoln Rockwell channel – named for the founder of the American Nazi Party – demonstrate how antisemitic conspiracy theories work, not as explicit rhetoric but as a broader narrative.

Internet discussions portrayed the SPLC as a politically motivated or illegitimate actor. Posts in Patriot Front Updates, for example, circulated allegations of fraud and money laundering while criticizing the SPLC and its efforts to identify and challenge white nationalist activity.

I found that this criticism of the SPLC also became connected to a broader antisemitic conspiracy narrative – one that portrays the organization as operating on behalf of purported Jewish interests rather than simply as an advocacy organization with political and ideological commitments.

These narratives circulated alongside the “great replacement theory,” which falsely claims that shadowy elites are encouraging immigration and demographic change to replace the white population and diminish its political and cultural influence. It’s a conspiracy theory that the SPLC and others have documented as central to contemporary white nationalism.

In this logic, the indictment is not an isolated fraud case – it is evidence that a coordinated network of institutions has been systematically suppressing white identity.

Victimhood as recruitment

Scholars of white nationalism have long identified victimhood narratives as central to that movement’s appeal. By portraying white people as under attack or unfairly displaced, these narratives transform social change into a story of persecution and provide a powerful justification for political mobilization.

My research on white nationalism shows how contemporary extremist movements rely less on formal membership and more on decentralized digital spaces. It is there that narratives, grievances and identities are continuously reinforced.

In these environments, major news events like the SPLC indictment become opportunities.

Why this pattern repeats

Extremist movements have long used mainstream controversies as recruitment opportunities.

Participants often interpret external events through narratives of threat, injustice and persecution. In doing so, they transform moments of controversy into evidence that their worldview is correct.

In the 1990s, for instance, the deadly standoffs between federal officers and the Branch Davidians religious sect near Waco, Texas, and survivalist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, became foundational persecution narratives for militia and Christian Identity movements. These groups saw the sieges as proof that the federal government was hunting gun owners and religious dissenters.

In online extremist communities, these events can become powerful tools for reinforcing group identity and attracting individuals who are searching for explanations or belonging.

With a real-world legal event like the SPLC indictment, extremists can point to government action as evidence that their worldview is being validated. The result is a narrative that appears responsive to current events, even when the connection is shallow or distorted.

Redirected domestic terrorism policy

Legal scholars have noted that the Justice Department indictment fits within the Trump administration’s broader pattern of redirecting domestic terrorism policy away from white supremacist groups.

The Trump White House’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention violent far-right groups as a domestic terrorism threat at all.

That context matters for understanding how the SPLC case landed in extremist spaces: not as an isolated fraud allegation but as institutional permission. The indictment has become a symbol before the evidence has been weighed.

In today’s fragmented digital media environment, symbols travel faster than facts, especially when they confirm what a radicalized audience already wants to believe. I believe the real danger is not that white supremacists believe the SPLC is guilty. It is that the controversy, whatever its legal outcome, has already done its work.The Conversation

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

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Trump just found a hidden loophole in the Supreme Court's birthright ruling

Since his return to the White House, President Donald Trump has issued over 270 executive orders.

That includes two orders issued in August 2026 addressing birthright citizenship, a subject seemingly settled by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision. In June, the high court struck down Trump’s effort to deny citizenship to children born to foreign parents who are unlawfully in the United States.

One order directs federal agencies not to recognize U.S. citizenship for children of certain foreign national parents. They include the children of an “alien enemy,” meaning citizens of a foreign country that is at war with the United States, and children of parents who are employees of a foreign government – such as ambassadors, for example.

The second executive order calls on federal agencies to curtail so-called “birth tourism,” which it defines this way: the “entry of any foreign national into the United States via a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth on American soil.”

As someone who has studied citizenship law, I found the two birthright executive eye-catching. At first glance, they seemed to defy the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision. But on closer examination, the picture is not so clear. That’s because the orders target aspects of birthright citizenship that the Supreme Court did not address in its June decision.

The Supreme Court decision

On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to stop recognizing birthright citizenship for babies born in the U.S. if neither parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident.

In June 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the order. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are … citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

Roberts noted that the only people excluded from that clause are people who are exempt from U.S. jurisdiction, despite living on U.S. soil, such as ambassadors’ children and members of Native American tribes. The number of people covered by that exception is, as law scholars have noted, “trivial and easily administrable.”

Roberts’ opinion said nothing about birth tourism. That omission seems to have left room for Trump to craft his new executive orders.

While Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck argues that the president is defying the court, I believe Trump is doing something different. He is engaged in what tax lawyers call “avoidance.”

The president is using lawful methods to identify loopholes in the court’s decision. Some scholars call it “legalistic noncompliance” – that is, getting around the court’s birthright citizenship decision while pretending to follow it.

A man sits in the back seat of a black limousine. Trump departs the Supreme Court on April 1, 2026, after attending oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Trump v. Hawaii

One way for a president to avoid the implications of an adverse court ruling is to claim a new action is authorized under a rule not discussed in the decision.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, explained the legal basis of the new executiue orders this way.

“Section 215 (a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president this authority,” Miller told reporters.

Nothing in the Supreme Court’s June birthright citizenship ruling touched on the president’s authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

However, the 2018 case Trump v. Hawaii did.

Decided during the president’s first term, after the so-called Muslim ban that suspended entry into the U.S. for people from some Muslim-majority countries, the Supreme Court held that the president “lawfully exercised the broad discretion granted to him… (by) the Immigration and Nationality Act … (to) suspend … the entry of aliens into the United States.”

The emphasis here is on “broad discretion.” As Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, the Immigration and Nationality Act allows the president to make “decisions whether and when to suspend entry … and on what conditions.” It is left to the president to figure out when “the entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

The language in Trump’s birth tourism executive order reflects Roberts’ understanding of the scope of the authority granted to the chief executive by the Immigration and Nationality Act.

“Birth tourism,” the order says, “undermines the integrity of the Nation’s immigration system by enabling foreign nationals to exploit their temporary admission to obtain permanent immigration-related benefits. Birth tourism also … impairs the executive branch’s ability to protect the national security.”

Protection of national security was one of the grounds Roberts specifically cited in Trump v. Hawaii as a basis for the president to prevent foreign nationals from entering the United States. The president’s new executive orders try to circumvent the court’s birthright citizenship case by invoking a law not discussed in that case.

‘Ending it a different way’

During the Oval Office signing ceremony for his two new executive orders, the president was not subtle about his intentions regarding birthright citizenship. With Miller at his side, he called the Supreme Court’s June ruling “very unfair” and said that with new orders “we’re ending it a different way.”

In its Trump v. Hawaii ruling, the Supreme Court charted the route for him to do so.

But, as Vladeck argues, even if the president does not succeed in getting the court to approve the administration’s new effort to end birthright citizenship, it will continue to “try to muddy the waters when it comes to describing categories of non-citizens” and make the definition of citizenship not depend on where a child is born.

Instead, Vladeck says, an immigrant child’s status in this country would depend on “whether officials can pin a disqualifying label on her parent.”

That would leave the court’s birthright citizenship decision undisturbed, while hollowing out its practical effect.The Conversation

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

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

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A single vote in CA is being watched around the world

In November, California will vote on a proposal to levy a one-off 5% tax on the wealth of all billionaires in the state.

Google co-founder and billionaire Sergey Brin has already spent US$100 million on political donations to a group opposing the tax. Brin is hoping to avoid a potential tax bill of US$13 billion, a return of roughly 130 to 1 if that investment is successful.

Advocates of the billionaire tax claim it would raise US$100 billion in revenue, to be allocated directly to state-funded healthcare, food assistance and public education.

Supporters of the union-backed proposal also highlight that most billionaires currently pay lower marginal rates of tax than the average worker, and that the revenue is desperately needed to fill gaps in funding created by US President Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid.

Its critics, which include California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, argue the measure will drive billionaires and their tax revenue to leave the state.

Taxing the ultrawealthy

Similar measures targeting the ultrawealthy are currently under consideration around the world.

In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed a 2% income tax increase for those earning over US$1 million, and passed a property surcharge tax on second homes. Other US states – including Washington state, Maine and Minnesota – have passed or are considering similar income or wealth tax measures.

In the United Kingdom, a group of 120 millionaires have launched a “Proud to Pay” campaign asking the government to levy an additional 2% tax on wealth over £10 million.

Spiralling global inequality

Behind the public discussion of California’s billionaire tax lies a much deeper debate about spiralling global inequality.

Recent data from the US shows the share of economic output flowing to workers has dropped to a record low of 52.9% in 2026. This means for every US$100 the economy produces, workers take home US$52.90 in pay, the smallest share since records began in 1947.

Similar trends have been observed around the world.

Conversely, the wealth of billionaires has accelerated rapidly. As of 2026, Forbes reports a global record 3,428 billionaires.

Perhaps most symptomatically, in June Elon Musk briefly became the world’s first trillionaire after the public launch of SpaceX. His wealth now sits at around US$800 billion.

The causes of inequality

Some blame globalisation for this explosion of inequality, but there are two other important related factors to consider as well.

The first is the global decline of the trade union movement. With union membership and power declining around the world, the ability of workers to negotiate for better wages has declined.

The second is a trend of corporate consolidation into a small number of large “superstar firms”. These companies, which include tech giants like Alphabet, Amazon, and Uber, wield monopoly-like powers. This reduces competition and allows these firms to drive down wages.

The rise of artificial intelligence and automation will only accelerate these trends, enabling the largest firms to shed even more workers even as the firms’ output and profitability continues to climb.

Workers feel the crunch

For the last couple of decades, stagnating wages have been propped up by cheap access to credit. With central banks using unconventional policies to keep interest rates low, household spending has remained largely stable, funded by an increase in household debt.

However, with inflation rising, central banks around the world have pushed up interest rates from emergency lows during the pandemic, cutting off the source of cheap credit. With inflation rising faster than wages, the effect has been real declines in living standards.

Unsurprisingly voters are unhappy at this “cost of living” crisis, and all over the world have turned away from incumbents and established parties.

A jump to the left?

If the previous decade’s politics have been dominated by dissent on the right, many countries are now seeing the emergence of stronger dissent on the left.

After Mamdani’s headline-grabbing victory in New York, Democratic Socialists have ridden a wave of momentum to win a series of primary races. Beyond the US, we can note left-independent Catherine Connolly’s election as Irish president, the rise of the Greens in the UK, and the recent resurgence of left-wing Die Linke in Germany.

These different parties and leaders all share a focus on combating growing global inequalities of wealth and power. Billionaires, the most obvious and visible symbol of global wealth inequalities, are an obvious target.

However, as California’s proposal shows, attempts to rein in the wealth and power of billionaires should expect furious backlash from billionaires themselves.

In addition to Brin’s US$100 million, other billionaire donors including Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt and Chris Larsen have also spent significantly to oppose the tax. Brin’s campaign committee has also organised competing ballot propositions which, if passed, would nullify the tax.

For now, polling suggests the billionaire tax is supported by a majority of voters. More than 1.6 million Californians signed the petition to put the tax on the November ballot.

The future of wealth inequality

California’s coming election will serve as an important test of the political power of the billionaire class, and the broader health of American democracy.

Yet even if the tax is successful, taxing billionaires only treats a symptom of global inequality, rather than addressing its underlying causes.

A policy agenda for seriously addressing wealth inequality must also therefore include a much broader suite of measures. These might include improving workers’ bargaining power, breaking up monopolies and public ownership of AI technology.

Without these structural fixes, we should expect voter anger and the current political instability around the world to continue to escalate.The Conversation

Henry Maher, Lecturer in Politics, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

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

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The media made Donald Trump look more coherent than he really is

On September 5 2024, after giving a speech about his economic plans for the United States, Donald Trump was asked what he would do, if re-elected president, to make childcare more affordable.

Trump then offered a nonsensical, 374-word response:

well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down – you know, I was somebody – we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter, Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about – because, look, childcare is childcare. It’s something – you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to – but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country […]

Trump’s answer (or lack thereof) showed he had almost certainly not given the important topic any serious prior thought. His response also provided valuable insights into the scattered state of his own mind.

Yet, many of the subsequent news stories didn’t pay any attention to this massive fumble, and instead reported earnestly on the policy ideas put forward in the scripted parts of his speech.

The New York Times’ article about the event, for example, was headlined “Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk”.

It made reference to his “jumbled and meandering answer” only once, and not until the 24th paragraph.

For many frustrated observers, this was a prime example of what had come to be known as “sanewashing”.

What is ‘sanewashing’?

The term “sanewashing” has been used to describe the tendency of journalists – particularly when reporting on Trump – to focus their attention on the coherent and normal (or “sane”) parts of what he says, while ignoring his often weird, incoherent ramblings (about, for instance, the fictional movie character Hannibal Lecter).

Many have argued that, in doing this, journalists are giving the wider public an inaccurate picture of who Trump is. They may even be inadvertently covering up his more extreme and dangerous ideas and whether he is fit to govern.

The important context here, too, is that during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden had received intense scrutiny over his declining physical and mental capacities, which caused the then-president to drop out of the race in August that year.

Many felt Trump was just as cognitively unfit for office (if not moreso), but that was not clear to voters because journalists were sanewashing him, and making him seem more normal and “together” than he really was.

Some commentators even suggested this revealed an underlying “bias” among journalists, which was helping Trump to win the election.

But our groundbreaking research tells a more complicated story.

Sanewashing in the 2024 election

We decided to investigate whether journalists really had sanewashed Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.

To do so, we focused our analysis around two speeches, the coverage of which had received a lot of attention for potential sanewashing.

One was the childcare example we mentioned earlier. The other was at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Trump made an off-colour remark about Arnold Palmer, which was widely interpreted as a reference to the size of the late golfer’s genitals.

We took the text of those two speeches, as well as hundreds of news articles that referenced them in the weeks that followed (from both traditional newspaper sources, as well as less-traditional online news outlets), and ran them through a series of computational analyses.

Our recently-published results show there is some evidence that sanewashing was occurring around both of these speeches.

We found reporters, on the whole, tended to focus on just one or two key topics Trump talked about, and did so via substantially different language than the now-president used.

But this didn’t occur consistently.

Journalists covering Trump’s economics speech tended to focus on exactly that: themes of taxation and government spending, and largely overlooked his failed answer on childcare.

On the other hand, when covering the Latrobe rally, journalists were much more inclined to discuss the comments about Palmer.

Perhaps not surprisingly, though, this was seen more frequently in online outlets, as compared to mainstream newspapers.

We also found, in spite of the media criticism, there was substantial meta-commentary on Trump’s incoherent speaking style.

However, online news outlets tended to use more strident language when doing so (using words such as “weird” and “bizarre”), where traditional outlets typically opted for more neutral language (like “meandering” and “erratic”).

This would suggest that journalists working for outlets such as the New York Times may feel a stronger need to adhere to notions of impartiality, and thus may feel less able to call out the extraordinary aspects of Trump’s rhetoric.

Is this a problem?

A lingering question amid all of this is whether or not sanewashing is fundamentally problematic in the first place.

Obviously it’s important that journalists accurately reflect reality in their reporting.

But we also don’t want them to engage in stenography either, and just reprint everything a politician says word-for-word.

In practice, sanewashing may simply be an inevitable byproduct of journalism itself; of the natural process of filtering out information that is deemed less relevant, and focusing instead on what’s most important.

And, very often, journalists get those calls right.

To demonstrate this point, let’s return to the article we mentioned earlier: “Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk”.

The commission referenced in that headline was the agency that would later come to be known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and which would be responsible for – among other things – the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

That act alone has been forecast to result in as many as 14 million excess deaths worldwide, which is obviously much more significant than a failed answer on childcare.

So journalists do need to make sure they’re still drawing attention to Trump’s weird sidetracks, but not letting those distract from the more serious ideas buried underneath.The Conversation

Stephen Harrington, Associate Professor, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology; Ella Chorazy, Senior Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, and Timothy Graham, Associate Professor in Digital Media, Queensland University of Technology

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

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Trump’s trapped: Appeasing most Americans will cost him Evangelicals

The American war on Iran has quickly become one of the most unpopular wars in United States history. At the beginning of March 2026, when the war started, 46 per cent of Americans opposed the conflict, according to pollster Nate Silver’s aggregator of polling data. Now that number has risen to 57 per cent.

As a result, U.S. President Donald Trump is in urgent need of reliable support for the war effort. A group known as Christian Zionists consistently shows strong backing for his military actions.

Foremost among these supporters are those who gathered for the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) annual conference recently held in Washington, D.C.

Led by the firebrand pastor John Hagee, CUFI has established itself as one of the most powerful lobbying groups within the Republican Party. With a membership of 10 million, it stands as one of Trump’s most reliable bases of support, particularly in terms of his war efforts.

At the recent conference attended by thousands of fervent supporters of close American-Israeli ties, as well as the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Hagee opened the conference’s night to honour Israel event with the following statement about the Iranian regime:

“The issue is whether a regime that sponsors terror and threatens Israel should be permitted to exist… Israel has the right to stop a nuclear sword from being placed over the neck of the Jewish people.”

Dispensationalists, evangelicals

The doctoral project of one of the authors of this article, Jason Piché, focuses on Christian Zionism, dispensationalism and their impact on U.S. foreign policy. Dispensations are seen as distinct periods in history, believed to be ordained by God to govern and organize the affairs of the world. Dispensationalism functions both as a method for interpreting the Bible and as a framework for understanding its history.

Co-author André Gagné’s 2024 book American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare and End Times addresses the role of American evangelicals in U.S. politics.

Christian organizations like CUFI exist solely to fervently support Israel. Yet Christian Zionism has been a crucial aspect of some American Protestant groups since the late 19th century, and its influence has only increased since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Christian Zionism began in tandem with a theological idea known as premillennial dispensationalism in the mid-19th century.

During a tour of the U.S., Bible scholar John Nelson Darby promoted the belief that God had divided the history of the world into seven dispensations. The final dispensation, according to Darby, would see the return of Jesus Christ and the beginning of his millennial reign.

Darby believed that Jewish people would play a crucial role in this final dispensation, as Jesus’s return could only occur if the Jews reclaimed their traditional homeland in Palestine and built a Third Temple.

Christian Zionists and dispensationalists have therefore become strong supporters of the state of Israel, viewing its security as being a fundamental aspect of their theology. As a result, they support joint Israeli-U.S. military operations against Iran and believe that America should take steps to promote Israeli interests in the region.

Christian Zionism and U.S. foreign policy

Trump recently announced that negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran have resumed, which initially led to some pause in hostilities between the two countries. Now, Trump says the U.S. is only “semi-negotiating” with Iran.

For his Christian Zionist supporters, however, negotiations with the Islamic Republic pose an existential threat to Israel and, consequently, to American interests. During the recent CUFI Israel event, prominent pastor Russell Johnson expressed these concerns and was met with thunderous applause from the crowd:

“That is why I must say to our very own political leaders, finish the job! … Israel should not be restrained from permanently removing an existential threat simply because diplomats want a ceremony and politicians want a headline. If you want America to be strong and to be free, America must remain a friend to Israel.”

For Trump’s most loyal supporters, the American-Israeli war with Iran is seen as an existential struggle that encompasses both material and spiritual dimensions.

They believe the U.S. and Israel must neutralize Iran to guarantee Israel’s long-term security. Such actions not only empower Israel and solidify its position within the dispensationalist framework of the end times, but also benefit America, as they believe it aligns with God’s promise in Genesis 12:3 to bless those who support his covenant people.

Trump’s conundrum

Trump is in a difficult position. With an approval rating of merely 38 per cent, ending the war could alienate his most ardent supporters, while continuing it could further distance him from the majority of Americans who disapprove of the conflict.

His approach of vacillating between largely inconsequential airstrikes, cataclysmic threats and unsuccessful peace negotiations is unlikely to satisfy any of his key constituencies.

What is clear is that if he decides to escalate the war, Christian Zionists will be at the forefront of those supporting him.The Conversation

André Gagné, Full Professor, Department of Theological Studies, Concordia University and Jason Piché, PhD Student, Christian Zionism and Dispensationalism, Concordia University

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

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Democrats have a working-class delusion —and the data proves it

Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class?

The answers come in different forms.

Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, railing against “the oligarchs.”

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 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 had become the left’s latest blue-collar savior until he ended his campaign in the wake of a sexual assault allegation, 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.”

The most recent high-profile progressive candidate to embrace those working people: Abdul El-Sayed, whose economic populism helped him win the 2026 Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Called a “working class” champion by the United Auto Workers, El-Sayed performed best in wealthier, higher-educated areas of the state. His opponent, Haley Stevens, drew more support from Detroit and working-class communities.

Still, El-Sayed’s victory has led to a familiar refrain: 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 – “economic populism” 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, messenger or 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 more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It’s a specific way of looking at the world.

Conventional definitions of the working class 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 politically homeless working class: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party.

Economic abandonment

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 the strongest argument. 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 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 also declined, to 32%.

That gap is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It’s 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 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. Whether immigration levels should be increased, the two groups were virtually identical in 2000 – around 8% support. By 2020 Democrats were at 48%, working-class voters at 24%.

Even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust the institution 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 stems from 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.

This is an updated version of a story originally published on June 2, 2026.The Conversation

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.

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DC’s strangest political mystery just took a bizarre left turn

In the latest twist in one of the strangest ongoing scandals in Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced that the government would be dropping charges against the four people accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the 2,000-foot long water basin that connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. Pirro said faulty construction – not vandalism, as President Donald Trump had claimed – caused the pool’s liner to peel off in June 2026.

As I’ve followed this bizarre saga, I’ve found myself reflecting on the history of the pool itself. It was built in the 1920s, when Washington was transformed by ambitious construction projects, even as the nation grappled with political division, racial conflict and clashes between religion and secularism.

To me, everything about the pool’s early history – the debates over its placement, the innovative engineering techniques used during its construction, and its proponents’ longing for something visually and metaphorically unifying – stands in stark contrast to the slapdash renovations, blame games and abuses of power playing out today.

Coming to a consensus

In 1901, the U.S. Senate formed the McMillan Commission, a group of architects, landscape designers and artists, to develop a parks system for the nation’s capital.

The commission’s 1902 report also recommended a location for the future Lincoln Memorial. Although proposals for a memorial had emerged shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, decades of political disagreement over its design, location and purpose had delayed construction.

The report proposed situating it at the western end of the Mall, near the Potomac River. Inspired by the waterways of Versailles and the reflecting basins of the Taj Mahal, the commission envisioned a reflecting pool linking the future memorial to the Washington Monument. In this way, these two magnificent monuments could be reflected in a huge mirror of water, framed by manicured, green grass.

Over the ensuing decade, the plans continued to elicit debate and controversy, pitting supporters of the commission’s vision against members of Congress, railroad interests and real estate developers.

The American Institute of Architects and American Federation of Arts backed the report, arguing that isolation from the city’s bustle created a dignified space for reflection. They also called attention to the qualifications of the artists on the commission, and to the economic viability of the site: The land was owned by the federal government, so the project’s funds could go toward the memorial itself rather than acquiring land.

But some House leaders insisted that the memorial be built on Capitol Hill, two miles to the east, since Lincoln had preserved the Union and worked closely with Congress during the Civil War.

Railroad interests wanted the memorial near the soon-to-be-completed Union Station, a proposal backed by some real estate developers. Even the National Highways Association joined the fray, arguing that the US$2 million Congress had authorized for the memorial in 1911 would be better spent on a memorial highway named for Lincoln linking Washington and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The Union Station plan drew ridicule in the Washington press and failed to gain congressional support. When the proposal to replace the memorial with a highway came before Congress in 1912, the House of Representatives rejected the idea, too – despite some fears that moneyed interests would win out – and moved ahead with plans for a traditional monument.

Around the same period, plans were also put forward for Lee Highway. Named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee, the road reflected the era’s ongoing debates over how Americans memorialized the Civil War.

A pool on a swamp

With the riverside location for the monument settled, construction of the Lincoln Memorial began in 1914. The excavation of the basin for the reflecting pool started in 1920, two years before the memorial itself was completed.

Author J.W. Duffield, writing in 1922, compared the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to the one in front of the Taj Mahal, that “exhalation of a dream.”

“It is in accord with the eternal fitness of things,” he continued, “that these memorials to America’s two greatest Presidents – Washington, under whom the nation came into being; Lincoln, by whose labors it was preserved and by whose blood it was hallowed – should stand in close proximity, as shrines to which posterity may pay pilgrimage and tribute.”

Yet there were several obstacles involved in the construction of the pool – namely, the area was swampland, so the settling of the ground and the drainage presented practical construction challenges.

Engineer Charles A. Peters Jr. worked on the pool. In a 1923 article for the journal The Military Engineer, he described some of the creative solutions.

To deal with the settling, Peters and his team developed flexible flooring lined with an impervious three-ply fabric. The drainage system had to empty the pool in less than 24 hours without leaving puddles. So it was designed with a sloped basin and drainage system that allowed crews to empty the pool for maintenance while preventing water from collecting in low spots.

An additional consideration was cold weather. Engineers had to account for the stresses of freeze-thaw cycles, which can gradually damage waterproofing layers, crack concrete and masonry, and create leaks.

The waterproofing worked: It held up for decades, and in its early years, members of the public could be seen ice skating on the frozen reflecting pool.

From Lincoln to Trump

On May 30, 1922, 50,000 people – including Robert Todd Lincoln, the late president’s only surviving son – gathered on the National Mall for the unveiling of the monument for the man whom some call “America’s secular saint.”

During the ceremony, President Warren Harding declared Lincoln’s accomplishments “so colossal that none will dispute that he was incomparably the greatest of our Presidents” due to “the greatness of his intellect, his honesty of purpose, and his kindness and gentleness.”

The same year that the Lincoln Memorial was inaugurated, the tomb of Tutankhamum was discovered in Egypt, fueling a broader fascination with ancient civilizations, monuments and the ways societies preserved memories of powerful figures. The Egyptian pharaoh Menes appears first among the lawgivers represented in the interior frieze on the South Wall of the U.S. Supreme Court building, completed in 1935. These friezes reflected the aspirations of the nation’s leaders to place America on the continuum of great civilizations.

The deliberative, thoughtful process of remaking the nation’s capital in the early 20th century bears little resemblance to Trump’s insistence on remaking the capital in his image.

After Trump announced his wish to change the color of the pool to what he calls “American flag blue,” the National Park Service awarded a no-bid contract to a politically connected firm, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, to repair leaks and paint the pool. It signed another no-bid contract to install a filtration system with Greenwater Services, a construction company whose owner had donated to Trump.

The rushed renovation that ensued – and the squabbling over whether the peeling liner was the result of vandalism – led to charges against four suspects that were eventually dropped.

The pool debacle came on the heels of other attempts to modify the nation’s capital, from a new White House ballroom to a proposed monumental arch. In October 2025, Trump dismissed all six members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in order to circumvent the independent design review board.

The 1920s weren’t devoid of partisanship, graft and scandal. Far from it. But unlike Trump’s top-down approach, the process for building monuments and civic spaces involved Congress, artists, architects, engineers and city planners who debated, offered their expertise and listened to public.The Conversation

Jennifer Tucker, Professor of History, Wesleyan University

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

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