A previously little-known White House aide has garnered growing public attention in recent days after Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned her while levying an attack on President Donald Trump.

The Georgia Democrat said that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of President. Instead, Ossoff continued, “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie.”

Ossoff was referring to 35-year-old Natalie Harp, a longtime aide to Trump. When asked about Ossoff’s comments, Trump likened the Democrat to “Pee-wee Herman” and said he “would much rather do other things.”

Read More: CNN Condemns the White House’s Attacks on Journalist Kristen Holmes: Here’s What to Know

Ossoff has stood by his remark about Trump and Harp. Appearing on MS NOW this week, the Georgia Senator said: “It’s been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week.”

So who is Harp, and what is her role in the White House? Here’s what to know.

Harp said that Trump saved her life

In 2019, Harp went on Fox News and thanked Trump for signing the Right to Try law the year before. She told the network that she had stage 2 bone cancer, and that the new law allowed her to access experimental treatments, which she said saved her life.

After hearing her recount her experience, Trump asked her to give a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, according to the New York Times.

“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” she said at the event. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”

But after the convention, the Washington Post reported that medical experts cast doubt on Harp’s claims. Harp has said that she was treated with “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use,” and experts said that the federal legislation that Trump signed in 2018 wouldn’t have made that drug accessible to Harp because the medication had already been approved.

About two years after her speech at the Republican National Convention, she became a member of Trump’s staff.

She used to work for a far-right news channel

Before Harp joined Trump’s team, she worked as an anchor for a far-right news channel called One America News Network for a couple years. While working for the network, she propagated Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

Her official title is ‘special assistant to the President and executive assistant to the President’

In Harp’s role, officially called the “special assistant to the President and executive assistant to the President,” she works closely with Trump. Many of the Truth Social posts that the President shares are ones that he dictated to her to type and hit “post” on. 

According to the Times, which cited two people who were aware of the situation, Harp hit the “send” button on the enraged messages that Trump sent to the billionaire and major Republican donor Miriam Adelson in 2024—messages that nearly lost him Adelson’s backing. 

Harp was also the one who transcribed dozens of social media posts that Trump dictated to her one day in which he attacked the writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump raped her in the 1990s, the Times reported.

Some of Harp’s colleagues have dubbed her the “human printer” because she is known for carrying a portable printer as she trails Trump around so she can give him whatever information he wants or needs in print copies.

When appearing on MS NOW this week, Ossoff accused Harp of “printing out Donald Trump’s daily dose of delusion and flattery.”

She was one of the select number of people who was on Trump’s secret flight out of Turkey

When Trump left Turkey in July on a secret, alternate plane after receiving an Iranian assassination threat, only a few people working in the White House were on his flight, including Harp, CBS News reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was also on the plane with Trump and Harp, as were a couple other aides. Other higher-up members of his Administration, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, were on the other plane—the one that the Administration had said that Trump would travel on, and that members of the White House press corps were on.

Read More: Why Trump’s Secret Flight Was Extraordinary by Presidential Standards

When asked by the Times about Harp’s role in the White House and why she was selected to be among the few staffers on the secret flight, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s team.”

The nature of her relationship with Trump has been a subject of scrutiny

According to the Times, Harp wrote Trump several letters in 2023 that concerned some people near him. In the letters, which reporters at the Times viewed, Harp wrote messages including: “You are all that matters to me” and “I don’t ever want to let you down.” She called Trump her “Guardian and Protector in this Life,” and thanked him, the outlet reported.

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote in one of the letters, according to the Times, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

The news outlet also reported, citing two sources with knowledge of the remark, that Trump said at one point in 2023 that Harp was the only person on his team who cared about him.

Harp’s estranged brother, Preston Harp, was asked about the Times’ reporting about the 2023 letters when he appeared on CNN this week. He replied: “I’d say since she was like 16, she’s had an obsession with, gosh, how do I explain this? She’s written letters to other Presidents. Let me put it that way. And so like, her dream came true finally.” When asked which Presidents she wrote letters to, he said: “I didn’t see the letter, but George Bush obviously, during the Iraq war.”

He also described his sister’s relationship with Trump as an “infatuation” but said, “I don’t think it’s a physical attraction.”

“I think that Trump’s best friends are people who are his fan club,” he said. “And so she’s his biggest fan. And so that’s probably why he likes her. And she’s good looking. She’s got a good personality. I don’t know.”

“I mean she thinks that he saved her life, so, like, somebody living with that kind of gratitude—that must feel pretty good,” he continued.

Harp has not publicly spoken about her relationship with Trump in the wake of Ossoff’s comments, but other White House aides and Republicans have jumped to her defense.

In a statement to TIME, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle called Ossoff’s comments “cringeworthy” and criticized the Senator’s voting record, in addition to defending Harp.

“Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team,” Ingle said in the statement.

Eric Trump, one of the President’s sons, slammed CNN’s interview with Preston Harp on Wednesday.

“What absolute trash,” he said in a post on X. “Natalie is an incredible young woman — a cancer survivor, a genuinely good person, and arguably one of the hardest-working people in the White House. She’s deeply committed to my father, to her job, and to this country.”

President Donald Trump’s Administrations have overseen construction work on hundreds of miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. But one small portion of the planned wall—stretching merely 17 miles—has become the center of a hard-fought battle.

That section of the project, which extends across challenging terrain in Texas’ Big Bend National Park that has historically seen relatively few attempted border crossings, has faced pushback from everyone from public lands advocates to congressional lawmakers to local residents.

Read More: What's the Status of Trump's Border Wall? A Key Campaign Promise, Over a Decade On

The Trump Administration has been pushing the construction of the border wall in Big Bend despite the public outcry, going so far as to bypass a score of environmental laws to expedite the project. 

But on Monday, after months of opposition, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott announced that CBP had paused “all construction” in the park while he visited the site to conduct a “personal, on-the-ground evaluation.” In post on X, Scott wrote that he would be working to “evaluate the terrain and listen to local leadership, community members and stakeholders” over the next “couple of days.” 

Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott also said on Monday that he had spoken with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who Abbott said had “committed” to not building “a wall or a fence” in Big Bend. Abbott said there were “other tools” to ensure border security. 

Here’s what to know about the Trump Administration’s efforts to build the border wall in Big Bend, and the opposition the project is confronting. 

What the Trump Administration is seeking to build in Big Bend

Big Bend National Park sits in a remote southwest corner of Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brewster County. The Administration has sought to build 17 miles of barriers across that section of the border as part of the larger border wall project.

Perhaps the most recognizable image of Trump’s wall is the “primary wall,” a structure built from tall steel bollards up to 30 feet tall that makes up the first line of the barrier system that would be encountered by those travelling north from Mexico. The section of the project planned to run through Big Bend, however, would look notably different, according to Scott.

“CBP is building one new access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology, and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” he said. “We are NOT building a 30-foot wall or stadium lighting through Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, or the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area.”

The portion of the wall in the park would be made up of a non-contiguous “vehicle barrier system,” according to the CBP, which consists of “steel posts supported by continuous steel rails,” power cables, cameras, roads for patrol cars, and shelters along the border. 

According to the agency’s Smart Wall tracker, an interactive and frequently updated map that shows the status of the border wall, CBP has several construction projects interspersed along the border labeled as a “vehicle barriers … technology & patrol road.” A couple of these are located at the southern tip of the park; one sits far west near Presidio County, while others are located at the eastern edge of the park. These sites are in the Chihuahuan Desert, which presents a difficult landscape to navigate filled with steep canyons and mountainous terrain.   

A controversial push to speed construction

In June, the Trump Administration waived more than 20 environmental and preservation laws intended to protect Big Bend’s landscape in order to accelerate the construction of the border wall in the park.

To do so, the Administration invoked a section of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which allows the government to bypass laws that obstruct the building of border wall.

DHS defended the move at the time by describing Big Bend as an “area of high illegal entry” and saying that “there is presently an acute and immediate need” to build more barriers.

Migrant encounters are relatively rare at the section of the border that runs through the park, however—and have become more so in recent years. The park includes roughly 118 miles of what’s known as the Big Bend Sector of the border, which spans 517 miles from Sierra Blanca, Texas, to Sanderson, Texas, and covers roughly one-quarter of the full length of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. CBP recorded a 74% decrease in border crossings through its Big Bend Sector between fiscal years 2023 and 2025, with apprehensions dropping from 11,823 to 3,096. There were a total of 237,538 migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border in FY 2025, meaning that the 3,096 apprehensions in that sector accounted for just 1.3% of the total number. And CBP’s planned border wall in the park would only cover a fraction of a fraction of the full sector.

The Administration’s move to bypass the environmental laws triggered immediate opposition. Bob Krumenaker, the park’s most recent former superintendent, called the news “devastating” to Marfa Public Radio and referred to it as “giving CBP unfettered authority to do anything they want within the national park.” Legal challenges also followed in the form of multiple federal lawsuits, while members of Congress made efforts to block DHS’s funding for projects in Big Bend. 

Why the project has faced opposition, and from who

Grassroots organizations, conservation groups, businesses, local communities, and lawmakers have also made efforts to fight against the construction of the border wall in Big Bend.

Much of the opposition stems from concern over the park’s natural landscape, which is home to an array of wildlife and is effectively undeveloped. Other groups oppose the construction because they view the park as a cultural and heritage site, while still others have voiced concerns for the impact the planned barrier construction could have on the tourism economy there. 

A series of lawsuits have been filed in an effort to block DHS’s plans to construct the border wall in Big Bend.

One lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity challenged DHS’s waiving of laws to carry out construction in the park. “Until now no administration has been heartless enough to waive laws in a national park like Big Bend, so we’re suing to uphold the U.S. Constitution and protect this crown jewel,” Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement according to a news release. 

The Center for Biological Diversity had previously filed a lawsuit that argued the construction would “devastate the region’s wildlife, recreation economy, and natural and cultural heritage.”

Another lawsuit, filed by The People of La Junta for Preservation and Far

Flung Outdoor Center, a tribal nonprofit and an outdoor recreation company, argued that the construction will cause damage to archaeological sites associated with indigenous peoples and could threaten protected religious freedoms. 

Groups have also mounted protests and sent letters to lawmakers to call for the planned construction to be halted.

In March, the grassroots organization No Big Bend Wall sent a letter to several leaders on congressional committees on behalf of 132 organizations asking that the use of any federal funding for the border wall in Big Bend be prohibited. 

All the Democratic members of the Texas delegation in Congress sent a letter to Mullin later that same month voicing “staunch opposition” to the wall. 

“This proposal threatens preservation of one of America’s crown jewels, Texas’ largest state park, and the state’s only congressionally-designated Wild & Scenic River,” the lawmakers wrote. “Construction and maintenance of a border wall segment and the associated roads, secondary barriers, power lines, towers, and lighting will disrupt natural biodiversity, river dynamics subject to routine flash flooding, and one of the darkest night sky areas in the world.” 

Over the following two months, more than 2,000 people rallied at the Texas Capitol building in Austin, and seven former superintendents of Big Bend National Park urged Mullin not to waive federal laws to build the border wall in the park. 

In early August, video showed heavy machinery bulldozing the land at Big Bend. A bipartisan group of Texas House lawmakers soon after sent a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday in which they urged him to halt the Big Bend construction, citing “damage to one of Texas’ most pristine and irreplaceable landscapes” that they said had already begun with the movement of bulldozers and construction equipment into the park. 

Last Wednesday, a large crowd of protesters gathered in the park chanting “No road. No wall. No wire. No way," as they held hands in a circle. They also held a large banner that read “NO WALL,” along with a series of other wildlife-themed flags and signs. 

More than 140 local businesses, recreation groups, and outfitters who rely on the tourism economy in the park also penned a letter on Aug. 4 to Cornyn, Cruz, and Abott asking them to halt the border construction to preserve the vibrant tourism economy that lives within the park.

Scott released a statement last week in response to the public reaction specifying that “what people are seeing right now is survey and design work—NOT construction of a wall through the park.”

Following Scott’s later announcement that CBP would be pausing construction on the wall in Big Bend, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), which has pushed back against the Big Bend construction, lamented the damage that it said the project has already done to the park’s lands. 

“The people have spoken, and they do not want the Trump administration to bulldoze America’s national parks for border infrastructure,” said NPCA President and CEO Tiernan Sittenfeld in a statement. “Unfortunately, the federal contractors’ bulldozers have already inflicted tremendous damage to one of America’s most iconic national parks. Their heavy equipment has torn through miles of priceless wild landscape, wreaking havoc on sensitive wildlife and irreplaceable habitat.”

Can President Donald Trump pen a new chapter in his love story with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un? 

In Trump’s first term, the two leaders, in Trump’s words, “fell in love” after exchanging letters and held three historic meetings, but failed to make much progress toward the goal of denuclearizing the heavily armed hermit state. 

Now, Trump appears to be trying to recapture the magic, reportedly urging aides to set up a meeting with Kim as soon as this fall. This news comes soon after Trump’s Truth Social post on Sunday announcing he had ordered the US military to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with ally South Korea in part because it would send “a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful” — North Korea. 

Trump has claimed, without elaborating, that Kim has responded to this overture, but there’s been no public response from Pyongyang yet. 

Trump’s outreach didn’t come entirely out of nowhere. Trump has made clear since the beginning of his term that he would like to meet with Kim again, and there was speculation that a meeting might happen when Trump traveled to South Korea for a summit last fall. North Korea’s UN Mission in New York has also rebuffed several attempts by US officials to deliver a personal letter from Trump seeking to restart dialogue. 

In the midst of an unpopular conflict with Iran that seems unlikely to end in anything resembling a victory, it makes sense that Trump might be reaching back to what he sees as one of the foreign policy high points of his first term. “Kim Jong ​Un has always treated me with great respect,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I understand him. He understands me.”

Beyond reconnecting with an old friend, it’s not entirely clear what Trump actually wants out of North Korea. But if his goal is a new diplomatic breakthrough, that will be even harder than it was the first time: The country is a much different place than it was the last time the two leaders sat down and even if they were to meet again, Kim seems even less likely to make real concessions. 

Like it or not, North Korea is a nuclear power now

Analysts believe North Korea possesses around 50 nuclear weapons with enough fissile material to build 40 more. It has missiles that are theoretically capable of reaching the US mainland. There was a time when the North Koreans were willing to at least discuss giving up their program in exchange for sanctions relief and major concessions on US military support to South Korea, but that time is probably over, partly thanks to Trump’s own actions. 

“There is no chance that North Korea is going to denuclearize. Zero chance,” said Joseph Yun, a veteran US-North Korea negotiator who recently served as acting US ambassador to South Korea. “They have seen what happened to Iran. They have seen what happened to Ukraine. The way they see it, their nuclear weapons are what protects them.” Last year, the country’s official news agency dismissed denuclearization as an “unrealizable pipe dream.”

On top of that, North Korea is in a much stronger negotiating position than it was the last time these two leaders met for a photo op.

“It’s a very different North Korea now. It’s stronger geopolitically, and Kim is stronger domestically.”

Jung Pak, served as US special representative for North Korea in the Biden administration

In 2018, North Korea was heavily isolated and struggling under an international sanctions regime that was at least officially — if not always in practice — supported by China and Russia as well as the United States. For a young leader still looking to establish his internal legitimacy and international standing, a meeting with the sitting US president was a major coup. 

But things improved dramatically for North Korea after the pandemic. After it began lifting its Covid-era lockdown — one of the toughest in the world — North Korea has become what the Wall Street Journal has called “the world’s most unlikely growth story.”

The country’s economy has grown for three straight years, and while it’s still an impoverished country where nearly half the population is malnourished, Pyongyang is by all accounts booming, with thousands of new homes built along with a surge in Western-style restaurants and ride-hailing apps. 

“North Korea emerged from the pandemic stronger, despite the odds,” said Jung Pak, who served as US special representative for North Korea in the Biden administration. “It’s a very different North Korea now. It’s stronger geopolitically, and Kim is stronger domestically.”

North Korea has been one of the main beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine, sending thousands of soldiers and munitions to help the Russian war effort. While thousands of those troops have died, the North Korean regime has gained billions of dollars in revenue and military aid from Russia in response, as well as invaluable battlefield experience for its commanders and weapons systems.     

Russian President Vladimir Putin has come through for the North Koreans in other ways. In 2024, Russia vetoed the mandate of the UN body that monitored the enforcement of international sanctions on North Korea, effectively shredding the international sanctions regime. In 2025, trade between North Korea and China, its main economic partner, rose 25 percent.  

The regime has found other innovative ways of raising revenue, reportedly netting billions through cybercrime targeted at foreign banks and cryptocurrency exchanges. 

Kim is also less desperate for legitimacy these days. In September 2025, he stood alongside Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at a massive military parade in Beijing, a powerful demonstration of unity among three US adversaries. These days, Kim likely feels he’s the one being wooed. Xi’s high profile trip to Pyongyang in June was interpreted by many as a sign that China, warily eyeing the increasingly close relationship between Russia and North Korea, was looking to shore up its ties with its longtime ally. 

Domestically, when the world’s first millennial dictator took power after his father died in 2011, many wondered how long he would last. Today, he’s feeling secure enough to be thinking about long-term handoff plans, publicly positioning his 13-year-old daughter as his future successor. 

Kim is clearly not desperate to meet with Trump, and these days, the United States has fewer means to pressure him. Without Chinese and Russian support, the US can only dial up international sanctions so much. As for military pressure, the US has been moving military assets out of the Korean peninsula to the Middle East and recently redeployed its last aircraft carrier out of Asia. 

As Trump’s actions this week demonstrate, he’s not all that interested in working with US allies in the region to pressure the North Koreans. But if he were considering pairing his warm overtures to Kim with a stick, a “fire and fury” threat wouldn’t pack the same punch today.  

Is there any reason for new US-North Korea talks?

Still, there are reasons Kim might want to sit down with Trump again. North Korea would still like US sanctions lifted. Kim’s influential sister has stated that the regime is looking for the US to formally accept its status as a nuclear power, as Russia has now done.  

Former US State Department North Korea negotiator Joel Wit suspects that given Trump’s desperation for talks, Pyongyang might try to press its advantage even further. 

“If I was a North Korean, I would ask the United States for what I would call a ‘peace agenda,’” he said. “That would mean more than just reducing the size of US-[South Korean] exercises. It could include cutting back on US troops in South Korea or even Guam.”

Trump, who has repeatedly, including in his recent Truth Social post, made clear that he sees the US military presence in South Korea as a waste and the South Koreans as coddled, wealthy freeloaders, might be amenable to concessions like this. 

But what could the US get out of talking to North Korea if denuclearization is off the table? Some analysts have suggested a limited deal might be possible, which could see North Korea dismantle its reactors or some of its centrifuges, slowing down the growth of its nuclear program if not eliminating it. 

Pak also noted that given North Korea’s refusal to engage in nearly any diplomacy with the US since 2019, just holding talks and building some confidence between the two sides would be progress. “The meeting itself would be the win,” Pak said. 

On the other hand, holding talks that do not explicitly aim at eliminating North Korea’s nuclear program would be seen as effectively accepting that North Korea is a nuclear power now. At this point, there’s a strong realist case to be made for accepting North Korea’s nuclear status and proceeding from there, but it’s hard to square with the administration’s stance on Iran’s nuclear program. 

It’s also likely that the kind of incremental concessions North Korea might, in the best of circumstances, be willing to offer, would not satisfy a US president with a penchant for grand bargains. 

In his first term, just the fact that Trump and Kim sat down made history. Now that that’s been accomplished, they may find that, like many a romance a few years in, they’ve run out of things to talk about. 

Laurie was on her way to a gate at the airport where she worked as a manager when a colleague called with a warning: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had turned up again and were asking airline staff to help locate a passenger.

She had years of experience cooperating with federal law enforcement. But the encounters she was accustomed to followed a protocol: airline managers were notified in advance, officers arrived in uniform with their badges visible and judicial warrants were presented for passenger arrests.

Read more: ICE Considers Expanding Detention Space in 14 Locations—Including Guantanamo Bay and Virgin Islands

Multiple gate agents working at airports in Colorado, Texas and Arizona have told TIME that ICE agents have become a recurring presence in recent weeks. With protocols for handling such encounters unclear or inconsistently applied, airline employees like Laurie say they are increasingly being left to decide for themselves how to respond.

She knew how consequential that decision could be.

Ten days earlier, two men in plain clothes had approached a gate agent, identified themselves only as federal officers and asked the employee to summon a passenger. Laurie, who was the manager on duty, had received no advance notice of their arrival. She approached the men and asked for identification.

She said the officers told her they were ICE agents and showed their badges, which had not been visible. An announcement went out over the airport’s public address system. A woman approached the desk, and the officers took her into custody.

Laurie asked to see a warrant and the men told her it was in their car. She followed as they escorted the passenger to an unmarked vehicle with an out-of-state license plate, where the officers showed her an administrative warrant rather than a judicial warrant signed by a judge.

“Well, this isn't a criminal. This is immigration, it's different,” the agents told her, before handcuffing the passenger and driving away.

Laurie asked TIME to use a pseudonym because she fears government retaliation and was not authorized by her employer to speak publicly. TIME reviewed video footage of the incident filmed by Laurie.

“Because I hadn't seen this before, I was kind of freaking out, thinking, ‘What do I do?’” she said.

ICE ramps up its presence at airports

Airline employees around the country are confronting similar questions as ICE expands its presence at U.S. airports. Gate agents say officers have asked them to help identify or locate passengers, provide information from internal airline systems and grant access to restricted areas such as jet bridges and, in some cases, aircraft. The requests have left some workers uncertain about when they are required to assist federal officers and when doing so could conflict with airline security protocols.

The increase in airport enforcement comes as ICE seeks to meet a White House goal of 2,000 arrests a day, a target confirmed by an ICE official not authorized to speak publicly. Last month, it was reported that the agency was making an average of 20 to 40 arrests a day at airports, targeting, among others, travelers with expired visas and pending asylum cases.

Videos of airport arrests have also circulated widely online. On July 21, two plainclothes ICE agents arrested Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old woman from Ecuador, at the jet bridge at Denver International Airport, according to a widely shared video. That same day, ICE arrested an Ethiopian faculty member from the University of Maryland at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

The operations have been aided by expanded sharing of travelers’ information between federal agencies. Since May 2025, ICE has been obtaining traveler information through the Transportation Security Administration under a previously undisclosed data-sharing program, according to a declassified memo released by the watchdog group American Oversight. The New York Times reported that the program gives ICE access to the names and birth dates of passengers the agency believes may be subject to immigration arrest.

The administration has also broadened its use of administrative warrants. Previous administrations used such warrants to arrest people who were already in deportation proceedings. Under the Trump administration, they have also been used in cases involving immigrants who are actively applying to renew their immigration status.

“In the past, people like that have never been prioritized for deportation if they pose no other public safety threat, given that they're taking steps to get into compliance with the law,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council.

Backlogs and processing delays in the immigration system can put immigrants at risk of losing legal protections while their applications are pending, she said. 

ICE agents can also make arrests without a warrant in certain circumstances if they have probable cause to believe someone is in the country without legal status and is likely to escape if not immediately arrested. Gupta said that authority has been abused in previous immigration operations.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that law enforcement officers are “simply enforcing our nation’s laws and following all applicable laws and established policies.”

“When DHS components operate in the same transportation environment, they coordinate as appropriate to support public safety, security, and lawful operations while minimizing disruption to the traveling public,” the statement continued. 

Some recent airport arrests have faced scrutiny in court. Jodi Ziesemer, an immigration lawyer who represents four immigrants arrested by ICE at Denver International Airport in separate cases, said two of her clients were told that the officers arresting them did not know why they were being detained. In one case, she said, ICE could not initially establish the reason for the arrest.

“I asked ICE why they had arrested her, and they told me they thought that maybe she had a deportation order from 2002, but they couldn't find any other paperwork about it because it wasn't a digital file, so they detained her first, and then they started looking for some paperwork about her,” Ziesemer said. The client spent six weeks in a detention center before a federal judge ordered her release.

How airline employees are responding

The encounters have also raised concerns about the position in which they place airlines and their employees. A Phoenix couple is suing United Airlines for false imprisonment and negligence over the carrier’s role in an ICE arrest at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

“I've gone to agents who have been involved with any ICE agent,” Laurie said. “Most of them are just like, ‘I don't want to be doing this. Like, why are we helping them?’”

After the first arrest she witnessed, Laurie raised her concerns with airline leadership and asked for guidance.

“We haven't gotten a clear security directive,” she explained. “There's never been an official written directive about ICE."

Laurie says she was still waiting for guidance when ICE agents returned to the airport looking for another passenger. This time, she made a different choice. She called the supervisor at the gate, asked for the passenger’s phone number and called the woman herself.

“I know this is going to sound extremely radical, or crazy,” she recounted telling the woman, “but ICE is there at the gate, and they're looking for you."

There was a pause. “Are you serious?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Laurie said. “I know this is crazy, but I promise you. I'm being serious.”

“Should I leave?” the woman asked. “I think it might be best if you do,” Laurie said.

When Laurie reached the gate, the woman she had called approached her. She appeared to be in her late 20s and was traveling with a family member. Laurie said the two stepped into a bathroom to speak privately, where the passenger said she did not understand why ICE was looking for her.

“Why is this happening? I have all my papers,” she asked.

After calling a relative, the woman decided not to take the flight. She returned with the hood of her jacket pulled over her head, thanked Laurie and left the gate with her family member.

The ICE agents arrived after she was gone. Laurie recognized two of them from an earlier encounter. About 10 minutes later, one approached her, showed his badge and asked whether she could confirm that the passenger had checked in. Laurie refused, telling him airline employees could not provide passenger information.

As the flight neared final boarding, another ICE officer accused Laurie of interfering with the operation and pressed her to help locate the passenger. Laurie declined to say whether the woman was on the flight's passenger list and told the officer he would need to contact the airline’s corporate security department for information. “You're going to need a subpoena,” she said. No arrests were made at the gate that day.

The next day, the passenger called her. 

She had made it home. And she was with her child.

"I was extremely scared that ICE would take another person in front of me, but also for myself and how I was jeopardizing my job and safety," Laurie said. "But I would 100% do it again, without a moment of hesitation."

President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday a temporary pause on 50% tariffs on Canada as both countries race to finalize a trade deal.

The President’s announcement came hours before a series of tariffs set to cover about $20 billion worth of imports into the U.S. from Canada were set to take effect.

“I have paused the 50% tariffs against Canada, that were scheduled to kick in tomorrow morning for a three day period, based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a deal!” Trump said on social media.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney released a statement moments later, confirming that there had been “intensive discussions” with the U.S. to “address outstanding trade issues.”

“Substantial progress has been made, although there is important work still to be done,” he said.

Read More: Trump Imposes 50% Tariff Hike on Canadian Goods

The tariffs will now be paused until Aug. 21, subject to the finalization of an agreement between the two countries.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the deal will include "comprehensive market access for ​all ⁠American goods, economic security commitments, digital trade alignment," along with other provisions.

Trump added in his social media post that the Keystone XL pipeline—a cross-border oil pipeline project between the U.S. and Canada that was canceled by former President Joe Biden in 2021 after pushback from environmentalists, Native American tribes, and Indigenous advocates—"may be awoken from the grave," but did not provide further details.

The President later posted what appeared to be an AI-generated image of himself dragging the Keystone pipeline out of the ground.

Neither side has provided further confirmation about the contents of the agreement.

TIME has reached out to both the White House and the Prime Minister's office for comment.

U.S. and Canada push toward a deal

Carney said earlier this week that he planned to speak with the U.S. President ahead of the tariff deadline. The announcement follows a period of negotiations between the two sides.

During a tour of a tire factory in Iowa last week, Greer told reporters that the U.S. and Canada were engaged in “constructive negotiations” but warned that if a “country retaliates” they would “take action.”

Canada's minister responsible for U.S. trade, Dominic LeBlanc, and chief trade negotiator Janice Charette have been in Washington since last week for talks.

The negotiations unfolded against a backdrop of ongoing grievances between the two countries, including Trump’s repeated statements about his desire to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state—an idea Carney has strongly pushed back against.

In August, Carney took a swipe at Trump, mocking the U.S. President after a teleprompter malfunctioned in the middle of an on-camera speech.

The tense relationship between the pair has also played out over the Gordie Howe International Bridge—a cross-border bridge connecting the two countries that has repeatedly become a source of disagreement between Washington and Ottawa.

How U.S.-Canada trade tensions escalated

The last-minute tariff pause comes after more than a year of escalations between the two countries.

In February 2025, the White House hit Canada with a 25% tariff on most goods and 10% on energy resources, citing what it regarded as inadequate progress in curbing cross-border illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Canada then imposed tariffs on some vehicle imports from the U.S. in April 2025, amid a larger trade war sparked by Trump’s global tariffs—the majority of which were struck down by a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.

The 50% tariff hike on a range of Canadian goods was announced in July, with Trump signing a series of proclamations citing Canada’s “discriminatory treatment” of American products.

The new levy, a retaliation for Canada’s tariffs, would apply to a range of Canadian goods, including electronics, sports equipment, and essential oils.

The Administration had also announced targeted new tariffs on Canadian dairy products and exports of wine and other alcoholic beverages.

According to economists, the tariffs could have had significant economic consequences if enacted. TD Economics estimated that, if maintained, they could reduce Canadian GDP growth by 0.3 to 0.6 percentage points over the following year.

A Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey of 1,833 firms found that 77% of affected exporters expected revenue losses, while 35% expected their revenue to fall by at least half.

In a new proclamation issued Tuesday suspending the tariffs, Trump said: “Canada has expressed a commitment to remove the discriminations or unreasonable and unequal impositions.”

In a statement late Tuesday, the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. applauded Trump's announcement and called for "a negotiated solution that gets American spirits back on retail shelves in all Canadian provinces and returns the spirits sector to a zero-for-zero tariff framework."

The new tariffs were set to apply despite the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA)—which had shielded Canadian industries from earlier U.S. tariffs.

The USMCA, which was signed by Trump in 2018, is a trilateral agreement that eliminated or reduced tariffs on goods traded between the nations of North America. It governs nearly $2 trillion in annual trade among the three countries.

In early July, the U.S. declined to renew the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement for a 16-year term. Rather than terminate it outright, this puts the USMCA under annual review. Trade experts told TIME that the move is expected to carry profound long-term economic consequences.

Since January, many Cubans have lived a life of near-constant darkness. The Trump administration’s oil blockades have led the country into a worsening energy crisis, collapsing what was already an eroding national power grid. 

Daily blackouts have plunged the Cuban nationalized, universal health system, once the pride of the country, into a humanitarian crisis. For months, hospitals have been without necessary power and ambulances strapped for fuel. Piles of trash line the streets, increasing the risk of disease. Cold storage issues threaten lifesaving vaccines, and a combination of the frail economy and US sanctions has left pharmacy shelves almost empty. 

The public health crisis exposes an often overlooked aspect of the way we tend to think about the promise of universal healthcare. Having accessible and free medical services is only one part of the solution. While Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is bound up in its own history and national context, it still demonstrates that public health of all kinds can only be as resilient as the electricity, water, transportation, refrigeration, supply chains, and institutions that enable it. 

An old prototype for universal healthcare 

Not long ago, Cuba’s health system was seen as a promising model for successful free universal healthcare. In the years following Fidel Castro’s rise to power, health authorities focused on the integration of healthcare delivery models into a single public system. The Castro government aimed to expand services once concentrated in Havana into rural areas, such that the entire population would have access to basic care services. In 1974, the government launched community-based polyclinics that placed primary care specialists in almost every Cuban community. 

Over the decades that followed, that widened access to healthcare led to significant, measurable returns. Infant mortality in the country has dropped from 37 per 1,000 live births right after the revolution to seven per 1,000 live births in 2024. Infectious and parasitic disease mortality also improved, dropping from a rate of 45.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1970 to 9.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019, according to data reported by the Cuban Public Health Ministry. 

It’s not entirely surprising that the successful Cuban national health model has been the site of curiosity and enthusiastic scrutiny in American health equity circles, despite vast differences in state ideologies. The US has never ensured that every citizen has affordable access to healthcare, and large disparities persist in low-income and rural populations. The chokehold of private insurance has ensured that, unlike nearly every other country in the world, the US has largely rejected the prospect of universal care. Even historic gains in insurance coverage have faced rollback threats under the One Big Beautiful Bill. 

On certain key metrics, the US also falls far behind Cuba, which boasted 9.5 physicians to 1,000 people in 2021. That same year, the US reported just 3.7 physicians to every 1,000 people. The 2019 measles epidemic demonstrated a gap in childhood vaccination rates as well: 92 percent of children ages 13 to 17 in the US received two doses or more of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. In Cuba, the childhood completion rates were well over 99 percent, and the country has not seen a measles outbreak since 1993. 

From its early years, the Cuban health system has functioned against a background of economic decline particular to the country, one attributable to a complex combination of external pressures, among them US blockades, a complicated economic reliance on Venezuela, a struggling state-run economy, and a flailing industry heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

While other sectors faced attrition, Cuba’s health system, at least, appeared capable of weathering these crises. During the pandemic, the country proved to be a model in global health, having developed a homegrown Covid-19 vaccine rapidly and reaching a 95 percent vaccination rate. Its robust supply of trained health professionals made headlines when Cuban healthcare workers provided essential pandemic aid to a small town in Italy.

 So why has this system proved to be so fragile now? 

New blockades deal the final blow after Hurricane Melissa 

Torrents of rain and flooding from the Category 3 Hurricane Melissa hit Cuba in October of last year, affecting much of the island’s eastern provinces. More than 735,000 people were evacuated, and the environmental disaster has put the country’s basic health infrastructure in a precarious state. 

In the storm’s wake, a combination of flooding and damaged water systems increased the spread of viral infections of arboviral diseases such as dengue and oropouche. A report by the Pan American Health Organization published in March placed water, food, and vector-borne diseases in the “very high” health risk categories. Apart from damaged water and sanitation infrastructure, the report describes how disruptions to health service access, routine surveillance of disease vectors, and environmental conditions that breed mosquito-borne disease outbreaks have dramatically increased the risk of infectious disease spread. 

Hurricane Melissa arrived during a recovery period from earlier storms, such as Hurricane Rafael in late 2024, as well as sporadic earthquakes in recent years. These natural disasters also heavily damaged health facilities, leading to collapsed roofing, damaged roads and cables, and the loss of supplies and equipment. 

For years, Cuba’s economy was propped up in large part by its relationship with Venezuela. In exchange for support from Cuba’s highly trained professionals — especially healthcare workers — Venezuela long provided a critical supply of crude oil, which helped the country keep the lights on even in the face of US sanctions. 

That partnership ended in January after the nighttime capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the sweeping Trump oil blockade soon after has dealt a challenge too difficult for the energy infrastructure to withstand. 

Already struggling to recover from other disasters, Cuba plunged further into its present crisis. Mario Cruz Peñate, Pan American Health Organization representative for Cuba, said that while the public health situation has been evolving for a while, he has seen more acute upheavals as sanctions persist, causing mass blackouts that have made it impossible to sustain vital health services and emergency care.

Disease control continues to struggle post-Melissa, with aid organizations worrying about communicable food- and water-borne diseases, such as hepatitis A and diarrhea, that can be caused by unrefrigerated food. On the administrative level, limited transportation resources and electricity have led to a dearth of vaccine supplies, which typically require cold rooms for transfer and storage. 

Continuity of care, in particular, has been affected for the worse. More than 100,000 elective and reconstructive surgeries have been postponed, for example, because of a lack of supplies and a backlog of emergency surgeries. At a briefing in May, representatives of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization reported that over 32,000 pregnant women faced limited access to diagnostics and limited amounts of the stable electricity needed to sustain neonatal units. Prenatal care faces delays because of the lack of everything from testing supplies to available facilities. And now, even once successful improvements in health indicators have fallen: a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research measured an increase in infant mortality rates from 4.0 to 9.9 per 1,000 births between 2018 and 2025. 

For humanitarian aid organizations, alleviating this health crisis also poses a stark challenge. Cruz Peñate ascribes this to availability, timing, and opportunity to distribute aid supplies, all of which have been made inconsistent by the ongoing blockade. 

“The response to the situation in Cuba has to increase; we have to scale up the response. All the support we can manage to receive will be important,” Cruz Peñate said. “Here in Cuba there is really a situation that needs attention.”

Is Cuba now an outdated prototype for universal healthcare? 

While Cuba’s healthcare system was never bound to map precisely onto the US, some of its most notable successes — the high physician-to-patient ratio, the almost entirely vaccinated population, the ample health screenings — still remain desirable. And yet those very accomplishments have crumbled under the threat of extreme weather events and the country’s inability to restore its broken power grid.  

Trump targeted even more petroleum suppliers in his latest round of sanctions on July 23, leaving Cuba scrambling still further to revitalize its energy sector. Those same sanctions also took aim at the Cuban healthcare export economy, alleging that it involves forced labor. 

Earlier this month, Cuba’s government loosened constraints on a handful of private operations, including pharmaceuticals and elder-care facilities, in response to the shortage of medicine in the country.  With state-stocked shelves running empty, the new decree allows private pharmacies with Cuban health registration to fill in the medicine gap. Similarly, privatized elder facilities are also allowed to operate at a capped rate of 60 people per home, with mandatory visits from state physicians. 

The government still prohibits private sector medical and dental care, and Cuban officials remain adamant that the “socialist state enterprise keeps its central role,” so it’s difficult to claim that the country’s medical model is being pressured towards privatization. But the erosion of some of its elements still speaks to a state-run health system under strain. 

We often think of healthcare itself as an equation of medical services along with healthcare personnel and the authorities — government, industry, or both — that control it. But the crisis facing Cuba gets at the dependence of all of these factors on the broader energy ecosystem. Even a once-promising healthcare model can quickly collapse when a crucial component is missing: fuel.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

The general election for Wisconsin governor is now a week old. But the past seven days of debate between the race’s Republican and Democratic candidates can be paraphrased in just two lines:

“My opponent is a shill for Big Tech who wants to build data centers over Wisconinites’ farms, parks, preserves, graves — and, possibly, Lambeau Field.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

The Republican nominee, Congressman Tom Tiffany, has been the aggressor in this argument. Tiffany has branded his Democratic rival David Crowley as “Data Center David,” spotlighting the Milwaukee County Executive’s past support for turning Wisconsin into a “data hub” for “the entire globe.” In the Republican’s telling, Crowley is a corporate stooge eager to let Wisconsin’s “lakes run dry” and its “family farms” get “paved over,” just to generate higher profits for his Silicon Valley paymasters.

Crowley has returned fire. The Democrat has insisted that every Wisconsin community should have veto power over any data center project within its territory — and that new computing campuses anywhere in the state must comply with strict regulations. Meanwhile, Crowley has argued that Tiffany is the race’s true corporate shill, noting that the member of Congress voted for tax cuts that benefit Big Tech (paid for with cuts to Medicaid and food stamps), permitting reforms that made data centers easier to build, and a ban on state and local AI regulations. “Congressman Tiffany loves data centers,” Crowley warned in a recent statement.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear how much they actually disagree on what they would do about the issue as governor. 

The Wisconsin governor’s race has quickly become the most prominent flashpoint in the national war over data centers. And it’s not hard to tell which side is winning. On Tuesday, Josh Shapiro, the moderate Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, announced a suite of measures to slow and block “predatory” data center developments, after having previously led efforts to attract them. 

If the public’s views on data centers are increasingly clear, the substantive issues remain unsettled. And the politics are more complicated than polling alone would indicate: Key constituencies in both the Democratic and Republican parties remain invested (literally and figuratively) in hyperscale development. Even as Tiffany and Crowley spar over who would do more to curb the data center menace, their actual policies quietly reflect these tensions.

How data centers became a flashpoint in Wisconsin 

On first glance, Crowley and Tiffany’s back-and-forth on data centers looks odd in multiple respects. For one thing, Republicans do not typically accuse Democrats of trying too hard to spur corporate investment — nor of doing too little to protect the environment. For another, Crowley and Tiffany seem to appear to largely agree about data center policy, which makes their emphasis on the issue sound a bit strange.

Upon closer inspection, however, Tiffany’s emphasis on the subject isn’t hard to understand.

Crowley just barely defeated socialist Assembly member Francesca Hong in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. And data center policy was among the key divides in that contest, according to Crowley himself: Hong championed a statewide moratorium on data centers, while Crowley merely favored imposing tight guardrails on their development. 

What’s more, Crowley really did tout the potential benefits of data center development in the past. And he is closely allied with sitting Democratic Governor Tony Evers, who enacted large tax subsidies for new computing campuses in the state. Thanks in part to that largesse, Wisconsin witnessed a sudden wave of hyperscale (in other words, AI) data center development over the past two years.

Thus, by staking out a more (ostensibly) hardline, anti-data center position, Tiffany hopes to fracture the Democratic coalition — and isolate Crowley from the 76 percent of Wisconsin voters who say that the server farms’ costs outweigh their benefits. 

In reality, however, the distinctions between Crowley and Tiffany’s positions on data center construction are much narrower than the latter’s attacks suggest. And to the extent that Crowley is more sympathetic to hyperscale development, this has less to do with his alleged fealty to Big Tech than his support for organized labor.

Crowley and Tiffany mostly agree about data centers

Crowley and Tiffany’s positions on data centers heavily overlap.

Neither candidate supports a statewide moratorium. Both say that local communities should have the power to veto new computing campuses; that data centers must pay the full price of their energy needs (including the costs of any new power and transmission infrastructure that their consumption necessitates); and that companies should not be allowed to enter into nondisclosure agreements with local governments that temporarily conceal negotiations over new data center developments from the public.

Likewise, as their respective attacks suggest, Crowley and Tiffany were both friendlier to the AI industry in the past, before the backlash to artificial intelligence — and the infrastructure it requires — took off. Crowley really did express a desire for Wisconsin to become a global leader in artificial intelligence. Tiffany, meanwhile, has indeed voted to cut taxes on AI companies and shield them from state and local regulations. And the Republican is aligned with an even more unabashed champion of data centers than Evers, President Donald Trump.

Further, many of the distinctions between Crowley and Tiffany’s data center platforms reflect perennial left-right divides on other issues, rather than any difference in each candidate’s degree of chumminess with Big Tech. 

For example, Crowley wants to require data center projects to finance new renewable energy installations — both so that they can meet their own power needs in a sustainable way and so that Wisconsin’s broader electric grid becomes less dependent on coal. 

Tiffany also recognizes that data center development could be leveraged to fund new renewable energy. But he sees this as a bug, not a feature: After all, new solar and wind farms could eat up Wisconsin’s precious farmland, which Tiffany has sworn to protect. The Republican instead prefers for new data centers to run on coal, thereby propping up that embattled industry.

Crowley is more pro-data center in one way

All this said, Tiffany’s platform is genuinely less pro-data center than Crowley’s in one respect: The Republican has promised to end all taxpayer subsidies for data centers in Wisconsin. 

Crowley’s position is comparatively nuanced. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in July, the Democrat said, “I do not believe Wisconsin should automatically roll back all data center tax incentives, but I do believe we need a more rigorous review of whether taxpayers are receiving sufficient value for the incentives being provided.”

In response to Tiffany’s recent attacks, Crowley has embraced far more adversarial rhetoric towards the tech industry in general and the AI sector in particular. And he has called for imposing a set of requirements on new data center development so numerous and profound, it is unclear whether many companies would be interested in pursuing new projects under his leadership, subsidies or no subsidies. 

Nevertheless, as of this writing, Crowley has yet to abandon his July position on tax incentives. Instead, he has countered Tiffany’s charges on that front by noting that, in supporting Donald Trump’s tax bill, his Republican opponent effectively “signed over $70 billion in tax handouts to the same companies now steamrolling over our local communities with data centers.” 

This is a fair hit. But it’s also a little evasive. How high the corporate tax rate should be federally — and whether Wisconsin should offer tax breaks to data center developments — are two different questions. 

And Wisconsin’s subsidies to hyperscalers are not small. Under Evers, the state exempted large data center projects from sales taxes. This means that a data center developer need not pay taxes — to either the state or localities — on construction materials, IT equipment, on-site power infrastructure, cooling systems, or electricity. 

Critically, these exemptions do not sunset: Tech companies don’t just avoid sales taxes when initially building their data centers. Rather, they pay no taxes on their facilities’ electricity consumption forever, while also avoiding any levies when updating their servers or other equipment.

All this adds up. According to a report from Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the state is poised to forgo $1.5 billion in sales tax revenue during the construction of certified data center projects, and then another $369 million annually after the facilities are fully operating. This is an especially sensitive issue in Wisconsin, where voters are still upset over an effort to lure tech manufacturer Foxconn to the state in Trump’s first term, a costly gambit that failed to deliver on its promised benefits.

To be clear, the Fiscal Bureau’s projections do not mean that data centers are likely to subtract billions of dollars from Wisconsin’s state and local budgets. Even if the hyperscale facilities are exempt from sales levies they must still pay property taxes. And their owners could owe corporate taxes while their construction workers and permanent employees will pay income taxes. 

Their spending also generates business — and thus, income tax obligations — for other Wisconsin enterprises, such as utilities. On net, the projects will almost certainly increase the amount of revenue available to Wisconsin state and local governments. The debate is over whether the projects could have generated even more revenue, in the absence of subsidies — or whether these developments would have gone to a different state, had Wisconsin not made their funders such a sweetheart deal.

The evidence on that question is mixed. On the one hand, tax subsidies of some kind were plausibly necessary to spur hyperscale data center investment in Wisconsin. At present, 38 states provide tax incentives to data center developers. 

On the other hand, Wisconsin’s subsidies are unusually generous. States commonly spare servers and capital equipment from sales taxes, but many do not extend that exemption to electricity. And the indefinite nature of Wisconsin’s subsidies is also far from standard. In nearby Illinois, data center projects enjoy a sales tax exemption for only 20 years. 

Meanwhile, Wisconsin has some structural assets that might make it appealing to tech companies, even if it offered far lower subsidies. Due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, Wisconsin boasts abundant water. And it also has relatively cool temperatures, which limit hyperscalers’ cooling costs. 

Crowley has not ruled out dramatically scaling back the state’s subsidies. But unlike Tiffany, he has thus far declined to endorse abolishing those subsidies in their entirety.

In Wisconsin, banning data centers is not the pro-union position

At this point, you might be asking why Crowley doesn’t simply go “full populist” on data centers. Why give Tiffany any room to get to the Democratic Party’s left on this issue? Why not shore up your left flank by simply calling for a statewide moratorium — or at a minimum, for ending all data center tax breaks? After all, roughly three-quarters of Wisconsinites think the facilities are net harmful to the state. 

In Tiffany’s telling, the answer to these questions is simple: Crowley is a bought-off puppet of the AI industry. But this is almost certainly wrong. 

In truth, Crowley’s refusal to fully disavow data center construction likely reflects his ties to labor, not capital. 

In his attack ad, Tiffany alleges that Crowley’s campaign is funded by “the people building” data centers and then flashes this image:

Tiffany’s claim is true — but in a misleadingly literal sense: The figure cited appears to be a reference to Crowley’s support from Wisconsin’s building trades unions. As of August 13, unions representing Wisconsin electricians, pipefitters, carpenters, construction workers, and other laborers had collectively contributed $412,000 to Crowley’s campaign. The Democrat has received no comparable support from corporate PACs of any kind, much less AI industry-affiliated ones. 

The building trades are strongly supportive of data center construction — and for good reason. A data center serving OpenAI and Oracle in Port Washington, Wisconsin is being built through an explicit partnership with the Wisconsin Building Trades Council. 

Separately, the Democrat has evinced concern for municipalities that do desire data center development, saying that Wisconsin can protect its ratepayers and environment “while also not preempting communities that have done their due diligence to allow for different types of economic development investments.”

For some Wisconsin communities, the fiscal benefits of data center development can be profound. 

Consider Port Washington: In recent decades, the city’s manufacturing base shrank — and its business tax revenues declined with it. As a result, homeowners shouldered more and more of the burden of financing local government. But its new hyperscale data center promises to dramatically change its finances. According to the city’s Mayor Ted Neitzke, the project is expected to add between $1.3 and $1.8 billion in property value to a municipality whose entire existing valuation is scarcely over $1 billion. 

By doubling the tax base, the data center could finance property tax cuts or public service expansions for Port Washington residents. Many of Wisconsin’s other post-industrial towns face similar challenges — and thus, could reap similar benefits from data center development. This may be why neither Crowley nor Tiffany have felt comfortable endorsing a moratorium, despite their increasingly populist rhetoric about data centers and AI.

For most voters, data centers aren’t central

Add it up, and you have two candidates who are balancing the interests of the data center boom’s material beneficiaries against its growing political toxicity — and giving more and more weight to the latter. 

It is unclear whether data centers will remain at the forefront of governors’ race as the campaign enters its homestretch. Although hyperscale facilities are increasingly unpopular in Wisconsin, they also are not a top-tier concern for the vast majority of the state’s voters. In a July poll from Marquette Law School, only 5 percent of Wisconsin voters named “data centers” as the state’s most important issue, putting it behind inflation, “illegal immigration,” health insurance, property taxes, “jobs and the economy,” and housing affordability.

Nevertheless, the fact that Crowley and Tiffany are sparring over who dislikes data centers the most — months after both expressed positive sentiments about the facilities — shows which way the wind is blowing. 

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham countered President Donald Trump’s previous comments about who was responsible for the hacks that influenced the 2016 presidential election during his opening remarks at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Monday,saying there was “no doubt in his mind” Russians were involved,

Graham cited intelligence findings that Russian operatives tried to interfere in the election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee computer network as well as the emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

“I think every American should be concerned about what the Russians did. From my point of view, there’s no doubt in my mind it was the Russians involved in all the things I just described — not some 400-pound guy sitting on a bed, or any other country,” Graham said. “Russia is up to no good when it comes to democracies all over the world.”

Graham’s comments appeared to reference statements made by Trump during a presidential debate in September.

“I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” Trump said at the time. “You don’t know who broke into DNC.”

Trump again raised the possibility that China orchestrated the DNC hack in an interview last month, though he offered no evidence to back the allegation.

More women than men say that their interest in politics has increased since President Trump’s election, according to a new poll.

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found that 58 percent of women say they are more interested in politics since November, compared to 46 percent of men. Overall, 52 percent of Americans say their interest in politics has spiked since the election.

Trump won the election by strong support from male voters, winning men by 12 points. According to exit polls, the 2016 election was decided by the largest gender gap in recorded history.

Interest has spiked the most among Democratic women–63 percent of Democratic women say they are more attentive to politics, compared to 54 percent of Republican women. Democratic women are also most likely to say that they have gone to a political event since the election. The Women’s March–which happened the day after Trump’s inauguration in protest of the president–was likely the largest political rally in U.S. history.

Overall, Democrats are about three times as likely as Republicans to say they have been to a political gathering–22 percent compared to 7 percent.

For the majority of the country, the election of Trump is still stressful to talk about. The poll found that 59 percent of the country feels it’s “stressful and frustrating” to talk about politics with people who don’t share their opinion of Trump. More women (64 percent) than men (54 percent) feel this way.

Florida Rep. Cory Mills, the incumbent representing the state’s 7th District, lost his Republican primary on Tuesday to former TV anchor Ryan Elijah after a controversial campaign for a third term in Congress.

President Donald Trump notably gave Mills his “Complete and Total Endorsement” on Feb. 10, when he wrote a social media post describing the candidate as “an America First Patriot.” But it didn’t seem to outweigh ongoing allegations of sexual misconduct, accusations of mishandling campaign finances, and questions about his military record.

Read More: Trump Says Voters Are Angry With Republicans—But Not With Him. Here’s What Polls Show

“Whether [Mills] wants it to be or not, obviously the allegations against him have become the defining thing that people are talking about,” says Kevin Wagner, professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University.

“The president's endorsement is powerful,” he says, “but it doesn't prevent voters from making a calculation on what they think of him individually in that seat.”

The controversies that came to define Cory Mills’s campaign

Going into the primary, the latest polling showed Elijah with 44% of the vote, while 27% backed Mills and 19% remained undecided. That meant there was no assured winner heading into Tuesday, Wagner says, with the number of undecided voters suggesting a lot of “volatility” in the race.

Incumbents are often the strong frontrunners in re-election campaigns for Congress, but Mills has been embroiled in a string of scandals in the past year. Last October, there was a court-issued injunction against him after a former girlfriend accused Mills of threatening to release explicit videos of her. The judge found that the woman in question, Lindsay Langston, provided evidence in support of her claim that Mills caused "substantial emotional distress." He wrote in his ruling that he did not find Mills's "testimony concerning the intimate videos to be truthful." In a separate incident in February 2025, D.C. police responded to a report that Mills had assaulted a woman with whom he was in a relationship. The woman later retracted her account, according to Politico, and police did not charge Mills.

In November 2025, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Mills. Its review included allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as allegations that he may have "omitted or misrepresented required information in his financial disclosure statements." The Committee emphasized that the investigation itself did not indicate that any violation had occurred, and Mills has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Mills's military record also came under scrutiny when several veterans disputed the account provided in his recommendation for a Bronze Star, which he was awarded in 2021 for his actions in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. In 2025, five individuals who served with him claimed that they did not recall his presence at the incidents for which he was awarded the medal. According to NOTUS, Mills attributed the discrepancies to differing recollections amid the chaos of wartime.

His campaign was hurt further this month after two of his fellow incumbent lawmakers in the state, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos, endorsed Elijah. Then, last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters that he does not support Mills.

“I have not endorsed Cory Mills and I do not support Cory Mills,” he said.

Trump also appeared to distance himself last week when he reposted endorsements for all of the Republicans up for election in Congress on Truth Social—except Mills.

What to know about Florida’s 7th District race in November

While the 7th District will likely stay red in November, attention is turning to how Florida’s redrawn congressional map could reshape its midterm races.

The new map, signed into law by DeSantis in May 2026, redrew 21 of the state’s 28 districts, looking to reduce the number of Democratic-leaning districts from eight to four—affecting Democratic incumbents like Kathy Castor in Tampa, as well as Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Mokowitz in South Florida.

While District 7 was not radically redrawn, Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, says that since this new map favors Republicans, flipping the 7th District could help offset any losses elsewhere in the state.

Elijah will go up against Democratic candidate and military veteran Bale Dalton in November, who is endorsed by Pete Buttigieg. Jewett says Dalton could be a viable candidate.

And if Dalton were to win, he says: “That might help not only the Florida congressional delegation pick up a Democratic seat, but of course, yeah, maybe at the national level, might offset some of these losses that they're expecting.”

Current polling and election forecasts show that Democrats are favored to take back the majority in the House of Representatives in November, which would be consistent with an existing pattern where the sitting President’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the country’s worst primary came to be

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: The Trump administration is trying to open up more public lands to logging, 

What’s happening? On Tuesday, the administration filed a proposal to repeal the “roadless rule,” a 2001 regulation protecting nearly 45 million acres of national forests not just from having roads built through them, but from logging. 

The majority of the forests that would be affected fall in 10 Western states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, while two — Colorado and Idaho — have their own state-level roadless protections.

The next step in the rulemaking process is a 30-day public comment period, after which the repeal can be finalized — though it’s likely to face legal challenges that could delay implementation. 

Why is the Trump administration doing this? According to the Agriculture Department, the change is intended to reduce the “regulatory burden” and return decisions about forest management to a more local level; the US Forest Service and some Republican governors in affected states have pointed to fire management concerns and the need to clear out accumulated fuel in forests. 

As Wall Street Journal reporter Robbie Gramer pointed out, however, only a tiny fraction of wildfires start in roadless areas of national forests (unsurprisingly, given the relative lack of people). 

Why are public lands advocates alarmed? Opponents of the repeal say ending the rule could irreversibly damage some of America’s most pristine forests and cause a long list of environmental harms. They have good reason to be wary: In 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the “immediate expansion” of timber production in the US, including a 25 percent increase in logging in federal forests.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The Smithsonian National Zoo is welcoming three new red panda cubs, who were born earlier this summer. According to the zoo, right now, the cubs are “really just balls of fur that eat and sleep.” But they’re also pretty dang cute, and the zoo shared some photos here. Enjoy, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

CNN condemned the White House for launching personal attacks on one of the network’s journalists.

“Kristen Holmes is one of the most respected and accomplished journalists covering the White House,” CNN said of its senior White House correspondent in a statement shared on X on Monday. “This afternoon, she did her job and asked the President of the United States a tough, relevant, and newsworthy question on behalf of the American people.”

“Public officials are free to challenge reporting they disagree with, but personal attacks on journalists for asking questions are beneath the office and inconsistent with the principles of a free press,” CNN continued. “We stand firmly behind Kristen and reject these attacks in the strongest possible terms.”

The network’s rebuke came after a question that Holmes asked President Donald Trump during an Oval Office event on Monday drew a heated response from Trump and, later, a series of critical posts from the White House targeting the journalist.

“Jon Ossoff said that you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as President,” Holmes asked the President, referring to a comment the Democratic Georgia Senator made during a speech the day before. “What is your response?”

“You mean Pee-wee Herman? Pee-wee Herman lookalike?” Trump replied. “No, I would much rather do other things. We’re building a great facility here. We’re fixing a White House that hasn’t been taken care of.”

The event in the Oval Office celebrated a teenage lifeguard who rescued a 10-year-old boy at a beach in Santa Cruz, California, in July. But it is common practice for journalists present at events like this to ask the President questions about a variety of issues.

Later on during the event, Holmes tried to ask the President another question, this time about whether North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un had asked him to “scale back” American military exercises with South Korea. Trump didn’t answer her, instead telling her “quiet.”

“You’re very disrespectful,” Trump said to Holmes. “Quiet.”

He then asked Holmes which news outlet she was with, to which she replied that she was with CNN.

“Fake news,” he shot back. “You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news.”

As Holmes tried to ask her question again, Trump repeatedly said: “Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet.”

“You’re a fake reporter and you report fake news,” he said to Holmes.

Tensions further rose after the official White House Rapid Response account on X shared a clip of Holmes asking Trump about Ossoff’s remarks and called Holmes “a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

“@POTUS hosts a hero lifeguard in the Oval Office and she uses it as an opportunity to take a cheap shot about one of President Trump’s staffers,” the White House continued. “These scumbags are the lowest of the low.”

Less than an hour later, the account made another post attacking Holmes.

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the White House said, tagging Holmes in the post. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

In addition to CNN’s official statement, many of Holmes’ colleagues fired back at the White House for its remarks. 

“What a horrible … thing to say. Kristen is an incredible reporter, person and, above all, mother,” Alayna Treene, a White House correspondent at CNN, said in a post on X. “I don’t understand such a reaction to a journalist asking the president for his response to something a Democratic senator has leveled against him.”

“Kristen is an excellent reporter who asked a good question, to which the president gave a fulsome answer,” Betsy Klein, a senior reporter and writer covering the White House for CNN, said in a social media post. “You know what’s disgusting and inhumane? Bringing her perfect children into this.”

Trump has repeatedly targeted news outlets and individual journalists throughout his political career. He has attacked female journalists in particular on a number of occasions; in November, for instance, he told one female reporter “quiet, piggy” after she asked him a question and, on a separate occasion later that month, called another “a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.”

The President propagated the term “Fake News” to denigrate the press, and members of his Administrations have continued to use the phrase in the years since. The White House has also created what it calls a “Media Bias Portal,” which lists journalists, news outlets, and articles that it claims are biased against the President. Several CNN stories, including some by Holmes, are listed on the site.

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. Let’s get into it.

One Big Idea: The electability conversation we should be having

Here’s something you wouldn’t know from most of the coverage of this year’s midterm elections: The biggest electability problem belongs to President Donald Trump and the Republicans. 

GOP candidates in the midterm elections must contend with defending an unpopular president leading an unpopular war, not to mention $4 gas (if they’re lucky). The administration has upset its own base at various moments — first tariffs, then the release of the Epstein files, now a worsening war — and the party has followed Trump into backing scandal-plagued candidates in the general election, including Ken Paxton in Texas and Max Miller in Ohio. To top things off, more than six years after the January 6 insurrection, any Republican who wants to remain in the president’s good standing cannot acknowledge the fact that he lost the 2020 election, an issue that helped cost the party major races in 2022 and could still bite in 2026. 

Tom Tiffany, the Republican Senate candidate in Wisconsin, has stood side by side with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote about recently. Just this weekend, Tiffany said he did not regret his efforts at all, even after events like the Jan. 6 insurrection. And Trump has done nothing to help candidates move past these concerns; his pardons for January 6 defendants and (so-far failed) attempts at creating a government fund for payouts have kept the issue fresh.

Yet still, the focus of Politics World (and to some extent this Substack) has often been the story that’s more dynamic: the changing nature of the Democratic Party. In doing so, “electability” has become synonymous with the ideological battle between moderates and progressives, and specifically the idea that left-wing candidates, in particular, are electoral underperformers.  

Take the latest edition of the New York Times political newsletter by chief polling correspondent Nate Cohn, which asks, “Could El-Sayed Cost Democrats Michigan?”

These candidates of the activist left often seem to fare much worse than mainstream progressives, even though they may not be very different on the issues. The members of Justice Democrats, which includes the Squad and many of their congressional allies, fare about five points worse than other Democrats. Elizabeth Warren, who might count as part of that broader group of activist-backed progressives who aren’t democratic socialist, has underperformed the Democratic baseline in Massachusetts by as much as 10 points on net.

On one hand, Cohn’s point is real — there is a trend of electoral underperformance among the most activist progressives worth analyzing. But the sample size is small (there are only nine members of Justice Democrats) and there are some complicating factors — mainly that the most progressive candidates often compete in uber-blue areas, so their organizing efforts are more focused on the primary than the general. 

There is also the reality of identity: Candidates of the left are often from a marginalized background — a woman, a person of color, maybe even both — and while the piece doesn’t mention the reality of things like racism, sexism, and (especially lately) Islamophobia, I’d argue that it’s a force multiplier in these conversations about progressive electability. What was Andrew Cuomo’s closing message against Zohran Mamdani if not dripping in Islamophobia? Prominent “Squad” members like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib continuously face even uglier rhetoric and conspiracy theories, and few politicians in America get more gendered attacks than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Would Democrats have been so willing to discard Francesca Hong as unserious if she weren’t a woman?  

These are ultimately questions batted around between political insiders that will be resolved in November, but the conversation also does the work of flattening just how unpopular Trump’s second-term MAGA agenda has been. That Democrats have a shot at retaking the House — much less the Senate — seemed far from certain in early 2025, considering the tough election map and partisan gerrymandering advantages. The president has upended the landscape through his sheer unwillingness to moderate, and there are no signs he’s hit his electoral floor. 

As we turn to November, it’s important for political coverage to reflect the main character of these elections (Trump). The president’s drag on electability should be front and center, with Republican candidates pressed about the administration’s actual policy at least as much as Democrats have been asked about Zohran Mamdani or Hasan Piker. Whichever party wins control of Congress, Trump will have far more power come January 2027 than any of the Democratic factions we’re discussing.

This is not to say we should “ignore the polls” — Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and voter discontent with issues like Iran and inflation are also derived from surveys, after all. But, as we saw in some surprising results in primaries this month in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, the polling side of the midterms should also not be treated as predictive gospel — and that goes double for platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket that have become integrated into mainstream media coverage and narrative-setting platforms like X. I’d also add that only bettors care about the spread — to most voters, who won is all that matters. 

Cohn and other top polling analysts like Nate Silver acknowledge the limits of predictive certainty in their writing, of course, and discuss Trump as well. But I do worry whether focusing on these kinds of small-bore distinctions between candidates risks getting ahead of things, especially after the primaries — a time when voters do consider electability as a factor — are over. 

It reminds me a bit of 2016, when the poll-driven anticipation of a Hillary Clinton victory pushed political coverage beyond the actual questions facing the public at the moment. That year, it sometimes felt like the press wanted a head start on holding Future President Hillary accountable, which presented a false balance between her inconsistencies and Trump’s overt extremism that — in my opinion — helped change the expected result in the process. 

This November, there’s a risk of repeating the same cycle. And in overfocusing on the supposed unelectability of the progressive left, we underplay the central story of this midterms: the massive delta between the actions of this administration and the voting public, and whether Republicans can either find a way to reframe that agenda or push Americans to weigh other issues instead. That’s what this election will be about. 

Last month, I was re-reminded of all this after reporting for a recent episode on gas prices for America, Actually. We stood outside of a Speedway in Allentown, Pennsylvania  — the heart of the state’s Seventh Congressional District, a key battleground in the midterms — and asked people about the most important issues for them heading into the general election. There, it was clear that people were mostly wrestling with their own financial struggles, but also their feelings about Trump, and the gap between his promised priorities on the campaign trail and the current reality. 

“I voted for him with his promises to the American people. And I think he’s let us down,” one Allen voter told me in our episode. I asked what the biggest broken promise was. “The prices…it’s skyrocketed. … My main objective is a roof over our head, pay our bills, and then what’s left? There’s hardly anything left.”

So consider this a coverage corrective. I have tracked the changes within the Democratic Party in our election coverage (and will continue to!), but I think this portion of the calendar requires us to update our language. The most toxic and consequential bromance in politics isn’t between a mayor and a Twitch streamer — it’s between the president and the party he’s reshaped in his image. 

What I’m hearing

This week, we’re back in Michigan! I asked a few questions to Orlando Bailey, executive director at Outlier Media, the Detroit-based newsroom that focuses on finding innovative stories in Black communities and beyond. ​​He is also the co-founder of the award-winning podcast, Authentically Detroit, and a regular contributor to WDIV-TV and Detroit PBS. 

Abdul El-Sayed will likely be the most-watched Senate race in the country this fall, after he survived a bruising primary against Haley Stevens. What’s one thing about that campaign you’ve seen on the ground that’s been less visible in the national coverage? 

The national conversation has largely focused on two fronts: first, trying to understand and define the values of the Democratic Socialists of America while assigning El-Sayed to that wing of the Democratic Party — a label he rejects, noting that he considers himself a “capitalist.” Second, his call for the United States to stop funding weapons for Israel in its current conflict with Hamas, a position that has also been incorrectly conflated with holding antisemitic views. 

What has been less visible in the coverage I’ve seen on the ground is the multiracial, multigenerational progressive coalition across the state that is supporting El-Sayed because they feel aligned with his message. I was on the west side of the state in Saugatuck, and my waitress was wearing an Abdul for Senate button. That surprised me because Allegan County tends to be more conservative. His lawn signs were everywhere, too. His message is connecting in ways I didn’t expect, and in places I didn’t expect.   

Part of the reason the margins were closer than expected is that progressive candidates still seem to lag behind moderate Democrats in Black communities. Why do you think some Black Democrats preferred Stevens to El-Sayed — and can he improve with those voters ahead of the general? 

I always take polls with a grain of salt, of course. I knew he wasn’t going to win the primary by double digits based on what I had been watching play out on the ground and online. El-Sayed actually lost Detroit to Stevens. I want to draw a distinction between Detroit’s large Black population and the Black electorate — the two are not synonymous. Black voters are still holding his feet to the fire over his participation in the Uncommitted movement during the last Democratic presidential primary, although he eventually came around to support Vice President Harris’ bid for office. Harris also endorsed him [after] the most recent primary.

There’s another issue, and I’ll say the quiet part out loud: There is a fraught relationship between Black communities and Arab American communities in southeastern Michigan. There is a history of conflict and mistrust between the two. Arab Americans own many of the commercial establishments that Black residents frequent, and tensions can reach a boiling point when people feel surveilled, cheated, or otherwise mistreated. Those tensions have, at times, escalated into violence, including incidents involving gas stations. El-Sayed is now being forced to have that hard conversation. He will also have to localize his policy priorities and explain plainly to people who are struggling how his agenda will affect their bottom lines.

I’ve found the Donavan McKinney race interesting. He’s a Black candidate near Detroit associated with DSA, and he’s maybe flown under the national radar. Tell me about McKinney and his race? 

McKinney started as a community organizer on Detroit’s east side, which is where I’m from. He was elected to the state House in November 2024 and has aligned himself with the progressive caucus in Lansing. He regularly holds town halls in his district and shows up when residents and advocates call on him. 

A little bit of history: Charles Diggs was first elected to Congress in 1954, and until Shri Thanedar’s election in 2022 — after the independent redistricting commission redrew the congressional maps — Detroit had always had Black representation in Congress. Since then, there has been a longing for Black representation to return to Detroit, and McKinney proved to be the right candidate at the right time. What’s interesting is that he and El-Sayed agree on a lot, but El-Sayed didn’t win Detroit. 

The question of whether President Donald Trump may, without seeking permission from Congress, demolish much of the White House and replace it with his own projects is now before the Supreme Court. 

Last fall, construction crews acting under Trump’s orders abruptly tore down the East Wing of the White House, the first step in Trump’s plan to replace the historic building with an enormous ballroom. A conservationist organization, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, soon sued to stop the construction on the ballroom in a case that is still ongoing. Lower courts have thus far agreed with this plaintiff that the ballroom is illegal. 

Last week, Trump formally asked the justices to greenlight his ballroom while the challenge works its way through lower courts. The case is known as National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

Trump’s claim that he may tear down large sections of the White House and replace them with the ballroom is not supported by law. A federal statute provides that “a building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” Although Trump’s lawyers claimed that two separate statutes allow him to get around this provision, the federal appeals court that heard National Park Service thoroughly dismantled that claim in a 101-page opinion. 

That said, the Court could potentially hand Trump a victory by prohibiting anyone from bringing a lawsuit against his ballroom to begin with. Should this argument succeed, it could have major ramifications for a wide range of laws that seek to conserve environmental resources or preserve sacred or historical sites. 

Under current law, a plaintiff who alleges that a defendant’s actions will illegally damage such a site may file a federal lawsuit so long as they can demonstrate that they plan to visit the site in the near future and will find the site less attractive if it is altered. This is exactly what happened in National Park Service: A member of a conservationist group — the National Trust for Historic Preservation — who often went by the White House said the new construction would diminish the beauty of the site.

More broadly, the Court has long held that plaintiffs who wish to observe something beautiful may often sue to enforce environmental statutes that seek to preserve that beauty. As the Court said in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), a seminal case that is often cited because it laid out limits on who is allowed to bring federal lawsuits, “the desire to use or observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes, is undeniably a cognizable interest” that can be asserted in federal court.

Trump’s brief, however, rejects this longstanding rule. Without it, numerous environmental, conservationist, and historical preservation laws could effectively cease to function, because no one would be able to file a lawsuit enforcing them.

The stakes in National Park Service, in other words, are far greater than whether Trump can replace the East Wing with an eyesore. And they are even greater than the question of whether Trump can remake one of America’s most cherished landmarks without congressional authorization. If Trump prevails in National Park Service, he could fundamentally wound America’s environmental protection regime in the process.

Trump’s ballroom is illegal

Recall that federal law bars new construction on federal lands within the District of Columbia “without express authority of Congress.” So, unless there is some existing statute that allows Trump’s ballroom to move forward, the ballroom is illegal.

But Trump cited no such law in his brief. Instead, he relied on two statutes that might be read to authorize parts of what Trump needs permission to do.

The first is a provision that permits Congress to appropriate money that the president may use to pay for “the care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting (including electric power and fixtures) of the Executive Residence at the White House.” But, as the appeals court that ruled against Trump explained, there are numerous reasons why this statute cannot be read to permit the ballroom. 

The most straightforward reason is that Congress only gave the president a $2.475 million budget to spend under this statute. But Trump’s lawyers claimed this project will be funded by “approximately $400 million in private donations.” So, even if Trump’s ballroom counts as an “alteration” or “improvement” of the existing “Executive Residence at the White House” — and all three of these points are contested — Trump cannot use his White House maintenance budget to fund a $400 million project.

To get around this problem, Trump’s lawyers argued that the National Park Service is allowed to accept private donations, so it can use donated money to build the ballroom.

But, while it is true that the Park Service may accept donated funds, that doesn’t mean that it can use these funds to tear down an historic federal building and replace it with something completely different. The relevant federal law permits the Park Service to “promote and regulate the use of the National Park System by means and measures that conform to the fundamental purpose of the System units, which purpose is to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wild life in the System units and to provide for the enjoyment of the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wild life in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

This law could not be clearer that it calls on the Park Service to “conserve” historic objects such as the East Wing and to leave them “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” So, if anything, this law prohibits Trump from using Park Service funds to build his ballroom. Tearing down an historical structure and replacing it with a different, much larger, and architecturally distinct structure is the opposite of conservation.

Still, there’s one big reason why Trump’s argument might win over the justices anyway. According to Trump’s brief in the case, the ballroom will sit on top of an enormous bunker that extends five stories underground and that includes “bomb shelters,” “secret military structures and equipment,” and “state of the art hospital and medical facilities.” The lower courts have already permitted construction on this bunker to continue; its legality isn’t before the justices. 

Trump’s lawyers’ attempt to characterize the ballroom as part of what their brief calls an “integrated military complex” is savvy, as the courts often defer to the other branches on questions of national security. And Trump’s Justice Department also makes an argument that plausibly could persuade this Supreme Court to rule in Trump’s favor despite the fact that the ballroom has no legal support. 

The most significant legal issue in National Park Service is whether anyone is allowed to sue in order to challenge the ballroom

As a general rule, no one is allowed to file a federal lawsuit unless they have been injured in some way by the defendant that they are suing; this requirement is known as “standing.” But the Court has long held that plaintiffs may challenge illegal practices that might alter the aesthetic beauty of a site that is protected by law. As the Court said in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (2000), “environmental plaintiffs adequately allege injury in fact when they aver that they use the affected area and are persons ‘for whom the aesthetic and recreational values of the area will be lessened’ by the challenged activity.’”

Friends of the Earth does not permit literally anyone to challenge any alteration to protected lands or buildings. Such a plaintiff only has standing if they can show that they will visit the site at issue in their lawsuit and that the planned alterations to that site will actually reduce their aesthetic enjoyment of it — but that’s enough.

The plaintiff in National Park Service is a conservationist organization whose members include a professor emerita of architectural history who said that she travels “to the White House neighborhood frequently”; that she “regularly view[s] the White House”; and that she believes that Trump’s proposed ballroom would render the White House less attractive because it would “diminish the primacy of the White House,” because “no longer would the eye be drawn to the jewel of the building at the center,” aka the residential section of the White House complex.

Thus, because organizations are typically allowed to sue on behalf of their members, this conservationist group has standing. They have at least one member who clears the low bar the Court set in Friends of the Earth.

Trump’s brief, however, dismissed this “seeing-is-standing theory,” claiming that the professor’s mere discomfort, produced by “‘observation of conduct” that she disagreed with is “not an injury sufficient to confer standing.” Trump, in other words, is effectively asking the Court to overrule Friends of the Earth, along with many other cases establishing that plaintiffs may often sue over aesthetic injuries.

If that gambit succeeds, the consequences for conservationist laws of all kinds would likely be catastrophic. As the appeals court explained, Trump’s “cramped standing theory would deem no one injured by a decision to raze the Statue of Liberty, to obscure the names on the Vietnam War Memorial, or to install a political billboard atop Mount Rushmore.” It could also prevent private lawsuits against a company that dumps foul-smelling chemicals in a national park.

The whole point of many environmental and historical preservation laws is to ensure that something that Congress believes is beautiful will remain beautiful. If no plaintiff can assert an aesthetic injury, that means that laws intended to preserve pristine, sacred, or historical sites will go unenforced — and may become completely unenforceable.

So, the stakes in National Park Service are quite high. While Trump’s statutory arguments are meritless, this case is potentially an existential threat to numerous environmental laws. The question is whether the justices will be persuaded by some combination of Trump’s attacks on Friends of the Earth and his allusions to national security to upend many decades of established law.

The Republican Party’s supermajority on the Supreme Court was barely a month old when the justices handed down one of the most consequential religion decisions of the last several decades. It was Amy Coney Barrett’s first significant vote as a justice.

The issue in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020) was whether churches and other houses of worship were exempt from Covid-era restrictions on attendance. At the height of the pandemic, New York imposed strict limits on how many people could attend worship services at the same time — a rule that steered straight into the emerging partisan divide over whether pandemic restrictions had gone too far — although these restrictions were actually less stringent than the rules imposed on similar secular venues like theaters and lecture halls. 

Just months earlier, a 5-4 Court had upheld similar restrictions in California, with Republican Chief Justice John Roberts joining the Court’s Democrats. Although Roberts typically votes with his fellow Republicans in religion cases, he worried that the judiciary “lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health” and decide life or death matters like how to halt the spread of Covid. The Court’s other four Republicans dissented, but this was before Barrett joined the Court, so they were still in the minority.

But the new majority’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese rejected this restrained approach, and the decision fundamentally shifted the Court’s approach to lawsuits seeking religious exemptions from state laws. Before Republicans gained their supermajority on the Court, the justices gave states a fair amount of leeway to navigate the fraught political questions that arise when someone exercises their faith in a way that can harm other people, or limit their legal rights. 

But now the justices typically make these calls themselves, and they usually do so in favor of religious conservatives. As a result, under the current Supreme Court, one of the Constitution’s most difficult balancing acts — the task of weighing when one person’s religious beliefs should overcome another person’s freedoms — has toppled over on the side of religious individuals and groups, often allowing them to violate the freedoms of others. This is especially true when lawsuits pit religious conservatives against people exercising sexual freedoms such as the right to use birth control or to marry a person of the same sex.

Prior to Roman Catholic Diocese, the rule was that religious institutions must comply with state law, so long as the state does not single people of faith out for inferior treatment. If a state closed all venues where people gather in auditorium-like settings, that was considered constitutional, even though some of those venues are churches. The courts would only get involved if a state tried to, say, close mosques but not movie theaters.

But Roman Catholic Diocese effectively ended that regime. The new majority held that churches may only be subject to the least restrictive rules that apply to any secular business, even if that business bears little resemblance to a house of worship. Indeed, Roman Catholic Diocese indicated that churches must be treated the same as outdoor facilities like “camp grounds” or “garages” where the risk of transmission, compared to a church, was minimal.

It was a clear sign of where the Court’s new majority wanted to take its religion cases. Under this majority, lawsuits brought by plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions from the law have largely been used to resolve cultural disputes between Democratic and Republican constituencies in favor of the latter. 

This Court’s religion cases, in other words, fit a pattern that is also found in its decisions on topics as diverse as voting rights, abortion, race, and the question of whether President Donald Trump is subject to US law. The Republican justices seek to advance policy goals that are popular within their political party and unpopular among Democrats, and they aren’t afraid to overrule a wide range of foundational Supreme Court precedents in order to do so.

More broadly, the Court’s new approach to religion threatens to disrupt public schools’ ability to operate, undercut many anti-discrimination laws, and potentially turn every future conflict between cultural liberals and the religious right into a constitutional case that must be resolved by the Supreme Court.

Conflicts between religious and secular visions of America are inevitable under the Constitution

Many of the Supreme Court’s religion cases are driven by two separate clauses in the Constitution that often pull in opposing directions. The First Amendment contains two provisions governing religion, the clause protecting “free exercise” of faith, and a clause prohibiting the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” The first provision guarantees everyone the right to practice their faith, while the latter was historically understood to prohibit the government from trying to advance a particular religious belief.

As the Supreme Court said in 1971, there is an “internal tension” between these two provisions — in part because it is inevitable that the government will make decisions that conflict with many people’s sincere religious beliefs. Taxes fund wars that many Americans believe are sinful. Public schools teach values that may be at odds with what their students hear in their temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques. Not long after Congress prohibited racial discrimination by restaurants in 1964, the owner of a South Carolina barbecue joint claimed that he could not comply because serving Black people violated his white supremacist religion (he lost in the Supreme Court).

Before Roberts was crowned as leader of America’s judiciary, the Court often resolved this tension by deferring to democratically elected officials. The Court permitted states to subsidize religious schools, but did not require it. It gave people who object to laws on religious grounds some exemptions from those laws, but did not allow these exemptions to give religious business owners an unfair advantage against their competitors. As the Court said in Locke v. Davey (2004), there must be some “play in the joints” between the competing values espoused by the Constitution’s two religion clauses.

But the current Court, which often seeks to centralize power within itself, has pushed hard to take away states’ ability to resolve some of these tensions, and instead resolves them itself. Under the old regime, blue states would sometimes operate their schools, or otherwise conduct their affairs, in ways that upset religious conservatives. And that was okay because that’s how things work in a multistate democracy.

This Court’s religion policies are both anti-federalist and anti-democratic. They restrict Colorado’s ability to bar anti-LGBTQ discrimination by religious business owners, and they force Maine to fund religious schools that label gay people “deviants” and “perverted.” These policies seek to impose a red-state vision on all 50 states, and, in some cases, they may go even further than that — requiring the government to subsidize religion in ways that even very conservative states reject. 

The Republican justices, in other words, have taken two vague constitutional provisions that espouse sometimes-conflicting values, and that reasonably can be read in many ways, and used them to impose their own values on the entire nation. The primary effects of these decisions are twofold: This Court often elevates religious freedom over other kinds of freedom, and it is rapidly tearing down the wall between church and state.

Religious freedom vs. others’ rights: The tug-of-war over the free exercise clause

The 20th-century Court cases that laid the groundwork for many modern debates over the Constitution’s free exercise clause are a bit of a muddle. 

In the 1960s, the Court used expansive language to describe the scope of this clause, and how easy it should be for religious plaintiffs to seek exemptions from complying with the law. Sherbert v. Verner (1963) held that laws that burden someone’s faith must “be justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State’s constitutional power to regulate.’” As any law student who has passed their first semester of constitutional law will recognize, this “compelling state interest” language is associated with a legal test known as “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding standard that courts apply in constitutional cases. Thus, Sherbert seemed to hold that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption from a state or federal law should receive one.

But the Court soon grew uncomfortable with the implications of this broad language — should people who claim that God does not want them to pay taxes, for example, really be exempt from the obligation to do so? — and began to place limits on who could get exemptions. 

The Court has ruled at least three times in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.

The expansive and easily available religious exemptions that Sherbert seemed to call for never actually came about. A 1992 study by legal scholar James Ryan found that federal appeals courts heard 97 free exercise of religion cases that applied Sherbert’s compelling interest test between 1980 and 1990, and they rejected 85 of those cases. 

In United States v. Lee (1982), the Supreme Court rejected an employer’s demand for a religious exemption from paying Social Security taxes. And, in Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), it ruled against a religious cult whose members worked in commercial businesses for no pay — the cult claimed that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws.

Both decisions were animated by a concern that a too-expansive reading of Sherbert would allow businesses that claimed religious exemptions to gain unfair advantages over their competitors. As the Court held in Lee, “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

But then the Supreme Court went too far. 

In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the objectors were two Native American men who lost their jobs and were denied employment benefits by the state of Oregon, because they used the drug peyote during a religious ceremony. The Court said that no one was exempt from any law so long as it applied equally to religious and nonreligious people alike.

The decision triggered instant backlash, with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) warning that Smith could lead to the government controlling “the selection of priests and ministers” and barring “the use of wine in communion service.” It’s likely that Smith was so widely disliked because the justices picked the worst possible case to put their foot down against religious objectors. The two men’s participation in a religious ritual did not injure anyone else. And the Court’s suggestion that the government may ban Native American religious practices smacked of colonialism.

Congress attempted, semi-successfully, to overrule that case when it enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). 

RFRA sought to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert … and Wisconsin v. Yoder,” a 1972 case establishing that Amish communities may educate their own teenage children instead of sending them to public high schools. The law, in other words, was intended to be a reset button, returning to the pre-Smith status quo when plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions were more likely to prevail.

But achieving that goal required answering a difficult question: What did the Religious Freedom Restoration Act actually seek to restore? Was it the expansive reading of Sherbert that courts never actually implemented — ie., that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption should get one — or the actual practice that existed prior to Smith, which was far more restrained?

By the time Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) reached the justices, the two major political parties both had divergent answers to this question. That case asked whether employers who object to contraception on religious grounds could refuse to provide their employees with health plans that cover birth control — despite a federal regulation establishing that these workers had a right to contraceptive coverage. The central question in Hobby Lobby, in other words, was whether one person’s religion may be invoked to diminish another person’s rights.

Most of the justices, the ones appointed by Republican presidents, answered this question with a resounding “yes.” 

Dissenting in Hobby Lobby, Democratic Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out her political party’s concern that one person’s rights should not be used to diminish another’s. She rejected the view that “RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith.” 

But there were five Republicans and only four Democrats on the Court when Hobby Lobby was decided, so Ginsburg’s view did not prevail. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion says that RFRA imposes an “exceptionally demanding” burden on the government when it wishes to enforce a law against a religious objector, and it ruled that a federal regulation requiring employers to offer contraceptive care in their health plans does not overcome this burden.

Yet even Alito seemed to recoil at the most expansive reading of Sherbert. His opinion concedes that “allowing tax-payers to withhold a portion of their tax obligations on religious grounds would lead to chaos.” So at least some aspects of Lee, the decision holding that private businesses must follow the same laws as their competitors, remain good law. 

After Hobby Lobby, the Republican Party’s position appears to be that religious objections trump laws that embrace a more liberal view of sexuality, or that otherwise resolve cultural conflicts between Democratic and Republican constituencies, but people of faith may not claim an exemption from literally every single law. At the very least, everyone still has to pay taxes.

Since Hobby Lobby, this agenda has come to define the Court’s religious liberty cases, including a number of recent ones that limit state governments’ ability to navigate political conflicts between religious conservatives and gay or trans people. While these cases are technically distinct from Hobby Lobby because RFRA only benefits plaintiffs who object to federal (that is, not state) laws, they also track the result in Hobby Lobby. 

The Court has ruled at least three times, for example, in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.

The Roberts Court, in other words, inherited a muddled mess of precedents governing when religious objectors may seek exemptions from the law, and much of this area of the law remains fairly muddled. Thus far, for example, this Court has not revealed whether it wishes to overrule cases like Alamo Foundation, that protect the rights of workers — though when it took up a case in 2025 that could have called Alamo Foundation into question, the Court did not do so.

But one bit of clarity that the current Court has provided is that, when the interests of religious conservatives conflict with the interests of queer people, queer people lose.

The Roberts Court has used education cases to tear down the wall separating church and state

Many of the Court’s cases involving religion in public schools also empower religious conservatives in cultural fights against LGBTQ Americans. In Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), for example, the Republican majority held that religious parents who object to books with gay or trans characters must be allowed to opt their children out of lessons that use such books. And, in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), the Republican justices appeared to hold that the Constitution requires public school teachers to out trans students to their parents, even if those students ask the teachers to keep their gender identity a secret.

But this Court has also advanced another project concerning religion, particularly in its cases about religion and education — dismantling the very idea that church and state must be separated. 

The First Amendment’s establishment clause — which prohibits the government from making any law establishing a religion — was long understood to require a degree of separation between government and religion. The Roberts Court hasn’t simply abandoned this reading of the establishment clause; it’s indicated that the very idea of separation between church and state is unconstitutional.

For much of the 20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the wall separating church and state was quite high. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), for example, the Court declared that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” 

The Court abandoned this approach nearly a quarter century ago, in its 5-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). But Zelman merely held that states could offer vouchers that can pay for tuition at private religious schools if they want to, not that they were required to do so.

One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive. 

Similarly, before Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Court in 2005, the Court generally insisted that public schools must remain neutral on religion. When schools promote a religious view, according to Lee v. Weisman (1992), that places “subtle and indirect” pressure on students to conform to that view, and leaves the student with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”

Yet, while Lee was consistent with mid-20th-century precedents regarding religion in schools, the consensus favoring government neutrality on religion was already fading by the early 1990s. Lee was a 5-4 decision, and its author, the moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, often argued that his more liberal colleagues read the establishment clause too expansively. Three years before Lee, for example, Kennedy dissented from a decision barring a county from displaying a Nativity scene in its courthouse. This decision, Kennedy wrote, “reflects an unjustified hostility toward religion.”

This idea — that government neutrality toward religion is itself a form of hostility against people of faith — could often be found in conservative critiques of the Court’s establishment clause decisions from this era. In a 1989 essay that foreshadowed many of the Roberts Court’s later decisions, legal scholar (and future federal judge) Michael McConnell made the then-audacious argument that the Constitution requires the government to subsidize religious schools.

The idea is that states typically tax all of their residents to pay for public schooling, but only some children actually attend these schools. Other families choose to pay out of their own pockets for private religious education, while still other families would prefer to send their children to a religious school but cannot afford it. This familiar system, where public schools are available to everyone and private schools are only available to people who can pay the tuition, McConnell claimed, is a form of discrimination against religious people. 

“That some parents wish their children to receive education in a religious environment should not deprive them of their fair share of the public resources devoted to education,” McConnell wrote. They pay the same taxes as families who send their kids to public schools. And so, McConnell argued, these religious families should be allowed to use that tax revenue to pay for their child’s private religious education.

Something close to the vision McConnell laid out in this 1989 essay is now the law. The seminal case is Carson v. Makin (2022), which involved a Maine program that provides private school vouchers for students in sparsely populated areas where it is not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school.

Maine law provides that these vouchers may only be used at “nonsectarian” schools, and not religious ones. But, according to Roberts’s majority opinion in the decision, a system that “pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious” is “discrimination against religion.” Carson, in other words, turns the old rule from Everson on its head. What was once forbidden is now mandated.

More broadly, the Court’s Republicans have ground the establishment clause down to such a tiny nub that little of it remains. For many years, the Court read that clause to forbid the government from advancing a particular religious view, but the Court overruled the older cases prohibiting government endorsements of religion in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), and they replaced them with something much narrower. Under this Court’s new test, the government can only violate the establishment clause by making “a religious observance compulsory” or otherwise coercing nonbelievers to engage in a “formal religious exercise.”

So the government cannot arrest you if you skip church services. Nor can a government official hold a gun to your head and force you to declare that Jesus is your personal lord and savior. But it is not clear that, under this Court’s approach to the establishment clause, anything else is forbidden. One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court — indeed, under cases like Carson, it is now required in many states — is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive. 

A plaintiff in Carson, according to Maine’s brief in that case, wanted the state to pay for tuition at a school that requires teachers to sign a statement agreeing that “God recognize[s] homosexuals and other deviants as perverted.” Previous federal court cases involved schools that teach girls they have a religious obligation to be subservient to their future husbands, or that prohibited Black students from having romantic relationships with white students. Under the Roberts Court’s new rules, taxpayers who find these views abhorrent — or who may even object to them on religious grounds — must nonetheless pay for tuition at schools that teach these values.

McConnell criticized the old regime for taxing religious parents to pay for secular education they find objectionable, but the converse is also true about the current regime — it taxes secular parents to pay for religious education that many Americans also find objectionable.

One nationwide solution

The unfortunate reality is that, in a pluralistic society, it is impossible to come up with a legal regime that won’t impose obligations on anyone that they object to on religious grounds. If a nation taxes citizens, some of them will object to how that money is spent. If it provides public schools, some families will object to the values taught in those schools. And if it changes which values are taught, some other families will object to the new lessons. 

The Roberts Court’s solution to these inevitable conflicts has largely been to resolve them in ways that favor members of the Republican Party’s coalition, such as religious conservatives, that burden members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, such as LGBTQ people, and that advance longtime Republican Party goals such as making private school vouchers widely available. 

That’s certainly one way to do constitutional law. The GOP controls the Supreme Court, and to the victor go the spoils.

But it is far from clear why many of these decisions should be made by a handful of unelected lawyers in black robes, especially in a nation that purports to be a democracy — and that also purports to be a federation of many diverse states. There was a lot of wisdom in Zelman’s approach, which allowed Maine to devise an education policy that makes sense for Maine and Alabama to devise an education policy that makes sense for Alabama. 

At the very least, cases like Zelman did not claim that the Constitution, with its two vague and often-contradictory approaches to religion, calls for one nationwide solution to the question of how to run a country made up of people of many faiths.

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

Hi readers, it’s me again! Caitlin will be back on Wednesday. Now, for today’s news: President Donald Trump, South Korea, and the state of the US’s military alliances.

Remember Trump’s first-term “love letters” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un? Trump was so fond of them that he took them with him when he left the presidency in 2021 (the National Archives did not approve). Now, it seems like the two leaders are taking up where they left off.

Over the weekend, Trump announced in a social media post that he would “substantially reduce” scheduled joint military exercises between the US and South Korea, which get underway today. The reason? His “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” 

But there may have been another reason. Trump also wrote that “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!””

The US-South Korea exercises “are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!),” Trump wrote, “but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

That last part — “unthreatening and respectful” — is not exactly true; in 2017, Kim called Trump “a mentally deranged US dotard” whom North Korea would “tame…with fire.” But in the present day, Trump’s announcement is a boon to the North Korean leader, who has denounced the military exercises. 

It’s also just the latest incident in the historically close US-South Korea relationship (the two countries have held military exercises annually for more than 70 years). Earlier this year, Trump lashed out with new tariffs, accusing South Korea of “not living up to its Deal,” referring to a 2025 agreement on trade and security between the two countries that South Korea’s legislature had not yet approved.

Go a little deeper

The US has more permanent troops in South Korea than it does almost anywhere else in the world, behind only its deployments in Japan and Germany. Under Trump, though, those once-durable commitments have started to look a lot shakier.

Europe — and Germany in particular — has borne the brunt of Trump’s second-term harassment: In May, Trump announced his intent to remove 5,000 US troops from Germany and threatened to go “a lot further”; the Pentagon has said that withdrawal will take place within 12 months. The US currently has more than 38,000 troops stationed in Germany.

Trump has made similar threats about US troops stationed in Italy and Spain, and even suggested removing all US troops from Europe.

Most of these threats have been triggered by Trump’s unhappiness with European defense spending, which he’s eternally trying to boost. 

But in his second term, the threats have grown much more tightly tied to Trump’s personal ambitions and grievances. Trump’s Germany announcement followed a clash with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the US war with Iran, which Trump has tried — unsuccessfully — to drag US allies into. Spain, in particular, has also drawn Trump’s ire for vocally opposing the war. 

Last month, he also tied the US troop presence in Europe to his insistence that the US be allowed to take over Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, a US ally and founding NATO member.

One link for later

➨ A low-tech way to save coral reefs. My colleague Benji Jones visited the island nation of Palau, in the western Pacific Ocean, to learn about a new approach to reef restoration. Scientists there are testing species of coral specifically for heat resistance to find better options for replanting reefs — all using some plastic picnic coolers and a bit of hot water. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the Chilean Andes has the largest digital camera ever made? It captured its “first light” last year in staggering high-definition. 
• Today’s trivia: What was the title of Iran’s ruler until 1979? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Friday’s trivia: On Friday, we asked you which US president responded to inflation by ordering wage and price freezes. That was President Richard Nixon.

Hasan Piker has for years now been both an asset and a liability for Democrats. The Twitch streamer has elevated base-energizing progressives, such as Darializa Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in interviews and with endorsements. But he’s also stoked controversy with past anti-Israel commentary and generally caused headaches for establishment Democrats who would rather not see Hasan’s favored candidates get any more oxygen. 

Why? A familiar concept for these kinds of centrist Democrats: electability.

That concept has been on many left-leaning voters’ minds over the past few weeks, as primaries have put progressive candidates to the test — with very mixed results. Last week, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost her primary to establishment favorite David Crowley. Not long before that, though, progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won his primary against the more mainstream Democratic candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — albeit by a much smaller margin than many polls predicted.

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Piker to talk about whether the recent primary results have refined his understanding of how prepared Americans are to vote for democratic socialists, what support for unabashedly progressive candidates tells us about the changing working class in America, and the “pundit brain” problem in the Democratic Party.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Piker, 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.

The last two weeks have produced mixed results for left-wing candidates: a big win in Michigan and a win this week in Minnesota for Peggy Flanagan, but a loss for Francesca Hong, which was a surprise in Wisconsin.

What have been your takeaways from the last set of results?

I think the ground game is phenomenal. There’s a lot of excitement on the platform. There’s a lot of excitement for the first time for “Change Candidates.” It’s still a good environment to be in if you are a socialist.

The establishment does have a lot of juice still, for sure. And when they can put together a similar strategy to what happened in 2020 against Bernie Sanders with Joe Biden, especially in a place like Wisconsin where Tony Evers is very clearly still a very popular governor, they were able to elevate David Crowley’s campaign, who actually had dropped out and consolidated support behind Sara Rodriguez initially. And he had to drop out because he was only performing at, like, 6 percent.

Yeah, the consolidation was swift, and it was complete. I mean, you’re comparing it to 2020, in which the establishment lined up behind Joe Biden and kind of nixed that Bernie Sanders campaign in the blink of an eye. I imagine you were surprised at the result.

I never underestimate my opponents, whether they be Republicans or whether they be establishment Democrats. You have to always operate as though you’re down 10 points. I don’t believe in the notion that we are going to win easy victories at the end of the day.

There are a lot of powerful interests at play here. There are a lot of people in positions of power that don’t wanna lose their seats. So they’re gonna fight like hell, so we have to also fight like hell. We have to fight extra hard, as a matter of fact, because we’re almost always outspent, right?

I got an alert right before we started talking from the New York Times that said, “A democratic socialist lost in Wisconsin, which shows the movement’s surging wave might crash before rippling out from big cities.” Is that wrong?

Oh, I love that. Look, people are gonna have their opinions. I’ll just say it like this.

Abdul El-Sayed’s one-point victory margin showed that the Democratic socialist-aligned movement or the progressive movement was in tatters. It was obviously a failure. And now, David Crowley’s less-than-one-point victory proves that the centrist bulwark is still here, and that the Democratic socialist movement is dying.

It kind of feels like it’s wish-casting for the most part, from a lot of people who maybe want to go back to the way things used to be. My assessment on this is definitely a little bit different. I think, at the end of the day, these are insurgencies, right? These are insurgent candidacies.

We’re talking about no name recognition for a state legislator that was entirely propped up by local Wisconsin DSA chapters. These people didn’t have a lot of money necessarily, and they were able to defy the odds, and they continued defying the odds all the way until the end.

The idea that the polls showed that Francesca was a clear frontrunner and was running away with this race is utterly irrelevant. Especially if you were to look at this with a broader perspective, like thinking about where Democratic Socialists of America have gotten to in the last two years.

I mean, I remember how I felt in 2024, in the aftermath of the DNC, about where the American socialist movement was as opposed to where it is now. We are clearly a force to be reckoned with, and that’s precisely the reason why a lot of people are paying close attention to what’s going on.

And I’ll say it like this. The fact that the Hong campaign did not have any major progressive national endorsements, and that I was like their top surrogate.

There was no Bernie Sanders endorsement, there was no AOC endorsement. That did make the Hong campaign unique on that front.

I think there were a couple other races that I was also involved in where my candidates lost, right? 

I mean, Saikat Chakrabarti was another great example of this as well. It wasn’t a statewide race, and obviously, there’s always clear local differences that play a formative role in how these races turn out.

But we’ve looked back at this data. There are a couple different endorsement trackers out there, and they’ll put my endorsement up there, and they’ll put, like, AOC and Bernie Sanders. And it’s very clear that the best likelihood of success usually comes from a consolidation of national progressive forces, whether it be outside expenditures coming from Justice Democrats or things like that. And with the Francesca Hong campaign, I think it’s a testament to their success. It’s a testament to how popular the platform is in general.

And one thing I will have to stress here is the salience of the electability narrative. I think that’s still a real motivator for a lot of people.

Yeah, I hear that. Both El-Sayed’s campaign and Hong’s campaign did better among middle-class voters — I should say, than the data would tell us, among working-class voters. Considering how central working-class and bottom-up issues are to the DSA message, why has it not produced results that actually get it more working-class votes? Because that does seem to be something we’ve learned over the last three, four weeks.

I think that we have to dramatically reconstruct how we understand what it means to be working-class in this country. I think a lot of people will disagree with what I’m about to say here, but we have to do away with this fantastical notion that the working-class is one specific thing.

I think for the longest time, people have thought about this hardhat-wearing coal miner as the true working class, oftentimes White as well. And the working class is unbelievably diverse in this country, and it’s also a lot more college-educated than people actually give it credit for.

I think partially this is because if you look back to the ’90s as opposed to right now, yes, if you had a college education, you were upwardly mobile. You were probably a professional managerial class individual that was going to be able to retire at a reasonable age. You were doing fairly well. It was a guarantee for getting a good job, right? 

That’s not the case in America any longer. There are a lot more people who have a college degree who are downwardly mobile, who are having a very tough time in the current job market, who do not own a home, and it’s seemingly less likely than before that they will ever be able to own a home.

And that is the actual working class. It’s much broader, right? So we’ve seen in Zohran’s race and in Abdul’s race, there’s this massive group of working-class folks that constantly get cast aside as not being a true representation of the American working class, when I think like, No, that is the true representation.