President Donald Trump’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to block former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola’s victory in the 2026 US Senate election. If you’re confused by this development, you should be. Because the election won’t happen for more than a week.

The case arises out of an odd candidacy that might undercut incumbent Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan’s reelection bid against Peltola. A man named Dan J. Sullivan also secured a spot on the ballot, and Republicans fear that the not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot might trick voters who wish to vote for the incumbent into voting for the not-senator instead.

In the abstract, it’s a fair concern. But there are two reasons to doubt that not-Senator Sullivan will attract many voters who actually wanted to vote for the Republican. According to a sample ballot published by Alaska’s Division of Elections, Sen. Sullivan will be identified as a “Registered Republican” and as the “Incumbent,” so voters will be told which Dan Sullivan to vote for if they wish to reelect the one who is actually a senator. 

Additionally, Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, a system where voters rank candidates in order of preference, and votes cast for losing candidates are redistributed to voters’ next choice. So an Alaska voter who wants to reelect the Dan Sullivan who is actually a senator, but who is confused as to which Dan Sullivan is the incumbent, can simply rank both Dans Sullivan as their top two choices, and the ranked choice system should ensure that their vote is counted as a vote for Senator Sullivan (and against Peltola).

The question of whether not-Senator Sullivan may appear on the ballot, moreover, has already been litigated. Initially, the Alaska Division of Elections, which is led by a Republican, attempted to disqualify the not-senator because it concluded that he did not seek election to the Senate in “good faith.” Not-Senator Sullivan sued, and an Alaska court ordered him reinstated as a candidate because “the Division’s decision to exclude Mr. Sullivan from the primary ballot was based on a ‘good-faith’ requirement that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the Alaska Statutes, or the implementing regulations adopted by the Division” — that is, there is not actually a law that prevents the not-senator from running, even if he is intentionally running as a spoiler candidate.

This lower court order was affirmed by the Alaska Supreme Court last June. If Republicans thought that this decision violates federal law, they could have asked the Division of Elections — which, again, is run by a Republican — to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

Instead, they appear to have let the issue lie until less than two weeks before Election Day, when Trump’s Justice Department filed a new, federal lawsuit claiming that not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot is somehow illegal, and asking a federal court to preemptively block a Peltola victory in the upcoming election. Trump says that he personally told the Justice Department to file this suit.

It is difficult to find an actual legal argument, much less a persuasive one, anywhere in the Trump DOJ’s complaint initiating the lawsuit. Trump’s lawsuit also runs afoul of something called the “Purcell principle” — a concept that, ironically, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the same day that the Trump administration filed its suit — which says that federal courts should be reluctant to intervene in election-related disputes when the election itself is about to happen.

It is likely, in other words, that the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn a Democratic victory that hasn’t even happened yet will fail. But the mere existence of this new lawsuit, which is known as United States v. Alaska, is an ominous sign that the Trump administration will use every tool in its shed to overturn Democratic victories in the upcoming election.

So what are the actual legal arguments in the Alaska case?

It is a bit of a stretch to even describe the Justice Department’s complaint in this case as a “legal” document, as the complaint does not so much as point to any law that either not-Senator Sullivan or the state of Alaska may have violated, and instead vaguely alludes to legal sources that use terms like “integrity.”

Specifically, the Justice Department points to a federal law which says that it has four purposes, one of which is to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” It also points to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bullock v. Carter (1972), which said that “a State has an interest, if not a duty, to protect the integrity of its political processes from frivolous or fraudulent candidacies.”

But the statute that Trump’s lawyers quote, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, does not concern which candidates’ names should appear on the ballot. As its name suggests, it is a law about voter registration, and it imposes requirements on states, such as requiring them to register voters when those voters obtain a driver’s license.

Similarly, while Bullock does include a single line indicating that states may enact laws targeting “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” nothing in the opinion suggests that sharing another candidate’s name makes someone’s candidacy frivolous or fraudulent. The decision itself concerned unusually high fees charged to a candidate for public office in Texas, and the Court concluded that Texas’s fees were unconstitutional. 

The line about “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” meanwhile, was included to clarify that states still have some power to regulate ballot access. While Bullock concluded that Texas’s fees were excessive, the opinion also suggests that states may impose more reasonable filing fees on candidates to discourage unserious candidates from seeking office. Alaska, for example, charges a modest filing fee of $100 to US Senate candidates.

The Trump DOJ’s entire argument, in other words, appears to turn on the fact that it identified two legal sources that use the word “integrity” in contexts that bear little resemblance to the Alaska case. 

Nevertheless, Trump’s lawyers claim that the court must prevent Alaska from certifying a Peltola victory “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”

This lawsuit also cannot be squared with one of the Republican Party’s favorite legal doctrines

Even if Trump’s Justice Department had a persuasive argument that leaving not-Senator Sullivan on the ballot is illegal, they should still lose Alaska because they waited too long to file the case.

In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the Supreme Court warned that “court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,” and it added that this “risk will increase” as Election Day draws closer. More recent decisions, many of them joined only by the Court’s Republicans, have read this “Purcell principle” quite expansively to forbid federal courts from issuing election-related decisions in the months leading up to an election. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even claimed that Purcell prevents federal courts from issuing election-related decisions as soon as nine months before the general election date.

Supreme Court decisions invoking Purcell to shut down lower court orders altering a state’s election rules are now very common in the weeks leading up to an election. On Thursday, for example, the Court relied on the Purcell principle to block a lower court order that would have made it easier for college students to vote in New Hampshire. The Court began its decision with this line: “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” 

Trump’s DOJ, meanwhile, did not even file its lawsuit seeking to preemptively invalidate a Peltola victory until less than two weeks before Election Day. If Purcell means anything, it must mean that a federal court cannot force Alaska to kick a candidate off the ballot mere days before a federal election.

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 getting a head start on litigating the midterms. 

What’s happening? The administration is asking a federal district court in Alaska to potentially block the certification of Alaska’s US Senate race, should incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican, lose to his Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola. 

It’s the first major lawsuit of the 2026 midterms aimed at directly challenging the results, and very likely a sign of things to come after polls close on November 3.

What is the administration arguing? Sullivan is currently in a close race against Peltola, a former US representative who polls suggest may hold a slight lead. But the race is complicated by the presence of a second Dan Sullivan, Daniel J. Sullivan, on the ballot (no relation).

According to the lawsuit, which names Alaska’s state elections director and several state elections entities as defendants, the election could be “tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan.” 

The suit asks that “Defendants not certify any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion,” which it defines as a loss by the incumbent Sullivan in the event that the other Sullivan attracts enough votes to alter the outcome of the election. 

What’s the context? The second Dan Sullivan’s appearance on the ballot has already been litigated. After he was initially disqualified from the ballot, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that he should be included, and he finished third in the state’s August primary (the top four vote-getters appear on Alaska’s general election ballot).

How worried about this should I be? For now, not very. Trump filing lawsuits disputing election results was all but inevitable, even if it’s surprising to see him start this early. 

None of that means he’ll succeed: Trump and his allies filed dozens of election lawsuits in 2020 and were largely laughed out of court. (Plus, this particular lawsuit has been assigned to a judge appointed by President Barack Obama.)

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy Friday! Here’s some good news to add to a recent string of encouraging headlines about cancer treatment: A new vaccine may reduce the risk of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, by more than 40 percent, according to the Washington Post. You can read all about it here with a gift link.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

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

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump is cozying up to Russia again. 

What’s happening? On Wednesday, Russia released an American prisoner, 74-year-old retired teacher Stephen Hubbard, back to the US. The US, Trump said in a social media post, “out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return.” 

Hubbard’s release is unquestionably good news. But Trump is wrong: In just the last month, his administration has delivered for Russia in more ways than one, often inexplicably and despite bipartisan condemnation. 

What is Trump doing for Russia? Late last week, he waived upcoming economic sanctions on Russia that he had only recently signed into law after they passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. He also: 

• Struck a diesel deal with Russia, temporarily lifting fuel sanctions on the country in exchange for Russia releasing a trivial amount of diesel into the global market; 
• Announced — seemingly without talking to either party — a Russia-Ukraine “energy ceasefire” favorable to Russia (which has since fallen apart); 
• Temporarily interrupted US intel sharing with Ukraine and played a role in interfering with Ukraine’s access to Starlink, which helps power the country’s drone warfare against Russia; and 
• Called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be replaced.

Last month, Trump also invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the annual G20 summit later this year, which would mark Putin’s first appearance since 2019.

What does Trump get out of all of this? There’s Hubbard’s release, but taking that on Trump’s own terms (muddled though they are), the US didn’t give anything to secure it — which means that all of those favors have amounted to not much at all, other than papering over Russia’s role as an international bad actor and breaking with US allies in Europe. 

Why does this matter? Trump’s Russia embrace comes at an awful time for Ukraine, which, as the New York Times reported earlier this month, is facing a Russian campaign to “freeze Ukrainians into submission” as winter approaches. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called Putin a “humanitarian.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I was delighted to learn about the US’s new national park yesterday, its 64th. Chiricahua National Park — until Tuesday, only a national monument — is the first new park in six years. Located in southeastern Arizona, it’s also called the “Wonderland of Rocks,” according to the Washington Post; you can read more about it here with a gift link. 

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

With two weeks until the midterm elections, Democrats are comfortably favored to take the House. Their path to Senate control, though, is harder — and it could run through Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race against former state Senate president Troy Jackson, a Democrat.

When Collins first ran for Senate in 1996, she pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate. But 30 years later, she’s still in office despite the odds, as Maine has grown more blue around her. 

One secret to her political durability is her success in “bringing in the bacon” for Mainers: Her official Senate website features a map of projects that she says she helped fund as chair of the Senate Appropriations committee, including hospitals, bridges, affordable housing, public transportation, and water systems.

This year, though, all of that money might not be enough for Mainers to look past their frustration with another Republican: President Donald Trump.

To learn more about what Maine voters are thinking as they prepare to head to the polls, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post reporter Dan Merica, who’s on the ground reporting from Maine, about why some Mainers who backed Collins before are now reconsidering their support.

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

Tell me how this race got to be so fascinating.

Maine this cycle was going to be interesting no matter what. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator who is running for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 this cycle.

But since the outset, it has really defined, I think, these midterm elections. The rise of Graham Platner, the oysterman turned politician, really hinted at the populist anti-establishment fervor that was in the Democratic base. That fervor was so strong that it prevented the sitting incumbent Democratic governor from winning the primary here in Maine to challenge Susan Collins. I think that said a lot about the Democratic Party. 

Obviously Graham Platner’s campaign then flamed out and he ended his campaign because of the allegations of sexual assault against him. 

But then you have the Collins angle of it, and she is really the poster candidate for a Republican who, in this election where Donald Trump’s approval rating is so low, is having to basically suspend political gravity in a state that really does not approve of the job that he’s done as president.

I want to ground this conversation in how voters in Maine feel about him right now because I know you’ve been talking to voters. What is the vibe out there? Are people mad? 

There’s a lot of anger for the president here. Maine is in a unique position where it’s been on the receiving end of a lot of what those people who are mad at Trump would say is harm that he has caused. 

It’s a border state. It borders Canada. There’s a ton of cross-border relationships. And so his attacks on Canada, his suggestion that it’s going to be the 51st state, has really hurt the state of Maine because it’s hurt tourism in the state. Many Canadians come down south to vacation in Maine. And there’s been a drop in tourism because of that fight with Canada.

The tariffs have hurt Maine because so much of the wood and the lumber that is grown and cut here in Maine is actually shipped up north to Canada to be processed, and then what it is processed as is shipped back across the United States. The tariffs have been incredibly harmful for the state. 

And then you have ICE. I’m in Biddeford. There was a shooting of an individual here in Biddeford. That has been an issue in this race as well. 

So there’s a lot of anger at the president, and it’s very easy to feel that when you’re talking to voters. I actually just spoke with a voter who voted for Troy Jackson, dropped his ballot in an early voting box. And I just asked him, “What did you vote for? Who’d you vote for? Why did you vote?” And he got visibly emotional when he started talking about the Trump administration and how scared he was for the future of democracy and that was why he was voting for Troy Jackson.

I’ve also talked to voters who supported Susan Collins just six years ago at the end of the first Trump administration. They voted for her back then and they feel like the last six years have made it impossible for them to vote for her again. And then on the other side, you have people who are hardcore die-hard Trump supporters and they actually think that Susan Collins has been too hard on the president. 

She’s in a really tough spot politically where on her left, there are a lot of voters, including some who have voted for her recently, who are furious with her, who don’t think she stands up to the president enough. And then on her right, there are voters who think that she stands up to the president too much.

It’s funny to think about these two figures representing the same political party because while they might agree on a few issues here and there, they couldn’t represent more different brands of Republicanism. What’s the truth of how much Susan Collins sides with Donald Trump?

She has sided with the president at times. She has voted against the president at times. I was struck that, in the debate on Thursday, she said, “I have been a senator under five different presidents.” I don’t exactly remember what her number was, but she noted that she had only endorsed one Republican president and that was George W. Bush.

I was just in Kennebunk, which is right next to Kennebunkport, which is a historical location for the Bush family. They have a large home at Walker Point. There is some relationship between the Bush family and Maine, [and it] makes sense that Susan Collins really does kind of line up more with the Bush-style Republican Party than she does the Trump-style Republican Party.

What’s her actual relationship with the president like? And surely he’s well aware that she was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach him over the January 6 insurrection. Does that get in the way of their relationship?

I think he’s very well aware when somebody breaks with him. I would have to imagine he’s aware of that. 

“It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.”

I was actually told by a Republican early in the campaign that President Trump demands loyalty from people that he supports, but this person actually said that there are rules for Republicans and that there are rules for Susan Collins and that Republicans were willing to kind of give her some leeway, which is actually an acknowledgement that they know the bind that she is in. 

They know that she’s running for reelection in a blue state, in a state that the president lost, in a state that is very hostile right now to the president. It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.

Affordability is a huge issue in Maine, right? And Donald Trump hasn’t exactly helped…

That has really heightened the competitiveness of this race. The same race is always going to be competitive, but the fact that gas prices are where it’s at, the fact that we’re going into winter, it’s starting to get cold up here. Home heating oil prices are above $6 a gallon. 

I think about 80 percent of homes that are heated by home heating oil are in the Northeast, a large portion of them probably in Maine and New Hampshire, two states with Senate races in November. It’s been a huge issue up here. 

The Trump administration has actually tried to get rid of a low-income program to help with home heating oil that helps a lot of folks in Maine. You’ve seen Republicans, from the gubernatorial candidate to congressional candidates, break with the president on that because they know it’s a huge issue. 

So when you talk about affordability, yes, we’re talking about the price of beef, the price of groceries, the price of gas, but there’s also these localized issues in a state like Maine, in particular. And I think home heating oil actually could be a really fascinating, underappreciated issue in this race. If you grew up or live in Arizona or Nevada or California, you’re not thinking about the oil that you need to heat your home. That could be a real issue here in a state like Maine.

Collins is a political survivor. For all of it to come crashing down because of, essentially, who the president was — is that a bit of a sad ending to this political story for her? Do you think she’d maybe have regrets about how she approached Donald Trump?

It’s certainly possible. And you’ve seen other senators who have bucked the president and have then retired and not run for reelection. I’m thinking of Thom Tillis, for example, in North Carolina. There is this fascinating case study in how the Republican Party has changed when you look at Susan Collins and you look at Donald Trump. 

Someone like Susan Collins in an earlier iteration of the Republican Party would’ve had a lot of success and would’ve probably stayed onside the Republican Party in a way that she just hasn’t done under Trump. She represents a different kind of era of the Republican Party. 

I think there was a time when bringing home the bacon to a small state really worked politically. I’m thinking about Harry Reid, for example — he represented Nevada. In 2010, he faced a really difficult reelection campaign and his entire campaign was bringing home the bacon to Nevada, a similarly small state, and he won reelection in 2010.

I think if Susan Collins wins reelection in 2026, it’ll prove that there’s still a lot of goodwill for politicians who can deliver funding projects for states like Maine, states like Nevada, smaller states that maybe don’t get the kind of national attention that others do. 

If she does lose, a lot of it will be put at the feet of President Trump. I’ll be fascinated to talk to her if she does lose, because I do think she will have a lot to say that she probably hasn’t said yet, but I think that’s an if, and I think we have two more weeks to find that out.

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

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”

But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.

A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.

Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).

Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability. 

That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularly argues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”

Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.

“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together?

And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.

“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”

The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it? 

In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy. 

While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing. 

Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda

Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.

The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance. 

Congressional Democrats have said that they want to investigate the Trump family’s crypto investments, their solicitation of foreign business investments, whether Trump granted pardons in exchange for money, corruption in government contracting, the jet gifted to Trump by the government of Qatar, fundraising for the White House ballroom construction, whether Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding was funded by a Russian oligarch, and much more.

In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.

The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.

Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress. 

Mary Peltola, running for Senate in Alaska, supports term limits for members of Congress; so does Talarico. Trump’s controversial pardons have also sparked interest from some congressional Democrats in limiting the presidential pardon power, an issue that candidates like Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton have also raised.

It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.

The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.

The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior. 

The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.

To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.

Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers. 

Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.

Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.

But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.

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

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to take over a public park. 

What’s happening? On Sunday, Trump announced in a social media post that East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal golf course on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, would close next month for what he described as “restoration work” to transform it from a three-course complex into a single professional-caliber course. 

According to a rendering of the “restoration” shared by Trump, the new course would also eliminate a popular public park and multiuse road around the course, which is currently home to some of DC’s historic cherry trees. 

Why does this matter? Relative to many other Trump decisions (like, say, the Iran war or interfering with Ukraine’s ability to defend itself), the fate of a golf course is not so high-stakes.

But it’s shaping up to be a major legal fight over the administration’s blitzkrieg approach to Washington that saw the East Wing of the White House demolished last year and Trump’s name attached to (and subsequently removed from) the Kennedy Center.

A DC preservation group previously sued over Trump’s plan to transform the course, which has been in the works for months prior to Sunday’s announcement. And the administration was already in hot water with a DC District Court judge over the recent removal of more than 500 trees from the course, which it described at the time as maintenance rather than part of Trump’s renovation scheme. 

Trump, for his part, has said that his administration has “an absolute right” to renovate the course and does not need approval, setting him on a course for a bigger clash with federal courts. 

What’s the big picture? Setting aside everything else about Trump’s golf course push, it’s unlikely — with just 15 days until the midterms — that this is a fight that will endear him or his party to voters, who are broadly fed up with corruption, inflation, and the overall cost of living.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy Monday! Early voting is getting underway in some states and while The Logoff officially encourages you not to read too much — or anything, really — into early voting numbers, I do recommend this post from the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? by Don Moynihan. He rounded up some of the best “I voted” stickers with art submitted by (mostly) children, ranging from charming to deeply strange. You can find them all here.

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

Wall Street is sending the public a dire warning: President Donald Trump has become a threat to the very foundation of American freedom — your frequent flier miles.

Okay, America’s big banks haven’t been using rhetoric quite that grandiose. But they are accusing Trump of imperiling Americans’ credit card rewards. 

The feud between Wall Street and the White House centers on the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA). Long stalled in Congress, that legislation aims to drive down the “swipe fees” that merchants pay to banks when customers use credit cards. In theory, if those fees fall, retailers might pass on some of the savings to consumers, in the form of lower prices.

Trump first endorsed the bill in January. But he’s ramped up his advocacy for it recently, amid a broader (belated) push to address voters’ affordability concerns ahead of November’s midterms. Last week, the White House urged Congress to “put Main Street over Wall Street” by enacting the law. On Monday, Trump praised Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall for “working tirelessly to pass the Credit Card Competition Act, in order to stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff!”

The financial industry is used to taking fire from Trump right before Election Day, then receiving favorable treatment from him thereafter. But in this case, Trump’s threat is not entirely idle. Large retailers are lobbying hard to get the Credit Card Competition Act passed during December’s lame-duck congressional session. Banks have responded by issuing a “code red,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. In recent days, their lobbyists have warned policymakers that, if swipe fees fall, credit cardholders’ cash rewards and travel points will go down with them.

In truth, the consequences of the Credit Card Competition Act are uncertain. But if the banks’ big-picture story is right — and the law cuts both swipe fees and credit card rewards — that would probably benefit the average American.

Poor people pay for your travel points

To see why, we need to first examine how the credit card system currently works — and whom it does and doesn’t benefit. 

Whenever you use a credit card to purchase a banana from Aldi, or volleyball from Dick’s, or an adult-sized Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume from Party City, the retailer must pay a fee to the bank that issued your card. The bank then uses that revenue to fund your rewards.

Critically, merchants don’t just eat the costs of swipe fees. Rather, they pass on part of the expense to consumers, in the form of higher prices. Some businesses concentrate these price hikes on card users (for example, barbershops often charge less if you pay with cash). But most retailers charge every customer the same price, regardless of their payment method. 

For this reason, shoppers who pay with cash or debit effectively subsidize those who pay with cards: The former face higher prices than they would in a world without credit cards, yet they receive no “cash back” or travel points in recompense. 

This arrangement seems unfair on its face. But it is especially troubling when one considers class disparities in the use of credit cards and receipt of rewards.

As a general rule, the higher a person’s income, the more they use credit cards. In 2024, US households who earned less than $25,000 a year put just 17 percent of their payments on credit cards; among households earning more than $150,000, that figure was 51 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.

What’s more, the rich are also more likely to qualify for premium cards that charge merchants exceptionally high fees, in order to fund extraordinarily lavish benefits. 

As a result of all this, swipe fees effectively redistribute money from poor and working-class people to affluent and wealthy ones. According to a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the credit card system takes, on average, $88 a year from households with annual incomes below $150,000, while delivering an average yearly benefit of $390 to households with incomes above that threshold.

American swipe fees are too damn high

To be sure, this does not mean that lower-income Americans would be better off in a world where credit cards didn’t exist. Such cards serve a variety of valuable economic purposes, from helping households weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes to facilitating online commerce. And maintaining a credit card system costs money: Banks need to finance the loans they extend, while payment networks must maintain vast computer systems to process transactions and detect fraud. 

Yet America’s credit card system is needlessly expensive. Our nation’s merchants — and thus, consumers — pay far higher swipe fees than their counterparts in other rich countries. 

To take one illustrative example: When an American buys $100 worth of groceries using a standard Visa card, the supermarket must pay the issuing bank a minimum of $1.23. Some disfavored stores must pay as much as $1.57 on such a purchase. If a customer uses a premium “Visa Infinite” card, meanwhile, the grocer’s fee can run as high as $2.07.

By contrast, in Canada, a grocery purchase worth $100 US dollars would incur a fee worth 95 cents if the customer used a standard Visa card. 

In Australia and the European Union, meanwhile, government regulations would cap that fee at 30 cents (or .3 percent), no matter what kind of card was used. 

Suffice to say, Australia and the EU manage to sustain functional credit card systems, despite charging merchants a tiny fraction of the swipe fees absorbed by US businesses. And although retailers have pocketed some of these savings, research suggests that fee caps have also lowered consumer prices. 

This affordability gain does come at a cost; American cardholders do tend to reap higher rewards than Australian or European ones. But this is not a good trade from the standpoint of economic justice; few think it is fair to take money from the poor to give to the rich.

The Credit Card Competition Act might not work

All this said, whether the Credit Card Competition Act would actually yield those outcomes is uncertain. The bill does not directly regulate swipe fees. Instead, as the name suggests, it aims to give credit card companies greater competition. 

Today, each time you buy an adult-size Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume with a Visa, Party City is required to process your purchase using Visa’s network. Which means it needs to pay whatever swipe fee Visa decrees. The store can protest an exorbitant rate by refusing to accept Visa cards. But this would send a large number of customers into the hands of Spirit Halloween. So its leverage is limited.

Under the CCCA, however, Party City would be able to accept Visa on a transaction — without necessarily using Visa to process the payment. Instead, the bank that issued the customer’s Visa would need to provide Party City with at least one alternative payment processor — a different network that has no relationship with Visa and which might offer lower fees. 

The law’s authors hope — and the banking industry fears — that this mandatory competition will force down swipe fees. But it’s not clear how much of a difference the CCCA would actually make. 

After all, under the law, banks would still get to choose the alternative payment network available to retailers when their customers pay with Visa (or Mastercard, or American Express, etc.). Party City would no longer need to pony up whatever Visa asks when a shopper pays with a Visa-Bank of America card. But if the store did decline to use Visa’s network, it would then need to partner with Bank of America’s hand-selected alternative. And since banks benefit from high swipe fees, BofA would have an incentive to pick an expensive backup option.

Nevertheless, the banks and retailers both seem to believe that the CCCA will sharply reduce swipe fees. If they’re right, then Congress shouldn’t vote down the bill, merely to protect affluent Americans’ travel points. 

It doubtlessly feels nice to receive a free flight or hotel stay, as a reward for spending a lot of money on yourself. But the poor probably should not have to pay higher prices, just so the affluent can enjoy such satisfactions.

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: White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is out of a job after only five days. 

What happened? Zacharia was fired on Friday after less than a week in her new role, after a rocky start that included a halting performance in the briefing room, a scandal over her legal credentials, and a round of less-than-successful cleanup interviews. 

The firing makes her the shortest-tenured White House press secretary in history, outstripping even first-term Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who made it 10 or 11 days (figures vary) before getting the boot. 

“Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci posted on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.” (No word yet on whether the “Zacharia” will emerge as a unit of time, as the “Scaramucci” has.) 

What’s the context? Zacharia’s remarkably short stint behind the podium unfolded as the White House is engaged in an unprecedented attack on press freedom: The administration is still trying to ban three media outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House, though as of earlier this week, a judge is still blocking the ban from taking effect.

The diminished nature of the press secretary job was on full display in Zacharia’s sole briefing on Tuesday, when she took questions from just three outlets: Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail. 

Why does this matter? Zacharia’s no good, very bad week is not likely to leave much of a lasting mark in its own right — other than, perhaps, as pub trivia — but as NBC’s Garrett Haake points out, it’s a very tangible manifestation of a White House that seems to have no idea how to spin itself out of crisis with just weeks until the midterm elections. 

Most recently, Trump has landed on flat-out lying about the state of the economy — but like Zacharia’s time as press secretary, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go all that well.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The underlying trend — municipal inaction — may be infuriating, but I loved this story about “tactical urbanism” from my colleague Sara Herschander. 

As she writes, vigilante activists have taken to painting their own crosswalks, building benches, and even installing makeshift bike lanes in their neighborhoods — and every time they do, “they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live.” 

You can read Sara’s full piece here, no gift link needed. Enjoy, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

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

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump wants to deport a member of Congress. 

What’s happening? On Monday, Homeland Security officers raided the Washington, DC, home of US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in an investigation reportedly tied to immigration paperwork filled out by her father when she was a minor.

That was, at the time, more than enough cause for alarm. Trump’s animosity toward Omar, who is Somali-American and an outspoken critic of the administration, is well-known, and the raid is an extraordinary violation of the Justice Department’s usual rule to avoid taking visible action around politically sensitive cases within 60 days of an election. 

On Wednesday evening, however, we learned more about the raid from the Wall Street Journal. The Omar investigation, the Journal reported, is explicitly aimed at stripping Omar of her citizenship — and thus her ability to hold office — and deporting her. 

How would they do that? Omar came to the US as a refugee when she was 12 and became a US citizen when she was 17. The Trump administration’s investigation is said to focus on whether she or her family misrecorded her age in order to more easily gain citizenship. 

The government cannot unilaterally denaturalize a citizen, however; it would have to ask a court to do so.

What’s the context? Historically, it’s rare for the US to strip citizenship from naturalized US citizens. But doing so at volume has been a major, if less visible, priority for the second Trump administration. 

As of earlier this year, NBC News reported, DOJ was targeting hundreds of people for possible denaturalization, and has reportedly hoped to put forward hundreds of new cases per month (though successfully stripping them of citizenship is another matter).

Why does this matter? Trump’s campaign to bend the traditionally nonpartisan DOJ into a tool to punish and harass his enemies has been one of the major stories of his second term. 

Even if it never advances beyond Monday’s raid, an investigation targeting Omar’s citizenship with the eventual goal of deporting her from the US represents a new and even more dangerous evolution of that effort — and it threatens to move the US to a far darker place, where citizenship and the rights it guarantees are predicated on the president’s goodwill.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — if you’ll allow me to depart a little from my normal approach to this section, I have a story about politics to share. It’s not, however, about the politics we’re currently dealing with, but about what could be: Democrats’ plan for a quietly ambitious “Project 2029” should they win the White House in 2028. You can read it with a gift link here.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to just log off, here’s an adorable snow leopard cub with massive paws. Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Donald Trump started his second term in office with a plan: Project 2025. 

The document — a detailed policy blueprint put together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation — outlined not just a hardline policy agenda, but a novel theory of how to wield power to get it done. Its chapters showed how a conservative president could aggressively use executive authority to strengthen the parts of the government he liked, like immigration enforcement, and smash the parts he didn’t, like foreign aid and the civil service.

During his presidential campaign, Democrats attacked Project 2025 as a nightmarish glimpse into what Trump would do if reelected, while Trump dismissed it as an outside plan irrelevant to his presidency. We now know Democrats had it right: Trump embraced Project 2025 for real. After winning, he appointed Russell Vought — the intellectual force behind Project 2025 — to lead his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and put its ideas into practice.

By now, its slash-and-burn tactics have fundamentally broken many parts of the federal government. The administration has managed to fire or push out hundreds of thousands of its employees and tear up the procedures that govern policymaking and implementation. It has also demolished the guardrails that protect democracy from power: bulling through constraints on executive authority, usurping Congress’s core responsibilities, and attacking the civil rights and electoral rules that underpin American democracy. 

As a result, the next president will not just inherit whatever policy messes Trump leaves behind. They will also be leading a government that may be structurally incapable of enacting appropriate fixes to those problems.

Democrats have bemoaned the results, but it’s long been unclear if they actually understood the real lesson here. Project 2025 showed that wielding power now requires not just policy vision, but also a theory of government — a plan to manipulate and reshape the very structure of the state to make sure new laws can be more than just words on paper.

With the Trump administration collapsing in popularity, and Democrats surging in the polls, we may see a test as soon as 2029. If they indeed win the next presidential election, will Democrats have anything as potent as Project 2025 in store?

The most prominent Democratic response to Project 2025 — an effort from a leading think tank, officially called “Project 2029” — seems undersized. A grab-bag series of conventional policy proposals, addressing issues like kids’ online safety and “the annoyance economy,” it does not even seek to grapple with the fundamental problem of a broken government.

But after months of reporting, I’ve learned that there is a quieter effort underway to build a true equivalent to Project 2025: a set of ideas for remaking the government just as sharply as Trump and Vought did — and perhaps more permanently.

The real Project 2029, as I’ve taken to calling it, isn’t yet a public document. But its broad agenda has become a point of consensus across the Democratic Party’s major factions. And importantly, its core ideas have real buy-in among both congressional Democrats and the top 2028 presidential hopefuls.

Unlike with Project 2025, no one organization is leading the charge. Rather, the real Project 2029 has been emerging from collaboration between loose groupings of NGOs, ex-Obama and Biden officials, and academics. Unlike the official Project 2029, they have no interest in developing campaign-trail-ready proposals on issues like childcare. Instead, they are laser-focused on responding to the Trump-Vought assault on democracy and the state.

“If you’re focused on the outcomes, you’re missing the real work that’s going on,” a top Democratic policy mind involved in these efforts told me.

The brain trust involved does not see its goal as simply restoring the pre-Trump status quo. Quite the opposite: Their central premise is that the government was broken before Trump’s second term. The hope now is to use Trump’s demolition derby as an opportunity to (ahem) build back better: to take the federal government, at once a tangled mess and an authoritarian menace, and turn it into a 21st-century democracy.

Where Project 2025 was dedicated to breaking the administrative state — firing bureaucrats and destroying entire agencies — the Democratic counterstrategy aims to create a government that can implement duly enacted policies with speed and competence. And where Project 2025 aimed to demolish democratic guardrails, Project 2029 aims to right-size the presidency and put in new barriers to prevent abuse of power.

This renovated federal government would be simultaneously more efficient and more constrained: capable of reacting to economic crises and delivering benefits at lightning speed, while simultaneously incapable of prosecuting the president’s political enemies or wielding ICE against peaceful protesters.

These general goals are increasingly being sharpened into concrete proposals. While there isn’t an authoritative policy document at Project 2025’s level of specificity, some key ideas include:

• A new, vastly simpler and politically protected set of rules for hiring and promotion in the civil service;
• Creating entire agencies and Cabinet positions dedicated to battling corruption and inefficiency;
• Overhauling federal privacy laws to facilitate legitimate information-sharing while constraining DOGE-style data theft;
• Reviving a never-passed bill that would cap the president’s ability to declare emergencies at a 30-day duration;
• Eliminating barriers that block policies at the front end, like the Paperwork Reduction Act, while creating new judicial remedies for federal abuses — like permitting citizens to personally sue government officials who violate their rights;
• A rewrite of the 1946 law that governs the basic rules about how the executive implements policy; 
• Funding community-based organizations that can both assist in effective policy implementation and organize against federal overreach;
• Rewriting the basic structures of US government by blowing up the filibuster; Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico statehood; and overhauling the Supreme Court — though these remain far more contentious than the others.

While most of these ideas sound hyper-wonky, so did much of Project 2025. And experts on federal policymaking say that changes like these could have a transformative effect. Moreover, the degree to which Democrats are prioritizing government overhaul in their planning process is unprecedented — with clear evidence suggesting their interest extends across factional divides and up to its top leaders. 

“These are themes that are motivating people, that people genuinely care about [and] are putting time, energy, and money behind,” Don Moynihan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, told me. “They see the stakes as paramount — we have to do this or our democracy is imperiled.”

Policy advocates who have been toiling away on these issues, for their part, believe that there’s a unique window for their ideas to become reality. “It feels like there has been a turning point,” said Jen Pahlka, a former Obama official who has become one of the leading lights of the government reform movement. “I think people see, in their own lives…the way that [government] is just breaking down.”

This new Democratic approach is beset by internal contradictions. There are some difficult trade-offs between efficiency and restraining power, a tension the movement is only beginning to grapple with. And there’s a major question of whether Congress, even when dominated by Democrats, is capable of passing reforms on this level of ambition.

But if these problems can be worked out, and its ideas turned into practical legislation and executive orders, the next Democratic administration could accomplish far more than anyone might expect. 

What the real Project 2029 is

If one person embodies the real Project 2029’s vision, it would be K. Sabeel Rahman.

Rahman, who has a PhD in political theory, with a focus on the relationship between democracy and capitalism, emerged as a leading Democratic thinker in the mid-2010s — ascending to the leadership of Demos, a think tank associated with the party’s progressive wing. After Joe Biden won the presidency, he tapped Rahman to help lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an obscure but exceptionally important White House bureau governing policy implementation.

Today, Rahman is a professor at Cornell Law School and, though he modestly suggests otherwise, one of the central figures in the Democratic project to reconceive American government. His forthcoming book, Remaking the State, will be an unofficial debut for many of its ideas.

This effort functions very differently from its conservative predecessor. While Heritage’s Project 2025 was a specific, dedicated group that produced a big blueprint document, the Democrats’ equivalent is more diffuse: a thinly connected network of people at think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities. Some involved organizations, like the Roosevelt Institute, are already prominent groups with a seat at the Washington table; others are obscure even by think tank standards. 

“There is no one plan — this is the biggest thing I want to convey,” Rahman said. “We desperately keep wanting a central planner, and we keep not having one. So instead, let’s stop trying to have one.”

Rahman and a handful of others have been trying to direct a process that can be — like a lot of Democratic Party processes — a little scattered and out of public view. He describes people coming together at conferences and convenings; collaborating on writing projects and sharing ideas through group chats and email chains.

“Efforts…have been happening below the water line, so to speak, with a lot of overlapping but often slightly distinct casts of characters,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a political scientist at Columbia University and former Biden official who held high-level positions in OIRA and the Department of Labor. 

A core task for this effort has been unifying ideas from two somewhat separate prongs of the Democratic brain trust. The first group focuses on restoring the power of the government to do useful things, quickly. The second aims to make democracy itself stronger, so future would-be autocrats can’t seize the reins the way Trump is trying to.

Both of those groups are responding to the Project 2025 agenda of blowing up the federal bureaucracy while empowering Trump. But they arise from different parts of the Democratic policy universe — and in some ways, the biggest challenge is making them cohere.

The focus on building a more effective federal government has its roots in a set of ideas often called “state capacity,” a major intellectual influence on the abundance movement. Its leading thinkers, like Pahlka, believe that the US government has been unable to function properly for decades due to bureaucratic hurdles — strict rules on data sharing, extensive multiagency review processes, and a glacially cumbersome hiring-and-firing process that protects incompetent workers and deters talented ones from going into public service. This bureaucratic mess, they argue, is the common thread underpinning liberal governance failures, from the healthcare.gov rollout debacle under Barack Obama to the disastrously slow and partial implementation of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Like many conservatives, this group is very interested in cutting red tape and adopting a more corporate level of efficiency. But they staunchly oppose Vought-style demolition of the administrative state. Instead, their ultimate aim is creating a more empowered government, one that is more nimble so it can deliver services and enforce regulation quickly and effectively. 

The ideas for constraining executive power, by contrast, come from what might be termed the pro-democracy movement. Originating largely in response to widespread alarm about Trump’s rise a decade ago, this movement thinks about government reform from the broadly opposite lens from the state capacity types. Looking at cases of democratic collapse abroad, they see an overly empowered executive branch as one of the chief threats to the republic’s survival — and have spent the past decade developing ways to constrain it.

Until very recently, the two groups’ work has almost exclusively operated on separate tracks. State capacity people often work in different think tanks, activist organizations, and academic fields than pro-democracy types. Their visions for policy reform have mostly proceeded independently, with virtually nobody trying to combine them.

The catalyst for change was the second Trump term — or, more specifically, Russell Vought and Elon Musk.

The twinned assaults on the structure of government from Vought’s OMB and Musk’s DOGE, their mass firings, and blatant power grabs, tore apart the policymaking basics Democrats had long taken for granted. Both the brokenness of the federal government and the health of democracy suddenly became immediately urgent concerns for the American left — and money and energy began pouring into developing a bold response.

Since then, the movements have begun to build out their respective policy visions. In October 2025, the Roosevelt Institute — the leading think tank for the party’s economic progressives — released a report essentially aligning itself with much of the state capacity movement’s vision of government repair. In January 2026, the center-left Searchlight Institute announced a new project involving Obama vet Mikey Dickerson, called Tech Viaduct, aimed at coming up with actionable reforms in this area. The Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, an academic project led by longtime Elizabeth Warren adviser Ganesh Sitaraman, published a paper on civil service reform in February that made the Trump-driven subtext of this new energy explicit.

On the democracy side, the Brennan Center for Justice — a longstanding voting rights group — debuted a comprehensive plan for democracy reform, including multiple specific reforms for topics ranging from restoring congressional authority to reining in executive branch corruption. In October 2025, Vanita Gupta, an associate attorney general under Biden, became the director of a new center at NYU aimed at developing “blueprints” for rebuilding “institutions that have been so core to our democracy.”

While most of the people and institutions involved still focus primarily on their policy silo, government efficiency or democratic guardrails, Rahman and others have worked to develop a consensus that pulls these ideas into one big agenda — not by issuing a single document but by getting people with compatible ideas on how to fix the problem into the same (literal and digital) rooms. 

Hertel-Fernandez, for example, focuses on the democracy side of the question — leading something called the Empowering Democracy Initiative (EDI) that develops ideas for changing the distribution of political power in American society. But he’s in close contact with other progressive outfits, like Roosevelt, that focus much more on state capacity.

“There is a lot more alignment on the overall vision,” Hertel-Fernandez said. “We see ourselves as working on different parts of this broader effort.”

The real Project 2029’s vision

Project 2025 was, from the outset, a very public undertaking. Think tank ideas don’t accidentally become major issues in a presidential election: Heritage wanted its ideas out there, using publicity to claim its role as the defining voice in the GOP’s future.

Project 2029’s key leaders, for the most part, have a different theory. Topics of vital importance to them, like restoring the independence of inspectors general and reforming interagency review processes, are not liable to capture most people’s attention. Instead, they aim primarily to build elite consensus in private conversations. Key figures in the effort insisted on speaking with me anonymously or off the record to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

That being said, there are a few venues where you can see their ideas breaking containment. Multiple sources pointed to The Reconstruction Papers, an essay collection published by the magazine Liberal Currents, as a place containing specific policy proposals that people in 2029 circles are taking seriously. EDI has also published a series of relevant policy papers.

But perhaps the single best publicly available guide to Project 2029 thinking is a recent series of policy papers published on the website Just Security called the “Reinvention Blueprints,” edited jointly by Rahman and Sam Berger (another Biden OIRA vet, who also works with Hertel-Fernandez at EDI).

In their inaugural essay in the series, Rahman and Berger explicitly synthesize the work of both the government efficiency reformers and the pro-democracy advocates into a coherent and unified agenda. They claim that the efforts of these two camps are not opposed, as they might seem, but actually two sides of the same coin.

Drawing on an influential article by law professors Emily Chertoff and Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Rahman and Berger argue the federal government is actually two “faces” rolled into one. There’s a civil state, which delivers benefits and promulgates regulations, and a coercive state, which arrests, prosecutes, and makes war. While the civil state is bogged down by endlessly procedural hoops, the coercive state can move at lightning speed — using broadly worded emergency and national security powers to sidestep any checks designed to safeguard democracy and human rights. Vought has done much to break or politicize the civil state liberals prize, while further empowering its coercive sibling.

“The levers of state power most unrestrained,” they write, “are the ones most prone to abuse.”

In this view, there’s also a crucial difference between government efficiency and executive discretion. On paper, Congress is supposed to set policy, and the president is supposed to implement it. In practice, however, the president has usurped a lot of policymaking authority. It’s possible to give some of that back to Congress by (for example) limiting presidential emergency powers, while simultaneously eliminating barriers to swift implementation of duly passed laws.

An emerging goal of the real Project 2029 is to turn these theoretical syntheses into policy: to build a plan for speeding up “good” government and slowing down “bad” government at the same time.

Berger and Rahman believe this could create a virtuous feedback loop between government efficiency and democratic health. Part of the reason that the Biden administration failed in its central purpose — preventing Trump from returning to power — is because its attempts to provide benefits to the American public were hamstrung by the government’s inability to implement policy swiftly and effectively. A state that works better is also one that (in theory) should enjoy greater support from the public — and thus be less vulnerable to anti-system demagoguery.

So how do you fix all this in practice? Here, the answer is a bit murkier. Without a central hub that can authoritatively say “this is the agenda,” it takes a long time to translate political principles into consensus policy proposals. It’s also somewhat early: Project 2025’s final document wasn’t released till after the April after Biden’s midterm elections. But some concrete ideas are nonetheless gaining traction.

As part of the Reinvention Blueprint series, two former high-level Biden officials working on personnel — Loren DeJonge Schulman and Rob Shriver — published a detailed proposal for fixing the civil service. This is one of the clearest areas where the efficiency and democracy concerns intersect. It is both the case that the slow and hidebound federal bureaucracy is a key reason that policy implementation fails, and that political interference with the civil service has been one of Trump’s most effective tools for enacting unlawful and authoritarian policies.

Their piece is thus focused on recommending efficiency reforms that do not create dangerous room for executive interference. They call for reform of Title 5, the provision governing civil service hiring, to cut through the thicket of contradictory rules governing personnel onboarding — shortening hiring processes that currently take months or years. They call for a new merit-based assessment of civil service performance. And they call for a reform of the federal pay scale, increasing the top-level salaries of civil servants to allow the government to compete with the private sector for top talent. All of this, in their view, can be done without creating more avenues for political interference with the bureaucracy — so long as there are clear safeguards written in to insulate civil service decisions from presidential dictates.

This proposal shows how the two theoretically contradictory approaches to fixing government can, with a little policy creativity, be accomplished at the same time — and even as part of the same legislative reform package or executive order.

You can see similar thinking at work in the EDI papers. Collectively, they focus on proposals for “power-shifting” — which means, among other things, using public policy to build up constituencies like organized labor that can check abuses of state (and corporate) power. But they also are deeply interested in power-shifting as a way to provide better services; one paper, by Biden Department of Labor vet Rajesh Nayak, focuses explicitly on how strengthening certain civil society groups could improve state capacity.

And there are plenty of other ways, often implicitly stated in the existing literature, in which the two areas of concern overlap. Democrats could, in a single bill, eliminate widely hated barriers to swift implementation — like the ironically named Paperwork Reduction Act, which mostly increased bureaucratic hurdles to policy implementation — while also curtailing executive discretion over declaring emergencies. They could reform the Privacy Act of 1974, the key act governing data-sharing inside the federal government, to get rid of months-long holdups for key information (like database access passwords) while empowering citizens to sue if their rights were violated.

Most of the prior ideas require legislation, which obviously makes them harder to implement, but also ensures they would persist. While many have been awed by the blitz of unilateral executive action during the Trump administration, his many reversals of Biden’s executive actions have also demonstrated the long-term fragility of this approach. Indeed, much of what seems like Trump’s legacy today could be just as swiftly undone the next time Democrats take the White House.

Understanding this dynamic, as well as the legal limits on the presidency, the most impactful Democratic ideas for transforming government are designed as new legislation. The danger of this approach is veto points: the Senate filibuster and a Supreme Court override. As such, many of the people I’ve spoken to are — following the new consensus among congressional Democrats — open to ideas for radically changing the balance of political power. Ideas here include filibuster abolition, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico statehood, expanding the size of the House, and various ideas for Supreme Court reform ranging from court-packing to jurisdiction-stripping.

“To do the things we all want to do, you just need to pass massive sweeping legislation,” Adam Jentleson, president of the Searchlight Institute, told me. “You’re going to need a lot of Senate seats to do it. And you’re also going to need to shift the balance of the courts.”

Not everyone involved is on board with steps this radical. The emerging consensus, inasmuch as it exists, is on executive branch reform. Ideas beyond that remain deeply contentious.

Its ideas, despite their shaggy structure, have penetrated nearly every corner of the party — and even brought people together across entrenched factional lines.

But the need for aggressive procedural moves was a major point of conversation at a conference I attended at Cornell in May, where I heard core elements of the Project 2029 vision floated for the first time. The event, titled “Rebuilding Democracy After Backsliding,” was held under Chatham House rules, meaning I can’t report the names of individuals attending nor attribute any remarks to specific individuals.

But it was clear to most of the attendees that the Senate and Supreme Court would be the biggest barriers to any kind of reform agenda — and that if Democrats win in 2028, they should be ready with ideas for muscling past veto points.

“A confrontation with the Court is coming,” one conferencegoer, a key figure in the Project 2029 conversations, said during their panel.

How this could happen for real

Given how loose this Democratic policy apparatus’ organizational structure is, it’s easy to be skeptical about its actual, real-world influence. What does it matter what a bunch of people are writing in obscure white papers or chatting about at conferences when none of them are going to be in Congress (let alone the next president)?

But what’s remarkable about the real Project 2029 is that its ideas, despite their shaggy structure, have penetrated nearly every corner of the party — and even brought people together across entrenched factional lines. They are widely popular among the people who will staff any future administration; in fact, they are already showing up in the rhetoric of party leaders and top 2028 candidates.

There is, in short, every sign that Democrats are actually serious about making dual-track government reform a central part of their next president.

Elizabeth Wilkins, president of the Roosevelt Institute, is the person who helped me appreciate this point most fully. An attorney and former Supreme Court clerk, she served in two senior roles in the Biden administration — first with Chief of Staff Ron Klain, and then with Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. She joined Roosevelt shortly after the 2024 election, putting her in charge of what is arguably the most influential policy shop on the Democrats’ left flank.

On paper, Wilkins looks like she should be a factional knife fighter. Khan’s FTC was the nerve center of the neo-Brandeisian movement, a subfaction of the progressive movement (in)famous for assailing intra-party rivals as corporate shills. Neo-Brandesians have a special hatred for the abundance and state capacity types — the Pahlkas of the world — and have spent much of the past year trying to paint them as neoliberal sellouts whose efficiency agenda is really Republican-style deregulation in drag.

Yet under Wilkins’ leadership, Roosevelt has embraced many state capacity ideas. In the past year, they have formally partnered with both Searchlight and the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank that serves as a hub for state capacity thinking, on events designed to build a shared left-center vision for fixing government.

“There is, at least in some corners, a useful consensus to be had about some of these reforms,” Wilkins said. “If you’re anywhere on the center-left to left-spectrum, there’s an opening to talk about what it looks like to [better] design and implement policy.”

Making government work should, in her view, quite obviously be a left-wing priority. She points to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has made cutting red tape central to his democratic socialist mayoralty, as proof of the left’s seriousness here.

“Mamdani is probably the most abundance-pilled mayor we have in America,” she said. “He’s got this idea that if you want the state to have a major role in public life, you should be most laser-focused on making government work.”

If state capacity reforms seem controversial but quietly aren’t, pro-democracy reform is universally and loudly agreed upon by virtually everyone. Obama, Kamala Harris, and nearly every top congressional leader have called for new policy changes designed to rein in the power of the presidency and restore Congress’s power. The Democratic congressional delegation has proposed detailed legislation on multiple different related fronts, ranging from protecting civil service independence to imposing restrictions on ICE activity.

The flag-carriers may be running for president

It’s tempting to see support for this whole program as wide but shallow — something Democrats talk about, but won’t actually care about acting on once they regain power. Yet the top-polling 2028 candidates have demonstrated real personal interest in some aspects of this, and some have gone even further.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is deeply invested in both sides of the coin: making government efficiency and abundance-style reforms a majority policy priority, as well as using California’s state resources to challenge Trump’s efforts to consolidate power in his own hands. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York co-founded House Democrats’ anti-corruption caucus, and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) has made challenging Trump’s self-interested abuse of power the centerpiece of his political identity. 

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has gone the furthest in embracing the Project 2029 worldview, making institutional reform pretty much his central pitch in interviews and public appearances. While his specific policy ideas tend to focus on some broader structural reforms — like expanding the Supreme Court and ending partisan gerrymandering — his general diagnosis is strikingly similar to the Project 2029 synthesis of state capacity and executive branch limitations (building on related ideas in his 2020 presidential run).

In one interview, he defined “the foundational issue” in American politics as figuring out “what it’s going to take for our democracy to function properly.” Proper functioning, in his mind, consists of two things: “a government that can provide basic services, and that can protect you from anyone who would make you unfree, including itself.” In another, he echoed the democracy reformers in putting executive branch overreach at the center of America’s problems: “If you have an executive branch that has shredded any institutions — even in the private sector — that could hold it accountable, you’re going to get really bad outcomes in your day-to-day life.”

When I spoke with him in May, he told me that the abundance and state capacity crowd “identified a bunch of things that are inarguably part of the [problem] with trying to build anything.” He also agreed with the basic view of his fellow Biden vets involved in Project 2029 — that their experience proved more radical reform to governing structures is the only path forward.

“If return to normal could be done, and could succeed, the last administration would have done it,” Buttigieg said.

This institutional message has become so central to his political identity that he’s turned it into a stump speech applause line. “I have come to believe that the kitchen table cannot be improved unless we are also reforming the institutional and political floor on which that kitchen table sits,” he said in an August address at a Black church in South Carolina.

There is, in short, both wide and deep investment in Project 2029-style ideas across the Democratic Party — which gives good reason to think that they will make up a pretty significant part of the next Democratic president’s agenda.

Will it really work?

The notion that Democrats are united around a set of policies that would, in a stroke, address the central pathologies of both the Biden and second Trump administrations almost sounds too good to be true. Alex Mechanick worries that it might be.

A professor at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Institute, where he has become one of the leading voices in the state capacity movement, Mechanick has thought deeply about the interplay between these issues and constraining authoritarian power, and earlier this year he published the first academic paper to address the relationship in real depth. When we spoke, he expressed concern that much of the thinking in Project 2029 circles might be skating over some pretty significant conflicts.

Start with the premise, articulated by Rahman and Berger, that you can draw a useful distinction between authoritarian and beneficial forms of state capacity. Mechanick points out that many of the most worrying abuses of the Trump administration — like its use of the Federal Communications Commission and antitrust law to attack the free press, or its use of tariff exemptions to make corporations dependent on the president’s personal goodwill  — all involve traditional areas of economic policymaking that liberal state capacity types want to make more efficient. Liberating the civic state to deliver better policy, he worries, could just as easily turn it into a more effective tool for political repression.

“If you go down the line of the things the government ordinarily does, and you cross-reference them against abuses of power, I’m not sure that you get a clean separation,” he told me.

Nor does he think this problem can be solved merely by empowering Congress and constraining executive discretion. Even a well-functioning legislature cannot write self-executing laws. You also need the executive branch to have real latitude to decide how Congress’s general guidance applies in specific cases. In fact, he argues, doing Congress’s will almost requires a strong executive branch to carry it out. “You cannot run an effective state demanding constant legislative micromanagement,” he said.

If he’s right on both counts, then there is a real problem for the Project 2029 thinkers: They are minimizing the degree to which their two objectives — a more effective government and a constrained White House — are competing objectives.

“The frustrating reality is that there probably isn’t a solution that is going to eliminate all trade-offs,” Moynihan, the Michigan professor, tells me.

To see this in specific, look at debates over an issue that fascinates wonks on both sides of the project: the data-sharing provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974. It was initially passed to protect against the misuse of government data in Richard Nixon’s era. The law creates barriers to agencies cross-referencing information on citizens, like Social Security records being shared with the White House to facilitate political attacks on the opposing party.

Clearly, the regulation of government data use has become more important rather than less. But should it be made stricter — or looser? 

When democracy reformers talk, as in the third essay in the Reinvention Blueprints series, they tend to call for a strengthening of data-sharing rules — treating them as necessary to prevent rogue actors like DOGE and ICE from building data-powered tools for corruption or repression. But when state capacity thinkers like Pahlka talk about the law, they see it primarily as a barrier to good government — adding friction to efforts to swiftly implement policy in the internet-and-AI age. 

These kinds of specific tensions could pull apart the broad Project 2029 alignment.

“It’s a mistake to think that guardrails that will make it harder for us to deliver benefits will somehow stop an authoritarian,” Jentleson of Searchlight Institute said. “If I was faced with a trade-off [between efficiency and guardrails], I would generally — probably almost always — opt for the version that made it easier to deliver benefits.”

Mechanick’s paper suggests some thoughtful solutions to dilemmas like this, most notably empowering courts to respond more aggressively to executive aggrandizement. But many of the other 2029 thinkers I’ve spoken with have been pretty hostile to judicial power, seeing a system ultimately controlled by a 6-3 conservative majority as more of a danger to their vision than a potential ally.

Which raises another question: Is everyone a little too sanguine about the politics here?

It’s easy to say today that Democrats will pass whatever legislation they want come 2029. But it’s hardly guaranteed that Democrats win a trifecta in the 2028 election. And even if they do, their Senate majority may depend on the type of moderates who are unwilling to abolish the filibuster — let alone admit new states or expand the Supreme Court. There is a chance, maybe even a big chance, that the optimism about getting the real Project 2029 agenda passed is wishful thinking.

Bipartisan legislation isn’t out of the question here. Some, like Mechanick and Pahlka, think this might actually be more viable than a party-line push. Republicans have historically been quite willing to cut red tape; on the democracy side, they might be more amenable to new laws constraining the executive with a Democrat in the White House. This isn’t just conjecture: In 2022, Democrats and Republicans worked together to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act, a bill explicitly designed to cut off the avenues Trump used to try and overturn the 2020 election.

The problem is that this route might require untenable amounts of compromise. Already, the current policy package needs to bring together the center-left and left — leading them to skate over areas of reform, like the influence of public sector unions, that divide the Democratic coalition. Try to bring in Republicans, and it’s possible the entire thing becomes too unwieldy to get across the finish line.

That both key policy and political strategy issues remain so unsettled illustrates just how far the real Project 2029 has to go before it’s ready for prime time. 

Yet it is only 2026. Democrats have two and a half years, at the earliest, before they’d be able to retake power and win the White House. And the amount of intellectual firepower being brought to bear on these questions, along with major institutional backing and high-level political interest, shows that they are serious about finding answers — and implementing them once they retake power.

“When you have a next president in, there will be a set of plans for how we actually try and fix things,” a senior policy adviser involved in these efforts tells me. “Not just fix things, but make them better.”

Correction, October 15, 12:45 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated Alex Mechanick’s job title.

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: Is Trump turning on Ukraine? 

What’s happening? Ukraine says its access to Starlink, the satellite internet system run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, and Starshield, the military version of the same technology, is being throttled as President Donald Trump’s animosity toward the country mounts.

Why is Trump angry with Ukraine? Trump has been hot and cold on Ukraine since he returned to office, but his current anger is driven by oil prices and successful Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries — particularly ahead of the US midterm elections. 

Last week, Trump announced a US-Russia diesel deal, which has elicited bipartisan anger and probably won’t do much, if anything, for diesel prices in the US. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has criticized the deal, leading Trump to lash out and call for Zelenskyy’s replacement.

Over the weekend, Trump also announced an “ENERGY CEASEFIRE” between Ukraine and Russia that doesn’t really seem to exist. “Both parties have agreed,” he wrote. “Do not break it!” (Russia appears to have broken it the same day, while Ukraine is complying for now.)

Is Ukraine actually to blame for high oil prices? Partially, but not primarily; as the BBC explains, while Ukrainian refinery strikes play a role, ongoing disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf oil industry from Trump’s war with Iran have had a greater impact (though Trump has tried to shift the blame to Ukraine).

Why is Starlink so important? Starlink and Starshield provide vital communications infrastructure in Ukraine, especially on the battlefield. The technology is also used to control offensive and defensive Ukrainian drones, which have emerged as a key part of Ukraine’s military efforts against Russia.

What’s next? Despite the fact that neither Russia nor Ukraine seemingly signed on to Trump’s “ENERGY CEASEFIRE” and Russia is still attacking Ukrainian energy facilities, Trump is trying to bind Ukraine to it: The US has reportedly threatened to suspend US intelligence sharing, which has helped give Ukraine early warning of Russian missile attacks, if Ukraine strikes more Russian refineries.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I appreciated this New York Times story, pegged to Pope Leo XIV’s diagnosis yesterday, about all of the ways that science has made lung cancer massively more survivable than in years past, with a fatality rate half of what it was in the 1990s. You can read it here with a gift link.

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

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

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is out of a job after serious corruption allegations. 

What happened? Guilfoyle resigned on Tuesday after being shown the door earlier in the day by Trump’s brand-new White House press secretary, who announced at a briefing that Guilfoyle had been asked to resign. 

Her departure comes just six days after a bombshell Wall Street Journal story, which described Guilfoyle’s efforts to solicit money from a Trump donor, including $100,000 to pay down a credit card bill, in exchange for access to Trump officials and conservative media figures. 

Guilfoyle also attempted to conceal those efforts: In one text to the donor, Eric Deters, she wrote, “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Who is Guilfoyle? Fallen MAGA royalty. Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality, is also the ex-fiancée of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. (and, more distantly, the ex-wife of current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat).

There appears to be little love lost between Guilfoyle and Trump, however. On Tuesday, he told reporters that Guilfoyle “wasn’t a member of my family. She I guess dated my son a long time ago.” (The Don Jr.-Guilfoyle relationship is thought to have ended in 2024.)

Why was she forced out? Corruption allegations are not, generally speaking, dealbreakers in Trumpworld; the president and his children are all innovators when it comes to profiting off the presidency, and there’s plenty of self-dealing going on around them.

That being said, Guilfoyle may have crossed the line in two specific ways: one, her alleged corruption benefited her and not the Trump family. And two, the allegations are embarrassingly unsubtle even by the standards of the second Trump administration. The combination appears to have been too much.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

This New York Times story, about what a potential superhabitable world elsewhere in the cosmos could look like, was a very cool, very sci-fi read — and we may find out more about the existence of such planets soon, with new space telescopes planned for next year and beyond. 

You can read the full story here with a gift link. Enjoy, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow! 

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

When life gives you lemons, make it rain. Or…something like that! On Tuesday morning, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar launched a fundraising drive in response to the Trump administration’s unusual predawn raid of her Washington, DC, residence.

The raid, which went down Monday, is reportedly part of a criminal investigation into Omar’s immigration history. The Democratic Congress member was born in Somalia and came to the US as a child, becoming a naturalized citizen in 2000 at age 17.

Omar has since become one of the most prominent progressive voices in Congress and a regular thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, who on Monday called her “terrible” and “totally crooked.” Vice President JD Vance has similarly claimed, without evidence, that Omar “committed immigration fraud.” On Monday, the New York Post reported that the investigation may have sprung from mistakes Omar’s late father made while filling out her citizenship application roughly 30 years ago. 

Needless to say, decades-old citizenship paperwork is not the kind of threat to public safety that typically commands the resources of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigations branch. (That same branch is charged with investigating transnational gangs and terrorists.)

And the raid is unusual for another reason, too: By longstanding practice, the Justice Department avoids taking any public steps in investigations involving political candidates within 60 days of an election. The midterms are just three weeks from now. 

This investigation is unlikely to affect Omar in the midterms, however. In the words of her longshot Republican challenger, John Nagel, Minnesota’s Fifth District is among “the ‘bluest’…in the country.” The raid may have even galvanized Omar’s supporters, dozens of whom rallied at a Minneapolis park on Monday afternoon. Some held banners that read “we stand with Ilhan.” Another sign read, simply, “see you at the polls.”

Go a little deeper

Omar now belongs to an unenviable and surprisingly populous club: political opponents of Trump whom his administration has threatened with criminal indictments and investigations. 

I initially planned to list them out for you here, but then realized that list would be perilously long. By my back-of-the-envelope count, there are at least 30 Democratic politicians, public officials, and Trump-world defectors who have been accused of, investigated for, or charged with crimes during the second Trump administration. 

It’s easy to forget the scale of that campaign, however, because many of these efforts have (thus far!) stalled out or collapsed. In several cases, the administration opened much-publicized and thinly supported investigations that have yet to yield charges. (See, for instance, the criminal probe into writer E. Jean Carroll or former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.) 

In at least two cases — that of then-Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and several Minnesota officials — federal judges tossed out subpoenas for lack of evidence. And in one high-profile instance earlier this year, a grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress who released a video reminding soldiers to refuse illegal orders. The legal bar for issuing such an indictment is actually pretty low — which makes this grand jury’s refusal a telling rebuke of the administration. 

But these judicial setbacks aren’t exactly reason for optimism. The federal court system is becoming increasingly partisan, and as long as Republicans hold the Senate, they’ll be able to stack it with ever-more conservative and deferential judges. And several of the most partisan judges already on the bench are “openly auditioning” for Supreme Court slots, as my colleague Ian Millhiser recently put it. 

In other words, in the not-so-distant future, the court system may provide a weaker check on presidential overreach. And that’s bad news not only for the Ilhan Omars of the world…but also for American democracy. 

One link for later

➨ Turn off your sleep tracker. If your sleep hygiene and underlying health are both good, but you still struggle to catch enough ZZs, then you might actually want to tone down your quest for better sleep. “What you see in people with insomnia is that they’re trying too hard,” one sleep scientist told Vox. Analyzing your sleep scores and timing your naps can create anxiety that further fuels insomnia. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper were all invented by 19th-century pharmacists? At the time, it was widely believed that carbonated water could cure illnesses. And sugary syrups made said water vastly more delicious. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the 2025 Pixar film set in the “Communiverse”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the three-letter successor of tube TVs. That would be LCD, which stands for liquid crystal display.

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 planning a public killing. 

What’s happening? On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that it would execute Nidal Hasan, a former Army major sentenced to death for a 2009 mass shooting on a military base, publicly and on livestream. 

The execution, if it happens, would be unprecedented: The last widely reported public execution in the US was 90 years ago, in Kentucky, but to stream a death live would be something else entirely. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has promoted the announcement with something approaching glee, telling a reporter that “we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it.”

What’s the context? According to the Pentagon, Hasan will be executed via firing squad on December 3 — the first such execution by the military in more than 80 years.

Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, was sentenced to death in 2013 by a military jury following a court-martial for the 2009 shooting, when he killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 at Fort Hood in Texas. The execution is set to be carried out at the same Army post.

Will the Pentagon go through with this? It’s unclear, for multiple reasons. The Pentagon’s announcement that Hasan’s death will be livestreamed has generated a great deal of bipartisan pushback, as well as condemnation by religious groups, though that is unlikely to stop the execution itself. 

The head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops decried the decision to livestream the execution as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” and retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) called it the decision “beyond disgusting.” 

“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do,” Tillis wrote in a post on X. 

On Friday, Vice President JD Vance also said that he was unsure if the livestream would take place. 

Hasan’s legal team could also delay the execution substantially — potentially for multiple years — by challenging his detention in federal court, though he has exhausted the military appeals process.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The driest (non-polar) desert in the world, the Atacama in South America, was in full bloom late last month after record-setting rainfall. You can read more about the science behind the wildflowers here, or just enjoy some spectacular photos here (it’s a gift link). Either way, I hope it brings you some joy. 

The Logoff will be off on Monday for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, so we’ll see you back here on Tuesday. Have a good long weekend! 

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

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to fix the diesel crisis he caused. 

What’s happening? On Monday evening, Trump signed an executive order intended to lower diesel prices by temporarily expanding access to red-dye diesel. 

What’s red-dye diesel? A kind of diesel usually reserved for farm and construction equipment and other off-road uses — and marked with a little bit of red dye to distinguish it from other diesel sold for use in on-road vehicles. Ordinarily, it’s tax-exempt and not available to on-road vehicles, but Trump is expanding access in a bid to bring down the overall cost of fuel ahead of the midterm elections. 

Trump’s order defers payment on — but does not actually suspend — the federal tax on red-dye diesel for on-road vehicles through the end of the year, while also directing his Cabinet “to explore pathways to eliminate the obligation to pay the deferred taxes.” 

What’s the context? Diesel prices are way, way up because of the Iran war. Currently, the national average price per gallon is $6.32, compared to $3.68/gallon one year ago. 

Will this do anything to lower prices? Not very much, in all likelihood, for a whole slew of reasons ably explained here — including that the order can’t change the underlying reality of a global diesel shortage.

Why does the price of diesel matter? Most people don’t use diesel to fill up their tank, but semitrucks shipping food and other goods around the country rely on it. That means that when diesel gets more expensive, nearly everything else does too, sooner or later. 

Why does Trump care? This is best explained by the fact that Trump signed the executive order while on the campaign trail in Nebraska — ordinarily a comfortably Republican state that instead looks potentially in play for independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn. 

High diesel prices have hit hard in Nebraska and other agriculture-heavy states like Iowa and Kansas, jeopardizing Republican Senate seats in all three.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a story worth clicking for the cover photo alone: Scientists have discovered two new challengers for the title of world’s loudest bird, the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema. Both can top out at more than 120 decibels — louder than a jackhammer, according to 404 Media. 

If you’re curious, there are videos of both bird calls in the article, though I have not played them out of respect for the sleeping dachshund on my lap.

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

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

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to bribe his way out of a midterm disaster. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, Trump announced a plan to send $90 payments to more than 20 million Americans 65 years and older, drawing from a pool of money called the Medicare Improvement Fund. 

Trump, in a post, described the payments as part of a strategy to “substantially LOWER costs for our Seniors” — but the money, a single nonrecurring payment set to go out this month, was reportedly already earmarked for other programs before Trump decided to redirect it. 

Why now? Trump, facing a potentially catastrophic midterms for his party, has been looking for any way to turn out (Republican) voters — up to and including offering them cash, either implicitly or explicitly, in return for their support. 

In the implicit category: these $90 payments and a smaller number of $500 Affordable Care Act refunds (fewer than 1 million) that began going out last week. 

Much more explicitly, however, he’s also promising Americans $5,000 if they reelect Republicans in the midterms.

Trump has directly linked Medicare payments with the promised checks: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People,” he wrote in a post, “they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”

Will it work? It’s hard to say for sure, but it feels unlikely: The Medicare payments are relatively small, while the ACA payments are going out to relatively few voters. Polling suggests that voters are not fans of the promised $5,000 checks, and even fewer believe that they’re going to happen (they’re almost certainly correct). 

What else should I know? Direct payments to Americans — real or promised — are not the only way Trump is trying to sway the midterms in his favor. He’s also continuing to spend taxpayer dollars on a propagandistic ad campaign, which he personally directed.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast team is back with a deeply controversial new question: What color are tennis balls? Personally, I think yellow, but whatever your opinion, it’s a fascinating conversation. You can listen here, or read a partial transcript here.

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

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

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is once again selling access to the highest bidder(s). 

What’s happening? On Thursday, the Washington Sun’s Jeff Stein reported that Trump will reprise his 2025 “crypto dinner” later this year, hosting some of the top investors in the $TRUMP memecoin at his Virginia golf club. 

The top 185 holders of $TRUMP will receive an invite to the event, which the website describes as the “Most EXCLUSIVE DINNER IN THE WORLD.” The top 29 $TRUMP holders will also be eligible for a “special VIP reception.” 

What is $TRUMP? As my colleague Adam Clark Estes explained last year, memecoins like $TRUMP are “all but make-believe.” The coin is a crypto token, or “a type of digital asset that’s built on a cryptocurrency’s blockchain, but it is not a full featured cryptocurrency, like bitcoin.” 

In other words, buying it doesn’t get you very much — the value of the coin has collapsed since early last year when Trump took office — but it will get you a chance to have dinner with the president. 

What’s the context? This will be the third major event Trump has hosted for buyers of $TRUMP, following a May 2025 dinner at his Virginia club and a “crypto and business conference” earlier this year at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump gave a keynote speech. 

But it’s just one of the many, many ways that Trump and his family have found to enrich themselves through crypto: There’s also another memecoin, $MELANIA, and his lucrative crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, which received a $500 million investment from a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family last year.

Strictly speaking, as Stein points out, Trump himself does not own the company minting $TRUMP, though he still profits handsomely, to the tune of $636 million last year, from transaction fees and other revenue. And he’s made even more off World Liberty Financial, which he and his sons do own, along with others: $799 million in 2025 alone, according to financial disclosure forms filed earlier this year.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Don’t miss this story about “junk journaling” from my colleague Rachel Miller, a hobby that she describes as “a great way to cope with digital malaise and existential dread.” (Needed!) You can read it with a gift link here.

Plus: It’s a big day for Denali National Park’s sled dog puppies, of whom I’m a big fan.

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

Depending on your political appetite and your geographic location, you absolutely do not need me to remind you of the upcoming midterm elections. But for those of you unencumbered by an unhealthy attachment to political news, and unassaulted by the onslaught of ever-more-brazen political ads, consider this your official notice that the midterms are approaching. Fast.

In less than six weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. 

So starting this evening, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s Midterms, Actually team for five weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the 2026 midterms. Together with outside experts, we’ll break down one issue each week and suggest further reading and races to watch in November.

Up first, and without further ado: the profound shift that both parties have experienced since the 2024 election. These are not your mother’s Democrats. Or Republicans.

Go a little deeper

To kick this series off, I asked Astead to imagine a hypothetical world in which he hadn’t followed politics since 2024. (An outlandish counterfactual: Astead is acutely plugged into politics.) But in this alternate universe, I asked, what would surprise him most about 2026?

Easy, he said. The GOP’s disillusionment with President Donald Trump, who remade the party in his image. 

Let’s put some numbers on that phenomenon, to start. Trump’s approval rating has dipped to record lows, even among Republicans. According to an NBC poll conducted in mid-September, just four in 10 Republicans strongly approve of Trump’s performance, down 11 percentage points from the spring.

Republicans have soured on Trump over his handling of the economy and attacks on Iran, which violated his promise to keep America out of foreign wars. Trump’s delayed release of the Epstein files also fueled distrust in his base by exposing his own ties to the dreaded “elite insiders.”

In response, some Republican candidates have worked to distance themselves from Trump, even defying him in campaign ads. But it’s unclear whether that tactic will win over disillusioned or disengaged Republicans. If enough stay home, Astead said — especially with Democrats eager to vote — Democrats could flip the House and/or Senate and make Trump’s last years in office far more difficult.

And speaking of Democrats…they’re also undergoing a major transformation after their 2024 presidential defeat. That loss disproved their previous theory of Trump-era politics: namely, that Trump’s rise was an aberration that competence, decency, and normalcy would eventually overcome.

By contrast, today’s Democrats want a party that “fights,” Astead told me. “The open question is who they’re fighting: The oligarchy? Big Tech? The Billionaire/Epstein class? Trump’s Republican Party?” 

Democrats face ideological questions, too. Since 2024, voters have lost trust in the establishment and in party leaders’ ability to pick the best candidates; left-wing candidates have thrived in that vacuum. It’s pretty wild, when you think about it, that a Muslim democratic socialist in New York ranks among America’s most popular Democrats.

For both parties, then, November 3 is a test of their respective visions for America. Not just between the parties — as in, Republicans vs. Democrats — but within them, as well. That, in turn, will help determine the rest of Trump’s presidency…and the 2028 presidential election. 

But it’s only October 1. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 

➨  Races to watch: Michigan’s Senate race, where progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers; Florida’s 27th District, where Republican María Elvira Salazar publicly broke with Trump; and the Nebraska, Idaho, and South Dakota’s Senate races, where independent candidates will test both sides’ exhaustion with the two-party system. 

➨  More from Vox: 

• It’s not the left rising. It’s the center falling.
• More Republicans are breaking from Trump. Is it too little, too late?
• What Democrats are still getting wrong about voters

One link for later

➨ “Decant” your berries and asparagus. They’ll last longer with more space and air. It’s one of several gloriously simple ways you can reduce food waste without resorting to complex cooking projects or pricey “storage systems.” 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that octopuses’ arms are individually intelligent? When cut off, they can crawl away, grab food, and lift it to where an octopus’s mouth would be if it were still connected.
• Today’s trivia: What constellation contains the North Star and Little Dipper? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you where Napoleon was exiled after his forced abdication. That was a bit of a trick question, since he was exiled twice: first to Elba, in the Mediterranean Sea, and then to Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic.

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

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is spending taxpayer money on propaganda ads. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, the Trump administration aired a 30-second spot of Trump promising to “demolish the deep state, expel the warmongers from our government,” and “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists,” paired with black-and-white footage of the president walking down a hallway. 

For the final 10 seconds of the ad, a line of white text appears on the screen: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

What’s the context? This is the third such Trump-centric ad in the last week to air with that text, and so far the most prominent: It played during Saturday Night Live, Fox News Sunday, and multiple college and pro football games over the weekend, according to the New York Times. 

The other two ads also promote Trump, one with clips from a speech he gave over the summer and the other declaring “America will never be a communist country” over flashing photos of Trump as the song “Love Me” plays in the background. All of them are likely illegal, according to several ethics experts who spoke with the Times.

How much has Trump spent? It’s a moving target, but many hundreds of thousands. The Associated Press reported on Monday that the most recent third ad has at least $319,000 behind it, while the “Love Me” ad had cost taxpayers at least $443,000 as of Friday.

How is the administration responding? The White House has defended the ads as “public service announcements,” pointing out that Trump is not currently on the ballot. 

The black-and-white spot, however, is almost a 1:1 duplicate of a 2024 Trump campaign ad — and the others are no less Trump-heavy and substance-light.

Contra the administration line, Trump has also spent the months leading up to the midterms asking voters to “pretend I’m on the ticket” — including, now, by using their own money to put himself on air.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Now for a change of pace before we log off: Easily my favorite story from the weekend was from the cycling World Championships in Montreal, where Brandon McNulty, in stunning fashion, became the first American to win in 33 years (it’s a gift link).

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