Aaron Renn was in a good mood. And that was fair: It’s not every day that you get labeled the No. 1 “intellectual super influencer” for a major swath of the Trump-era right.

“It’s always good to have some independent validation of your work,” he told me.

A former partner at the consulting firm Accenture, he’s now best known for his writing on urban policy and the role of evangelical Christians (like himself) in American culture. His concept of the “negative world” — the idea that contemporary mainstream culture is inherently hostile to anyone taking evangelical principles seriously — has become influential enough to receive feature treatment in the New York Times.

Yet for anyone familiar with American politics, the idea that someone like Aaron Renn is in any way the No. 1 “super influencer” on the right might seem implausible. He’s not a social media warrior with the White House’s ear, like Laura Loomer or Chris Rufo. He’s not a household name like Tucker Carlson. He doesn’t run a big media outfit like Ben Shapiro. So where does Renn’s achievement come from, and what does it mean?

The source is a new report from the boutique risk analysis firm Baron Public Affairs LLC. Baron makes its money, in part, by advising corporate clients on how best to navigate the DC political environment to advance their interests. Its new report is an attempt to guide them through a specific subset of the right: the national-populist corner of the right-wing policy world that’s achieved greater prominence since 2016.

Baron’s report paints a fascinating picture of today’s conservatism, shining a light on some of its most thoughtful, relevant, and interesting quarters. Yet in doing so, the report also skates over divisions inside the group under consideration  — splits that matter immensely for the American right’s future.

The “super influencers,” explained

In its report, Baron compiled papers published by six right-wing think tanks and one right-leaning intellectual journal. They then used a proprietary research platform to comb through 29,181 citations to individual people in those papers, and assembled a list of the top 20 most cited names in their sample. These, in Baron’s estimation, are the “super influencers” who “most inform the policy leaders of the nationalist-populist movement,” the conservatives building intellectual scaffolding to support the GOP’s turn toward both economic and political nationalism. 

Baron did not publish the full list of 20 names (and did not respond to my repeated requests for comment). But alongside Renn, the most cited name in its sample, it revealed two other “super influencers” in an accompanying podcast: Brad Wilcox and Michael Lind. Both are revealing.

Wilcox is a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank known for taking an unusually empirical approach to social conservatism. If you’ve followed Wilcox, whose work has often been relevant to our coverage at Vox, you’ve probably seen him offering charts, graphs, and regression analyses to defend his view that marriage is one of society’s most important and valuable institutions. His most recent book is titled, simply enough, Get Married.

Lind, by contrast, arguably isn’t a conservative at all. A longtime commentator on American politics, he began his career as a kind of left labor populist — hostile to mass immigration due to the same (empirically doubtful) fears about the harmful effects on native-born workers that once shaped Bernie Sanders’s views on the issue. 

Long critical of the cultural elitism of American liberals, Lind has drifted more and more toward writing for conservative outlets: becoming in effect, if not in self-identification, a real influence on the populist right. (He is not the only liberal on the list, which per Baron includes “two Biden-era White House officials and a writer who leads one of the more prominent tribes of the Left.”)

These three men — Renn, Wilcox, and Lind — reflect what Baron sees as the defining preoccupations of the “super influencers” more broadly.

Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad (in fact, none of Baron’s top 20 were foreign policy experts at all). Instead, they’re overwhelmingly focused on different questions: how to reverse declining fertility rates, or the effect of trade competition with China on American cities and families. 

Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad.

In our conversation, Renn suggested a uniting concept for the issues these writers cared about: “the social health of the nation.” By this, he meant things that couldn’t be fully captured by traditional economic metrics: whether Americans feel happy, whether they feel like they live meaningful lives, whether they feel like their families and communities are secure and stable. 

“There are these trends that don’t seem super healthy even if the GDP line continues to go up,” Renn says. “Those have been issues that weren’t part of Donald Trump’s initial set of issues, but are ones that have become widely talked about — even on the left.”

Though the preoccupations of the right’s new social thinkers may have arisen alongside Trump to challenge Reagan-era free-market conservatives, they themselves are not necessarily Trumpy. Befitting the fact that many have backgrounds in quantitative social science, and that some see themselves as liberals, they tend to be looking for answers beyond MAGA demagoguery. That’s true even though their research topics have some obvious appeal within MAGA spaces.

Super influencers against themselves

Baron’s report paints an appealing portrait of the modern right. Renn’s oeuvre is indeed fascinating, and Wilcox’s empiricism fosters a more serious conversation around social policy than the traditional culture war hysterics. More broadly, I think Baron is right that the sorts of issues that preoccupy these thinkers will indeed remain important for the right for quite some time.

But I think there’s a danger in treating this group as homogenous, or as representative of the right as a whole.

To see why, it’s helpful to go back to the report’s basic methodology — tracking citations in right-wing publications. Those publications were drawn from the following seven sources:

• American Affairs
• American Compass
• The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI)
• The Claremont Institute
• The America First Policy Institute (AFPI)
• The Center for Renewing America (CRA)
• The Heritage Foundation

These are extremely different outfits. Three of them — American Affairs, American Compass, and FAI — indeed overlap with the kinds of questions that Baron’s “super influencers” are interested in. The other four, by contrast, are MAGA more than anything else: Their mission, at least as currently constituted, is to mount an intellectual defense of the president’s worldview and/or develop policy ideas that might flesh out Trump’s inchoate impulses.

This isn’t necessarily relevant for Baron’s mission in advising clients on which influential voices deserve their attention. But for those of us interested in mapping the intellectual right, these distinctions are vital.

Indeed, by Baron’s own estimation, there is a significant difference between the kinds of people cited in reports by these two sub-groupings in its sample. The first grouping, Baron found, will regularly cite “heterodox liberals” like Lind who share some of their priorities; the second did not cite a single such liberal in any of the reports it surveyed. 

Thus, there actually isn’t one unified cadre of intellectual “super influencers” shaping the national-populist right. There are two distinctive groupings: one which influences the sorts of New Right outfits committed to their own ideological project, the other which influences reports released by MAGA appendages. While there is some overlap between those two groups, Baron’s own analysis suggests they are meaningfully distinct blocs.

This matters for the right’s future. In fact, it matters a lot.

Publications from the first three of Baron’s sources tend to be less hard-edged about partisan conflict; they engage with liberals quite a bit because they prioritize their long-term policy goals and are looking for coalition members who can help advance them. In their work, you can see some of the virtues the Baron report documents amongst the cited “super influencers” — empiricism, “genteel temperament,” a focus on distinctively 21st century social problems.

Work by the other four, by contrast, tends to paint American political divisions in apocalyptic terms. Claremont writers, for example, have famously described the 2016 election as “Flight 93” and declared that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They do not cite liberals approvingly because they see them as worse than political rivals: as villains, the authors of America’s ills, whose power must be crushed for the country to survive. 

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” as Heritage president Kevin Roberts put it in an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

One of the principal questions of the right’s looming post-Trump era will be whether it can move past this kind of zero-sum partisanship. The Baron report might lead one to be optimistic on that front: if Aaron Renn truly is the leading influence among the American right’s national-populist intellectuals, that portends a future where America’s warring political tribes can finally start to find common ground.

But I wouldn’t bet on it, at least not for some time now.

There are deep reasons why Trump, a human embodiment of rage and division, leads the Republican Party — and why some of the right’s top thought leaders are so loyal to him. So long as those reasons persist, the influence of more thoughtful “super influencers” on practical politics may be more limited than one might hope.

LONDON, Ontario — President Donald Trump seems dead set on escalating his trade war with Canada. And no one is really sure why.

On Monday, Trump threatened another round of 50 percent tariffs on top of the ones he just implemented — this one targeting Canada’s auto industry, which is so deeply integrated with its American counterpart that large duties would do major damage on both sides of the border. By Tuesday morning, he had begun musing about renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” to spite Canadians. And throughout all of this, he and Vice President JD Vance had renewed their “jokes” about absorbing Canada as the 51st state.

But who is this even for? While the White House’s behavior infuriates Canadians — it is palpable on the ground here in Canada — it’s unusual by Trump standards in that nobody seems to want this conflict but him. 

Even the most fringe, or unpopular, foreign policy ideas he’s pursued typically have think tanks devoted to pushing them, or a loyal ally to please, or a voting bloc to rile up before the midterms. But unlike, say, Trump’s conflicts with Iran, or Cuba, or China, it’s hard to find a highly visible corner of conservatism that’s the driving force behind a nationalist campaign against Canada. 

When I reached out to trade experts, political scientists, and in-the-know Republicans of the pro- and anti- Trump persuasion to try to trace the origins of Trump’s trade war, they had trouble pointing to anything solid. As one veteran GOP lobbyist put it, there doesn’t seem to be any ideological, business, or congressional coalition devoted to egging on the trade fight. 

Even people sympathetic to Trump’s economic nationalism seem confused: Michael Lind, a populist pundit who last year penned a piece titled “Why tariffs are good,” has just written a follow-up titled “The madness of Trump’s Canada trade war.” And while there are some affected industries — autos, steel — they don’t seem to be main characters: United Auto Workers, which backed some prior tariffs, came out strongly against the proposed auto tariffs.

The politics don’t make much sense either. American voters have long disapproved of Trump’s tariffs on Canadian-made goods, and the current escalation threatens to be the largest and most economically damaging yet. Republicans sound anxious about its impact on the midterms; several key Senate races are in states right on the Canadian border, and any tariff-related price spike there could supercharge Democrats’ core midterm message about affordability. 

“This has never been a particularly well-thought strategy. I think that the biggest, most coherent explanation is that this is about power.”

Kim Clausing, UCLA trade economist

“If I were [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune, I’d be very pissed at Trump right now,” says Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster at Zenith Research.

So why are we at (economic) war?

The best answer is deceptively simple: because Trump, and Trump alone, wants to be. 

There is no good strategic rationale for the way Trump has gone about badgering America’s northern neighbor, even if you share his broadly nationalist view about trade. Rather, Trump has become fixated on dominating or even possessing Canada. And his top deputies are backfilling his fixation, including by offering terms of surrender the Canadians simply couldn’t accept. 

“This has never been a particularly well-thought strategy,” says Kim Clausing, a trade economist at UCLA. “I think that the biggest, most coherent explanation is that this is about power.”

It’s the latest example of the risks of governance by one man’s whims — one that could both damage America’s economy and burn its relationship with its staunchest ally before it resolves.

Trump’s northern power trip

Typically, when you try to explain the policy of any government, you look at two main factors: interests and ideology. In this case, neither is close to sufficient to explain the intensity of Trump’s war on Canada.

It is true that, for decades, the United States has had meaningful trade disputes with Canada over issues like lumber and dairy. But these issues never boiled over into a massive trade war, for the simple reason that they simply aren’t that large as a percentage of GDP. There’s a reason that every administration prior to this one — including Trump’s first — handled these issues through normal negotiating processes rather than loud bullying.

On the ideology front, it is true that Trump’s 2016 victory has revived conservative interest in economic nationalism — leading to the creation of groups like American Compass, a think tank dedicated to putting policy meat on the bones of the right’s nationalist spirit. But these nationalists largely converged on China as their principal economic enemy. While Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro is helping run Canada policy now, there was no sign in his essay in Project 2025 — or from other allies — that anyone was contemplating a full-on trade war with Canada beforehand. And American Compass does not appear to be involved in the current fight, offering no official comment on its press page or founder Oren Cass’s X feed.

“I really do think it is Trump’s idiosyncrasies that caused him to settle on Canada,” says Phil Magness, an economic historian who closely tracks intra-right economic disputes. “Others in the admin are going along with it.”

The timeline backs up Magness’s assessment.

In November 2024, shortly after winning the election, Trump began feuding with then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — calling him “governor” and beginning his talk of Canada as the 51st state. Less than two months after taking office, Trump targeted Canada with (at that point) historically high 25 percent across-the-board tariffs.

When the Washington Post investigated the rationale behind these tariffs at the time, they found a void. There was no policy paper behind the Canadian tariffs, nor any clear intellectual godfather or industry backer. People inside the administration put all the credit (or blame?) solely at the president’s feet. Within MAGA media, the closest to radical anti-Canada sentiment might have been Tucker Carlson’s trollish musing about “regime change” in 2023.

After Mark Carney replaced Trudeau as prime minister, and won the general election primarily on an anti-Trump platform, tensions cooled to a somewhat surprising degree, at least when it came to trade talks. Prior to this week, the 51st state rhetoric had declined dramatically; negotiations on trade looked like they had a real chance of success. Indeed, just this Tuesday, Trump himself declared they had reached a deal and postponed tariff implementation as a result. The Friday breakdown thus felt like a bit of a shock.

But reading detailed accounts of the negotiation collapse, including a brand-new ticktock from the New York Times, it’s clear that overweening American conditions were a major part of the failure. Most strikingly, and relevant, were US demands that it have control over Canada’s tariff rates with other countries and that it be able to reimpose American tariffs on Canada at will.

The key point here is that the Trump administration was not, and never has been, interested in a reciprocal trade deal between allies based on clear and cogent principles. Instead, they want to vassalize Canada — to bully it into surrendering elements of its sovereignty, or even its sovereign existence altogether. It is clear that this is the direct result of the president’s personal fixation.

Why exactly Trump has become so obsessed with controlling Canada is harder to say. Per the Post, there are theories ranging from bitterness around a legal battle over Trump Tower Toronto to his friendship with Kevin O’Leary, Canadian entrepreneur and host of the reality show Shark Tank. Certainly, his more recent rivalry with Carney hasn’t helped: “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump declared, menacingly, after the prime minister delivered a critical foreign policy speech in January.

My own personal theory is that it’s of a piece with Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland, another cause that’s largely unique to him. He is looking toward his presidential legacy, and nothing makes a real estate developer think “legacy” more than literally enlarging the size of the United States on the map.

But in practical terms, the reason may be immaterial. Whatever the roots of Trump’s Canada fixation, we know that it is real and a major driver in US foreign policy — one so important, in fact, that he is willing to jeopardize his party’s all-important Senate majority in order to pursue it.

Rep. Randy Fine, the Republican running for reelection in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, has unfavorably compared Muslims to dogs and suggested Israel should starve Gazans. “We need more Islamophobia, not less,” he wrote in one post on X. “Palestinian is a synonym for evil,” he wrote in another.

You might think that such a person would obviously be the most repugnant candidate in tonight’s FL-6 primary. But then there’s Dan Bilzerian, the right-wing influencer who challenged him.

Bilzerian is an open antisemite and Holocaust denier with millions of social media followers who has said that “most of the problems today are caused by Jewish supremacy.” He has called the mastermind of the October 7 attacks a “hero” and fantasized about personally killing Israelis. During the campaign, he regularly called Fine a “fat Jew” and released an AI-generated music video on X that muses about a second Holocaust: “Jewish supremacist, Satan’s creepy little minions / should we revisit that Austrian painter’s opinions?”

Lest the reference be too subtle, the line is overlaid over a graphic of Adolf Hitler wearing a painter’s apron.

House leaders in both parties condemned the antisemitic attacks and Fine won easily, but Bilzerian appeared poised to finish with about 19 percent of the vote with over 90 percent of ballots counted, making him the top vote-getter out of four Republicans challenging the incumbent. 

This should all be a giant flashing warning sign for the GOP’s post-Trump future. 

As on the Democratic side, divides over Gaza and October 7 have created a schism inside the GOP. But the right has rejected the very idea of gatekeeping against bigotry as either “woke” or needlessly divisive. For all his anti-Muslim statements, Fine is a Republican in good standing, with President Donald Trump’s “complete and total” endorsement to prove it. And he and others with similarly vicious views have turned the right’s debate over the Middle East into an increasingly nasty fight over American Muslims and Jews themselves. 

Fine and Bilzerian may be unusually blunt and cruel. But the tendencies they represent have much wider purchase in the GOP — and could end up derailing its future.

How the country’s worst primary came to be

Prior to 2025, Randy Fine was a Florida state legislator best known nationally for his intervention in the most recent Republican presidential primary — during which he initially endorsed Gov. Ron DeSantis, but then flipped to Trump. In 2025, he ran for the US House in a special election to replace Mike Waltz, the member of Congress Trump initially picked to serve as national security adviser.

Fine coasted to victory in the GOP primary, but underperformed Trump by about 10 points in the general election. That was still easily good enough to win, as FL-6 is very red, but it pointed to Fine’s weakness as a candidate.

“He repels people,” DeSantis said in a press conference after the special election.

Since joining the House, Fine has made a name for himself for two things: his unshaking personal devotion to Trump and his frequent bigoted comments about Palestinians and Muslims, which he revels in using to generate controversy. 

After his February comment about dogs — “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one” — prompted outrage from leading Democrats and civil rights groups, Fine went on the far-right TV station NewsMax to suggest that the United States should force Muslims out of the country. On his social media accounts, he started posting images of dogs superimposed on a Gadsden “don’t tread on me” flag.

As Fine was making a name for himself through explicit anti-Muslim bigotry, Bilzerian was doing the same with antisemitism.

Bilzerian, who retains a fortune of uncertain size from his prior career as a professional poker player, is best known for the hard-partying lifestyle portrayed on his Instagram. A manosphere influencer and self-proclaimed sex addict, he has claimed to be dating 50 women at once and to have suffered two heart attacks at age 25 due to a combination of sleep deprivation, Viagra, and cocaine abuse. He currently has 29 million followers on Instagram and 2.1 million on Twitter.

In November 2024, he did an interview with Piers Morgan — still pinned to his Twitter profile — that served as a kind of mainstream coming-out party for his antisemitic worldview. In the interview, he said, among other things, that Jews control the media, exaggerated the Holocaust, and killed JFK. He has escalated into eliminationist antisemitism from there.

When he entered the primary in the spring, Bilzerian framed his challenge against Fine entirely around the congressman’s religion. “This fat jew @RepFine…has no place in our govt,” Bilzerian wrote in a March post. “When I unseat him I’m going to draft laws to have anyone putting Israel before America tried for treason.”

Fine, ever the class act, responded by going after Bilzerian’s dual Armenian citizenship. “We don’t want Armenians to be able to serve in Congress,” he said in a May interview. The ensuing campaign has seen Bilzerian posting a pro-Holocaust video, a swastika spray-painted on a Fine campaign sign, and Fine attempting to get Bilzerian investigated by the FBI.

In a year full of ugly primaries across the country, this is without question the ugliest and most hateful.

What the Fine-Bilzerian race says about the right’s future

The scary thing about Florida’s Sixth District is that it might not be an isolated incident.

Among elected Republicans, Randy Fine may have made the most violently offensive anti-Muslim comments — but he is not the only one doing so. In fact, one of the most striking trends among congressional Republicans in the past year has been an uptick in more of them talking like Randy Fine.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) posted on Facebook that “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult.” Former Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) posted on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) tweeted that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) declared there should be “no more Muslims” in Texas, and (per a Washington Post count) posted on the topic 244 times in the first three-and-a-half months of the year on the topic. Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL) even introduced legislation — called The CRUSADE Act — that would effectively require Muslim immigrants to disavow the Islamic legal-moral code, called sharia, as a condition of receiving a visa.

This isn’t entirely new territory for Republicans. In 2010, there was also a wave of right-wing panic about sharia conquering American law that led to over a dozen state-level attempts to ban it. Trump’s proposal to impose a “total and complete ban” on Muslim immigration was, of course, a huge part of his message in his first campaign. And the national security team in his first administration was heavily influenced by a group of anti-Islam activists who called themselves “counter-jihadists.”

What’s new about the current wave of Republican Islamophobia is the explicitness. In the past, Republicans typically differentiated between ordinary Muslims and extremists, claiming to merely be targeting the latter even when their proposals would have restricted the former’s rights. Today, however, Republican officials have become increasingly comfortable dispensing with this fig leaf — saying that Muslims and Islam are the problem, period.

This is rooted in some combination of genuine bigotry and a cynical read of the GOP primary electorate. Polls consistently show high levels of hostility to Islam and Muslims among Republican voters; in May, for example, the pollster PRRI released a survey showing that 76 percent of Republicans agreed that “the values of Islam are at odds with American values and the American way of life.”

Disturbingly, Bilzerian’s antisemitic strategy might be similarly in tune with elements of the GOP base. 

Antisemitism is still far less tolerated within the Republican Party — in fact, condemnation of Bilzerian has been notably bipartisan and his support on Tuesday, while unnervingly high, was nowhere near enough to threaten Fine. But his hyper-online cohort of far-right influencers has been growing in relevance, especially among Gen Z conservatives, who (per recent polling) form the demographic epicenter of America’s growing antisemitism problem.

In fact, Bilzerian wasn’t even the most prominent extremist candidate in Florida on Tuesday. That would be James Fishback, the GOP candidate for governor who ran a longshot campaign against Rep. Byron Donalds that was frequently accused of racism and antisemitism and had a visible following among young “groypers.” He appeared set to finish with around 10 percent of the vote with over 90 percent of ballots counted. Both are following the trail blazed by Nick Fuentes, the right-wing livestreamer who has made a name for himself as a leading voice of antisemitism. 

Increasingly, this overt antisemitism is becoming a normal part of the lexicon in certain corners of right-wing media. Tucker Carlson, who has long taken care to hide his more inflammatory ideas under layers of innuendo and plausible deniability, recently accused Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro of wanting everyone to eat “goyslop” — an antisemitic term popular with far-right young people that implicitly accuses Jews of ruining the lives of non-Jewish Americans. Candace Owens, the right-wing podcaster second only to Carlson in reach, has been even more brazen. 

And while their clashes with the White House over the Iran war have recently alienated Trump, it’s still an open question what will happen when his influence wanes and whether the next Republican nominee — whether it’s Vice President JD Vance or someone else — will bring these figures in from the cold. 

There is, of course, both Islamophobia and antisemitism on the Democratic side as well. But there are also some antibodies in that the party has, however imperfectly, long made anti-bigotry one of its core values — many of the critiques of “Woke 1” were about excesses in this regard. 

By contrast, Republicans have turned on the very idea of imposing guardrails, making it harder to repel candidates who cross the line into hate. Last week, a pair of conservative writers — professor Greg Conti and journalist Aaron Sibarium — warned that this rejection was setting the party up for disaster.

“Frustrated by the suppression of mainstream, center-right views, conservatives increasingly reject as cancel culture any public repudiation of genuinely fringe ideas, creating a subculture of racism, sexism and antisemitism that did not exist to the same degree even five years ago,” they wrote in the New York Times.

The Fine-Bilzerian race shows that this concern is not hypothetical. Trends on the right are moving swiftly to normalize the unthinkable, to make it so two candidates in a primary race could think that the gutterest of gutter bigotry could be a ticket to victory (or at least, enhanced stardom).

If things keep going this way, the future of the Republican Party could end up looking a lot like Florida’s Sixth.

Tom Tiffany, the new Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, is not just a passive supporter of President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election. He is an active promoter of them.

In December 2020, when he was a member of Congress, he signed on to a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory. On January 6, 2021, he voted against certifying the results in Pennsylvania and Texas just hours after rioters threatened to kill his colleagues. He has stated he would have overturned Wisconsin’s results too, and just this year endorsed an FBI investigation into the state’s elections. And though the national climate in 2026 favors Democrats, Wisconsin is a closely divided state: Tiffany could beat the odds and win the general.

There is, in short, a very real chance that someone who doesn’t believe American elections are legitimate may soon be supervising them in one of the 2028 presidential cycle’s most important swing states.

It’s not just Wisconsin. In each of the other most critical 2028 states — Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada — Republicans have chosen an election denier as their nominee for governor, secretary of state, or both. If any of these candidates win, they will have at least some degree of authority over the administration of elections in a state that could determine the outcome of the next presidential election. 

So could the outcome of the 2026 midterms ultimately lead to a stolen election in 2028, as some are already warning? Election experts say it’s very unlikely.

State election laws contain numerous overlapping checks on interference from top officials. The judiciary has a pretty strong track record in stopping election malfeasance. A reform to the Electoral Count Act, passed quietly during the Biden presidency, significantly improved federal protections against election interference. And in 2028, the man uniquely responsible for previous pushes to invalidate the 2020 election won’t be on the ballot.

“[There are many] reasons why one should not be concerned,” said Rebecca Green, the co-director of the Election Law Program at the College of William and Mary. “Even in circumstances where there is a single partisan in control of a state’s election process, there are numerous checks on that power.”

That said, the risk isn’t zero. There is a remote chance, if the election is extremely close, that a well-placed election denier could swing the outcome. And even if they don’t outright steal an election, someone like Tiffany could still use their office to damage the electoral system in some pretty important ways.

“We have to be walking between complacency and alarmism,” said Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at UCLA. “Both of those are bad.”

Why the 2028 election is more secure than you think

Election law varies from state to state. Most of the time, the state’s secretary of state (SOS) is in charge of elections, but sometimes it’s the state board of elections. Sometimes the SOS is directly elected, and sometimes they’re appointed by the governor. 

But in broad strokes, there are three ways for governors or an allied SOS to attack an election. They can try to suppress opposition voters before the voting starts, by (for example) purging them from the rolls or putting insufficient polling stations in their neighborhoods. They can try to interfere during the vote count, by trying to disqualify outparty ballots or even falsifying the vote count. Or they can try to interfere afterward, by refusing to certify election results.

“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism. That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”

Rick Hasen, UCLA election expert

Each of those is exceptionally, perhaps even prohibitively, difficult to pull off — even for a committed election denier.

Voter suppression is hard because the tactics are legally limited. Current federal law bans voter roll purges within 90 days of the election, which allowed Democrats to simply re-register voters disqualified in previous Republican purges (though the Supreme Court may overturn this provision in an upcoming case). Impediments like polling station placement are, per Hasen, hard to target; they are most likely to affect low-income and low-propensity voters, who have trended Republican in recent elections.

Interfering with the counting of votes is made difficult by what Green terms “adversarial election administration”: basically, the fact that partisans from both parties are involved in multiple different stages of the counting process. Every state has strict rules governing the counting process, and observers from both parties can see if they’re being breached in the other party’s favor. If there is an irregularity, courts are empowered to step in and correct it.

And it is simply illegal for governors or secretaries of state to refuse to certify legitimate elections. State laws in all relevant battleground states allow courts to issue a writ of mandamus requiring officials to certify duly counted results, which they have done repeatedly since 2020 when Republican-controlled county election boards withheld certification.

“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism,” Hasen said. “That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”

The 2022 reform to the Electoral Count Act added several additional safeguards for presidential elections specifically, including a requirement that Congress defer to court determinations on electoral legitimacy if a governor attempts to defy them. 

And all of that assumes that a Republican who denied the result of the 2020 election would necessarily attempt to steal future elections. That may not be the case. 

“Just because you have partisan control of an election, and just because that person has cast doubt on previous elections, doesn’t mean that person is not going to be committed to running a fair election,” Green said.

Such a sentiment may sound naive, but it also may reflect the reality of post-Trump politics. The president was the driving force behind the attempt to overturn the 2020 election; his insistence that he did not lose, and his iron grip on the hearts and minds of the GOP base, pushed the party onto grounds that its other leaders clearly feared to tread. 

While Republicans certainly attempted to stack the electoral deck in their favor prior to Trump, these brazen attempts to overturn or steal legitimate elections are a product of his time in office. Whether he has permanently changed the Republican Party into an entity that will regularly reject elections they lose is very much an open question.

Why electing election deniers could still matter

All of this should give us some comfort about the upcoming state-level races: It is simply very hard for a governor or SOS to steal a presidential election even if they want to. While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.

But even the most impregnable-seeming fortresses can be breached. And there are reasons to worry that, in an extreme case, an election denier in key positions could well damage the integrity of the 2028 presidential election.

In a 2022 paper, the law professor Lisa Marshall Manheim argued that conventional legal analysis has proven inadequate for addressing the threat of election subversion. While legal experts are correct to say that the law makes stealing an election hard, the most dangerous threat to US elections — Trump’s 2020 campaign — was essentially extra-legal in character.

While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.

While “superficially” operating through the legal system, Trump was actually asking officials from Congress on down to engage in obviously unlawful behavior. When Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to overturn the state’s results, or for Mike Pence to find the “courage” to nullify the results on January 6, he wasn’t asking these two men to act according to their legal duties. He was asking them to step beyond law, to embrace a reading of their office’s powers so obviously absurd that it amounts to declaring the text of the law to be no limit at all.

This is the nightmare scenario: one in which officials in key positions simply decide that they no longer have to follow a good-faith reading of the law. If enough officials in the right places decide to cast off legal shackles, no carefully crafted statute can stop them. We will, as Hasen put it, exit the domain of law into “something else”: the politics of raw power.

Anyone who endorsed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election — let alone actively attempted to act on them — has already shown a degree of contempt for election law. That means that one can’t rule out a similar display of contempt in the future, only this time with the power to turn that into impactful defiance of law.

It’s vastly too early to say the conditions under which such a radical breach might occur, in 2028 or in the future. A lot depends on the makeup of the Republican Party; whether leaders after Trump embrace or downplay his hostility to the electoral system itself. But we now know that the risk is there. And the more election deniers we have in key positions, the greater the odds are that the risk becomes real — even if the baseline probability remains low in absolute terms.

This connects to another, more insidious risk: that electing election deniers could exacerbate the ongoing crisis of electoral confidence since 2020.

Even if Tiffany or someone like him doesn’t try to outright prevent or nullify Democratic victories in their state, they could still declare that they lack confidence in the result’s integrity. That they tried to run a fair election, but that Democrats or the courts prevented them from doing so — and thus, despite their lack of legal powers to stop it, that they believe the election to have been compromised or even stolen.

This may not lead to a series of January 6s across the country. But even if it didn’t, it would deepen the lack of trust Republican voters have in the electoral system. If Republicans post-Trump continue to believe that Democrats are engaged in widespread cheating, that could contribute to an environment where the kind of extra-legal shenanigans Manheim warned of could look more tempting.

So while it is quite unlikely that the 2026 elections will lead to a crisis in 2028, it could play a role in dashing the possibility that American democracy moves on from the dangerous Trump-era fighting over elections. And as long as that fighting persists, another 2020-style crisis will remain a live possibility.

The American right has a new enemy.

In a new report on Cuba, the State Department argued that Havana has become “the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism” — which the State Department calls “Third Worldism.” Cuba is spreading this doctrine, per Secretary of State of Marco Rubio, with the explicit intent of fomenting revolution in America.

Here, the Trump administration is following conservative influencers — who in recent months have become increasingly preoccupied by the “third worldist” threat. 

“The Left is moving from ‘woke’ to Third-Worldism,” Chris Rufo, perhaps the right’s leading activist, recently wrote. “Third-Worldism is a more serious threat to life, liberty, and property.” 

Ben Shapiro, one of conservatism’s leading media voices, declared in April that “the future of the Democratic Party is radical third worldism.”

And Reihan Salam, the president of the influential Manhattan Institute (which employs Rufo), has warned that “Third Worldism, left unchecked, won’t remain on the radical fringe” — citing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as the chief example of a third worldist in power.

All of this may be news to Mamdani and other Democrats, who virtually never use the term to describe their own views. So what are Rubio, Rufo, and Shapiro talking about? And is there any truth in the various claims about rising third worldist influence?

The answer is more complicated than it might seem.

Conservatives are using “third worldist” a lot like the terms “woke” and “critical race theory” before it: as an ill-defined concept that serves as a clearinghouse for various right-wing grievances and can be used as a slur to discredit and demonize the left.

Yet at the same time, they’ve actually put their fingers on something real. Among a very specific and visible sub-section of the socialist left, a set of views that can be reasonably termed “third worldist” are rising in prominence. For progressives outside this camp, deciding what comes next will require engaging with the right-wing critique directly and not dismissing it as a smear. 

What “third worldism” means, on both the left and the right

The term “third world” itself originated in a 1952 article by the French thinker Alfred Sauvy. 

The capitalist West was the “first world,” and the Communist Eastern bloc “the second.” Most countries outside of North America and Europe were, at the time, aligned with neither bloc — making up the “third world.” 

For this reason, the earliest ideology that fits the term “third worldism” was not Marxist, but rather efforts like the Non-Aligned Movement to build global solidarity between post-colonial states who were trying to avoid being dominated by the two competing world powers.

But Communist regimes in the Global South — most notably, China and Cuba — became inspirations for a distinctively Marxist spin on third worldism that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.

This theory held that the locus of revolutionary activity had shifted to 1) armed revolutionaries of the Global South and 2) militant movements within the capitalist world led by oppressed minorities. Out with the Communist Party USA and the Soviet Union; in with the Black Panthers and the Viet Cong.

This broad worldview had many ideological influences — ranging from Mao’s Little Red Book to the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Some leftist writings, like the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire or the well-known pamphlet The Mythology of the White Proletariat, are clear examples of what might be termed “third worldist” thought.

But on the whole, this kind of third worldism is frustratingly tricky to pin down. It has no authoritative spokesperson, no text or movement that clarified its core principles in any detail. It is a label attached to ideas from the outside, as often by those ideas’ enemies as by their allies.

“‘Third worldist’ is almost a pejorative [term] you would use on the left,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation magazine and author of Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World.

The Trump administration and its allies are basically arguing that people like Sunkara are trying to trick you. Whatever the modern left’s protestations, their actual views are still basically pretty similar to those of Cold War American radicals who apologized for the Khmer Rouge. Only in this case, the most admired Third World militants are now jihadists rather than Communists.

The most influential work in this vein comes from Zineb Riboua, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank. She sees third worldism as a joint product of anti-American governments, including Cuba, and leftist intellectuals in American universities. Its recent prominence, in her view, is a function of October 7 and the Gaza war — which allowed third worldist logic to fuse “seamlessly with the decolonial language” that became popular during the woke era.

“In this viewpoint, a terrorist organization like Hamas comes to be seen as the armed expression of a national liberation struggle,” Riboua writes. “The question ceases to be what Hamas actually did and becomes what Israel is presumed to represent. And because Israel is positioned as the forward post of American imperial power, defending Hamas becomes, almost automatically, a moral gesture directed against the United States itself.”

But Riboua does not stop with foreign policy. In her view, third worldism has become a kind of “universal ideology” that is “applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation.” When leftists talk about “decolonization,” she argues, they are really talking about the planned demolition of America from the inside.

“The ideology asks a country to accept that its power is a historical accident awaiting either correction with a sort of new Red Terror or annihilation,” she writes. 

This, for the right, represents the left’s emerging “post-woke” animating doctrine. While the 2020-era left was interested in policing conservative speech on social issues, it is now interested in acquiring political power and using it to tangibly transform America’s policy and political institutions along Marxist and third worldist lines. It is “a vicious, lowest-common-denominator leftism that imports anticolonial resentments to the metropole,” writes Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy.

The effect, ultimately, will be to transform the American governing model into something that more closely resembles that of a “third world” country: corrupt, lawless, violent, and chaotic. The language they use to warn of this can be unmistakably racialized.

“Mamdani wants to plunder New York like the Somalis plundered Minnesota,” Rufo writes. “Legal or illegal, it’s all piracy, looting, and expropriation. Pure third-worldism.”

What the right gets wrong about third worldism — and what it gets right

By the time we get to “Zohran Mamdani is a pirate,” it’s clear that the analytic train has gone off the rails. Third worldism is no longer being used to define a specific and recognizable approach to geopolitics, but rather a pure insult with ugly racial insinuations.

Indeed, while Mamdani is certainly a socialist with pro-Palestine politics — he announced this week he looked into arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but lacked legal authority — there is no evidence to suggest he is an anti-American Hamas admirer.

As mayor, his governance has focused primarily on quality of life and cost of living issues. And far from couching his arguments in the language of anti-American revolution, Mamdani’s recent address on July 4 was a classically patriotic text, whose praise for American soldiers and meditations on our “grand experiment in self-governance” sound far more like Lincoln than Fanon.

The attempt to lump Mamdani into a scary, foreign-sounding category recalls nothing more than the efforts to rebrand other left-wing ideas — like “critical race theory” — into millstones to hang around Democrats’ necks. Rufo was the intellectual force behind the CRT panic, back in 2021, and admitted at the time that his intent was political warfare rather than rigorous analysis. By coming up with a catch-all term for problematic left-wing politics, they could apply it not only to the real “critical race theory” — which were largely abstruse academic texts — but also ordinary Democratic policy or generic liberal ideas. 

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Read in this light, the right-wing allegation that third worldism is supplanting woke is more confession than anything else. From McCarthyism to the Reagan era and on through Newt Gingrich warning of Barack Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview, the right has deployed fearmongering about foreign subversion as a central tactic to delegitimize its opponents and rally the base. The sweeping allegations about the entire Democratic Party being overtaken by third worldism represent a fusion of this old Red Scare blueprint with the new Rufo tactics of mimetic-conceptual warfare.

“There’s really nothing new here,” said David Austin Walsh, a historian of the right at the University of Virginia. “Third worldism is a term that’s being utilized to describe the exact same thing as what was meant by ‘the international Communist conspiracy’ back in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Yet Walsh, who is himself a DSA member, also acknowledges that there’s a nugget of truth here. Much as the Communist Party USA actually was a Soviet cut-out, there are people and factions on the American left that actually fit the description of “third worldism” advanced by Riboua and her fellow travelers.

The most obvious example is Hasan Piker, the streamer and provocateur who has become a lightning rod in debates over the Democratic Party’s direction.

Piker has repeatedly expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, despite its vicious authoritarian tendencies, and said he would vote for Hamas “1,000 times” over Israel. My colleague Eric Levitz described his worldview as “campist,” an old leftist term for someone who aligns themselves with any government that opposes the American-led bloc, and one that I think is a bit more precise than “third worldist.” But Piker’s fascination with anti-American militancy and terrorists — he once gave a fawning interview to a Houthi fighter on stream — suggests that third worldist is at least a reasonable descriptor.

Another example is Neville Roy Singham, a Chicago businessman who sold his consultancy for $785 million and has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to leftist causes around the world. Singham, who was known to monologue to his employees about the virtues of Che Guevara, is at the center of what the New York Times describes as “a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.” Though he funds American leftist organizations like Code Pink — in fact, his wife, Jodie Evans, is its cofounder — he currently resides in Shanghai.

There is also a third worldist activist current. The International Caucus of the DSA, one of many sub-organizations within the leftist faction, has celebrated the “achievements” of Cuba’s authoritarian government and whitewashed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which, again, is more precisely campist than third worldist). Students for Justice in Palestine, the leading pro-Palestine campus activist group, praised the October 7 attacks as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

And this tendency could be gaining its first representative in Congress. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA candidate who recently unseated a multi-term House incumbent in a Democratic primary in New York, has accused Black and Latino men of “fetishizing ugly colonizer women” and retweeted a message praising Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. While her public statements are more limited than those of Piker or the DSA IC, there’s at least reasonable grounds for believing that she’s cut from the same cloth.

The left’s third worldist problem

So what to make of all this?

Right-wingers like Riboua are picking up on real trends in leftist ideology, ones that are reflected to some degree in its institutional infrastructure. And interestingly, the leftists I spoke with conceded that there were some things to worry about here. Arash Azizi, a socialist historian at Yale University, said that this “negative third worldism” was a “serious trend” on the broader left. Sunkara was more skeptical of the term “third worldist, but he did express concerns with the DSA IC’s tendency to forget “first principles” — by which he meant core commitments to democracy and anti-authoritarianism. He also critiqued pro-October 7 statements on the left as “antiquated, ineffective, and morally questionable.”

At the same time, it is concomitantly clear that people on the right are overstating the significance of the problem.

Views that might accurately be called “third worldist” are controversial inside the left and even within the DSA. And the left does not currently dominate the Democratic Party, despite a handful of primary victories this cycle. To say that third worldism has conquered the Democrats, or even that third worldism is the new “woke,” is to get miles ahead of the evidence.

Putting those two conclusions together yields a more precise diagnosis: that third worldist views are, by virtue of the DSA’s electoral success, becoming a more prominent part of the broader left coalition even as its reach remains limited overall.

While Mamdani cannot reasonably be described as a “third worldist,” he operates in coalition with people who are. He filmed chummy videos with Hasan Piker; his endorsement rocketed Darializa Avila Chevalier to her primary victory. Like any political faction, the socialist left depends on alliances between sub-groups who have real and meaningful differences in worldview and approach.

When talking about this, Sunkara tried to disassociate the broader left from the third worldist subcurrent by analogy.

“It would almost be like me saying ‘the Republican Party is programmatically committed to white nationalism’ as opposed to saying ‘the Republican Party sure does have some vocal white nationalists around,’” he said. “The difference is key.”

But of course, the Republican Party’s relationship with white nationalists has been a significant political problem — and a moral one. However Democrats ultimately decide to handle these ideas floating around progressive circles, the process starts with acknowledging that they’re real. 

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump has seemingly called off a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia after his energy secretary already formally signed it.

What happened? On Wednesday, the Trump administration formally concluded what’s called a “123 Agreement” to work with Saudi Arabia on the development of its civilian nuclear power infrastructure. This kind of deal allows the United States to provide another country with nuclear fuel and equipment on the condition that they submit to safeguards against building a nuclear weapon.

But on Thursday morning, after the negotiations were quite literally concluded, Trump threw a monkey wrench into things — posting on Truth Social that the deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”

The Abraham Accords are a series of agreements from Trump’s first term that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some nearby Arab states. In effect, then, Trump is saying that Saudi Arabia will not get its 123 Agreement unless it formally recognizes the State of Israel. Which the Saudis are unwilling to do absent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Why is Trump doing this? As is often the case with his strange last-minute decisions, no one really knows. There are a few leading guesses, though.

The first is that the agreement with Saudi Arabia was a bad idea on the merits. Experts on nuclear weapons, the Middle East, and international relations more broadly all said that the deal gave Saudis exactly what they wanted with virtually nothing in return, effectively surrendering a key piece of leverage Washington has on Riyadh.

The second is that other American friends in the Middle East got angry. The Israelis are a leading candidate, as they have long opposed any agreement that might bring the Saudis closer to a nuke. The Emiratis, often in competition with Saudis for regional influence, are another; their nuclear deal with the US, inked in 2009, is a lot stricter.

The third is bipartisan opposition in Congress, which would need to approve any deal.

What’s the takeaway: Unless something changes radically, Trump has blown up a nuclear deal that’s already been signed — humiliating his negotiators and angering the Saudis.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

As of today, we are officially two weeks away from the NFL’s first preseason game. Our long national nightmare of calling soccer “football” is almost over.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump announced giant new tariffs on Canada, which are scheduled to start in 30 days. Now negotiators from both countries are scrambling to see if they can be avoided.

What happened? Late on Monday, the White House announced 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods — including whiskey, cheese, down jackets, and (naturally) hockey sticks. Because the Supreme Court sharply limited his tariff powers earlier this year, Trump is invoking a largely forgotten and possibly defunct authority under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

Previously, these goods had been covered under the USMCA, the trade deal Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico in his first term to replace NAFTA. But on July 1, the agreement expired and the US declined to renew it. 

Why is Trump doing this? The White House claimed three key grievances: Canadian duties and restrictions on American alcohol, dairy products, and automobiles. Liquor appears to be a special irritant: All but two Canadian provinces have pulled US-made booze from government liquor stores, and even some Democrats have complained.

However, the alcohol boycott began as retaliation for the trade war Trump launched in early 2025, when he was talking regularly about Canada becoming America’s 51st state. Much like his effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Trump is trying to fix a problem he caused in the first place.

Interestingly, the tariffs will not go into effect for 30 days. This suggests that they may be less a serious policy initiative than a negotiating tactic. 

What’s the takeaway: Trump’s lifelong fascination with economic warfare has survived the Supreme Court’s rebuke, and he continues to fixate on Canada as a special target of his ire. It is unclear why; both countries have suffered from the breakdown in bilateral relations. 

But whatever the motivation, the ultimate outcome is clear: Icy relations to the north are a permanent fixture of the Trump presidency.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The Odyssey officially had the biggest opening of any live-action movie of the year, as the new Avengers: Doomsday trailer is greeted with yawns. Here’s to the new MCU: the Mycenaean Cinematic Universe.