With the midterms just under six weeks away, more Republican candidates are coming to the belated realization that, if they want to save their seats, they could perhaps use some distance from the very unpopular president whose approval is reaching new lows.

Now, after a decade in which President Donald Trump has demanded — and increasingly received — near-total loyalty from his parties’ candidates and congressional delegation, and used his bully pulpit to launch harsh personal attacks on Republicans who don’t provide it, such distancing attempts remain cautious and limited.

But they are growing more common. And this isn’t just in the toughest blue territory — even Republicans in states or districts Trump won overwhelmingly are now rushing to emphasize how they don’t agree with the president on some of his most controversial and unpopular agenda items. 

“It’s only natural that candidates would seek to create distance from Trump, especially on issues — like the Iran war — that are unpopular,” GOP strategist Douglas Heye told me. “That doesn’t guarantee success, and can be a hard needle to thread, but it’s the natural play.”

For now, the primary motivator is political. But today’s election-year cracks could be signs of larger breaks later, especially as Republicans look toward life without the singular figure who’s dominated the last decade-plus of party politics. 

A party running away from major parts of the lame-duck president’s agenda today might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow — with potentially major implications for governance. And if Trump’s record is truly deemed a failure by Republicans, the GOP’s future will be wide open.

Where the general election cracks are starting to show

The boldest break in recent weeks has been from Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida, who represents a heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County district that Trump won solidly in 2024. 

Last week, Salazar released a campaign ad in which she spoke directly to the camera and addressed Trump, saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” She added: “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

The ad was the most dramatic sign yet that Trump’s ongoing polling collapse with Latino voters — a critical component of his 2024 coalition — is showing up for Republican campaigns as well. As Salazar’s ad suggested, many swing voters interpreted Trump’s “mass deportation” talk as a promise to clamp down on border crossings and remove dangerous criminals — not to patrol the streets with militarized operations going after otherwise law-abiding migrants, many of whom have established ties to the community. If the backlash proves real in places like Florida and Texas, it could affect how future Republicans approach the issue.

That same week, two incumbent House members in Iowa in tough races decided to let their votes tell the tale. Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn both voted for a resolution to end Trump’s war in Iran, and each posted on social media that they opposed an “open-ended war.”  

Vice President JD Vance, who reports suggest was privately opposed to the decision to launch the military operation, mentioned at the Republican convention in Dallas that slain conservative activists Charlie Kirk “hated war,” but stuck with Trump even when he disagreed — an apparent plea to wavering Trump voters to do the same.

Polls show strong opposition to the war among the public, and if it continues to be a drag on GOP candidates, that could strengthen the currently embattled faction of the GOP that urges caution about foreign entanglements. On Tuesday, two more Republicans — Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor of Wisconsin, and Sen. Jon Husted, running for Senate in Ohio — publicly said it was time to bring the war to an end. (Husted caveated this by saying that ending the conflict would require a deal with Iran, and that he wouldn’t vote for the congressional resolution to end the war.)

Wisconsin GOP candidate for governor Rep. Tom Tiffany today on rising gas prices and Iran: "I just believe we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on … Time to come home, take care of business here in America." pic.twitter.com/oHo1QjiGDr

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) September 22, 2026

Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa, has also been cautiously seeking a bit more distance from Trump by, for instance, opposing his plan to cut tariffs on foreign beef imports since it would increase competition for local cattle ranchers, the New York Times recently reported.

Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, facing a reelection race that polls suggest is surprisingly competitive, has publicly criticized Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, saying they hurt businesses in his state.

Even two members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who are both running for governor — Tiffany in Wisconsin and Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida — are making similar rhetorical adjustments. 

Tiffany disagreed with Trump renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” an action taken as part of Trump’s overwhelmingly unpopular trade war with Canada. And Donalds removed many mentions and pictures of the president from his website this week, the Miami Herald reported (replacing a pledge to “Enact the Trump Agenda” with one to focus on “affordability”).

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Some Republicans in blue states or districts — like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — have long tried to play up their disagreements with Trump, to position themselves as independent voices. 

But many other candidates are still clinging tightly to Trump. “I am still with that guy,” Michael Whatley, the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina, said at a rally with Trump last week. Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, is similarly sticking by Trump (despite Trump’s constant digs at how Paxton dresses). It doesn’t hurt that Trump’s super PAC could be a critical player in theirs, and others’, races.

And when GOP candidates do try to stress their independence, it typically comes in the form of saying they disagree with the president on a particular issue that’s going over poorly in their state or district — most often either tariffs, the Iran war, or immigration.

The GOP candidates’ double bind

Through much of the Trump era, Republicans have faced a powerful incentive to minimize openly breaking with the president — because they feared Trump would be vindictive enough to use his bully pulpit against them, as he has against his GOP critics in the past.

Strategically, candidates face a double bind, as stressing their independence from Trump can theoretically help with swing voters who have soured on the president, but it also could hurt turnout among the Trump-loyal base.

“It’s a fine line to walk,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. “You don’t want to look like you’re being disloyal to a Republican president, because you could end up with a Truth Social tweet that would destroy the support of Republicans who like Donald Trump for your campaign.”

For Republicans in redder states or districts, Trump’s engagement could still be their candidates’ greatest asset — he could help spur them to go to the polls and help frame the midterm contest in purely partisan terms.

“Motivation in midterm cycles matters a lot,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster at Echelon Insights, recently posted on X. Ruffini’s argument is that, due to the Senate map and gerrymandering in the House, many more competitive seats this cycle are in states Trump won big. So, he argued, “raising Republicans’ motivation to vote will go further than it did in 2018 because of the political terrain this election is being fought on.”

But if Trump’s approval is reaching new lows, that calculus could change — even in redder areas. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval at 32 percent, the worst result in that poll since Trump entered politics.

That could explain the new round of distancing we’ve been seeing in recent weeks. And if the polling bears out and the party does end up suffering substantial losses, it could potentially hasten that trend, as Republicans grow more wary of tying themselves tightly to an 80-year-old who won’t be on the ballot again. 

Should Democrats regain control of the House, Senate, or both, there would be no shortage of votes they could call to test just how far Republicans are willing to break with Trump on issues like immigration, tariffs, and the war. It could also create a difficult position for the next Republican presidential nominee — especially if it’s Trump’s own vice president — as they seek to incorporate lessons from the backlash without offending Trump.

For his part, Trump has been relatively restrained in response to all this, perhaps recognizing what a difficult political situation his party is in. Asked by reporters about Salazar’s ad Friday, he called her “a nice person” but “a little bit softer on the border.” 

But he couldn’t resist adding: “Without me, she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s campaign to take over Greenland has reached a peaceful end — for now. 

What happened? Trump signed a new security agreement with the leaders of Denmark and Greenland while at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, outlining an expanded US military presence on the island. 

The deal is the result of months-long negotiations between the two countries and Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Crucially, it reaffirms the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Denmark and Greenland, something Trump has spent the last year-and-a-half-plus threatening to sweep away. 

What’s the context? Trump returned to office last year proclaiming that US “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” for US national security, even though Denmark — and by extension Greenland — is a NATO ally. 

That rhetoric quickly escalated, and by this January, Trump was suggesting that the US could even use force to take the island. “If we don’t do it the easy way,” he said — buying Greenland from Denmark, or perhaps bribing its residents to secede — “we’re going to do it the hard way.” 

This, understandably, freaked Europe out, prompting multiple countries to deploy small numbers of troops to Greenland. 

Does this mean Trump is done trying to take over? We can always hope. It’s possible Trump will claim this as a win and move on, even though Tuesday’s deal doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the US-Greenland relationship. (Last week, he referred to it as “a dream come true” for the US.)

That being said, Trump’s desire to own Greenland always made more sense as an attempted legacy move than anything else, whatever his professed justifications. So while he might be happy to take the win for now, with the war in Iran still on and the midterms fast approaching, it shouldn’t be surprising if he’s clamoring for ownership again before his term is up.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy fall equinox! In addition to the start of astronomical autumn, it also marks the recurrence of “Chicagohenge”: As this NPR story explains, for a few days each year, the sun aligns with the city’s rigidly gridded streets to create a stunning view. (It happens in other cities as well, but not always on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.)

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has moved aggressively to leave his mark. Many of his most visible legacy projects are not pieces of legislation, though. They’re part of a campaign to reshape Washington, DC, itself. 

Last year, Trump knocked down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his massive new ballroom. He tried renovating the Reflecting Pool, which did not turn out well. He regilded four large statues near the National Mall, paved the White House Rose Garden, and drenched the Oval Office in gold and golden appliqués.

Other Trump plans are still in the works: He’s proposed building a 250-foot triumphal arch in a traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River. He now says the arch would double as a “military complex,” housing drones, snipers, and ammunition.

And, of course, there’s the ongoing fight over the Kennedy Center, which Trump has threatened could be “ripped down” if he doesn’t get his name on the building in some capacity (he already tried once, and was ordered by a court to remove it).

It’s all a lot to keep track of. Luckily, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently spent time with Trump touring the ballroom construction site. Terris explains what ties all the disparate projects together and what they reveal about the Trump’s effort to reshape the nation’s capital — and his own legacy.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

What is up with Trump’s obsession with physical landmarks? 

Before I even talked to him, I did a lot of reporting about why he seems to be so obsessed with all this stuff. And it’s really like a legacy for him. He’s trying to build something that will last beyond his time here, both his time here in the White House and probably his time here on Earth. He wants to actually have physical monuments to himself. 

Somebody who’s close to him told me that the president doesn’t care that much about legislation. He doesn’t care that much about the kind of nuts and bolts of being a president. He cares a lot about buildings and prizes. If he has buildings and prizes, then he feels like his legacy will go on forever. That’s why he wants the Nobel Prize. That’s why he’s building an arch for himself in Washington. It’s really about a legacy that will withstand the test of time in his mind.

Which is to say, he doesn’t really realize that the right legislation could get him more prizes.

Most presidents try to be very successful presidents and have other people build monuments for you. He’s trying to honor himself, basically. It’s something I asked him about actually when I sat down with him in the Oval Office. There was a viral moment a few months ago from Senator Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia who may run for president. And he said at a rally that the president is building monuments to himself because he knows that nobody will do it when he’s gone.

I asked the president this because I thought maybe he’d take a shot at Jon Ossoff or deny it, but I was very surprised. He just said, “Yeah, that’s true. Nobody will do it when I’m gone. When I’m gone, nobody will do it.” 

It feels kind of self-aware, surprisingly, of Donald Trump to not take a shot at Jon Ossoff, but to just agree with him and say, “Yeah, that’s exactly my motivation.”

Part of me though — okay, here’s a guy who recognizes that when he’s gone, history may not necessarily look fondly upon him. But also there was a part of me that thought that that’s not actually what he was saying. 

What he was maybe saying is, “I’m the only person in the world capable of building something as beautiful and important as these monuments. I alone can fix it. I alone can build it.” Nobody else has the ability to do this the way that he has. So on the one hand, possibly self-aware that he won’t be recognized the way he wants to be. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a kind of egomaniac talking about how he’s incredible at things and nobody else can do it. I think it’s all kind of tied up in that he’s not the most introspective person I’ve ever talked to, let’s put it that way. 

But even the least introspective person in the world, when he gets to be 80 years old, might start thinking about what’s left of him after he’s gone.

Tell me about the tour President Trump gave you. 

I thought I was going to get 20 minutes with him in the Oval Office. I ended up getting 45 minutes in the Oval Office and then almost a 45-minute tour of the White House grounds. 

He showed me the Rose Garden, where they put statues and they turned it into a kind of paved-over terrace that looks like Mar-a-Lago. He showed me the Presidential Walk of Fame, where they have all the pictures of the presidents and then the autopen for Joe Biden, and a room called the Palm Room where he put down a new marble floor that he was very proud of. 

The helipad was still being constructed. He walked me over there and introduced me to the construction workers as they were building this helipad. And then he took me to the ballroom itself and showed me this behemoth building. 

“Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever.”

There’s steel rising 70 feet in the air. It’s the size of one-and-a-half football fields. He was bragging about how there’s more steel there than in the Washington Commander stadium that’s being built. It’s this enormous thing that you can’t really see anywhere in Washington unless you go up the Washington Monument and look at it from afar. And I was just in the middle of this thing and I couldn’t really believe how huge it was. 

He wanted to show me this is where the entrance is going to be, [where] the chandeliers will be. He told me he could picture it all already because this is, quote, “What I do.” 

He’ll gaze out the window in the morning first thing in the morning from the residence to see the work. He’ll look out the window at night to see the work. He is monitoring this very closely.

One thing that the ballroom especially shares with the Kennedy Center is that it feels like this administration is doing its darnedest to outmaneuver the courts, to get around any legal questions concerning the work. Did that come up at all while he was giving you this tour?

When I was getting the tour, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that they could keep going. There was a kind of pause on their ruling where they were allowed to keep doing construction while the Supreme Court figured out how they were going to rule on it. And so clearly they were racing against the Supreme Court to get as much done as possible. They really wanted to become like a fait accompli. They wanted it to look like the whole thing was done. It was beyond going back. 

I was asking the president, “Are you worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule that you can’t keep doing construction unless you get permission from Congress?” Congress does have the right to decide what happens to federal buildings, so it would make sense that they would be able to make a decision on this. And he said he wasn’t worried about it at all. He said, “the Supreme Court’s going to make the right decision. The people want this.”

He’s like, “If I needed to get Congress’s approval, I could do it, but it’s not going to happen.” And he ended up being right. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval. The Supreme Court’s letting him do it.

But Congress may get shaken up in about a month and a half. Is that on his radar?

Yes, and certainly Democrats are aware. I talked to a bunch of Democrats for this story mostly about what happens next. Are they going to start investigating the ballroom? Are they going to start looking at subpoenaing donors and looking at the contracts and figuring out if there’s a pay-to-play scheme, if there was illegal construction happening? And Democrats are champing at the bit for that. 

They’re calling it a target-rich environment. They’re ready to get subpoena power. And they’re also talking about in 2028, what do we do if we get the White House ourselves? Will we tear this down? 

[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] says she wants to turn it into a soup kitchen. There are all sorts of ideas for it. I asked the president about that too. I said, “Are you worried that Democrats will get the White House in 2028 and they come and they tear down this ballroom right after you built it?” And he basically said, “I’d like to see them try.” 

He said, “We’re building this ballroom with nuclear concrete.” That’s what he called it, nuclear concrete, concrete that can withstand a nuclear blast. He’s like, “If it can withstand a nuclear blast, I’d like to see Democrats try to take it down.” 

He told me somebody could go to the ballroom with a jackhammer and spend two days straight jackhammering one column and it wouldn’t even leave a mark. And so he’s basically daring them to try to tear it down because he’s building something that he feels like can withstand a nuclear blast so it can withstand Democrats.

At the end of the day, all of this is just about his legacy. That’s what you learned by hanging out with him and talking to him about it. Do you think by spreading his efforts across DC, he’s ensuring that at least something stands and that his legacy is ultimately secured? 

He definitely thinks that these buildings can withstand more than anything else. Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever. 

I do think there’s a world in which Democrats tear down some of the stuff. The arch is a good example. I mean, the ballroom is hard to tear down, right? First of all, it’s super expensive. It’s huge. It also has to be replaced with something. You can’t just tear it down and then leave a hole in the ground. You have to then build another ballroom, which would be kind of a crazy thing to do and take all this time and then become another story about how Democrats are spending all their time building a ballroom. 

Is it possible? Sure. It just seems a little bit harder to imagine, but the arch, you could see that thing getting dynamited on some Fourth of July and then just leaving it as a traffic circle. So I could see a world in which maybe some of these things get destroyed in a kind of, I don’t know, epic fashion. Why not?

It feels like he might be onto something, which is that it would be very controversial to just tear something down for the sake of it out of spite.

Absolutely.

There’s also two years left in his term. Do you get the sense that this is slowing down or ramping up?

It’s hard to say. I have a hard time believing it’s going to end, especially if he becomes a lame-duck president and there’s even fewer things he can do legislatively.

Why not just keep building things and putting your name on things because there’s nothing else to do with your time? 

He said that in the first term, the reason he didn’t do a lot of this stuff is because he was too under siege, that it was a difficult time to build a ballroom because of the Russian investigations or the impeachment trials and stuff like that.

Maybe he gets tied up in all that same kind of stuff if Democrats take charge, but I also feel like he’ll have an easier time just trying to ignore subpoenas. It’s going to be a really messy time. And so maybe he’ll just hole himself off into a room somewhere designing more buildings, because what else is he going to do?

Nationally, abortion has faded as a campaign issue. Four years after it helped Democrats stave off a red wave, candidates in battleground races are focusing their attention on cost-of-living issues, immigration, and policing. As of mid-August, abortion was mentioned in less than 5 percent of Democratic Senate ads, a key difference from the past two cycles, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.

Maine is different. As of September 16, Democratic advertisers had spent roughly 15 percent of their $40.8 million broadcast TV and streaming dollars on ads focused on abortion rights, according to Nate Schwartz from AdImpact. It’s one of the biggest topics there, he told me, after ads about President Donald Trump and healthcare. Planned Parenthood’s political arm is also making its biggest ad buy of 2026 against Susan Collins, at $600,000, and WinSenate, a super PAC aligned with Senate Democratic leadership, has spent 70 percent of its TV, streaming, and digital money in Maine on abortion-focused ads.

The target is Collins, the only Republican senator up for reelection in a state Trump lost in 2024, and one of Democrats’ best chances to flip a seat. Seeking her sixth term, Collins is running in a year when Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by about 9 points. It’s also the first time she will face voters since Roe v. Wade was overturned — a decision Justice Brett Kavanaugh helped deliver after Collins, who has long described herself as “pro-choice,” cast the pivotal vote to confirm him in 2018. 

For the abortion rights movement, this is the race that has to work. Groups are pouring their biggest investments of the cycle into a state where fewer than half a percent of voters call abortion their top issue, in a year when Democrats have opportunities to win nearly everywhere. If a blue wave arrives and lifts every Democrat except the one running to avenge Roe v. Wade and remove the senator who famously sealed its fate, the organizations will have a harder time telling donors the issue still moves voters, and a harder time arguing that Republicans will pay a political price — even in blue states — for votes that restrict access to abortion.

“We know that abortion is the number one negative in Maine voters’ mind,” Lisa Margulies, a Maine spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes, told me. “It’s really the No. 1 dealbreaker.”

The first job for Democrats and abortion rights advocates is convincing Mainers the issue is still a pressing one. Seventy-two percent of Maine adults say abortion should be legal “in all or most” circumstances, and since Democrats took control of Maine’s government in 2018, the state has expanded who can provide abortions, required and subsidized insurance coverage for the procedure, eliminated most patient cost-sharing, loosened restrictions on care after viability, and shielded patients and providers from prosecution and lawsuits.

Collins has made that her defense. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision, she said in June, “has not had an impact on the state of Maine in that Maine actually expanded its law.” Advocates call that the central misunderstanding. 

“There’s this perception — and Sen. Collins herself has said it — that somehow Maine is immune, and that’s just not true,” Margulies said, pointing to their state-level efforts to keep access intact and to federal Medicaid cuts that have already hit Maine providers.

Also muddying the waters is the senator’s Democratic opponent. Collins is facing off against Troy Jackson, a longtime fixture in Maine politics who rose from the state House to the Senate presidency but fell short in bids for Congress in 2014 and governor this year. Early in his career, Jackson said that abortion “should never be legal” and that women should be required to view an ultrasound if they want to end a pregnancy. He has since renounced those positions and has earned 100 percent ratings from Planned Parenthood since 2017. (Jackson replaced Graham Platner, the original Democratic Party nominee, who quit the race after being accused of rape, an allegation he denies.)

While Collins prevailed for reelection in 2020 despite voting to confirm Kavanaugh, Democrats say her decision is much more salient for voters now that Americans live in a post-Roe world, one where more than 15 states have near-total abortion bans. 

If Collins loses, Democrats and abortion rights groups will say her Kavanaugh vote is no doubt partly why. A win for Collins would be harder to read, though the explanations that leave out abortion are already being prepared, including a messy nomination process that produced a candidate fewer voters were excited about, and a “unicorn” incumbent with decades of personal relationships across a small state and a long record of bringing federal money back home.

The abortion rights bet hinges on two things: that the Kavanaugh vote cost Collins something on top of what an unpopular president and rising gas prices already have, and that voters will judge Jackson by the positions he’s renounced rather than the ones he once held. 

The vote Collins won’t apologize for

When Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh, she said she believed his assurances that he considered Roe v. Wade settled precedent. She had previously said that she would not vote for any nominee who expressed “hostility” toward the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to an abortion.

As many observed at the time, Kavanaugh’s record gave strong signals that he would in fact vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. In her floor speech announcing her vote, Collins dismissed those warnings, suggesting opponents had been whipped into a “frenzy” by advocacy groups. When he ultimately did side with the conservative majority in Dobbs, Collins issued a statement calling the ruling “ill-considered.”

Four years later, though, Collins is doubling down on her vote for Kavanaugh, telling local media this summer that she does “not regret” it. “Given what subsequently happened to Roe, I don’t think that simply fades into the background,” Robert Glover, a political scientist at the University of Maine, told me.

Democrats are zeroing in on the fact that Collins has continued to confirm anti-abortion federal judges, even as recently as this month. Last fall she voted to confirm Joshua Dunlap, a Maine attorney, to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit over objections from 20 Maine organizations citing his record on abortion and marriage equality. 

“Susan Collins says she has no regrets about confirming the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, and has proved it by continuing to vote for Trump’s right-wing judges,” Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan told me in an emailed statement. “Now, her approvals are underwater, and she’s trailing with women voters because Maine women have had enough of being betrayed.” 

George Hill, the president and CEO of Maine Family Planning, told me Collins “defied” them with her vote for Kavanaugh, causing “irreparable harm” across the country. He emphasized how vulnerable Mainers are if Republicans retake control of state government.

Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for Collins’s campaign, dismissed the criticism about anti-abortion judges, emphasizing that her pro-choice boss also voted for 188 judges nominated by President Joe Biden, including Julie Rikelman, who served as litigation director of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Collins, she noted, is the only Republican who voted to confirm all three of the court’s liberal justices, and she voted against Amy Coney Barrett.

Margulies rejects this accounting. “We deserve better than, ‘Well, she’s not as bad,’” she said. “When it comes to reproductive rights, she’s not a moderate anymore.”

While her judicial votes are facing scrutiny, Collins has also spent decades building up a brand as a Republican willing to buck her party on abortion when the issue comes up in the Senate. 

In May 2025, Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund published a memo online titled, “Senator Susan Collins’ long history of supporting Planned Parenthood and access to essential health care.” Among other things, the memo highlighted Collins for speaking out against proposed Medicaid cuts, for co-sponsoring a bill in 2022 to codify Roe v. Wade, and for opposing a 20-week abortion ban bill in the Senate. This past summer, the memo was quietly taken down from their website.

Asked about the removed page, Margulies didn’t say when or why it was taken down, but pointed to what she described as a sharp shift in Collins’s record over the past year, particularly on judicial confirmations. “There are times when she’s been true to her word and put Mainers ahead of politics, but she closed that chapter this year,” she told me.

“Because she is a Republican, the national groups continue to twist themselves into a pretzel to support these male candidates with terrible records,” Kernen said, referring to Platner and Jackson. 

So far, Mainers appear to have split Collins in two in their minds: There’s the dedicated public servant who puts her state first on one side, and the partisan Republican who sometimes disappoints them on the other. A University of New Hampshire poll over the summer found Collins rated far better on bringing federal dollars home to Maine than on her Supreme Court confirmation votes. Maine voters, Glover said, “have historically been willing to separate Collins from the national Republican Party and evaluate her through a broader lens of incumbency, independence, and constituent service.” 

The turnout math

Even if Democrats can win the argument on abortion around Collins, it’s an open question how much it will move votes. “Right now, I feel quite confident that affordability, healthcare, and good jobs trump abortion access by a long shot,” Dan Shea, a political scientist at Colby College, told me.

But abortion rights advocates believe the ranking obscures how the issue actually works. Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said her group has spent years testing how to talk to voters about abortion, consistently finding that it overperforms as an attack. “If you go to a voter in Maine and you say, what are your top three or five issues, they may not name abortion,” she told me. “But if you say to them, Susan Collins took the following vote — and one of them is Brett Kavanaugh, which led to overturning Roe — it is extremely salient, and it moves that voter.”

The Kavanaugh vote works, she argued, as a character verdict — “an indicator that you’re willing to side with extremism over your own constituents.” That, she said, is the piece that’s missing in the analysis of what voters say they care about. “It is one of the most salient attacks in Maine and in a lot of other parts of the country.”

Ashley Kirzinger, a pollster at KFF based in Maine, said priority rankings are a weak guide anyway, noting “the economy” means different things to different voters, and issues compete with candidate dynamics and party loyalty. What has changed since Roe’s overturn, she told me, is who the single-issue abortion voter is.

“Before the Dobbs decision, abortion was a motivating issue for Republican conservative voters,” Kirzinger said. “Now what we’ve seen is a complete shift.” Those voters are more likely to be Democrats, younger women and women of color, and include more people who don’t reliably show up in midterms.

Abortion messaging, therefore, is doing two jobs. The first is turnout. Kirzinger said the Kavanaugh vote is aimed at Democratic women “who are not as enthusiastic about Jackson as a candidate” and who “may be more motivated to turn out as a vote against Collins’ record on abortion rather than for Jackson.” In a tight race inside the margin of error, a couple of points of turnout could make the difference.

The second job is persuasion, and the target is older women, who reliably vote. Women made up nearly 60 percent of Maine’s turnout in 2020, and Collins won them by 3 points. What Democrats need from them is a switch, which is why many of the abortion ads are built around regret. One Planned Parenthood ad features a woman who voted for Collins and “will not make the same mistake twice”; WinSenate’s features a voter who “felt [Collins] was the better choice” and doesn’t anymore. 

Jackson’s change of heart

Complicating the race is Collins’ opponent, Troy Jackson, who is in some ways a mirror image of her own political persona: a Democrat with a history of culturally right-leaning positions to appeal to voters in the other party.

Jackson, who started his political career in the rural and fairly conservative county of Aroostook, used to earn 100 percent ratings from Maine Right to Life. In 2010, as CNN’s KFILE reported, when he filled out the group’s candidate questionnaire saying he thought abortion should never be legal, he declined to say whether there should be exceptions even to protect the life of the mother, for rape or incest, or because of fetal disability. Maine Right to Life, which has not issued an endorsement in the Senate race, did not return requests for comment.

Jackson told MS NOW he evolved on the issue thanks to “a lot of conversations over time” with women, doctors, and community members. “It became more and more clear to me that abortion access was healthcare,” he said.

In 2023, while serving as Senate president, he co-sponsored a bill allowing abortions after fetal viability when a physician deems them necessary, one of the most expansive such laws in the country. In 2024, he shepherded through the Senate a shield law protecting Maine providers and patients of reproductive and gender-affirming care from other states’ bans, despite bomb threats that emptied the statehouse and a letter from 16 Republican attorneys general threatening to sue. “Troy stood up for and never wavered in his commitment to reproductive rights during some really harrowing moments,” Margulies said, “when it would have been a lot easier to step down.”

“I’m rock solid on this now, and Susan has been the opposite,” Jackson said in an interview with Maine Public Radio this summer. Kernan, Collins’s spokesperson, has charged Jackson with flip-flopping for “political convenience.”

The national environment is looking strong for Democrats, and Jackson has been narrowly ahead in recent polls, though all have been within the margin of error. A CNN poll released this month found nearly two-thirds of Mainers feel negatively about the Dobbs decision, including about half saying it makes them angry. A Fox News poll in August found 55 percent worried Collins votes with Trump too often. 

Whatever happens, the explanations are ready. If Collins loses, abortion rights groups will cast it as proof that the issue still moves voters even where it doesn’t top their lists, and as a warning to all Republicans running in 2028. Timmaraju previewed the argument in our conversation: A loss would signal “a crack in the armor” of so-called moderates, and show that voters “are not going to tolerate” incumbents complicit with an extremist administration. 

If Collins wins, the groups that spent millions on abortion ads are unlikely to conclude that doing so was a mistake. Kirzinger pointed to the turmoil that followed the Democratic primary and the late swap of Platner for Jackson, which she said benefited Collins “in a way that is hard to capture in polls.” Glover, the political scientist, noted the things Mainers have always weighed alongside her votes, including decades of relationships, the Senate Appropriations gavel, and federal money. Even Timmaraju, the abortion rights leader, offered the same hedge in advance: A Collins win, she told me, “says more about Susan Collins and Maine than it does about 2028.”

A win wouldn’t show that judicial votes carry no consequences, Glover added. But if Collins holds substantial support among voters who support abortion rights despite the Kavanaugh vote and the fall of Roe, “that would certainly suggest limits” for retrospective accountability for downstream consequences of Supreme Court confirmations.

Though the race is supposed to clarify whether voters will punish elected officials for taking actions that restrict abortion access, it probably can’t — at least not definitively. It will decide, though, who holds the seat, and reproductive rights leaders have been clear that without a Democratic Senate, nothing they want gets a vote.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch is going in a new direction: drone port and sniper platform.

What’s happening? Trump has been pushing to build a 250-foot-tall “triumphal arch” near the National Mall since at least this January. Relative to some of his other projects, however, it’s been slow going, and now he has a new plan.

Trump announced the updated design in a Sunday morning post, writing, “At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert” the arch into “a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch.”

In addition to drones, Trump said, the new arch will have “snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

Really? Maybe. We don’t yet know if this version of the arch will happen, or even if the military actually requested it.

For that matter, we don’t know if the arch will get built at all — though the administration appears prepared to move forward, despite a National Park Service determination that the arch would harm nearby historical sites, including the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

What’s the big picture? Trump’s plan for a “Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” sounds an awful lot like his “Ballroom/Military Complex,” which got a stamp of approval from the Supreme Court last month after multiple lower courts ruled against its construction without permission from Congress (which Trump also does not have for his arch).

Like the arch, the ballroom acquired its “military complex” label after running into obstacles (though unlike the arch, there’s a clear connection: The ballroom does in fact sit on top of a secure bunker).

The unifying theme, though, is Trump’s instinct to reach for “national security” as a cudgel whenever he’s thwarted. He also accused the media of being a “threat to our National Security” on Monday amid backlash to his press ban.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — I could not have been more thrilled to read this story from DC’s Capital Weather team this morning declaring the start of fall and some much-needed cooler weather. I hope you’re getting the same, wherever you are. 

Plus, it’s September 21 — don’t miss this now-venerable NPR story on the history of the Earth, Wind & Fire hit “September” and why it continues to resonate. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

It’s time for yet another United Nations General Assembly meeting in Manhattan — just one year after President Donald Trump appeared at it and asked, bluntly: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”

Every year around this time, roughly 130 leaders from around the world convene at the UN to deliver speeches, hold diplomatic meetings, and debate issues like AI, climate change, and the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Trump is scheduled to speak this week, as are Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (…despite New York’s chilly reception). 

Even more important than those big public speeches, however, are the one-on-one talks between foreign leaders. Trump has a packed meeting schedule on Monday and Tuesday, featuring the likes of Zelenskyy, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

In Trump’s famously bizarre speech last year, he attacked several US allies, called climate change a “con,” and suggested the UN itself was irrelevant. Increasingly — as we’ll get into below — that’s an accusation echoed by many UN critics.

Go a little deeper

This week’s meeting comes at a moment of crisis — or at the very least, inflection — for the United Nations. 

The UN faces a severe budgetary shortfall this year, caused largely by Trump’s refusal to pay America’s full dues. At the same time, the UN has battled searing criticism of its inability to end conflicts in places like Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza. 

Under the organization’s founding charter, any of the five permanent members of its Security Council — the body responsible for maintaining international security — can block important resolutions unilaterally. In 2022, Russia controversially used that power to torpedo a resolution condemning its attempted annexation of parts of Ukraine. Three years later, the US similarly vetoed a demand for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an increase in unrestricted humanitarian aid.

Critics point to impasses like these as evidence the UN no longer works; even UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said the Security Council needs reform. But it would be a mistake to conclude the UN is somehow irrelevant or newly ineffectual. 

For one thing, Security Council gridlock isn’t a recent development — it’s the historical norm. (Check out all the Cold War-era vetoes in the chart above.) The UN is also far more than its Security Council — it’s a sprawling humanitarian apparatus that provides food, cash aid, medical care, and other assistance to millions around the world. 

In Gaza last year alone, for instance, the UN says it provided clean water to 1.6 million people, operated dozens of makeshift schools for Palestinian children, and distributed almost $55 million of humanitarian cash assistance.

Those efforts probably won’t make headlines this week. But they help answer Trump’s 2025 question.

One link for later

➨ Put yourself first for once. A striking new poll finds that healthcare challenges prevent a sizable plurality of women from having the careers, social relationships, and family lives they want. The problem is overwhelmingly structural, of course. But in an exclusive interview with Vox, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates warns that women are also “often taught to put themselves last,” especially when they’re caregivers.  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that crows can solve puzzles as well as 5-year-olds? In one study, they were observed bending a piece of wire to fish a treat out of a tube.
• Today’s trivia: Which classic Broadway star — the most successful of her generation — debuted the songs “I Got Rhythm,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the US Supreme Court justice who succeeded John Paul Stevens. That would be Elena Kagan, an Obama nominee who was confirmed to the court in 2010.

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is a Christian Zionist who believes that Israel is biblically entitled to all of the Holy Land. He’s pretty much the last person you’d expect to condemn Israeli conduct in the West Bank, where settlers have spent decades using a combination of construction, coercion, and outright violence to push Palestinians off their own land.

Yet earlier this month, Huckabee went out of his way to denounce the behavior of some settlers — describing them as “band of terrorists” who had committed “horrible activities of criminal nature.”

Huckabee’s surprising outrage stems, in part, from their recent choice of victims. Last month, settler extremists besieged three Palestinian homes in the village of Qusra, including one belonging to American citizen Lou Ridi. About two weeks later, masked settlers beat up a NBC News crew while they attempted to interview Aida Ahmed Abdullah, a Palestinian who had herself had been forced from her home by settler aggression.

But Huckabee’s outrage reflects something deeper. Settler terrorism, once relatively uncommon, has exploded in severity in recent years — with wink-nudge support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

The violence is so egregious, and so indefensible, that retired Israeli generals have compared the settlers to Nazis and demanded action to stop them. In mid-September, the INSS — Israel’s top national security think tank — issued a strategic alert warning that “Jewish terrorism” had become a national crisis and even an existential threat to Israel’s future.

“As history teaches us, democracies that fail to restrain radical forces within them do not survive,” the alert argues.

In Washington, settler terrorism against Palestinians has flipped the Israel debate on its head. Congressional Democrats, who have long been divided over the Gaza war, have come together to support legislation that would impose sanctions on Israeli politicians and corporations implicated in the violence. The Trump administration, the most pro-settlement White House in American history, has very conspicuously stood aside as Canada and European nations implemented sanctions of their own.

For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it — because the government wants them to.

For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it — because the government wants them to. While basically all Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow, the current Netanyahu government includes coalition partners unusually aligned with their most radical goals: the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. So long as they see settler terrorism as a useful tactic toward that end, and have the ability to stymie preventive measures and block accountability, the attacks will continue.

But if Netanyahu loses Israel’s election in October, and Democrats retake the White House in 2028, things might change dramatically. The political stars could align for a serious effort to change what Israel is doing in the West Bank — not just attempting to merely slow settler violence, but also challenge the broader apparatus of occupation that makes it possible.

In “conversations that I’ve had with congressional Democrats and their staff, this [settler violence] is the No. 1 issue that comes up, the thing they’re angriest about,” said Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer at the center-left Israel Policy Forum. “If you have a Democrat in the White House, this is something the Israelis are going to have to deal with — whether they want to or not.”

The rise of settler terrorism

Under international law, Israeli settlement in the West Bank is illegal: Countries are not permitted to move their own civilians into territory they occupied after a war. However, under successive Israeli governments — including the more peace-minded ones — the settlements have continued to grow. Many of those closest to the border function as suburbs of major Israeli cities; some further east, like Ariel, look like small cities in their own right. During the era when a negotiated solution looked possible in the near term, their growth was often seen as part of a bid to dictate the eventual borders of a Palestinian state — or blow up negotiations entirely — with “facts on the ground” that would be hard to undo.

While individual settlers live there for all sorts of reasons — for many, the housing costs are cheaper — the political movement overall exists to seize land from Palestinians and slam the door on the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict. 

On a macro level, the physical placement of the settlements cut Palestinian communities off from each other, making it hard — basically impossible — to construct a contiguous Palestinian state so long as they remain standing. On a micro level, settlements are often placed in ways designed to push Palestinians off their land — by, for example, putting Palestinian-owned land into no-go zones enforced by the Israeli military. And politically, the population growth in settlements creates a powerful constituency in Israeli politics whose entire way of life depends on preventing a peace agreement that would require settlement evacuation.

Settler violence is the literal bleeding edge of this overall strategy. Violent settlers live in ramshackle communities, tiny villages on hilltops or herding outposts encroaching on Palestinian farmland, that are often illegal even under domestic Israeli law. The people living there are the hardest of the hardcore settlers: fanatically devoted to the idea that the land is theirs by divine right, and that they have every right to use force to push their Palestinians neighbors out.

Their tactics include everything from killing Palestinian livestock to cutting off their water supply to burning down their homes to outright beating and killing them. The violence is autonomous, in that individual settlers decide on what to do, but enabled by the overall strategic plan of the settlement movement.

“There’s no hierarchy deciding that this [specific] house will be attacked. The decision is that this area is an area of all our interest, so we need to subsidize herding farms there. And those bring violence, which lead to displacement” of the local Palestinians, said Yehuda Shaul, co-director of the Israeli think tank Ofek and a leading observer of the settlement movement.

Settler terrorism is not new, but it used to be comparatively rare. In 2012, Natan Sachs — a leading expert on Israeli politics at the Middle East Institute think tank — wrote an essay warning that the growth of the settlements, and the radicalization of some settlers, were creating a dangerous new violent movement of settlers.  

“Back then, it was a fringe thing among settlers,” Sachs tells me. “It has become much more mainstream.”

Israel’s current government, which took power in late 2022 and is by far the most radical in Israeli history, bears enormous responsibility.

“This particular government is enabling settler violence beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” said Yousef Munayyer, the director of the Israel/Palestine program at the Arab Center think tank in DC.

Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, a settler living in a reportedly illegal home and a longtime advocate of ethnically cleansing West Bank Palestinians, is currently in charge of civilian administration in the West Bank. In effect, this allows him to use state resources to orchestrate a historic expansion of settlements across the West Bank — including the illegal outposts that many violent settlers call home. 

“This is his life’s work,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine at the International Crisis Group. “He’s completely dedicated to this and he knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, also a settler, is if anything more extreme: For years, he hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a terrorist who massacred 29 Palestinians at a holy site in Hebron, in his living room. Ben Gvir has, among other things, instructed the police forces under his authority not to arrest violent settlers and given thousands of weapons to settlers themselves.

In theory, the Israeli military and intelligence establishment should be a check on the extremists. Settler violence is not only illegal, but also a national security threat. Settler violence prompts Palestinian retaliation and, at times, even targets Israeli soldiers and police themselves. It can lead to international incidents, like those seen recently, that undermine Israel’s support with key allies abroad. The Israeli military is the ultimate authority in the West Bank; it could act on these concerns if it so chose.

In practice, however, they’re of little help. Israeli government data shows that, between 2005 and 2025, 94 percent of all investigations into settler violence fail to yield an indictment. The military will facilitate illegal settlements’ connection to the electrical grid. And its ranks are increasingly made up of “national religious” Jewish Israelis, a demographic that’s theologically on board with the settlement enterprise, versus more secular Israelis who primarily see the conflict through a security lens.

And after October 7, the Army dealt with a manpower crisis by significantly increasing the number of “regional defense units” — essentially bands of armed settlers that can be tasked with local security in the West Bank in lieu of regular soldiers. It emboldens violence in exactly the way you’d think.

So while the recent spike in settler terrorism can fairly be blamed on the Netanyahu government, the phenomenon itself is an outgrowth of the structural settlement growth Israel has condoned or actively pursued for decades.

“It’s all one set of policies,” said Ilan Goldenberg, senior vice president and chief policy officer at J Street, an American lobby that favors a two-state solution to the conflict.

How the violence could lead to a deeper break between America and Israel

Other than Israel’s government itself, the most important player in all this is the American government. As Israel’s chief diplomatic ally and military supplier, it has immense leverage that could be used to affect the West Bank (or anywhere else). Thus, changing American politics on Israel could quite directly produce a transformation on the ground.

Since October 7, Gaza has dominated American discourse over Israel — and it is arguably the most divisive issue in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Many Democrats (and a majority of rank-and-file voters) call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide, a label others in the party strongly reject. While the Trump administration and most elected Republicans have stood behind Netanyahu, a faction — including Vice President JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and a significant chunk of younger GOP voters — have grown increasingly critical of American military support for Israel’s actions.

But settler violence, specifically, might as well be another political universe. 

On the Democratic side, there is basically unanimous condemnation of what’s going on in the West Bank. Even Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a leading pro-Israel advocacy group, believes that Israel is erring here.

“DMFI unequivocally condemns attacks by violent Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel’s government must move beyond just words and take definitive action to protect civilians, and ensure that those responsible are held accountable,” Brian Romick, DMFI’s president, told me.

Last year, US Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) — an influential progressive pro-Israel voice in Congress, where he’s long represented some of the nation’s largest Jewish communities — co-authored the West Bank Violence Protection Act, legislation that would sanction violent settlers and their enablers. The law would effectively codify an executive order issued by President Joe Biden in 2024, but scrapped by President Donald Trump upon taking office. 

The key question going forward is what this political dynamic means for policy.

More than 170 House Democrats and 45 senators have cosponsored it, the vast majority of Democrats in both chambers. Goldenberg, whose J Street outfit has been a leading voice supporting the law, says rallying support for it has been easy.

By contrast, no Republicans have cosponsored the bill. When you combine that with Trump reversing the Biden order, and his broader enabling of settlement expansion, you might think that the administration would be willing to take Israel’s side in the argument over settler violence.

Yet that’s not been the case — and it’s not just Huckabee freelancing. Earlier this month, when Canada, the UK, and France imposed significant sanctions targeting settlements, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointedly refused to condemn these allied policies, saying that neither he nor Trump had any comment on their decisions.

“Obviously, we’re not going to do what the UK did. [But] we share the goal of stability: we don’t to see an uptick in violence or conflict or tensions in the West Bank,” he told reporters on September 8.

Settler terrorism, then, has a remarkable effect on both parties: Democrats in Congress go from fractious on Israel to united, and the Trump administration goes from Israel’s chief defender to a tacit enabler of allied pressure campaigns against it. Why?

I put this question to all the experts I spoke with, and everyone offered a basically similar explanation: that settler violence is morally and politically straightforward. Even the most hardline pro-Israel advocate, ones who rationalize mass civilian killing in Gaza as necessary to destroy Hamas and restore Israel’s security, blanch at videos of armed settlers beating up on defenseless Palestinians, which cannot be justified on the same grounds. Virtually nobody in American politics wants to be in a position of having to defend this kind of thing, and many of the most influential pro-Israel voices on the American side do not share the settlers’ extremist ideology.

“There aren’t two sides…it’s just one side terrorizing the other,” Israel Policy Forum’s Koplow said. “There are literally WhatsApp groups and Signal groups run by the Israelis perpetrating the violence where they themselves boast about it.”

On the White House side, there are also Trump priorities that the violence complicates. In his comments about the allied sanctions, Rubio said instability in the West Bank “has implications as well on our ability to make progress on Gaza, on the 20-point plan, and the Board of Peace that we’re very committed to.” However serious you think these initiatives are — there are very good reasons for skepticism — the White House seems to at least be publicly concerned about violence derailing it.

The key question going forward is what this political dynamic means for policy. While the Trump administration may not be willing to go out of their way to defend settler violence, they’re not exactly going out of their way to try and shut it down either. Huckabee’s comments about “terrorists” are symbolically significant, but the reversal of the Biden executive order speaks about the limits of this stance for actual policy. 

Democrats, by contrast, are clearly animated by the issue and willing to act on it. The question is what exactly those actions entail — especially if they retake Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028.

Here, there’s real disagreement between the experts. 

Skeptics suggest that there may be less substance here than it appears. Targeted sanctions against some violent settlers might matter on the margins, but unless they go after the settlement enterprise and US-Israel relationship more broadly they’re leaving the root cause of the problem intact. In the worst case, a focus on settler violence specifically might even be counterproductive — functioning as a kind of pressure release valve that allows Democrats to satiate their increasingly Israel-critical base without actually doing much that matters.

Such a focus “creates, in a lot of ways, more problems than it solves,” the Arab Center’s Munayyer said. “It reinforces this idea politically that it’s too risky politically to hold accountable the actual decision-makers in the Israeli government, and the real processes at play here — which are driven by the state.”

Others see this as a misread of the political dynamics — one that Sachs of the Middle East Institute called “too cynical by half.” On this line of thinking, targeted action on settler violence is just morally necessary: the violence is really terrible, and if the United States can curtail it even on the margins it matters.

Moreover, they argue, something like sanctions on West Bank settlers opens the door to broader action: creating a real precedent for punishing bad actors in Israel that could create a kind of ratchet dynamic for future action taking on the deeper Israeli policies behind settler violence.

It’s hard to say in advance which of these views are right. Experts in both camps say there’s a lot of uncertainty here: we don’t know what will happen this November, let alone who the Democratic 2028 nominee will be or whether they’ll win. A Democratic trifecta with President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would likely be quite different than, say, a divided government with President Mark Kelly.

But either way, how Democrats handle the settler violence question could well be an indicator of where the party is going to go on the US-Israel relationship more broadly — and, by extension, the future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. 

In 2024, Donald Trump’s victory was powered in large part by massive gains with Latino voters. He won 48 percent of those voters that year, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. But now, that support is plummeting; Trump’s approval rating among Latinos who voted for him recently fell from 93 percent to 66 percent, where it was at the beginning of his second term.

Why? It has a lot to do, as with everything these days, with the economy. 

It was the same in 2024. During that election, voters were experiencing rising costs and stagnant wages — the same trend that has continued until today. In 2024, though, Joe Biden and his administration — which also meant Vice President Kamala Harris — took the blame from all voters, and particularly Latinos. Today, the blame is falling on Trump. 

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Stephanie Valencia, who co-founded Equis Research, a political research firm that specializes in Latino voters, to unpack some of these recent shifts and explain them. 

“I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup,” she said on the podcast. “And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more.” 

That’s why, when the economy is bad, this group is primed to be a “swinging giant” in US politics, Valencia explains — and right now, it appears to be swinging hard against Trump. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Equis has called Latinos one of the last great wild cards in American politics. Is that because of some of the double-digit swings that we’ve seen among this voting group over the past few elections?

Yes, it absolutely has to do with that. Latinos often get given the title the “sleeping giant,” which I just want to get rid of from everybody’s vocabulary. 

We should be called the “swinging giant” based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical, and that swinging middle really is deciding every single election.

Your playbook gets into messengers and particularly how we reach folks where they are. It makes a Spanish-Spanglish distinction talking about the different types of media that Latino voters consume. 

I wanted to ask, in that vein, what’s the single biggest mistake campaigns make in terms of not reaching folks where they are?

Oh man, how long do we have so I can tell you how many mistakes? They’re really simple unforced errors. I’m going to give a very concrete and simple example that I think illustrates that. 

Look, I’m Latina. I grew up speaking mostly English, but I listen to Spanish-language radio. I watch a lot of YouTube, and on YouTube I’m watching people like Karol G and Carin León. A lot of people — a lot of Latino swing voters — have the same media consumption habits that I do.

The first problem or challenge that a lot of candidates make is they just simply translate their English ad into Spanish. And that is, to me, one of the biggest mistakes because there are a lot of things that people want to be communicating in Spanish that don’t translate word for word. There are sayings in Spanish that don’t translate directly from English or more direct ways you can communicate.

I’m sure it immediately reads Google Translate rather than an original message for said community.

Exactly. So that’s mistake No. 1. Mistake No. 2 is when they’re deploying that ad digitally, as a proxy for talking to people, they’re going to use Spanish-language browser settings. So they say, “We don’t want people who speak English to see the Spanish-language ad.”

So the way they find that set of voters is just by going to people who have Spanish-language browser settings. 

Like I said, I don’t have a Spanish-language browser setting. Everything I consume online is set in English on Chrome, but I still watch a lot of content in Spanish on YouTube.

So you’re missing a voter like me who’s going to see a Spanish language ad from a James Talarico or a Manny Rutinel and be turned on by it because I’m going to say, “Hey, that candidate’s speaking to our community. That candidate has enough respect to develop a Spanish-language ad.” 

We did some testing a couple of years ago that showed that over 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish think that party or candidate cares more about Latinos. It matters that much.

Let’s stay in 2024 for a second longer. Your research found that Project 2025 and Trump’s mass deportation plans were not top of mind for most people, and that they were thinking about the economy. I wanted to ask about that because I remember the RNC signs at the convention saying, “Mass deportations now.” One number says that 62 percent of Latinos now think that Trump wants to deport undocumented immigrants broadly. 

Why did it take till post-election to realize those threats of mass deportation were real considering they were so front and center during his campaign?

I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand the kind of news that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, is consuming.

What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on people or Trump surrogates who said he was going to focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals.

And so that’s what people bought. Fast-forward to 2026; the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. 

They were told he was going to focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was going to focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

And then add that to the litany of broken promises.

I’m hearing a distinction between a focus on the border, which Republicans did try to prioritize rather than the interior deportations that may have been more attributed to Stephen Miller than Donald Trump. But we have certainly seen that be a focus of the administration once they came back into office.

You mentioned the shift that has happened since 2024, and that’s really important, of course. Trump’s approval rating with Latinos is now worse than with non-Latinos, a stunning reversal in 18 months. 

You mentioned the factors that have contributed there, but is this really just the economy?

It’s the economy, it’s the war, and it’s immigration. It’s those three things. 

One thing that is really interesting to note about Trump’s approval, other than that it’s at basement levels — and he’s very much pulled down the GOP with him broadly and with Latino voters — is that in Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval on his total job.

And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.

Listen, you tell people you’re going to fix egg prices and gas is going to go down, and then you do the opposite, and we’re hearing that story universally across different electorate groups. 

You’re saying that’s still the main story when it comes to Latinos also?

Yes, it’s still the main story. I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup. What that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. 

We have less savings. We have lower rates of home ownership. So the safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have. 

That really has exacerbated the kind of impact that people are feeling right now as they’re trying to make ends meet.

You mentioned the exponential growth in the terms of people who now regret or are disappointed with their vote for Donald Trump. Does that mean a preference for Democrats? How should we think about the binary choice between D and R versus what is a clear story about a backlash to Donald Trump’s actions?

I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling about Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and promises broken that that is automatically going to translate for them as a party and as a brand.

Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. Twenty years of comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group. 

And part of what the build-up to 2024 was, was not only 20 years of a promise undelivered; it was the chaos at the border, it was feeling like Democrats were focused on everything but Latinos and their families, or everyday Americans and their families, and that they had lost that thread.

AI will be the death of me. And you. And everyone we know.

At least, this is what a growing number of technologists and policymakers fear. 

Last week, a lead researcher at Anthropic declared that there was a greater than 10 percent chance of AI “killing all humans” within the next decade. This nerve-racking forecast, combined with recent AI-initiated cyberattacks, have fueled calls for slowing the progress of artificial intelligence — a proposal that Anthropic and OpenAI subsequently embraced.

Not all prophets of AI doom agree about precisely how this apocalypse would come about. Many focus on scenarios reminiscent of The Terminator films, in which superintelligent machines conspire to exterminate humanity — perhaps in the same not-quite-intentional way that humans laid waste to the dodo, or passenger pigeon.

But there is another, arguably more intuitive way that AI could bring about mass death, if not human extinction: by making it easier for people to develop and deploy catastrophic bioweapons. 

Importantly, this hypothetical doesn’t require AI models to become conscious or superintelligent; it merely requires them to accelerate preexisting trends in biotechnology. 

For those alarmed by this hypothetical, the threat AI poses is essentially twofold. First, when combined with technological progress in gene editing and DNA synthesis, chatbots could vastly increase the number of people capable of assembling dangerous viruses already known to medical science. And the more potential bioengineers there are in the world, the higher the odds that one will prove to be a diligent psychopath.

Second, AI could help highly trained biologists to discover — or engineer — a custom supervirus, which could then fall into the wrong hands. 

Recent headlines have lent some credence to both of these fears. 

Earlier this year, biologists warned that, with a few simple prompts, they’d gotten chatbots to dispense detailed instructions for engineering a treatment-resistant strain of an infamous pathogen, step-by-step protocols for recreating a once-pandemic virus, and advice on dispersing biological payloads via weather balloon.

In August, a team of scientists revealed that an AI model trained on DNA sequences had generated blueprints for deadly viruses unseen in nature (albeit, viruses deadly to bacteria, not animals). And last week, Anthropic announced that it had thwarted several suspected attempts by state actors to use Claude for bioweapons research.

Precisely how much AI is increasing the risk of an artificial pandemic is unclear. Even before ChatGPT, advances in synthetic biology were already making bioengineering tools more potent and accessible. And even after four years of rapid AI progress, the technical barriers to engineering novel superviruses remain formidable.

Regardless, there is a great deal more that governments can — and should — be doing to protect us from synthetic pandemics, both manmade and natural. No matter what AI’s ultimate impact on biosecurity proves to be, now is the time to both prepare for the worst-case scenario and, ideally, preempt it.

Why synthetic superviruses are scary

Before we dig into how AI could raise the risk of a man-made pandemic, it’s worth spelling out why that prospect is so unnerving. 

Put simply, few things could more credibly destroy civilization — and/or, the human species — than a synthetic supervirus.

Infectious diseases have killed more humans than any other force on Earth. The Black Death wiped out at least 30 percent of all Europeans in the 1300s, while the 1918 flu killed 50 million people worldwide. You don’t need me to tell you what things were like in 2020 (or how much worse they could have been, if vaccines hadn’t been rolled out in record time). 

And nature kicked off these catastrophes without even trying. A bioterrorist consciously seeking to maximize human death could theoretically improve on evolution’s handiwork. If biotech continues to advance — and scientists identify viral genomes that reliably yield high transmissibility and lethality — a malicious actor might one day be able to manufacture a virus that’s both as contagious as measles and as deadly as Ebola. 

Natural selection generally disfavors viruses that are both highly transmissible and profoundly fatal; bugs that kill their hosts too reliably often have difficulty spreading. Yet a virus with a long asymptomatic period could escape this tradeoff. For example, HIV can live in a person’s body for a decade before generating noticeable symptoms. In theory, a highly contagious respiratory virus could similarly lie in wait for many weeks, months, or even years.

If bioterrorists ever managed to unleash an easily transmitted, highly fatal virus, they could shake the foundations of modern existence. In that scenario, reliably showing up for work might require accepting a 50-50 chance  of getting yourself — and your family — brutally killed. Covid never required essential workers to assume risks anywhere near this high (the virus had a less than 1 percent case fatality rate among prime-age workers, before vaccines became available). Although there are many heroes among us, plenty of doctors, nurses, warehouse workers, power plant technicians, delivery drivers, and other essential laborers might not tolerate a coin flip’s chance of wiping out their loved ones. And if enough sheltered in place, systems for producing and distributing healthcare, food, water, and power could swiftly break down.

Humanity’s “Joker” problem

All this invites the question: Who would ever want to do this? 

After all, viruses are terrible weapons: They’re difficult to make, impossible to control, and jeopardize the lives of those who cultivate and distribute them. Partly for these reasons, biological weapons have hardly ever been used; the last fatal bioterror attacks were the anthrax mailings of 2001.

To this, anxious biosecurity experts might reply, to quote the former British intelligence officer Alfred Pennyworth: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Mass shooters regularly forfeit their lives to the cause of killing others at random. And brilliant iconoclasts periodically develop murderous ideologies; Ted Kaczynski, the Harvard mathematician turned Unabomber, wished to bring about the collapse of industrial civilization.

And every once in a while, an aspiring supervillain gets graduate training in virology. In the 1990s, the Kyoto University-educated genetic engineer Seiichi Endo joined Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo death cult. Drawing on the group’s $1 billion in funds, Endo sought to weaponize Ebola, Q fever, botulinum, and anthrax — with the aim of killing as many nonbelievers as possible. 

Of course, Endo failed. And lone wolf psychopaths have never gotten their hands on anything more lethal than an assault weapon, bomb, or airplane. 

But some scientists believe that technological advances — including generative AI — may provide the Endos and Kaczynskis of tomorrow with catastrophic power. 

How AI and biotech could democratize bioterrorism

MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt is among his field’s most prominent Cassandras. And he has voiced two fundamental concerns. The first is that breakthroughs in synthetic biology and AI are rapidly expanding the pool of people who can engineer known viruses. 

Over the past 15 years, the cost and difficulty of editing genomes have plummeted. In 2012, to modify a specific site in a genome, you often needed access to custom-engineered proteins that cost upward of $5,000 and still tended to work poorly, according to Olivia Scharfman, a biotechnology fellow at the Institute for Progress. Thanks to the gene-editing tool CRISPR, a scientist with minimal lab training can execute such a modification for as little as $30. Meanwhile, DNA synthesis has also grown radically more affordable.

This might not be such a big deal, if dangerous biological materials were hard to legally access. But Esvelt and his colleagues recently demonstrated that this isn’t the case. As an experiment, they had a student place orders for pieces of the 1918 influenza genome using a pseudonym and fake position. Thirty-six of 38 DNA synthesis companies shipped the genomes without asking whether the applicant had government permission or sound intentions. Together, these fragments were enough to create the virus many times over.

Crucially, in Esvelt’s account, reverse engineering known viruses using modern tools does not require elite skills. Any random biology graduate student may be up to the job. 

And AI may be making such rudimentary viral engineering even easier. 

In theory, a chatbot can help you plan a bioweapons attack in much the same way that it can walk you through fixing a dishwasher: By finding and synthesizing the internet’s vast trove of information, offering step-by-step instructions for navigating unfamiliar challenges, and fielding all troubleshooting queries that might subsequently arise.

And there’s evidence that AI models will in fact provide would-be bioterrorists with precisely this kind of assistance.

In a 2023 study, MIT researchers asked students to seek guidance on engineering a pandemic from that era’s chatbots. Within an hour, the AI models had suggested four promising pathogens, offered detailed protocols for manufacturing them with with synthetic DNA, provided a list of DNA synthesis retailers with low screening standards, and advised that — if users still found themselves unable to make the virus, even with all this help — they could purchase the assistance of a contract research organization to do some of the bioengineering for them. 

And of course, frontier models have gotten a lot better since 2023. Last year, SecureBio, Esvelt’s biosecurity nonprofit, found that one OpenAI model outperformed 94 percent of expert virologists on troubleshooting complex laboratory problems. 

Anthropic’s internal research has produced similar results. In one experiment, the company tasked amateurs with drafting a bioweapons acquisition plan. It gave some participants access to basic internet resources and others the assistance of Claude models (with the safeguards turned off). Those working with AI developed far more viable blueprints, according to the biodefense experts who scrutinized the proposals for critical errors.

Thus, there’s reason to think that the number of people with the skills and resources necessary for reverse engineering a virus from genomic blueprints is sharply rising — and with it, the risk that a bloodthirsty nihilist or ideologue gets their hands on a dangerous pathogen.

AI might help scientists learn too much

What’s even worse than bringing back smallpox? Esvelt’s second concern is that these same technological forces — combined with top scientists’ often reckless ambitions — will lead to the discovery or development of a supervirus, a new or custom-designed pathogen even more dangerous than what nature has come up with in the past.

Today, some scientists are actively trying to discover — and publicly identify — novel viruses circulating in nature that could theoretically trigger the next pandemic. Others conduct so-called gain-of-function experiments, altering pathogens to discern which mutations make them more transmissible, lethal, or difficult to detect (some have alleged that Covid-19 emerged from precisely this kind of research, though that theory is widely rejected among epidemiologists). This work is generally intended to anticipate future epidemiological threats, so that we can develop vaccines before they arrive. But their work could inadvertently provide bad actors with recipes for reverse engineering mass-casualty bioweapons. 

Separately, advances in gene editing and AI may enable breakthroughs in viral engineering that yield apocalyptic pathogens. 

A recent study from researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute fed such fears. The scientists trained an AI called “Evo” on the DNA sequences of bacteriophages, the simple viruses that infect bacteria. They then used this “genomic language model” to generate blueprints for hundreds of bacteriophages found nowhere in nature. Sixteen of these designs yielded viable pathogens, some of which were better at killing bacteria than their natural ancestors. 

What is clear, however, is that novel pathogens are among the greatest security threats our species faces.

Theoretically, scientists may one day be able to engineer novel human viruses using the same basic techniques. What’s more, even if genomic-language models fail at that task, they might still be able to help users tweak existing viruses in ways that render them more transmissible, deadly, or vaccine-resistant.

These discoveries could theoretically filter down to amateur bioterrorists or well-funded extremist groups like Aum Shinrikyo. Alternatively, a state-sponsored weapons program could develop a catastrophic supervirus, then unleash it on the world through a lab leak or (perhaps, more improbably) a deliberate attempt at genocide. 

There is some precedent for the former scenario: The Soviet Union tried to weaponize smallpox and the Marburg virus, despite the considerable hazards and dubious military utility of such bioweapons. In the process, Soviet scientists accidentally triggered a smallpox outbreak during testing, while also letting anthrax leak from a laboratory, killing at least 64 people.

Bioweapons ain’t easy

All this said, there are reasons to question whether AI is truly making a synthetic pandemic more likely. 

Chatbots may solve some of the challenges facing an amateur biologist with omnicidal aspirations. But it doesn’t necessarily clear the biggest obstacles in that person’s path. 

Viral engineering is a complex, difficult, and physical undertaking. Performing it successfully requires what scientists call “tacit knowledge” — practical skills and understandings that are difficult to explain in words: knowing how to suppress the hand tremors that could rip delicate DNA strands, or how to recognize when the DNA in your solution has reached the proper concentration, or how to smell when a sample has been contaminated.

And these are things that Claude still can’t reliably impart. In studies, amateurs with access to a large language model tend to perform better on written biological challenges — but not on actual lab work. In a 2026 randomized study, non-scientists working with frontier AI systems were no more likely to complete a multistep laboratory assignment than those relying on the internet alone. 

Of course, tacit knowledge wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for aspiring bioterrorists in the mold of Seiichi Endo — graduate-trained scientists with extensive lab experience. But at a minimum, chatbots don’t appear to have turned every malcontent who once took AP Bio into a competent virologist.

And while AI will likely help top biologists advance their field’s frontiers, the barriers to custom engineering doomsday viruses remain formidable. The “Evo” experiment is arguably a case in point. Although the model did generate working blueprints for a few novel bacteriophages, nearly all of its suggested genomes didn’t work. Researchers had to arduously test hundreds of DNA sequences to arrive at 16 viable strands. And engineering slightly modified versions of an extremely small, well-known bacteriophage capable of infecting E. coli in a lab — and creating a novel virus more fearsome than any nature has yet devised — aren’t especially similar tasks. 

To offer a strained analogy: The fact that I can dunk on Victor Wembanyama in NBA 2K26 does not imply that I’m making progress toward being able to dunk on him in real life.

Even in the age of CRISPR and ChatGPT, biology remains an exceptionally difficult discipline that resists reliable modeling. The effects of modifying a single gene can often yield unpredictable and inconsistent results, varying with host biology, immune responses, and environmental conditions that scientists only partly understand. AI may help us overcome these complexities. It also might not.

We need to be preparing for the next pandemic

Scientists disagree about how serious a risk synthetic pandemics pose — and how much AI is magnifying it.

What is clear, however, is that novel pathogens are among the greatest security threats our species faces. Even if synthetic biology and artificial intelligence did not exist, natural selection would keep churning out new viruses — and periodically hitting upon ones that befuddle human immune systems. 

For this reason, there would be an urgent need to make our societies less vulnerable to future pandemics, irrespective of AI’s implications for viral engineering. In a world where chatbots and CRISPR are plausibly making bioterrorism easier, failing to invest aggressively in public health is all the more reckless.

The good news is we already know — from hard-earned experience — many steps that we can take to reduce the risk of a new pandemic and prepare to respond to one if needed. 

Governments can limit the destructive power of novel contagions by investing in vaccines that protect against entire families of viruses (or ideally, all of them) and broad-spectrum antivirals; raise our odds of catching outbreaks early by funding meticulous wastewater and clinical surveillance; ensure that essential workers don’t have to choose between staying alive and keeping civilization going amid a pandemic by developing and then stockpiling foolproof personal protective equipment; make indoor spaces less hospitable to airborne viruses by upgrading ventilation and filtration systems; and reduce the the threat of bioterrorism by mandating rigorous screening of synthetic-DNA orders.

Fears that humanity will be done in by superintelligent machines are currently galvanizing media attention and political concern. And this may be warranted. But we should pay at least as much attention to our species’ age-old, organic adversaries as we do to our hypothetical, robot ones — and not just because the latter could start teaching the former new tricks.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is escalating his fight with the media. 

What happened? Trump announced he was banning three media organizations — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House, “effective immediately.” 

In a Truth Social post Friday afternoon, Trump wrote that the ban was “a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” and that other outlets would follow. 

Why is Trump doing this now? We don’t know, and other than his blanket statement alleging “FAKE NEWS,” it seems like Trump doesn’t either. In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump said that “it’s really just cumulative stories of the last two years. You get sick of it.”

That complaint — “fake news” — is a long-running Trump attack that generally refers to unfavorable but true stories about him and his administration. 

Can he do this? Probably not, though it might take a while for journalists to get their access back. The ban sure looks like a First Amendment violation, and also like the White House’s attempt to ban the Associated Press last year as part of a dustup over the Gulf of Mexico, which a judge ultimately blocked. 

At the time, US District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled that “Under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints.” 

What’s the big picture? Trump has been flinging around “fake news” accusations for a long time now, but his attacks on the press and other media — like late-night shows — have grown more serious in his second term. 

The Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, banned press from its press office earlier this year and has tried to force reporters covering the building to sign a restrictive new press policy (that move was struck down in March).

Trump has also repeatedly threatened broadcast licenses for networks like ABC and NBC; last month, ABC sued over an FCC review of its licenses.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, before we log off: For a limited time, you can now get a 30-day free trial of a Vox Membership! You can sign up here to enjoy all of the great content my colleagues produce, including ad-free podcasts and unlimited access to Vox articles.

Plus, some weekend viewing: Did you know there’s a “sheepdog Olympics,” and it’s happening right now in the Scottish Borders? I did not, but I was delighted to learn. You can read more about it and see some of the dogs here. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

At the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, the documentary NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it’s all anyone’s talking about, even though few have actually seen it. 

Made by two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the movie takes place on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence agents and soldiers discuss things that they did in Gaza and how they did them.

As Bilge Ebiri writes in his Vulture review of NAZA, “One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll.”Another interviewee agrees that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Since its reception in Venice, the film has faced harsh criticism from the Israeli government — with at least one politician issuing a call to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. 

Shany Littman is a journalist for Haaretz in Israel and has been reporting on the film’s reception. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the conversation around the movie in Israel. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Have you seen the documentary NAZA?

I haven’t. I asked the PR person of the movie to send me a link and it’s not possible. I mean, considering the huge storm that came out, they’re probably rethinking how to handle the distribution of the film.

What I hear you saying is it’s safe to assume most people in Israel have not actually been able to see the movie. Is that right?

Yes, that’s correct.

But they are aware of what is in it. Let’s talk about the conversation around this movie in Israel. What’s the reaction been like?

You can find many different types of criticism from all sides of a political range. It’s not only right-wing people or people who are supporting the war. The claims are first that maybe the film itself is not verified. They have witnesses that are anonymous that they didn’t verify well enough. But I think most people — they just feel that this is an opportunity for all the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and [antisemitic] people in the world to attack Israel. Israelis from all sides are afraid of the way the world is seeing us at the moment. 

Is anybody in Israel saying, “Hey, we’re glad that they did it. We’re glad that they made this movie”?

Yes. There are people who are supporting Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, supporting their right to criticize, to investigate. As a liberal country, we should be able to investigate ourselves, to criticize ourselves. They are doing their work as journalists. 

There has also been a reaction from the Israeli government at a more official level. What has the Israeli government said about this film?

“There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening.”

The first person to react was the minister of culture. He said that the nationality of Yuval and the filmmakers should be revoked. That they should not be Israeli citizens anymore. There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening. I’m completely horrified by this. 

I already saw some clips on social media by people who were filming themselves where…you could see a house [in the background] and someone was saying, “You can all come here. This is the house of Rachel Szor’s parents. They live here and you can come and do whatever you want. I invite you all to come here and take revenge.” And there were several clips with the same message. 

I’m guessing they’re not coming back to Israel at the moment. I think it has become really dangerous for them to be here, and it’s a new level. I published an article about this. I didn’t do the movie. I just published an article supporting them in Haaretz and my mother is afraid that someone will attack me. The echoes of this event, they’re going very far now.

Are you frightened for the filmmakers if they choose to return? Do you fear for their safety?

Yes, absolutely. Especially because the elections are coming in a month. Many Israelis see this day as like the red line or the moment where we will be able to know if we can still live in Israel as a democracy, as a liberal democracy, or that the country has changed in a way that many [civil] rights and liberties that we think we have are gone. And that this country is not a democracy anymore. And so I think this is also why the blood is boiling.

This is a very, very tense and fragile moment. And for them I assume it is even more crucial and I hope they will not do anything that will put them in danger.

As the heads of leading artificial intelligence companies came together last weekend to warn that runaway AI development could lead to catastrophic outcomes, momentum briefly seemed to be building for regulatory action from Washington.

But one connected and influential tech industry figure has become the leading voice opposing many proposals for government action — on his podcast, in media appearances, and in his private advice to President Donald Trump, who now calls AI doomsday fears a “hoax.”

David Sacks is a venture capitalist and part of the “PayPal Mafia” who, in recent years, has exemplified the rightward shift of some in the tech sector. He advised Elon Musk on his takeover of Twitter in 2022, and regularly unleashes a stream of scornful commentary about Democrats on social media and on the podcast All-In, which he co-hosts with three other venture capitalists. 

And for anyone wondering why Trump seems so newly dug-in against AI safety warnings — and against government action that might slow down the runaway technology before people might get hurt — Sacks is right at the center of the conversation. When Politico asked this week about Trump’s newly vocal hostility to AI safety, a senior White House official said: “David Sacks. It’s all coming from him.”

Yet Sacks’s role in the debate is an unusual one. Though he champions the AI industry, he’s no fan of the US’s two biggest AI companies. In his years in the tech industry, he’s made powerful allies, as well as many enemies — technology investor Paul Graham once posted that Sacks may be “the most evil person in Silicon Valley” (in response, Sacks called him a bully and made insinuations of antisemitism). His role, and ideology, are a window into how complex the politics and geopolitical stakes of the AI race really are — as well as how Trump administration policy is often shaped less by agency policy processes than by who has the president’s ear.

After endorsing and fundraising for Trump in 2024 — “I love David’s house, what a house,” Trump said after a fundraiser at Sacks’s $20 million San Francisco mansion) — Sacks was rewarded with a job as the White House’s “artificial intelligence and crypto czar.” There, he helped steer policy until stepping down this past March. He still co-chairs a presidential technology board, and his influence persists — in May, the Washington Post reported that a phone call from Sacks to Trump temporarily derailed the planned signing of an executive order on AI. (Vox reached out to Sacks for this article, but he declined to comment.)

Sacks is not the only Trump adviser thinking about AI: Other top administration officials, like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have reportedly been more concerned about the risks of new AI tools for hacking, and have been trying to establish a government body that could help oversee the industry and address these risks.

But, so far, Trump has rejected this approach, and stayed much closer to the Sacks position. In a flurry of Truth Social posts Monday, he argued that AI would be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History,” said that the US had to “win” against China in the AI race, and dismissed concerns AI would “destroy the World” as a “hoax.”

To understand the implications of Sacks’s influence, you have to understand his position in the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem. In conversations with AI policy insiders, it becomes clear that many view his position through the lens of both his history as a tech investor, as well as his sharp-elbowed and take-no-prisoners style.

The split he embodies isn’t just about AI safety, but a fundamental divide over which business model of AI should succeed — one that pits Sacks directly against the biggest AI companies driving the safety debate.

Sacks is pro-AI — but he’s at odds with Anthropic and OpenAI

Sacks has generally been opposed to new regulation of AI companies by the government. His preferred approach, he’s frequently said, is to “let them cook.” He wants to let tech companies march ahead, and argues that government intervention would squelch innovation. “It’s this very libertarian approach to America winning in AI,” said Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations who worked on tech policy for President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, of Sacks’s approach.

That puts Sacks in opposition to AI safety advocates, who argue that regulation is necessary to rein in an increasingly dangerous technology. Indeed, even the leading AI company CEOs — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and even Sacks’s friend Elon Musk — have called for a slowdown in advanced AI development because of these dangers.

But Sacks has tended to dismiss warnings such as that of former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon as “doomer histrionics.” Of late, he’s also argued that if Anthropic and OpenAI are worried that their products are dangerous, that’s on them. “If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible,” Sacks posted on X on Saturday. 

Indeed, though Sacks is often shorthanded as pro-AI, he’s in some key ways been quite critical of the leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, themselves.

That’s partly because he’s aligned with a different faction in Silicon Valley. Sacks and key allies like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg want much more AI development from many more places, by way of models that are “open weight” or “open source.” These models make their parameters (“weights”) publicly available, in contrast to the flagship proprietary models of OpenAI and Anthropic. 

“Keeping innovation decentralized and accessible is the key to avoiding an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands,” Sacks posted on X earlier month. He has accused companies like Anthropic of trying to “kneecap open source” with regulation.

Proponents of open models hope advanced AI becomes something more like a widely available resource that individual users and companies can download, run themselves, and customize to their internal specifications — rather than having to go through a handful of companies that control access. “The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards,” Zuckerberg wrote in August. “Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

There’s a lot of money riding on this bet. Huang’s Nvidia manufactures chips used to train AI models and would like more customers (and just this month agreed to buy Hugging Face, a repository of open models). Zuckerberg’s Meta has hoped to be the US leader in open model development. 

More broadly, software startup founders and the venture capitalists who fund them can benefit from powerful open weight AI being widely available, since it’s a cheaper alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic’s expensive products. Sacks, as a co-founder of the venture capitalist firm Craft Ventures, and host of a popular podcast with three fellow venture capitalists, is more closely tied to this part of the tech ecosystem than any other.

Many believe that capable open weight AI presents a serious threat to the Big Two AI companies’ current dominance of the AI frontier, and thus their business model. The flip side is that some have argued that the Big Two present an “existential threat” to the software industry, predicting the frontier labs’ products could take over much of what today’s software companies do.

But regarding safety concerns, advocates have warned about the dangers of both closed “frontier” models and open models. “On the open source side in particular, it’s easier to have a bad actor — a terrorist group, a rogue nation, an extremist political group that wants to cause chaos,” said Brendan Steinhauser of the Alliance for Secure AI, an AI safety advocacy group. “They can strip out safety features and guardrails, they can do some fine tuning to basically make the models even more dangerous, and get them to help them develop biological weapons.”

The open weight AI faction argues, though, that intrusive government regulation on AI would end up mostly hurting open models and the companies that use them — entrenching the dominance of OpenAI and Anthropic, who would be better able to comply with onerous safety requirements given their size. They’ve publicly pooh-poohed AI’s existential risks, instead playing up what they say are the dangers that AI’s power will be controlled by a privileged few. Less regulation, Sacks argues, will let more flowers bloom.

These concerns aren’t only held by those with financial stakes. There’s also a school of thought on the left that is deeply suspicious of OpenAI and Anthropic’s intentions, and particularly around the companies’ desire for an exemption from antitrust enforcement, which they say will let them work together to address safety. 

Commentator Matt Stoller has argued that those warning about dangerous “superintelligence” are playing into the hands of tech “oligarchs.” And a recent American Prospect article said policymakers should “avoid codifying the preferences of the very companies who are generating the panic.” On the right, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) have expressed similar concerns that large AI companies’ demands for restrictions are a cover for consolidating market dominance. 

At a Politico event Wednesday — and to give a sense of just how strange the bedfellows can be around this issue — Sacks stressed that he agreed with former Democratic FTC chair Lina Khan that existing liability law already applies to AI companies. But while Khan said she was open to adding new legal restrictions, Sacks is arguing that existing law is perfectly sufficient for addressing safety risks. “These CEOs are going to be subject to massive civil and criminal liability if they put out products that are unsafe,” he said.

In other comments at the event, Sacks did appear to have softened his tone a bit, saying he was “open to ideas” about AI safety, and that “we should have an intelligent conversation” about how to manage risks. The problem, he argued, was that “what’s going on right now is a fear campaign” that makes such an intelligent conversation impossible.

Former Rep. Brad Carson, who heads Americans for Responsible Innovation, an AI safety advocacy group, said that Sacks has been the one preventing such a conversation. “When it comes to AI policy the Trump administration has, through their unwillingness to even talk about reasonable guardrails, brought things to such a crisis point that the industry is in jeopardy,” Carson said. “In many ways, David Sacks is the author of that ill-fated intransigence.”

Sacks, for his part, has pointed to Anthropic’s funding of much of the AI safety advocacy world — for instance, the company has given $40 million to an advocacy group founded by Carson — and said the company is “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

If we’re in an AI race with China, why are some of Trump’s policies friendly to Chinese AI?

The influence of Sacks and his worldview could help explain another seeming mystery of the administration: If Trump thinks it’s so crucial that the United States beats China in the AI race, why has he been so willing to bless the sale of AI chips abroad — including even to China?

National security hawks both inside and outside the Trump administration had warned against these sales and hoped to impose stringent controls on the export of Nvidia chips, fearing that if too many got out, the US would squander its AI lead over China.

Huang lobbied intensely against this, hoping to sell Nvidia’s most advanced chips to Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — and trying to resume sales of a less advanced but still sophisticated AI chip to China itself. Sacks became Huang’s biggest champion inside the administration — and they won over the president. Sacks publicly argued that blocking US chip sales to China and other countries would provide an opening for Chinese companies like Huawei to dominate their domestic market and gain a greater global market share with competing chips, putting the US on weaker footing in the long run.

National security-minded critics disagreed, arguing that Sacks’s particular vision for AI will likely, in practice, strengthen China’s AI sector. “I think we can have a reasonable debate on domestic policy,” said McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But when we start from the premise that the American AI stack — models, cloud, and chips — should be dominant globally, then selling China the technology to advance its own capability obviously undercuts that.”

China also looms over the cause of open weight AI that Sacks champions — because it’s Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot that produce some of the leading open weight models that US software startups currently use.

OpenAI and Anthropic argue that these Chinese models present national security risks, claim they rely heavily on copying or “distilling” their own models, and want the US government to scrutinize them. Some Trump officials have reportedly been sympathetic to their concerns, but the administration hasn’t restricted these Chinese models’ use in the US. Sacks argues that a US ban on Chinese open weight models will just end up enshrining the OpenAI-Anthropic duopoly he so loathes.

Overall, though, on both national security risks and AI safety risks, Sacks and Huang still seem to have the president’s ear. 

On Monday, Sacks was onstage with Huang at the live All-In podcast event discussing the “doomer hoax” when a purportedly impromptu call came through for the Nvidia CEO: It was Trump. 

“The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” Trump said on speakerphone. “That’s not going to happen.”

Then, after speaking for several minutes, Trump added: “David has done an amazing job.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: With fewer than 50 days until the midterm elections, President Donald Trump is hitting the campaign trail. 

What’s happening? Trump was in North Carolina last night for his first major post-primary season rally of the 2026 midterms (setting aside the GOP’s unusual midterm convention last week, which wasn’t not a Trump rally). 

Republican Michael Whatley will face former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper in November for an open US Senate seat.

Speaking near Charlotte, Trump urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ticket, because essentially I am.” It’s becoming a familiar refrain for the president, but not necessarily a promising one — polls suggest Trump is deeply unpopular with voters right now, more likely to drag a ticket down than boost it.

How else is Trump getting involved in the midterms? Last week, we noted that Trump was beginning to spend from his vast super PAC account to support Republican candidates. Now, we’re getting a better idea of what that spending looks like: As of earlier this week, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC and related entities had booked ads to the tune of $138 million, a number that could continue to grow.

MAGA Inc. has around $400 million in the bank, though as the Washington Post reported earlier this month, Trump has a long list of other things he could choose to spend that money on instead of the midterms (such as legal fees, travel, or even his eventual presidential library).

Will it make a difference? It’s a whole lot of money. But with not much time left until voters go to the polls and some mail-in ballots already going out — North Carolina voters began receiving theirs earlier this month — the map is looking fairly dire for Republican hopes. 

Trump, meanwhile, isn’t doing himself any favors. The fuel shortages caused by the Iran war are only getting worse, as my colleague Caitlin Dewey explained today. Polls suggest he’s picked the wrong side of the AI issue. And voters are still extremely mad about inflation.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

It’s not every day we get to write about a new cat — in fact, it’s the first time in more than 100 years. But that’s just what scientists found in the Bolivian Yungas Forest, according to a new study published today. The cat, Leopardus tilcayo, is a type of tiger cat, smaller than your average house cat. It’s also quite cute, and you can see pictures of it here.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: It’s decision time for Kamala Harris

On Wednesday, LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic Party megadonor Reid Hoffman threw cold water on the prospect of a 2028 presidential campaign from former Vice President Kamala Harris. “I think it would be a very challenging path for her and it’s going to be a very noisy field,” Hoffman said when asked at a Politico event in Washington, DC, whether Harris should run again.

His statement comes the same week CNN aired an interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who told Jake Tapper (while fly-fishing?) that he would not run for president if Harris did so — a curious move from someone who swung through South Carolina barely two weeks ago, and who has long been treated as a presumed frontrunner for 2028.

Taken together — and thinking back to our America, Actually episode on the question of whether Harris will run — I think you’re seeing the early stages of what I’d call a light public pressure campaign.

Let me explain: Harris has been curiously mum on most things politics since 2024, but it’s clear she wants to be taken seriously as an option for 2028 and has weighed in from time to time on issues (this week it was AI safety). When we recorded our episode in June, her allies emphasized two political points over and over: She’s leading the early 2028 polls, and nobody has supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base, Black voters, and women. But they stressed something else, too. Her former communications director Jamal Simmons told me Harris “should do what makes her happy,” and that “she’s earned the place to run, earned the right to run.” Harris surrogate Erin Wilson put it more sharply: “The idea that she does not deserve the opportunity to make that decision — or that she does not deserve the opportunity to put an infrastructure in place beyond the construct of 107 days — I think is incredibly unfair.”

To me, it seemed the group was less interested in making the case that Harris should run in 2028, and more interested in pushing back against an emerging elite consensus that she shouldn’t. They were fighting for the right for her to choose for herself, without Washington input or pressure from the media. And it came with an implicit acknowledgment: They understood that the party’s biggest donors, whose money and access shape much of the early stages of a presidential race, had moved on from Team Harris.

Hoffman’s statement is particularly notable because of the ideological lane he occupies. He’s not just any rich Democrat — he’s bankrolled several of the party’s newest post-2024 ventures, from the abundance-adjacent WelcomeFest crowd to the $10 million he put behind a super PAC boosting James Talarico’s Senate bid in Texas this summer. If Hoffman’s asking Harris to move on, that’s likely representative of the larger left-of-center apparatus, which is looking for a unifying contender who can fend off a challenge from the activist left in 2028.

Here’s what John Morgan, another big Democratic donor, told me about Harris over the summer:

I do not [want her to run]. I think that everything associated with the Biden administration needs to be put to the side and moved on. … I just think that everything that happened has left a bad taste, and we need a fresh start on that side of the aisle.

As Morgan also pointed out, this was once a group that backed Harris — or at least was initially open to her, even dating back to her first presidential run. Now, he says, the math doesn’t work:

I don’t think the money would come to her and the votes wouldn’t come. … Her natural base is gonna be California, and she’s gonna be competing heavily with Gavin Newsom in California. So they’re gonna be kind of cannibalizing each other’s donors.

Which brings us to Newsom, another left-of-center Bay Area Democrat with a long history of friendly rivalry with Harris who surely knows these donors have had a change of heart. He knows the Reid Hoffmans and John Morgans want a fresh face. He also knows Harris’s allies are right: Just as we heard in South Carolina, Harris maintains favorability among Southern Black voters specifically, and they’re likely the most important voting bloc of any Democratic presidential primary. 

And remember, candidate timing matters: A former vice president with universal name recognition like Harris could take a playbook from Joe Biden, who let Democrat after Democrat announce before he finally entered the 2020 race in April 2019. (And I imagine Newsom also watched Harris freeze the California governor’s race for months — leaving state Democrats in the dark as she decided whether or not to enter.)

So what’s a governor to do? 

Here’s what I think is happening this week: Newsom is putting pressure on Harris to make a decision early. And in doing so, he gives donors an incentive to make clear what they’re saying privately: They don’t want Kamala Harris to run.

It’s cynical, but that’s politics — and I think it’s a much more likely scenario than the one where Newsom earnestly gives up his agency to a longtime political rival. And notably, while the headlines focused on his pledge not to run if Harris gets in the race, I think the setup to it was even more telling. Before making the pledge, Newsom volunteered his own doubt that there will be anything to defer to: “I don’t know if she runs, but we’ll see. But I wouldn’t run if she ran.”

Democrats know Harris’s decision will have a big domino effect on the rest of the race — so much so that it’s worth getting answered early (meaning: as soon after the midterms as possible). But the comments from Newsom, Hoffman, and others should be instructive to Team Harris — and anyone who wants her to mount another presidential campaign. 

This would not be 2020, or even 2024; if Harris were to run, she would likely do so without much support from the major liberal institutions or the left-of-center donors.

In a time of anti-elite backlash and grassroots anger at things like the rise of artificial intelligence and corporate consolidation, that could be an opportunity to embrace a more populist, bottom-up message. There’s just one problem: Is that who Kamala Harris is?

What I’m hearing

This week I talked to Sean Scott, a reporter following faith, immigration, and politics for the Maine Monitor. I wanted to ask him about how the Senate race is playing out from a local perspective — and specifically about how issues like immigration have manifested on the campaign trail.

There’s been so much focus on the candidates in the Maine Senate race — but you’ve been tracking some of the issues that have locally shaped the race. What’s one that has come up in Maine? And how has it played out? 

Immigration policy has been a big issue in Maine this year, and it came to a head this summer after ICE agents shot and killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford. The shooting occurred shortly after former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner had dropped out of the race because of sexual assault allegations, and many of the Democrats vying to replace him went to Biddeford to speak out against the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement. This included the eventual nominee, Troy Jackson, who said ICE should be dismantled.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins, meanwhile, has drawn scrutiny for her role in negotiating funding for DHS. Protesters stormed her Biddeford office the day of the shooting, calling for her to be voted out. Collins has said she’s pushing for reforms within the immigration agency, and said she asked ICE officials to prioritize Maine as they rolled out body cameras. But the investigation into the fatal shooting is still ongoing, and I think many Mainers are waiting to see if the agency will be held accountable.

Donald Trump’s push for hardline immigration enforcement has been deeply unpopular. Are there any surprising coalitions that have developed in Maine in response?

I cover religion, and one thing that has been really interesting to me this year is the way coalitions of progressive faith leaders have responded to the administration’s mass deportation efforts. This was especially visible during the federal immigration enforcement surge Maine saw in late January. Faith leaders formed a “human wall” outside a business with an immigrant workforce to try and protect them. Nine faith leaders were arrested for trespassing during a pray-in at Sen. Collins’s Portland office, calling for her to vote against any DHS spending bill that would maintain funding for ICE. Faith leaders were instrumental in coordinating mutual aid efforts to help families who were afraid to leave their homes — one minister told me she collected rugs for an immigrant family with young children living in an apartment, worried that a noise complaint could lead to their detention. And a multifaith coalition held a weekly vigil at the jail in Portland for months while immigration detainees were being held there. That jail ended its contract with ICE in April. Just last week, a coalition of clergy from different faiths in Bangor came together to demand that a landlord terminate a lease with ICE.

You’ve been following the rise of Turning Point USA in Maine and the network of evangelical churches that has been central to that rise. How intertwined is the conservative faith community with Republican politics in Maine? 

Maine is one of the least religious states in the country, so it isn’t always front of mind for people. But I reported this spring on one network of evangelical churches that has taken an increasingly active role in politics in recent years, and on how we’ve seen some Republican lawmakers in Maine become more explicit about tying their faith to their politics since Trump took office. The state Senate minority leader started a weekly men’s Bible study for legislators last year. That Bible study, plus increased public outreach by a Christian lobbying group and an expanded prayer caucus at the statehouse, show how conservative Christianity has become more visible in Augusta over the past two years. And Charlie Kirk’s death has certainly spurred greater interest. As of May, Maine had at least 28 church-based Turning Point Faith chapters, twice as many as any other state in New England. The debate over transgender student athletes has been a big one this year, and conservative faith communities have certainly played a role there.

From a national perspective, it feels like the Maine Senate race has maybe gone under the radar since the fallout over Graham Platner, the previous Democratic candidate. Is there still a lot of energy and focus on the race in Maine?

I can’t speak to why the national interest has dwindled, but people are certainly still paying attention here! There’s lots of national money flowing in, and the ads are nonstop.

Throughout the Trump era, Democrats have wrung their hands about how they can win over working-class voters.

Why not ask the Democrats who’ve actually done it?

That’s what Robin Johnson — a political consultant based in rural Illinois, and a part-time political science professor at Monmouth College — set out to do after Donald Trump first won the presidency, asking Democratic state legislators who won tough districts how they pulled it off.

But after Trump’s shocking second win in 2024 revived concern about Democrats’ working-class woes, the time seemed ripe to ask legislators about how they’ve managed to cope with the challenges of a new decade.

So, working with the center-left Progressive Policy Institute and co-authors Stuart Malec and Jolie Libert, Johnson interviewed 28 state legislators who won in heavily working-class areas in the seven main presidential battleground states. 

They include Nevada state Assemblymember Max Carter, a retired union electrician; Michigan state Rep. Tullio Liberati, a construction small business owner; Arizona state Rep. Lorena Austin, a self-described “five-time college dropout” with sleeve tattoos; and Wisconsin state Rep. Karen DeSanto, a nonprofit executive and former professional circus clown.

The report, which Vox reviewed exclusively ahead of its publication, comes amid a factional debate within the party between rising left-wing and socialist candidates who have argued for more far-reaching policy proposals, and more moderate Democrats who have pushed for concessions to working-class cultural sensibilities. In the report, the authors said that lawmakers they focused on “could hardly be more different from the left-wing populists who’ve captivated the national media this summer.” 

Generally, the legislators in the report focused on pocketbook issues, though in different ways — some embraced populist causes, while others positioned themselves as business-friendly. And they broadly agreed that cultural issues were Democrats’ biggest challenge in reaching the working class.

“It’s really interesting how common the themes and the challenges are from rural Georgia, right down to the border of Arizona, to Las Vegas, northern North Carolina, and then up in the ‘Blue Wall’ states,” Johnson told me. 

I spoke to Johnson last week about his findings, and about what these state legislators’ experience has to tell us about the debate over the Democratic Party’s future. Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.

What’s changed in 10 years of interviewing legislators facing tough races

Walk me through where the idea for this project came from.

I’ve been working on this for 10 years. It started at a conversation at a little diner in Maquoketa, Iowa — a little “choke and puke,” as we call those places. I was with a former state senator from Iowa named Jeff Danielson, and it was right after Trump won. Most of the focus was on what happened at the congressional or presidential level, and we thought, why not take a look at state legislators competing in these tough districts?

I approached my friend and my congresswoman, Cheri Bustos, who I’ve known really well and helped on her campaigns, and said, would you be interested in working with us and sponsoring it? She said, absolutely, because her district, the 17th in Illinois, is rural working-class. And she was able to win these voters.

We talked to probably 75 current and former legislators for that first report. We did another one in 2021, focused on members of Congress and state legislators who win Trump districts. Then we did a third one last year, on Democrats in working-class districts in the heartland. Then she retired from Congress and I went to a PPI conference this past February, and PPI agreed to partner on this with a different focus, slightly — on the seven battleground states, on districts that are really close and have more working-class voters than the national average.

So, having done this several times before, what’s new in the latest version? What are people saying now that they weren’t, necessarily, in previous rounds of this?

In the past, when we focused on the Midwest, it was mostly all white, mostly men, some women. Now, we went to North Carolina and Georgia, and there were African American legislators, men and women. And we went to the West, and there were Latinos.

But what was interesting to me was: Nobody brought up their identity in these interviews. I had to bring it up to one woman from Nevada, mentioning, “Well, you’re Native American.” “Yeah, but I don’t really talk about that much,” was the response. 

That was one big takeaway: Nobody talked about identity. Their focus was totally on their constituents, their working-class constituents. 

What were some of the common themes you saw in the responses?

There’s no secret sauce. They’re deeply rooted in their communities, they know the people that live there, they know the language, they work hard.

But they focus on economic issues. If somebody asks them about cultural issues, they’ll respond, but they try to get back to economic issues, because that’s what they’re hearing about from voters, mostly.

These folks are from a variety of backgrounds. Some are true working-class, they don’t have college degrees. One guy near Detroit runs a construction company, didn’t get a degree. Another woman we focused on from Arizona had tattoos all over and took 14 years to get her BA. Some are the traditional route — attorneys, some small business people.

But it’s a lot of different backgrounds, and we want to contrast that with the consultants who tried to make the perfect Frankenstein candidate out of [former Maine Senate candidate Graham] Platner. These people are out there — you don’t need to create it. They’re out there.

Cultural issues

On how politics has changed over the years, there’s a particularly vivid quote in the report from state Assemblymember Elaine Marzola from Nevada.  

She tells you: “My campaign’s biggest adjustment in 2024 was shifting away from leading with social and cultural issues and instead focusing more directly on affordability and economic concerns.” And she adds, “While I remain progressive on many social issues, voters across backgrounds increasingly want leaders focused on affordability, education, and public safety rather than endless culture war debates.”

How widespread was that sentiment?

It’s very widespread. Their focus is on the issues that matter, that they’re picking up from their constituents. A lot of times they reported that some of the people in their campaigns told them they should talk more about abortion or other social issues — mainly abortion — and they refused to do it. 

A lot of them talked about a major problem in the party being these litmus tests that groups have, that you can vote with them on nine out of 10 issues, but on the tenth issue, if you’re not with them, you’re an enemy. 

If you’re going to have a true big-tent party, you’ve got to have some room for disagreements on some of these issues that reflect the local voters that people have in their districts. Several in Georgia told me pointedly that their leadership understood and would give them passes on votes that they knew they couldn’t be with them on. But in other cases, I heard a lot of pointed comments about these groups demanding 100 percent allegiance, that it’s all or nothing.

In a lot of districts down South, I heard from a couple gentlemen; it’s the Bible Belt. People go to church regularly. African Americans, the older generations of African Americans, are more middle-of-the-road, if not conservative on some of these cultural issues. So there’s got to be room for people to vote their districts on some of these cultural issues.

But on the economic issues, they’re there. They’re unified with the rest of the party. 

Economic issues

Well, it’s interesting on economic issues, because there’s unity on focusing on affordability and pocketbook issues in some form. But you also describe how some people take a more populist approach, and others have a more business-friendly approach. Is there tension there?

We asked people, how would they describe themselves? And most of them describe themselves as moderate. But the range of issues you have at the state level may differ some compared to the federal issues. A true populist approach at the state level may not have the same meaning as a populist at the federal level.

In fact, some of the folks with business backgrounds were pretty aggressive in some of their policy ideas. I think [Assemblymember] Joe Dalia from Nevada is one, he actually combined with [Rep.] Ro Khanna on a policy idea, the congressman from Silicon Valley who’s definitely a progressive. Dalia’s background is in business entrepreneurship.

Is all politics local?

The dynamics are a little different in state legislative races, even tough competitive ones, because there’s just so much less national money, national interest, group interest, virality, all of the dynamics that are so important to national politics. These are truly local races. So do you think these lessons can apply to national politics?

These state legislators are easy to overlook. They’re close enough to the people that they’re in, they can knock doors more than like a member of Congress. You can’t really knock doors in a congressional race — you can do some and have volunteers do it, but these people are out doing it individually. 

But they still get hit on national issues. Some of them didn’t do much TV — Georgia’s got smaller districts — but they’re on TV in Wisconsin. And they’ve got to raise money and then have the party help them out. They’re used to getting hit on national issues because the Republicans try to tie them to some of the more far-left ideas. 

They also feel that the deep roots they have in the community help overcome that because they’re better known, they’re battle-tested in that regard. A lot of times, especially with social media, you think you’re going to come up with some neat little line to put on social media that’s going to carry you to a victory, or some pithy slogan or whatever. It’s really not. For these folks anyway, it just comes down to doing the hard work. 

But this is the bench that the Democrats need. You want to pick some people down the road that have proven ability to win these tough districts — here they are. 

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s Fed gambit has officially failed. 

What happened? On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve voted to raise interest rates by a quarter of a percent, citing ongoing inflation. The rate hike was widely expected, and normally it would be largely unremarkable (at least for this newsletter, which doesn’t generally cover monetary policy). 

In this case, however, it’s also a direct rebuke to Trump, who has spent the last year-and-a-half-plus demanding rate cuts — and plotting a Fed takeover to get them. 

How has Trump gone after the Fed? It’s a long list, but the two most significant episodes are Trump’s efforts to force Fed governor Lisa Cook from her seat to stack the Fed board in his favor (still ongoing) and the Justice Department’s coercive criminal investigation against former Fed chair Jerome Powell (since ended). 

Neither succeeded, but Trump likely thought his goal was in reach when the Senate confirmed his nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, in May. On Wednesday, however, Warsh — several months into a four-year term as Fed chair — bucked Trump’s persistent demands by voting for the rate hike.

Why does this matter? Trump successfully exerting political control over the Fed would be extremely bad news for just about everyone. Lowering interest rates is a great way to juice the economy in the short term — exactly what he might want as his party faces down a potential midterm wipeout. But it could seriously damage the economy’s long-term health too, which is why the Fed is designed — successfully, as it turns out — to be insulated from partisan politics. 

What else should I know? So far, Trump’s response to the hike has been muted, at least by his standards. 

He’s threatened to take more drastic action, however: Earlier this month, he said he would suspend trade relations “WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT” if the Fed went through with its rate hike.

It’s not clear whether he’ll make good on that threat — but one way or another, we likely haven’t heard the last of Trump’s Fed vendetta.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a small bit of good news from New York: After an announcement by Mayor Zohran Mamdani earlier this year, the city is rolling out new, free public restrooms this week as part of a pilot program to address a longstanding complaint by New Yorkers. 

Have a great evening and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

If you felt a gust of wind late on Friday, it came from hundreds of immigration lawyers who simultaneously exhaled after the Supreme Court announced it would not hear a case known as Genalo v. Black. That case asked whether certain immigrants could be held in immigration detention facilities indefinitely without ever receiving a bond hearing or other opportunity to seek temporary release. And if the Court had decided this case, its recent immigration decisions suggest that most of the justices may have blessed indefinite detention.

The Black case originally concerned two lawful permanent residents of the United States who were arrested during the first Trump administration because of crimes the two men committed years before, and that they had already served prison sentences for committing. 

These immigrants were arrested because of a federal law, which provides that the federal government “shall take into custody” noncitizens who committed certain crimes or who are accused of involvement with terrorism so that the government may begin deportation proceedings against these individuals. This law does not allow these noncitizens to challenge their detention while their deportation case is pending. (Notably, the relevant federal law sometimes allows an immigrant to be detained without hearing if they are merely suspected of terrorism, which means the person could be detained indefinitely based on false allegations.)

Both men sued, claiming that it is unconstitutional to hold them for too long without some kind of hearing to determine whether they should be released after paying a bond. And a federal appeals court agreed, holding that “due process bars the Executive from detaining such individuals for an unreasonably prolonged period…without a bond hearing.” 

Thus, Black was more than just another flash point in America’s debates over immigration. It was a test of one of the most fundamental protections that a liberal society provides to its residents — the right not to be locked up, forever, without any way to challenge the basis of that detention. 

Now that the Supreme Court has removed the Black case from its own docket, this appeals court decision will not be formally repudiated by the Supreme Court. So immigrants who are detained indefinitely may still ask courts to give them a bond hearing — at least for now.

Still, the Court’s nondecision in Black leaves a cloud of uncertainty hanging over similarly situated immigrants. The Trump administration will no doubt continue to detain people for prolonged periods of time (most of whom won’t be able to obtain a gubernatorial pardon, like one of the men was in this case). And the question of whether these immigrants can be detained forever will remain unresolved until the Supreme Court takes up another case involving a similarly situated immigrant.

Why the case was dismissed 

Both men at the heart of the Black case spent significant amounts of time in immigration detention facilities years after serving sentences for crimes. One, a Jamaican citizen named Carol Williams Black, spent seven months in an immigration detention facility. The other, Keisy Guerrero Mariano, spent 21 months in detention without a bond hearing or other procedure that could allow him to seek release while his case was pending. These 21 months in immigration detention more than doubled the time he spent in New York state prison for his actual crime — he pled guilty to second-degree assault after he got into a fight outside a New York City restaurant.

But there is no longer a legal dispute about what should happen to either man — in the words of the law, both cases are now moot. Black has since been released from detention and says that he “made the difficult decision to leave the United States” and has no intention to return. And the Trump administration’s case against Guerrero Mariano went up in smoke in late August, after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul gave him a pardon — thus wiping away the conviction that allowed the Trump administration to detain Guerrero Mariano in the first place.

Guerrero Mariano is one of six individuals that Hochul pardoned at the time. In her official announcement, she said that she did so because these six people “have demonstrated remorse, exemplified rehabilitation and displayed a commitment to improving themselves and their communities.”

There’s also a great deal of evidence indicating that Hochul pardoned Guerrero Mariano in order to resolve his immigration case — and potentially keep the Supreme Court from deciding Black. Among other things, the actual pardon document signed by Hochul specifically states that it will grant Guerrero Mariano “relief from removal.” Guerrero Mariano’s lawyers had sought this pardon, and Hochul granted it mere days before his brief was due in the Supreme Court. 

That brief’s very first sentence, moreover, states that Hochul “granted Respondent Keisy G.M. a full and unconditional pardon of the state criminal conviction that is the sole basis for his removal,” and it urges the justices to dismiss the case as moot.

Last Thursday, Trump’s Justice Department joined a stipulation calling for the justices to dismiss the case against Guerrero Mariano, most likely because even they recognized that a lawful permanent resident with no conviction may not be detained. The Court granted that request on Friday.

So that’s good news for Guerrero Mariano, who presumably will now be able to live freely in the United States. 

Guerrero Mariano’s lawyers were right to fear a trip to the Supreme Court

It’s possible that the Supreme Court might have agreed with the lower court’s holding that immigrants who are detained for an “unreasonably prolonged period” have a constitutional right to a bond hearing — this Court has, on rare occasions, broken with the Trump administration in immigration cases. But those decisions are few and far between.

Among other things, this Court has allowed President Donald Trump to deport immigrants back to war zones. The Court’s Republican majority effectively nullified the Convention Against Torture, a treaty that is supposed to protect immigrants from being deported to nations where they will be tortured. The Court also blessed so-called Kavanaugh stops, which permit suspected immigrants to be racially profiled so long as their race or ethnicity isn’t the sole reason why they are stopped by law enforcement.

Moreover, while the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit’s decision in Black — the one holding that immigrants like Guerrero Mariano may receive a bond hearing if their detention is “unreasonably prolonged” — reached a plausible legal conclusion, this conclusion was not a slam dunk under the Supreme Court’s previous precedents. And that means that the justices could have easily come up with a reason to reverse that decision if they wanted.

On the one hand, the Court said in Zadvydas v. Davis (2001) that “a statute permitting indefinite detention of an alien would raise a serious constitutional problem.” On the other hand, the Court held in Demore v. Kim (2003) that an immigrant similarly situated to Guerrero Mariano may “be detained for the brief period necessary for their removal proceedings.” 

Read together, these decisions suggest that the government does have some power to detain people while their immigration case is pending. While Zadvydas indicates that this detention can go on for too long, the Court has never established when an immigrant’s detention has stretched too long. So that means that the justices would have a fair amount of leeway to allow prolonged detentions without defying any of their previous precedents.

So it’s clear why everyone from Guerrero Mariano’s lawyers to Hochul seemed concerned about what would happen if the Court decided this case. In the worst-case scenario for immigrants, Trump could have gained the power to lock many people up for years without any meaningful way to challenge their detention. In the best case, the Supreme Court may have reached the same conclusion as the Second Circuit — but even that decision was vague about how long an immigrant must be detained before they must receive a bond hearing.

In any event, the bottom line is that the Court’s decision to dismiss the Black case is good news for Guerrero Mariano. But that dismissal merely delays a reckoning for other immigrants who face prolonged detention while their case is pending.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump can’t put his name on the Kennedy Center — so he’s closing it, effective immediately. 

What’s happening? On Tuesday, the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to close the building indefinitely, shortly after a federal judge rebuked efforts to engrave Trump’s name into the facade.

According to the board, the closure is because the center is in bad financial shape and the building itself is in a dangerous state of disrepair. Without Trump’s support, they claim, a renovation will be impossible — and Trump has made clear he won’t support it unless his name is on the building, even though Congress already approved $257 million for the project last year.

How did we get here? Trump has been obsessed with claiming the Kennedy Center — a memorial for an assassinated president — and its cultural cachet for himself ever since he returned to office last year. He quickly stacked the Kennedy Center board with his appointees, then installed himself as chair. 

In December, he had his name added to the building’s facade and its official title, temporarily making it the Trump-Kennedy Center. A federal judge ordered him to undo the renaming in June, and the administration complied — but the facade has remained covered since then, obscuring the removal.

In August, Trump also threatened the center with demolition if he didn’t get his way; he sounded a similar note in a Truth Social post Tuesday, writing that “the Building is destined to doom.” 

What’s the context? Trump and his handpicked board have both portrayed the Kennedy Center as a destitute, derelict institution in need of rescue. In reality, the Washington Post reported last month, he’s done his fair share to drive it into the ground: Ticket sales and fundraising both plummeted after his December renaming, resulting in a nearly $100 million shortfall. 

What’s the big picture? The Kennedy Center was doing just fine before Trump returned to office. Now, its doors will close because he can’t turn it into a monument to himself.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I loved this recent episode from my colleagues over at Vox’s Unexplainable podcast, who went looking for the oldest story ever told — with some help from an astrophysicist and a cognitive anthropologist. You can listen here, or you can now find Unexplainable on Netflix. 

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The recent history of mail voting in the United States has more twists and turns than an Emmy-winning drama. But for the cause of democracy, at least, yesterday’s ending is a happy one.

On Monday, the Supreme Court definitively blocked President Donald Trump’s many attempts to sabotage voting by mail — opining, in a three-sentence brief, that Trump can’t implement his new rules for the 2026 midterms. Or for any election, probably. 

Those last-minute rules, you may recall, would have required states to adopt new ballot envelopes and upload absentee voters’ names and envelope barcodes to a still-nonexistent online platform. Many officials argued they couldn’t possibly adopt the new measures before midterm voting starts, which would essentially cancel mail-in voting in their jurisdictions. 

The Supreme Court, of course, has been broadly sympathetic to Trump’s legal antics, even when they appear to clearly flout law or precedent. But shutting down voting just before the midterms? That’s one bridge too far for them.

Go a little deeper

Hobbling vote-by-mail was just one of Trump’s plots to meddle in the midterms, however — and several of the others are still underway. Here’s where some of the president’s most significant election maneuvers stand today: 

How worried should you be going into the midterms? That, my friend, is a question to answer in your own little heart. But I’m taking my cues from Vox’s politics editorial director, Benjy Sarlin, who recently reminded listeners of our America, Actually podcast that there are many, many institutional and logistical barriers to many of Trump’s more concerning legal machinations. 

“We’re taking it very seriously here…and nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “But it is still a very difficult path [where] so far he has had zero success.”

One link for later

➨ Skip the shrimp. A new analysis by researchers at the University of Bath and Faunalytics, an animal welfare group, attempts to quantify the amount of animal suffering required to produce different factory-farmed foods. They concluded that eating smaller animals = causing greater suffering, simply because you have to eat — and, by extension, farm and kill — so many more of them.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that American founding father Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mastodons? It’s actually one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition.
• Today’s trivia: Which English-language remake of an older French film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the former pro hockey player who founded a major Canadian restaurant chain. That would be Tim Horton, whose eponymous cafes have occasionally gotten snarled in the trade spat between Canada and the United States.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.