Artificial intelligence is already generating technological change that, on its own and in combination with advanced robotics, will design and define much of our future. But who will design and define AI—tech-bro billionaires whose primary mission is to become trillionaires, or citizens and elected representatives who seek to harness technology in the interest of humanity? Donald Trump has made his choice, signaling at a Pittsburgh “energy and innovation summit” last summer that he would willingly sacrifice the public interest and let the tech industry call the shots. “Regulation be damned” was the message from the president; let the chips fall where they may. Trump formalized his subservience in December, when he issued an executive order that The New York Times reported “grants broad authority to the attorney general to sue states and overturn laws that do not support the ‘United States’ global A.I. dominance,’ putting dozens of A.I. safety and consumer protection laws at risk. If states keep their laws in place,” the report continued, “Mr. Trump directed federal regulators to withhold funds for broadband and other projects.”

In March, Trump baked his agenda into a “National AI Legislative Framework” that emphasizes deregulation and federal preemption of the states. “Preemption is the real story,” Zephyr Teachout, the scholar of monopoly power, wrote on X. “We do not need a national framework for AI. Of any kind. We need state and federal laws but we will be crushed if we block local power to protect kids, workers, consumers, journalism, everything. Congress should do its job, not stop states from doing theirs with common law, liability, antitrust, and more.”

So far, however, Congress has tended to sideline itself, while the president and his administration rush to embrace the financial overlords during this transformative moment. That embrace is so shameless, so transparent, that messages and images emanating from the White House seem like dystopian cinema. “The future of AI is ‘personified,’” first lady Melania Trump declared at a March 25 White House event where she appeared with robots and asked Americans to “imagine a humanoid educator named Plato” replacing teachers.

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“Call me a radical, but no!” responded Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has emerged—along with a growing number of the scientific pioneers of artificial intelligence—as a thoughtful AI skeptic. “We should not be replacing teachers in America with robots. We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve.”

Sanders is right, of course. But, as has too often been the case when it comes to industrial and technological revolutions, their influence on society, and the resulting policy disputes, being right in the early stages of a transformation can be a lonely mission.

The good news is that the people get it. A February Economist/YouGov survey found that 63 percent of Americans think jobs will be lost in an AI transition that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged “isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed who expressed an opinion on the question said they believed AI will hurt the economy.

That’s backed up by polls in states where the issues have been framed by fights over the development of AI data centers. A December letter from more than 230 environmental groups, including Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, argued, “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security.” Voters see what’s happening in states like Wisconsin, where a Marquette Law School Poll in March found that 69 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the costs of the data centers outweigh the benefits.” That’s the same percentage that said AI is developing too fast.

Smart Democrats and a few Republicans are seizing on these concerns. But there are not enough of them. “Sadly,” Sanders says, “Congress has done virtually nothing.” This disconnect has added urgency to a moment of enormous importance for people whose jobs are threatened, whose children’s brains are already marinating in AI slop, and whose privacy is being invaded by an ever-tightening surveillance state and an industry that’s determined to barter off personal data to the highest bidder.

To be sure, AI has huge potential to benefit humanity: by assisting responsible scientific innovation, helping medical researchers identify new strategies for diagnosing and treating disease, and (in ethical hands) increasing cybersecurity and other protections. But that potential will turn to peril if Trump and his allies—in both political parties—simply serve an industry that is already pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into manipulating the results of the 2026 elections. The urgency of the moment inspires this issue of The Nation, which affirms that skepticism about AI is well-founded and necessary. The articles in our special section examine the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of tech billionaires, along with concerns about job losses and surveillance, questions about military and police uses of new technologies, and smart strategies for regulating and governing AI.

At a point when everyone must take a side, The Nation is siding with humanity. We want the best that AI has to offer for the people. But we know that won’t happen if the citizens are locked out of the decision-making process, as Trump and his allies seek to do with their preemption scheme.

That scheme threatens to upend a burgeoning popular revolt that has already emerged at the grassroots, as communities all over the country reject the construction of behemoth data centers that are designed to meet the astronomical energy demands of the AI and cryptocurrency industries.

This is where Sanders proposes to intervene. In late March, with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), he proposed legislation to establish a national moratorium on the construction of data centers.

But this is about much more than data centers. “Bottom line: We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy, and the future of humanity,” the senator says, arguing that a federal moratorium—along with state and local interventions and the growing movement for international regulatory treaties—can slow down the self-serving rush of AI fabulists and profiteers.

“Congress has a moral obligation,” AOC says, “to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society. We must choose humanity over profit.”

Yes, we must!

Surprising pantry staples have seen spiking sales in recent months: Hamburger Helper and canned sardines. Rice and beans.

Americans aren’t just hankering for comfort food. Instead, they’re doing everything possible to stretch their dollars, choosing cheap, shelf-stable options as the rising cost of living strains household budgets. Borrowers are also increasingly falling behind on their car payments and student loans; renters are turning to “Buy Now, Pay Later” services to cover housing costs; and blood plasma sales are booming.

Yet President Donald Trump has deemed the affordability crisis a “hoax,” and he continuously boasts about the strength of the economy. All the while, an array of alarming metrics suggest that his reckless approach to domestic and foreign policy has worsened the existing strain on working people, pushing millions closer to the brink and pulling the promise of economic mobility ever further out of reach.

Farmers were already contending with high costs and plummeting sales thanks to Trump’s unprovoked trade war with China. Now that he’s instigated an actual war with Iran, prices for fuel and fertilizer are sharply rising, too, with the potential to set off a cascade of inflation that spreads from the cost of feed to prices at the butcher counter. Gas, which averaged $2.90 per gallon in February, swelled to $3.70 four weeks later—the second-largest monthly jump in 30 years.

On the domestic policy front, municipalities are bracing for the fallout from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Already-insufficient SNAP funding is being pared to the bone, placing millions of Americans in danger of having their food assistance slashed or eliminated altogether. These reductions are projected to contribute to 70,000 preventable deaths by 2040, while Medicaid cuts are poised to deprive millions of insurance coverage. New polling also reveals that a third of Americans have already been forced to cut back on essentials or borrow money to afford healthcare.

This is all unfolding as the unemployment rate ticks upward, with hiring stalled and the likelihood of a recession in the next 12 months approaching even odds. Trump and his allies crow over the market’s resilience—when he’s not sending stocks tumbling by starting armed conflicts or levying crippling tariffs, that is—but the economy is being propped up by a handful of tech companies and their fire hose of investment in AI, which may prove to be a market-crashing bubble or a job-killing engine of mass immiseration.

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Rampant inequality helps mask these grim financial forecasts. Cash-strapped families may be turning to recipes originally popularized during the Great Depression, but the rich are spending with abandon. And even as the fate of America’s wealthy diverges ever more starkly from the circumstances of the working class, Trump’s upwardly redistributive tax cuts and interventionist foreign policy threaten to further entrench this K-shaped economy. Consumer debt reached a record $18.8 trillion as of the end of last year—an average of over $100,000 per household—while a majority of adults say they can now afford to purchase only the bare essentials. Trump, for his part, claimed at Davos that “America will not become a nation of renters.” If that’s true, it’s because we already are.

Americans see the numbers at the pump and the till, and won’t be convinced to disbelieve their lying eyes: 59 percent say that the economy is getting worse, and many of Trump’s own voters now blame him for the downturn.

Democrats are capitalizing on the potency of affordability messaging ahead of the midterms. But messaging isn’t enough—if the party returns to power, it’s vital that it pursue policies that effectively pull working people’s finances back from the brink.

Representative Ro Khanna, who backs a proposed 5 percent billionaire tax in his home state of California, has partnered with Senator Bernie Sanders to introduce legislation that would take the measure nationwide, raising over $4 trillion. This money would be used to provide a $3,000 annual payment to members of households earning less than $150,000, fund healthcare and childcare, and guarantee public school teachers a minimum salary of $60,000.

It’s a bold proposal, befitting a moment when half-measures won’t cut it. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported on a 67-year-old Bronx woman who, despite receiving SNAP, still can’t always afford three daily meals. So she skips lunch and drinks water during the day to cover the cost of dinner. She has diabetes and manages her blood sugar with the help of Milky Way candy squares—healthier alternatives can be too expensive.

Helping Americans like these afford the essentials for a decent life may not rank among this president’s priorities, but there’s at least one consumer good that the Trump administration is determined to provide. Last week, a federal commission passed a vote urging the US Mint to create a commemorative coin featuring the president’s likeness. It will be up to three inches in diameter, and made of 24-carat gold.

Last week, progressives received more good news in their quest to retake the Senate. Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper and insurgent Texas state Senator James Talarico soared through their respective primaries. To the extent that betting markets’ predictions mean anything, they now place the odds of Democrats flipping the upper chamber closer than ever to even money.

But these elections aren’t the only stories offering hope in these times. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hit the ground running—advancing a path for universal childcare, introducing a fairer budget and a plan to balance it, and continuing to civically engage the public with his magnetic social-media presence and charismatic interviews. 

Underpinning it all has been a quiet, methodical effort: building out his administration.

Three recent appointments demonstrate Mamdani’s commitment to that long-cited political adage that personnel is policy. He and his team are drawing qualified, visionary, sometimes unconventional talent from the best of previous administrations—all deployed to pull on as many levers as possible to make New York a more just and affordable city.

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Mamdani struck fear in the hearts of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in November when he appointed former FTC chair Lina Khan to head his transition team. Now he has taken a natural next step in tapping one of Khan’s former deputies, Sam Levine, to lead the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. 

For all the buzz around Khan, Levine has more than demonstrated his potential to serve as the people’s tribune. At the FTC, he worked on rules that banned certain hidden and deceptive charges, won money back for defrauded car buyers, took on tech companies—including the cesspool formerly known as Twitter—for abusing consumer data, and sued Amazon for “trapping” people in subscriptions, leading to a $2.5 billion settlement.

Levine has brought that same bold approach to New York. In January, the Mamdani administration banned hotels across the city from charging junk fees, estimating that this new rule will save consumers more than $46 million by the end of this year. After a January ruling that guarantees delivery drivers the same minimum pay rate as restaurant workers, Levine said: “We want companies to be on notice that there’s a new sheriff in town.”

But as laser-focused as that sheriff has been on putting money back in people’s pockets, Mamdani is also expanding the scope of what it means to make New York livable. The mayor has said that his “vision is not limited to the homes that we live in,” but a city where working people “afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.” This comes as no surprise from the son of filmmaker Mira Nair—and from a man whose shirtless rap videos as Young Cardamom continue to resonate with viewers despite his best efforts.

The now-mayor is bringing his vision for a truly arts-forward city to life through last week’s appointment of Diya Vij to lead New York’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Vij has spent over a decade in the world of public and community-based art, and is returning to DCLA after a four-year stint under Mayor Bill de Blasio, during which she launched a program that embeds artists into city agencies.

Vij’s appointment comes at a critical time. As the federal government guts arts and culture—an estimated one-third of museums have lost funding and hundreds of NEA grants have been canceled under Trump 2.0—New York is the largest municipal funder of arts in the country.

After five years of shrinkage in New York’s creative sector and with artists increasingly priced out of the five boroughs, Vij and Mamdani will also be working to ensure artists can afford to live in the city whose global influence is defined by their creativity—a breath of fresh air given that New York has not built dedicated new housing for artists in over a decade.

Finally, few of Mamdani’s policies have been as hotly debated as his positions on policing and public safety. As a candidate, Mamdani pledged to keep Jessica Tisch—originally appointed by Eric Adams—as police commissioner, which was viewed as a pragmatic step. 

In naming Stanley Richards commissioner of New York’s Department of Correction, however, the mayor made it clear that he aspires to lead a new era of criminal justice. Richards is the first formerly incarcerated person to hold the position. After serving time for robbery in the late 1980s, he went on to climb the ranks of the Fortune Society, an organization that provides re-entry services to formerly incarcerated people.

Richards’ perspective is urgently needed. The notoriously deadly Rikers Island jail complex is slated for closure in 2027—and last spring, a federal judge ordered control of it to be temporarily transferred to a third-party remediation manager. This has left the city without control of its own jails for the first time in 400 years. The takeover was the culmination of years of litigation following reports of staff brutality, medical neglect, squalid living conditions, and dozens of deaths inside the jails.

Richards himself was once held at Rikers. Now he vows to “prioritize the safety of staff and incarcerated people,” and increase access to community services.

In an oft-dispiriting era of politics when so many doubt whether elections matter, Mayor Mamdani is working overtime to prove that they can. Less than 100 days in, his administration is already demonstrating what change looks like at the most granular level: putting competent people in strategic positions to enact idealist policy.

In other words, they are embracing a philosophy once articulated in the simplest of terms by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “pick smart colleagues.”

Before dawn on February 28, the United States and Israel launched what Donald Trump hailed as “major combat operations in Iran” but was, in fact, an undeclared, unauthorized, and unconstitutional regime-change war. As the bombs rained down on at least 14 cities, the death toll included Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and at least 165 people—most of them young girls—at a primary school. The president said the mission was “eliminating imminent threats.” In reality, it killed children, provoked counterstrikes across the Middle East, and threatened the region with another of the “forever wars” that Trump once campaigned against.

The attack on Iran represents the latest manifestation of an increasingly belligerent foreign policy that has seen US military interventions topple two government leaders in two months. The president who in 2024 declared, “I’m not going to start wars,” is now starting wars of aggression, threatening invasions, abandoning treaties, and creating chaos with such abandon that, in the words of former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes, “Trump’s second term has been the worst-case scenario.”

The Nation opposes Trump’s latest war, as do most Americans. But we are concerned that the response of many commentators to the Trump catastrophe is to hope for a return to a failed old order—a system of “rules” and strategies so unpopular that voters have already rejected them. That naïve longing ignores the need for this country to take a new look at its place in the world.

This issue of The Nation takes that new look from a perspective rooted in our values, experience, and history. If there is a through line in The Nation’s 160 years, it is that building a healthy and secure democracy is incompatible with an endless quest for global dominance. We know that Trump is reckless and wrong, but there’s more to our crisis than the mad ranting of an aging autocrat.

US foreign policy is adrift between an old order that is rapidly dying and a new one that is yet to be born. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, his reelection in 2024, and the robust debates between centrists and progressives within the Democratic Party tell us that the foreign-policy establishment’s bipartisan consensus no longer exists. Americans are rejecting assumptions that guided decades of US engagement with other countries—in particular, the idea that an international “rules-based order” backed by US military hegemony is worth maintaining, no matter the cost.

Trump’s “America First” agenda, however, has never offered a viable way forward. Mistakenly labeled “isolationism,” it is better understood as what the Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt calls “predatory hegemony”: a vision of the United States unbound by rules and unabashedly self-interested. Fueled by Trump’s vainglory and paranoia—his fever dreams about getting “ripped off” by allies such as Canada and by African children who need USAID programs to survive—this approach replaces diplomacy and international aid with a neo-imperial worldview in which the powerful take what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

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Trump is wrong. But putting a new coat of paint on the old “rules-based” order is not the alternative to toxic Trumpism—not for the United States, and not for a world where most people long ago recognized that the rules are written to benefit multinational corporations, arms dealers, and the politicians who serve them.

This issue of The Nation approaches the search for thoughtful, reasoned alternatives with a sense of urgency, seeking to counter the rush by elites in both parties toward an agenda of great-power competition, in the vain hope that political unity can be reforged around hostility to China or Russia.

In today’s deeply interconnected world, where challenges such as climate change and pandemics are global in scope, policymakers need to offer more than the prospect of new cold wars. This begins with the recognition that it is not in the best interests of US security and prosperity to export insecurity to countries we refer to as “partners.”

The pursuit of US global military hegemony, whatever the cost, is not the answer—whether it is advanced by Trump or by an elite foreign-policy establishment. Competing for dominance abroad invariably neglects urgent domestic needs and infringes on American liberties.

There is a better way: a new and affirmative US foreign policy that embraces restraint as an essential component of our own security and prosperity. An approach that insists that keeping Americans safe does not require spending more on defense than the next 10 countries combined. One that is clear about the genuine threats facing our country but refuses to be drawn into debates over which candidate, or which party, is tougher on China or Russia. One that tackles the mutually reinforcing challenges posed by domestic and global inequality and the grievances nurtured by both. One that recognizes the need for new alliances to address the climate crisis, the dangers of nuclear war, and the existential threat posed by unregulated artificial intelligence. One that understands, finally, that our futures on this planet are bound together.

Trump is orchestrating the destruction of the old international order. But he hasn’t a clue about how to preserve our security in this new era. That vacuum offers an opportunity for fresh thinking. This issue offers a modest contribution to that process by reviving the idea that another world is possible.

On February 12, Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) introduced legislation to finally lift all provisions of the US trade embargo against Cuba and advance the cause of normalized relations between Washington and Havana. The United States–Cuba Trade Act “would repeal or amend several laws codified over decades that restrict trade, exchange, telecommunications, and travel with Cuba,” according to a statement issued by McGovern’s office. The bill also calls for a bilateral dialogue, mandating that “the President should take all necessary steps to advance negotiations with the Government of Cuba.”

“I think we have to establish an opposition to Trump’s policy,” Representative McGovern asserted in an interview with The Nation. “I think we have to say there’s another way to do this.”

The legislative initiative comes as tensions between Cuba and the United States have turned deadly. On Wednesday, Cuba’s border patrol intercepted an armed group of exiles on a Florida-registered speedboat within one nautical mile of Cuba’s northern coastline. An exchange of gunfire killed four and injured six on board; one Cuban commander was also injured. The boat was loaded with assault weapons, Molotov cocktails, and camouflage uniforms, indicating “an infiltration with terrorist ends,” according to Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. “In the face of current challenges,” the Cuban government stated, “Cuba reaffirms its commitment to protecting its territorial waters…in order to protect its sovereignty and stability in the region.

Those “current challenges” are the result of the Trump administration’s decision to ratchet up economic pressure on the Cuban people by cutting off shipments of Venezuela petroleum and threatening other oil-producing nations to halt all oil exports to the island. The “total pressure” policy of energy deprivation is suffocating Cuba’s basic economic activities—creating a burgeoning humanitarian crisis for the Cuban populace. Foreign airlines ferrying tourists from Canada and Russia have suspended flights because they cannot refuel their planes once they land; tourist hotels are shuttered, costing thousands of Cuban jobs; the Canadian mining conglomerate, Sherritt, has suspended its operations on the island. Clinics and hospitals are closing. For average Cubans, “every day brings extended power cuts, intermittent water, spoiled food, suspended classes, canceled surgeries, and transportation that stops without warning,” Maria José Espinosa and Emily Mendrala reported in El País. “Families spend entire days searching for fuel, cooking gas, or basic goods.”

Across the international community, leaders are addressing the cruelty of US sanctions. At the Vatican, Pope Leo has expressed his concern for the “pain and anguish” of the Cuban people and urged both Washington and Havana to engage in a “sincere and effective dialogue,” free of coercion, to resolve rising tensions. “The blockade that the United States has imposed on Cuba,” stated Chilean President Gabriel Boric, “violates the human rights of the entire population.” “You cannot strangle a people like this,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has asserted, while offering the good offices of her country to facilitate talks between Washington and Havana and dispatching naval vessels filled with humanitarian assistance.

Just this week, at a meeting of Caribbean nations—CARICOM—attended by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, leaders across the region condemned the humanitarian impact of US economic pressure on Cuba. The prime minister of Jamaica, CARICOM chair Andrew Holness, called for a “constructive dialogue between Cuba and the US aimed at de-escalation, reform and stability. We must address the situation in Cuba with clarity and courage,” Holness said.

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“The situation in Cuba is dire,” McGovern and Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned President Trump in a February 25 letter to the White House. “Given that Cuba poses no credible national security threat to the United States, we urge you to lift the oil embargo on Cuba immediately to prevent unnecessary human suffering and reduce the potential for a regional refugee crisis.” As their letter admonished Trump: “Your escalation of the embargo and use of tariffs to starve a nation of critical resources are forms of economic coercion without a defensible rationale.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Nation: Representative McGovern, you have introduced a resolution to lift US sanctions and finally end the Cuba trade embargo. In the MAGA-controlled Congress, the votes aren’t there. What, then, is the purpose of moving this bill forward at this time?

Jim McGovern: I think we have to establish an opposition to Trump’s policy. I think we have to say there’s another way to do this. There has been a very little discussion on Cuba, you know, in recent years in Congress. I think a lot of people on the left have thought it’s a hopeless cause. And, you know, the people on the right just figure it’s a matter of time before the government collapses and they can put in whoever they want.

But I think if we care about the Cuban people then we care about opening political space. In Cuba, opening things up economically is the way to go, and that is why the embargo should be lifted. We have introduced this legislation because we need to start building a movement again—a movement calling for lifting the embargo, you know, and turning the page once and for all on what has been a Cold War policy for over six decades and restarting the effort [under Obama] to normalize relations.

TN: Indeed, in a few weeks it will be the 10th anniversary of President Obama’s history-making trip to Havana, a major symbol of his breakthrough with Raúl Castro to turn that page and normalize bilateral ties.

JM: I was part of a small group that pressured Obama to open things up—and he did. Ten years ago, I went with him to Cuba when he went on that trip, and I thought things were getting better on the island.

TN: In your opinion, what are the lessons from the Obama–Raúl Castro breakthrough a short decade ago?

JM: First, that it worked! I mean, more political and economic space opened up in Cuba. More Americans could travel to Cuba.

But I think the Cubans and people in the United States were too slow in kind of taking full advantage of that opportunity. If there had been more exchanges, more business investments, more, you know, cultural exchange…. I think there should have been a greater sense of urgency. I think it would have been harder for Trump to turn it around when he became president.

I thought when Biden became president for sure he’d go back to the to the Obama policies. Biden was in those meetings that some of us had with Obama on Cuba. Vice President Biden actually called me to tell me that they were going to change the policy. But then he didn’t do anything until the last few days of his presidency. He symbolically went back to the Obama policies. But it was too late.

Biden messed up. I don’t know what they were thinking. I don’t know whether they thought they had more time so let’s not piss off the right-wing Cubans in Florida. We might need them in the next election. It was a political calculation, I think.

TN: That has been the fate of Cuba policy for decades. A policy mortgaged to swing state political calculus.

JM: Cuban policy has been more of a domestic political issue than it has been a foreign policy issue.

TN: What do you think the end game is of this Trump-Rubio “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba, essentially blockading all oil shipments to Cuba and deliberately creating a humanitarian crisis?

JM: I think they fantasize that the government Cuba will collapse.

TN: What is your sense of Trump’s statements that Rubio is talking to “high-level” Cuban representatives? Do you see any evidence of a dialogue between Washington and Havana?

JM: Well, the Cuban government has said they’re willing to talk about a wide range of issues. The Cuban government has never said that they’re not open to conversation. The question is: What Is Trump asking for? You know, like return the [expropriated] property? Or maybe just to build a Trump Hotel in Havana? Maybe that’s all they want.

TN: There’s been talk of congressional delegation possibly going to Cuba to highlight the humanitarian crisis. Would you go?

JM: I would, I would, I would like to go. I don’t know whether the current speaker of the House or the committees of jurisdiction would allow it…if they would provide funding for such a trip. It takes about a month or so to get authorization. So the process of planning an official trip to Cuba would move slowly.

TN: Can Congress play a role in fostering a Cuba policy is in the national interest of the United States and the best interests of the Cuban people?

JM: We have to talk about it. Democrats, you know, and thoughtful Republicans, need to talk about it. We can’t be afraid to talk about it. If the issue is immigration, the more misery you cause, the more immigrants are going to be coming to the United States. But that’s what the Trump administration is doing. Again, Trump is always dangerous. He’s arrogant, and he believes that if I say, if I tell somebody to jump, their response should be, how high? You know that history is not in his portfolio.

The future of Cuba needs to be determined by the Cubans who live on the island. Not by Trump and Marco Rubio. Not by those in the United States who want to dictate what Cuba’s future looks like.

Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by scenes of naked authoritarianism, from federal agents raiding a Georgia elections office to killings in the streets of American cities.

But there is another variety of authoritarian encroachment underway—this one calmly procedural, but with the potential to be just as devastating to American democracy.

Earlier this month, the House passed the SAVE America Act, which threatens to block millions from voting in November. It’s just one salvo in a multipronged Republican effort to undermine the midterms and lay the groundwork for a new round of 2020-style election denialism should Democrats win Congress. From the flurry of Trump-instigated redistricting efforts to the new FCC guidance that spurred CBS to pull Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, Trump and his allies are using every tool at their disposal to depress turnout, intimidate voters, and unjustly tilt the electoral balance toward Republicans.

Last spring, election-denier Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice began requesting confidential voter registration data from states and jurisdictions around the country—and suing those that refuse to comply. The information the agency collects is being shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which has launched its own effort to investigate naturalized Americans accused of voting before gaining their citizenship. And, shortly after January’s Fulton County FBI raid, Trump called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting,” though the Constitution he vowed to preserve, protect, and defend gives the executive branch no authority to manage elections.

If approved by the Senate, the SAVE America Act could be this administration’s most devastating blow yet to voter participation. The bill would require states to share their voter data with DHS, along with forcing Americans to furnish a photo ID at the polls and produce proof of citizenship before registering to vote. This is despite the fact that Trump’s own profoundly compromised Justice Department claims it has identified only 10,000 noncitizens on the rolls after examining nearly 50 million registrations. Under the guise of preventing hypothetical ballot-casting by .02 percent of the enrolled voter base, then, 21 million Americans who lack immediate access to their birth certificate or a passport could lose the franchise.

In this attempt to shrink the electorate, Trump and congressional Republicans are using the levers of democratic governance to undermine democracy itself—a strategy sometimes referred to as stealth authoritarianism. It’s practiced by despotic regimes like that of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who reshaped his country’s electoral system to hamstring his opponents. Naturally, he has few more devoted fans than our president, whose administration is bear-hugging Orbán in the lead-up to another technically free yet profoundly unfair Hungarian election.

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As our own midterms approach, Americans cannot be sure that Trump will restrict himself to procedural manipulations. He has expressed regret that he did not order the military to seize voting machines after his 2020 loss, and could very well decide to use this cycle to make up for lost time. Even more likely, however, are tactics at the margins designed to intimidate voters and disrupt proceedings. Arizona Republicans are seeking to station ICE agents at polling sites, while their Indiana counterparts want to truncate the state’s early voting period, and the Republican National Committee pushes to restrict the counting of mail-in ballots.

The SAVE America Act at least faces an uncertain path to the Resolute Desk, as Senate Republicans lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster. And despite the right’s myriad efforts to stack the deck in its favor, Americans could still deliver Democrats a November victory so resounding that cries of election rigging will ring obviously hollow. Only a year into his term, the president has already lost considerable ground with the Black and Hispanic voters who helped secure his most recent victory, and states from New York to California are implementing measures designed to fortify their elections against outside interference.

Still, a rout is by no means assured. Democrats have been sounding the alarm on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies ever since his glide down the golden escalator, but calls to save American democracy have failed to resonate amid an affordability crisis that finds families nationwide struggling to contend with the ever-inflating cost of food and housing. So, in a savvy democracy strategy, progressives would be wise to fuse Trump’s threats to the integrity of our system of governance with a bold case for their ability to lift the middle class out of despondency.

During his 1984 presidential run, the late Jesse Jackson credited Ronald Reagan’s 1980 win not solely to his persuasion of Democrats and independents but also to the large numbers of demoralized young, poor, and minority voters who sat out the election altogether. These were the people Jackson claimed as his constituency, ”the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.” Their absence at the polls had handed Reagan the precedency, Jackson argued, a victory delivered “by the margin of despair.”

By suppressing the vote and intimidating their opponents, Republicans are attempting to engineer a 2026 win by the same margin. To counter this, we might take inspiration from Jackson’s lifetime of public service. Defeating the right in November will require a broad mobilization that bridges divisions of faith, race, and class—a rainbow coalition.

For the right, few words are more beloved than “deregulation.” GOP candidates often spend their campaigns raging against the boogeyman of the regulatory bureaucracy, and once they take office, right-wing policymakers use their power to slash at the guardrails protecting Americans’ health, environment, and wallets. In the earliest days of his term, President Donald Trump managed to one-up even the usual Republican enthusiasm for red tape-cutting, assigning federal agencies the ridiculous and arbitrary target of repealing 10 regulations for each new one they enact.

In recent weeks, however, a far more judicious form of deregulation has found a surprising champion: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. No, the new mayor isn’t making a shocking rightward turn—instead, his administration is focused on lightening the administrative load for New York’s more than 183,000 small businesses.

Progressives have long and justly condemned the deleterious effects of mega-corporations like Walmart and Amazon, whose tax dodging, union busting, and cost-cutting tactics undermine market competition and workers’ rights. But Mamdani is pairing leftist critique of big business with deregulatory measures that bolster smaller enterprises. If successful, these policies will help give mom-and-pop shops a fighting chance against the corporate behemoths—and may also offer a new playbook for progressives nationwide.

After declaring in his inaugural address that he would “free small business owners from the shackles of bloated bureaucracy,” Mamdani signed an executive order earlier this month to do just that. It directs city agencies to comb through the more than 6,000 rules governing small businesses and identify opportunities to simplify regulations and reduce the myriad associated fees and fines.

It’s a timely move that could strengthen the small businesses at the heart of America’s largest city. Though New York is the nation’s financial capital and home to more Fortune 500 headquarters than any other American locale, 89 percent of its businesses have fewer than 20 employees—and these small operations are facing significant pressures. In addition to navigating the city’s sprawling regulatory ecosystem, they must contend with rising rents, Trump’s scattershot tariffs, and an affordability crisis that is leaving middle-class Americans increasingly unable to engage in discretionary spending. The result: This spring, 8,400 businesses ceased operations in the city, while only 3,500 new ones opened.

Of course, many ordinances are indispensable; after all, few would want to eat at a restaurant that doesn’t answer to a health inspector. But in a fraught economic landscape, Mamdani’s reimagining of the city’s regulatory structure could be the difference between survival and shuttering for many of New York City’s struggling small enterprises. After all, when the government throws up too many hoops for independent businesses, only the wealthy will be able to afford to jump through them.

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Mamdani is by no means the first left-of-center voice—or even the first inhabitant of Gracie Mansion—to attempt to reclaim the politics of deregulation from conservatives. Most recently, the topic was central to the political bestseller Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. In it, the journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that progressives have for too long tolerated labyrinthine approval processes and regulatory apparatuses. By doing so, the authors assert, well-meaning leftists have obstructed the construction of housing, public transportation, and other social goods.

The abundance framework has been lauded by centrist Democrats searching for a path out of the wilderness of the party’s disastrous 2024 election defeat—a path that won’t ruffle corporate feathers, of course. And it’s been roundly criticized on the left for its potential to provide cover for the sort of pro-business, deregulatory free-for-all that libertarian fantasies are made of. However, the still-burgeoning Mamdani administration may prove that, when paired with other progressive priorities, targeted deregulation can both serve working Americans and be politically resonant.

In one of the most acclaimed ads of his campaign, the then-longshot candidate interviewed food cart operators about “halalflation.” They’d applied for permits, but were stuck in a waiting list almost 10,000 would-be vendors long. The number of permits was strictly capped, and between 2021 and early 2024, only 71 new ones were issued. So, to start their businesses, the vendors paid extortionate sums on the black market to rent existing permits, passing their artificially inflated costs on to customers.

In December, with Mamdani’s support, the City Council passed a bill raising the cap on street vendor permits. The benefits may not be solely economic: Amid the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown, which has seen even minor infractions used to justify harassment, detention, and deportation, providing the city’s largely immigrant street vendors with the chance to operate legally may help shield them from abuse.

And amid his universal childcare push, Mamdani’s administration has pledged to partner with in-home daycares. Despite their integral role in supporting working families and the city’s economy, these small businesses were sidelined during prior 3-K and pre-K expansions—in part because they struggled to contend with regulations that larger childcare providers could more easily meet.

This is a far cry from the carnival of red tape–shredding that the right longs for, and stands apart from the corporate-friendly vision of abundance adopted by Klein and Thompson’s most fervent supporters. Instead, as Mamdani put it, this is an “agenda of abundance that puts the 99 percent over the 1 percent.”

For Democrats, whom voters have historically trusted less than Republicans when it comes to the economy, this is an opportunity to embrace a politics that turns a longtime weakness into a new asset. The Trump administration’s egregious economic mismanagement has cost the party much of its lead in voter confidence. Now the left has a chance to maintain and even build upon these gains—perhaps by proving itself to be both tamer of big-business excess and champion of small-business success.

Bruce Springsteen used the first great protest song of 2026, his “Streets of Minneapolis,” to deliver a blistering condemnation of the violent assault that a strike force of 3,000 masked and armed agents of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waged on Minnesota’s largest city. The American bard describes how, during the first weeks of January, Minneapolis became “a city aflame…’neath an occupier’s boots” and recounts that “there were bloody footprints where mercy should have stood and two left to die on snow-filled streets: Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” Springsteen was not merely mourning; he was calling out the Trump administration’s propagandistic distortion of the truth about Pretti, an intensive-­care nurse with the Department of Veterans Affairs, gunned down by Border Patrol agents on January 24, and Good, a poet and mother of three, shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on January 7. And the Boss excoriated “Noem’s dirty lies.”

The lies told by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, including wildly unfounded assertions that Good and Pretti committed acts of “domestic terrorism,” have inspired widespread demands for accountability for the most dangerously dishonest of Donald Trump’s miserable cast of cabinet appointees. There is plenty of competition for the “worst of the worst” title in Trump’s cabinet. But Noem’s attempts to defend the indefensible, her personal and official scandals, her mismanagement, and above all her outrageous and propagandistic lies about Good and Pretti are not merely shameful. They are impeachable.

Members of Congress, no matter their political affiliation, must recognize a constitutional duty to remove this gangster from the position of public trust that she has so flagrantly abused. The will of the people is already clear. Trump and Noem thought they could intimidate the public into quiescence. But tens of thousands of Americans have filled the streets of Minneapolis and cities across the country to demand the abolition of ICE because they have chosen to believe their own eyes, as opposed to Noem’s lies.

The arguments against Noem are now so stark that even senior Republicans are making the case for her removal, with North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis raging against “the incompetence of the leader of the [Department of] Homeland Security,” adding, “She doesn’t know how to lead, how to de-escalate. She’s exposing ICE officers to dangerous situations; she’s exposing US citizens to deadly situations.” Even as Trump tried to distance himself from some of Noem’s most extreme statements and policies in late January, the president’s response to Tillis and to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, another Republican who’s said the secretary should go, was to call the senators “losers” and announce that Noem would be staying because “she’s doing a very good job.”

With Trump digging in, it falls to members of Congress to act. Many Democrats have done just that, as part of the most significant accountability movement yet seen during the year of chaos that Trump and his noxious inner circle of aides, such as Stephen Miller, have unleashed. In addition to tentative calls from Republicans for Noem’s resignation or firing, a robust movement to impeach the cabinet secretary has attracted support from over 180 House Democrats as of February 2. Supporters of impeachment have rallied around a resolution sponsored by Representative Robin Kelly (D-IL) that indicts Noem for obstructing the congressional oversight of detention facilities operated by DHS; for “using her position for personal gain while inappropriately using taxpayer dollars”; for “using her position to circumvent the Federal contracting process and [funnel] Federal funds to her friends’ businesses”; and for “repeatedly [violating] the Immigration and Nationality Act, the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution, and due process rights of American citizens by directing [ICE] to make widespread warrantless arrests, forgo due process, and use violence against United States citizens, lawful residents, and other individuals.”

The resolution notes that, in the case of Renee Good, “despite video showing the officer on the side of the vehicle while firing and the vehicle was moving away from the officer on the second and third shots, Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem is claiming publicly that the officer was in danger and in front of the vehicle when he fired.” That lie points to the most compelling argument for Noem’s removal: She is a determined propagandist who seeks to distort the truth, undermine investigations, and divide Americans. And all the evidence suggests that she intends to keep lying to the American people, the media, and Congress.

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None of the House members who propose to impeach Noem are naïve. They know that the full constitutional promise of the impeachment power has been undermined by Senate Republicans who have refused to hold members of their own party—including Trump himself—to account. And they know that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will do everything in his power to thwart accountability for Trump and his appointees—just as he did during the fight over the release of files regarding the convicted child-sex offender and longtime Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein. But the anger over Noem’s reckless actions and scorching dishonesty has momentum, which could force congressional action in much the way that US Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) ultimately did in their fight for the release of the Epstein files.

Khanna has emerged as an ardent supporter of Noem’s impeachment because “she’s presided over agents who are killing American citizens.” The California representative includes Noem’s impeachment on a list of steps that, he says, must be taken to rein in ICE and DHS. “Congress is not powerless. Democrats must unify around an actual agenda,” argues Khanna, who urges opposition to future DHS funding, a repeal of the multiyear $75 billion in funding for ICE that Congress approved last year, investigations and prosecutions of ICE agents who have broken the law, and a strategy to “tear down and replace ICE with an agency that has oversight.”

To that list, we would add formal action by Congress to bar ICE agents from interfering with the 2026 midterms.

We understand that some will ask why Noem’s impeachment should be a priority with so many threats to be addressed and so many other members of the Trump administration who merit removal (including Trump himself). Our answer is that this is an accountability movement that has gained traction, has the potential to attract at least some Republican support, and above all will send a message to the whole administration that, to quote Springsteen, “We’ll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis”—and the lies that have been told about Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and all the others who have died on Kristi Noem’s watch.

“If it expires, it expires” is a reasonable way to manage a week-old gallon of milk—not a treaty designed to stave off a potentially apocalyptic nuclear conflict between Russia and the US

And yet, this was President Trump’s response when asked about the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which lapses today. It was the last nuclear arms agreement between the two countries.

For the first time since the Cold War, we find ourselves in a world without constraints on nuclear proliferation among global superpowers. It is no wonder the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947, has shifted its symbolic Doomsday Clock to the closest it has ever been to midnight: just 85 seconds.

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The expiration of New START marks the end of over five decades of continuous arms control efforts between Washington and Moscow. With the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT)—called for by President Johnson in 1967 and culminating with President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972—the United States and the Soviet Union began to more openly dialogue for the sake of de-escalation.

President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987, banning a whole class of nuclear weapons entirely. In 1991, President Bush and Gorbachev agreed to the landmark Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), resulting in the disarmament of 80 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons over the next decade. A series of follow-up agreements eventually led to Presidents Obama and Medvedev signing New START in 2011, capping each side at 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads. That treaty was last renewed in 2021 by Presidents Biden and Putin.

These agreements are in no small part why the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons has fallen from its peak of 70,300 in 1986 to roughly 12,300 today.

But since the turn of the century, a once-bipartisan commitment to diplomacy has slowly been undermined by increasingly jingoistic Republican administrations. In 2002, John Bolton persuaded President George W. Bush to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in the name of fighting terrorism. Trump doubled down on this doctrine during his first term, pulling the US out of the INF and the Open Skies Treaty.

But Trump II almost makes Trump I look like the Nobel Peace Prize winner he yearns to be. In addition to ditching New START, he has gutted the State Department of its nuclear diplomats and ordered the resumption of nuclear testing for the first time in more than thirty years. Surprise: Putin then threatened to do the same.

And this is to say nothing of Trump’s reckless posture toward foreign policy writ large. From abducting the president of Venezuela to threatening an invasion of Greenland, he seems hell-bent on alienating America’s allies and antagonizing our adversaries. As we return to a global landscape with no guardrails on man’s most dangerous weapons, Trump has made America the bull in the geopolitical china shop.

Our current foreign policy doctrine is so destructive that even America’s closest ally has taken the exceedingly rare step of speaking out against it. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum last month, we have reached “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.”

So what will it take to come back from the brink? The scientists behind the Doomsday Clock have issued their call to the relevant world leaders: Keep the dialogue of nuclear nonproliferation alive. End the vicious cycle of us versus them.

But short of a come-to-Jesus moment from the president—whose favorite Bible verse is “an eye for an eye”—the responsibility for salvaging what’s left will fall to the rest of us. It will take the courage of other leaders, an engaged media, and an informed citizenry to fight to keep the goal of disarmament and, eventually, abolition alive.

As the agreement’s expiration reminds us, time only marches forward. But the Doomsday Clock can be set back. Throughout the 1980s, millions around the world applied pressure on the superpowers by participating in anti-nuclear demonstrations. In 1987, the INF was signed—inspiring the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to wind its clock of catastrophe backwards. As the Bulletin itself put it in 1988, “protests yield progress.”

In 1990, they shifted the clock back even further, as the Iron Curtain fell. Then, too, in attributing the cause of humanity’s return to a safer world, the Bulletin cited global activism. And by 1991, in the wake of the START agreement, the Bulletin turned back the minute hand the furthest it had ever been, before or since: 17 minutes to midnight. (The Doomsday Clock’s founders designed it on a 15-minute scale.)

With the bevy of other disasters facing America and the world, it may seem impossible to recreate the degree of mass mobilization around nuclear disarmament that the Cold War era inspired. But as I heard former Soviet leader (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Mikhail Gorbachev say on many occasions: “If we don’t attempt what seems impossible, we will risk facing the unthinkable.”

Silicon Valley Representative Ro Khanna has the distinction of representing more billionaires than any other member of Congress. Despite this—or maybe because of it—he’s backing a state-level proposal that has infuriated some of his wealthiest constituents: a billionaire tax.

The measure could appear on ballots this year, and if passed by voters, would apply a one-time, 5 percent tax on billionaires who were residing in California as of the first day of 2026. The state would collect payments in 2027, and funds would be sorted into a dedicated account, with much of the proceeds specifically earmarked for healthcare funding.

“All this is saying is, ‘You’ve created unprecedented wealth. We want to make sure that there’s some shared prosperity, that there is some benefit to the working and the middle class,” Khanna told me in an interview.

In response, a consortium of tech billionaires—Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, Google cofounder Larry Page, and venture capitalist turned Trump 2.0’s crypto and AI czar David Sacks among them—have threatened to leave the state for the greener pastures of onshore tax havens like Texas or Florida.

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Really, though, all these shaking fists and revving private jet engines mean one thing: The measure might actually work.

Thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, California’s Medicaid program is set to lose $190 billion over the next ten years. This is on top of increasing housing insecurity, stagnating wages, and the systematic shutdown of clinics and rural hospitals across the state. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, 15 percent of wealth—in a region that is itself home to nearly one-third of the value of America’s stock market—is owned by just nine households. This can’t hold.

The billionaire tax promises immediate relief to these countervailing crises. Proposed by healthcare unions, it would fund healthcare, education, and food assistance programs in California—and functionally neutralize some of the egregious tax breaks carved out for billionaires by the OBBA.

And beyond its impact on the Golden State, this measure would set a precedent. It was one thing for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to include wealth taxes in their 2020 campaign platforms; it’d be another entirely to see one play out in California—the state Democrats nationwide turn to as a laboratory for experiments in progressive public policy. From being the first in the nation to implement a $15 minimum wage to taking the most aggressive posture on climate and clean energy, California has broadened the bounds of what is politically possible time and again. A wealth tax success story would offer a model for lawmakers everywhere.

And maybe that’s why the billionaires are talking about their “long-term commitments” to leases they signed last week. We saw this same panicked song and dance during Zohran Mamdani’s campaign: Billionaires threatened to leave Park Avenue for Palm Beach, claiming New York would become openly hostile to business. So far, they haven’t.

In fact, the wealthy are actually less likely to move than the middle class—in part because it’s a lot harder to pick up a thriving business and drop it in Miami than tech CEOs would have you believe.

In their haste to disavow California, tech founders seem to forget that Silicon Valley made them just as much as they made Silicon Valley. It’s long been the global hub of tech innovation because it’s the place where capital, supportive infrastructure, and human talent converge—not because a handful of genius messiahs coincidentally wound up in Palo Alto.

And while some portray this policy effort as some sort of punitive act of vengeance against the wealthiest Americans, Khanna made the case to me that this is simply an effort to establish what he calls a “new tech social contract.”

“I have always supported innovation and the Silicon Valley ecosystem,” he said. But he also argues that “the social contract is, to those who much has been given, much is expected. And we have a situation now where people in California are being denied healthcare.… they’re closing rural hospitals, they’re closing clinics…. if you’re building extraordinary wealth, then a nation only thrives if everyone in the community feels like life is improving.”

Some of the more level-headed tech scions recognize that this is no great imposition on their success. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, who himself has seen his net worth grow by tens of billions in recent years, has said he’s staying put.

“I have not even thought about [leaving] once,” he said in a recent interview. “We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes they would like to apply, so be it. I’m perfectly fine with it.”

Nevertheless, right now Huang’s sanguine attitude is the exception to the rule—contrary to Khanna’s expectations. He sees this tax as part of a fight for a system that both supports entrepreneurial risk-taking and offers a dignified standard of living for all.

“I was surprised by the freak-out over it,” said Khanna. “What I’ve tried to do is say, look. I celebrate builders. I celebrate entrepreneurs. I celebrate innovators. I understand that people have taken an extraordinary risk in creativity, and that’s a great thing. But there is a social contract to make sure there’s shared prosperity, and that is what we need.”

Later in our conversation, I asked Khanna about the elephant in the room: what his support for a billionaire tax means for his political future in a district—and a country—where the ultrarich hold outsize political sway. Reporting suggests that a number of tech moguls in California are conspiring to support a primary challenge against him (in secret Whatsapp chats, of course).

Khanna told me he’s not fazed.

“My values are with the working class and middle class in my district and around the country,” he said. “And I’m not going to be a coward or intimidated into compromising my values. And I think at this point, people want moral courage.”

The wisest condemnation of Donald Trump’s decision to send us troops to the sovereign nation of Venezuela to remove President Nicolás Maduro, as part of the administration’s plan to “run” Venezuela in collaboration with US oil companies, came 205 years before Trump announced his “Donroe” Doctrine.

In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who played an essential role in crafting the Monroe Doctrine—the foreign-policy position that he and others hoped would guard the Western Hemisphere against the threat of European colonial expansion—explicitly rejected military interventions for the purpose of regime change and economic conquest. “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams told Congress. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

Even where the United States might object to a foreign leader, Adams argued that the country must lead by example and with diplomacy, so that the fundamental maxims of US foreign policy would not change insensibly from liberty to force: “She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”

Trump, acting very much as a European king of old, attacked Venezuela as this edition of The Nation went to press. His move represents a brazen violation of international law that destabilizes global security and seizes Congress’s exclusive authority to declare war. Military force is justified only in response to a clear, credible, and imminent threat to 
the security of the US or its treaty allies. Venezuela, whatever its internal dysfunctions or its connections to drug trafficking, poses no such threat.

Trump’s scheming to forcibly determine the political leadership of another sovereign nation represents a grave departure from our best principles—as stated by Adams—and a return to the most discredited habits of American foreign policy. We are not naïve about American history. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, The Nation has decried presidential abuses of the Monroe Doctrine as a tool for the creation of corporate client states. But Trump’s self-styled Donroe Doctrine proposes a fresh bastardization of US foreign policy that is so extreme—and so dangerous—that it demands an urgent response from Democrats and those Republicans whose oath to the Constitution takes higher precedence than their loyalty to an authoritarian president and his fossil-fuel-industry donors.

While Trump and his allies tried to justify naked aggression as part of a convoluted strategy to target “narco-terrorism,” Representative Pat Ryan (D-NY), a former Army intelligence officer who served two combat tours during the Iraq War, declared, “No matter what they say, it’s always oil.” Ryan was not alone in recognizing echoes of the WMD claims of former president George W. Bush, and how that blood-for-oil war went so horribly awry. In his first bid for the presidency, Trump positioned himself as something of an anti-war Republican. That was always a cynical gambit, and Trump is now exposed as an economic imperialist who learned nothing from Iraq and who is willing, as Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) noted, to embark on a career of empire that risks the lives of US troops to make “oil companies (not Americans) more profitable.”

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No one in their right mind believes that the madness—and danger—of Trump’s Donroe Doctrine will halt at the borders of Venezuela. His State Department declared on social media: “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.” The American people see through the lies. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 33 percent of Americans approve of the US military action to remove Maduro, while 72 percent worry about further US involvement in Venezuela.

This popular rejection of Trump’s territorial ambitions should inspire members of Congress to stand up to the administration—recognizing, as John Quincy Adams did, that if a president seeks to make America “the dictatress of the world,” this country will “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Between 1958 and 1970, researchers in St. Louis collected 320,000 baby teeth. Unusual though that image might be on its own, the discovery that came out of it was far more disturbing: Fallout from nuclear weapons tests had made its way into the bodies of the very youngest Americans.

Indeed, the resultant Baby Tooth Survey found that children had absorbed elevated levels of strontium-90—a carcinogenic radioactive isotope. The study attracted widespread attention, including from President John F. Kennedy. The month before his assassination, he signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963—the Cold War’s inaugural arms-control agreement.

As Kennedy, a young father, said at the time: “The loss of even one human life or the malformation of even one baby—who may be born long after we are gone—should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.” That presidential recognition and action came at the urging of not just scientists but grassroots activists such as Cora Weiss, a New York City mother who sent her own children’s teeth to be tested and made peace her priority.

Cora, my friend and frequent collaborator, died in December at age 91. She was a champion of the United Nations and its mission to advance peace and women’s rights—and along with her husband, Peter, a brilliant international lawyer, she never stopped organizing to save the world from nuclear destruction. Unfortunately, in the last months of her life, that organizing became more necessary than ever.

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In the fall of 2025, Kennedy’s acknowledgment of the dangers of nuclear weapons gained a grim new relevance when President Donald Trump announced that the United States might resume nuclear testing. Exactly what form these tests will take is unclear, but if Trump initiates a new era of explosive nuclear testing, it will constitute a catastrophic break from decades of hard-won restraint.

This move risks restarting a nuclear arms race, and Russia is already vowing to “take reciprocal measures” should the United States resume tests. Trump’s saber-rattling ignores the repercussions of nuclear testing that led the world to this moratorium in the first place.

This painful legacy is perhaps most acutely felt in the Marshall Islands, where the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in the years following World War II. In 1954, the United States detonated its most powerful hydrogen bomb, Castle Bravo, on the archipelagic nation’s Bikini Atoll. The blast was more than 1,000 times stronger than those inflicted upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only after testing, the residents were evacuated and told they could soon return. But they were not allowed home for 15 years—and even then, they were soon re-evacuated from the radioactive island, which remains virtually uninhabited to this day.

In the years since the detonations, Marshall Islanders who were exposed to nuclear fallout have experienced increased rates of cancer, leukemia, and infants born with congenital defects. On one atoll, 20 out of 29 children under 10 developed thyroid cancer. These catastrophic effects have reverberated across generations: More cancers are on the horizon for a community that has already lost so much.

To Trump, this death, disease, and destruction is perhaps a small price to pay for Making America Fearsome Again—and he, after all, will not be paying it.

Senator Ed Markey, a longtime congressional leader in the fight for nuclear disarmament, writes for The Nation in this issue: “Instead of deterring foreign nations, renewed testing would be like throwing gasoline on the arms-race fire.”

He’s right, but can movements be mobilized to avert Trump’s march toward madness? Cora Weiss taught us the answer to that question.

It’s vital to recall the history of activists like Cora, who found the tools—and the teeth—to prevent nuclear war. In 1961, she joined a local chapter of Women Strike for Peace, a movement to end nuclear testing. Activism that started with sending her children’s baby teeth to St. Louis evolved into world-shaping leadership as the United Nations’ representative at the International Peace Bureau, and as its president between 2000 and 2006. Cora, who co-chaired the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, was a pillar of much of the anti-war organizing—including trips to return POWs, and efforts to humanize the Vietnamese people in the eyes of Americans and to convey the war’s impact on women and children.

She would go on to organize one of the largest antinuclear marches in history—1 million people who gathered in New York City’s Central Park on June 12, 1982. She also drafted the unanimously approved UN resolution affirming the importance of women’s roles in the peace and antinuclear movements.

“I wasn’t making a revolution,” Cora told the Columbia Center for Oral History in 2014. “I was just working hard and long.”

It’s time to work every bit as hard and long as Cora did to create a world of peace safe from nuclear accidents, conflicts, or all-out war. It is the least we can do for the generations of people still facing the radioactive fallout of US recklessness.

This article is part of a special Nation package devoted to LA’s bold stand against the Trump administration’s assaults on the city.

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The New York Nation, as some called this magazine in its early years, has always kept one eye on Los Angeles. Even if the magazine suggested in an 1869 essay on “The New West” that “not everything is lovely there,” our writers have over the past century and a half been drawn to the sprawling city—with all its energy and possibility, along with its share of sordid realities and inequalities—and the broader story of what would come to be known as the Left Coast.

We return again with this issue, which features a multifaceted examination of LA’s bold resistance to the Trump administration’s assault on the city itself, and on the rich diversity and democratic promise that Los Angeles represents. Bill Gallegos, a veteran Chicano activist who is a member of The Nation’s editorial board, sets the stage with his examination of the remarkable coalitions that pushed back against Trump’s decision to send federal troops to the city last spring. LA Mayor Karen Bass offers her perspectives on resisting Trump and Trumpism. And author and music-­industry veteran Danny Goldberg contributes a moving reflection on the linkages between the racial-justice protests of the past and our current struggles.

This package begins an expanded focus by The Nation on Donald Trump’s assault on the blue zones of a nation he is bent on tearing apart. Beginning with the resistance in California makes sense because The Nation has so frequently turned to the state for political inspiration.

In 1934, when the socialist novelist Upton Sinclair ran as the Democratic nominee for governor there—under the slogan “End Poverty in California,” or EPIC—The Nation’s editor and publisher, Oswald Garrison Villard, hailed him for building a grassroots movement of unemployed and working-class voters who were desperate for change during the Great Depression. Sinclair’s campaign fell short, but its advocacy for state-run cooperative industries and relief for the poor struck a chord in a state—and a nation—that was seething with labor unrest and economic discontent.

Two years later, the novelist John Steinbeck brought the conditions of California’s agriculture workers to national prominence in a Nation article. “It is fervently to be hoped,” wrote the author of The Grapes of Wrath, “that the great group of migrant workers so necessary to the harvesting of California’s crops may be given the right to live decently, that they may not be so badgered, tormented, and hurt that in the end they become avengers of the hundreds of thousands who have been tortured and starved before them.”

During World War II, the magazine denounced the internment of Japanese American citizens—who were overwhelmingly from California, as well as Oregon and Washington—as a national catastrophe. Portraying the detention of patriotic citizens as “mass hysteria,” The Nation observed: “Discrimination against citizens because of their racial lineage cuts straight across the American tradition.”

Carey McWilliams, the LA writer who published one of the first books decrying the mistreatment of Japanese American families during the war, edited The Nation from 1955 to 1975. One of California’s greatest historians, writing books like Factories in the Field and Southern California: An Island on the Land, McWilliams chronicled the state’s transformation from an agricultural frontier to an economic powerhouse, exposing the human cost of its sunshine image.

During the 1950s Red Scare, when loyalty oaths and blacklists rocked Hollywood and much of the rest of the country, McWilliams and The Nation defended LA writers, directors, and artists who’d been accused of subversion. The magazine’s exposés of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunts provided a platform for voices that would otherwise have been silenced, in a fight that another Nation editor, Victor Navasky, chronicled in his remarkable 1980 book Naming Names.

In 1965, Hunter S. Thompson told the story of California’s motorcycle gangs for The Nation and expanded that article into his bestselling book Hell’s Angels—ushering in the era of “gonzo journalism.” Mike Davis, the great California-based historian and social critic, also began to contribute groundbreaking essays to The Nation. Writing in the mid-1990s, Davis chronicled the dire effects of racial capitalism in Compton, called out California’s mass incarceration crisis, and explained the origins and consequences of the state’s “natural disasters”: the fires, earthquakes, and floods that raised profound questions about everything from overdevelopment to climate change. Davis, like so many other great Nation writers on the California experience (Robert Scheer, Amy Wilentz, Jon Wiener, and Rebecca Solnit among them) treated the state not as a sun-drenched exception, or as an American West of Eden, but as its truest self—a place where the nation’s inequalities, contradictions, and possibilities have been laid bare.

This month’s package of articles on resistance and coalition-building in our second-most-populous city continues in this great Nation tradition of looking west—of searching not only for the sources of this country’s turmoil but also for clues to how we might yet forge a progressive future in which another LA, another California, and another America are possible.

Democrats have developed an uncanny skill for seizing defeat from the jaws of victory in recent years. That didn’t happen, though, in the December 2 special election to fill a US House seat in Tennessee. While progressive Democrat Aftyn Behn fell short in her quest to flip a radically gerrymandered Republican district, she made up so much ground that smart Democrats have already begun to redo their calculations—and reconsider their strategies—regarding the midterm elections.

If they reconsider those strategies boldly enough, they could seize a national victory in 2026 from the jaws of Behn’s narrow defeat in 2025. By dramatically expanding the map of House and Senate races in which they invest resources, by recognizing the need not just to run against Donald Trump but to run for something, and by embracing the progressive economic policies that have boosted turnout for candidates as diverse as Behn and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Democrats could secure midterm victories that are about much more than partisan point-scoring. They could disempower Trump’s MAGA movement sufficiently to check and balance the corruption, economic plundering, cruelty, racism, xenophobia, and authoritarian overreach that has characterized the most dangerous administration in modern history.

The stakes are so high—and the threats to democracy so real—that many progressives still refuse to allow themselves to hope. Yet the spirit of resistance is alive in the land. And it is growing in a manner that tells us that 2026 can and should be seen as a critical juncture for a country that can no longer accept the backward politics of Trump and his MAGA satraps.

The past year, for all its frustrations and disappointments, drew the outlines of opposition. Courageous progressive activists and electeds stepped up from the start of Trump’s term with a boldness and clarity of vision—as this year’s Nation Honor Roll (page 46) illustrates. As the months went on, the reach of the resistance became ever more inspiring—and visible. Americans turned out by the millions for “No Kings” rallies in June and October, filling the streets of great urban centers as well as the town squares of rural communities to protest everything from ICE raids to assaults on science to Republican schemes to fund tax cuts for the rich by gutting Medicaid and anti-hunger programs. Then, on November 4, the resistance flooded polling places nationwide. Democrats swept gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey by far wider margins than predicted and secured overwhelming control of the legislative chambers in those states. They also won breakthrough victories for candidates in red states: flipping Georgia Public Service Commission seats and grabbing enough legislative posts to end Republican supermajority control of the Mississippi state Senate. And in Seattle and New York City, voters rejected right-wing demagoguery and centrist Democratic caution to choose dynamic young democratic socialists as their mayors.

The 2025 fightback against Trump, in the streets and at the polls, has been unprecedented. But will it be sufficiently powerful in 2026 to upend the Republican control of Congress that enables Trump, Stephen Miller, and their MAGA wrecking crew? An answer can be found in the results of Behn’s race and other 2025 campaigns that rallied a new generation of voters with an aggressively progressive affordability agenda.

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In a Tennessee district where the party’s national ticket was on the losing side of a 60–38 split in 2024, Behn narrowed the margin to 54–45 in a special election that saw surprisingly robust turnout. That result wasn’t an outlier: In every special election for open US House seats since Trump began his second term, emboldened Democrats have, on average, outrun the percentages for the party’s 2024 presidential ticket by roughly the same 13-point swing that Behn achieved. “Whether you go from the suburbs of Washington, DC, all the way to the Southwest in Arizona, whether you’re looking at Texas, whether you’re looking at Tennessee, whether you go down to Florida, we are seeing the Democratic out-performance of Kamala Harris happening across the political map,” said Harry Enten, CNN’s veteran number cruncher.

Republicans and their amen corner in the DC pundit class can claim that special-election results tell us nothing about how upcoming midterms will go. But they’re wrong. “We actually have history to show that what happens in special elections doesn’t just stay in special elections; it spills over to the midterm results,” explained Enten. “When a party outperformed in special elections since 2005, five out of five times they went on to win a majority in the US House of Representatives. What happened…in Tennessee is a very, very bad omen for Republicans and a very, very good omen for Democrats.”

How good? A 13-point swing from Trump in 2024 to the 2026 midterms could flip more than three dozen GOP-held seats to the Democrats—a swing similar to the 2018 “blue wave” that disempowered Trump two years into his first term. Even Republicans acknowledge that the narrow GOP advantage in the House is now exceptionally vulnerable. And some worry that the party’s three-seat Senate majority might suddenly be threatened, with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) describing the Tennessee results as a “dangerous” indicator that disdain for Trump has become “a powerful motivator” even in red states.

If Democrats are looking only for a confidence boost, then they can thank Behn and the party’s other 2025 special-election candidates—some of whom were elected, others of whom closed the partisan divide by as much as 28 points—for a collective bump to a party that currently lacks the ability to restrain or counter Trump, not least on Capitol Hill, where the Democrats have struggled with the basic demands of mounting a credible opposition to a president whose mismanagement of the economy, personal scandals, and chaotic and corrupt approach to governing has decimated approval ratings for both Trump and the GOP.

Americans are ready to give Democratic candidates enough support to get the party back into the fight politically. But the Democrats—whose own approval ratings are nothing to get excited about—should not be satisfied with merely offering an alternative to Trump. It is true that the president is unpopular and that his policy stances—even on issues like tariffs and immigration—have been massively discredited in the eyes of the electorate. But Trump hates to lose.

The president, who still refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election, has devoted his energy in recent months to rewriting the rules before the 2026 elections. In addition to schemes that gerrymander the House district lines of red states like Texas and Missouri, he’s calling for federal and state pressure to upend structures that make it easier to vote, declaring: “No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID!” And he will not stop there. Count on the president to enter the new year with fresh “flood the zone” schemes to take back momentum from the Democrats. Expect him to keep targeting “blue cities” with violent immigration raids and federal occupation strategies—and to ramp up attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion and the trans community. Who knows how far he will take his lawless threats against Venezuela, his tariff adventurism, or his nuclear brinkmanship?

Ultimately, Trump’s desperation will lead him to try and compete with Democrats on the most compelling of domestic issues: the escalating affordability crisis. Democrats such as Mamdani, who promised to rein in the cost of living, won big in 2025. Trump will try to muddy the waters in 2026 with convoluted healthcare-pricing interventions, cynical pledges of targeted tax cuts, and dangerously ill-conceived proposals to deregulate AI. He’ll have a hard time getting proposals through a US House in which Republican Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have lost control of his caucus. But bet on the billionaire class, corporate interests—especially those for AI and crypto—and AIPAC to spend record amounts of money to try and save the GOP.

Against Trump’s willingness to abuse his authority obscenely and the willingness of his allies to spend just as obscenely, Democrats can’t afford to run cautiously. They need to recruit and support dynamic young and progressive candidates in purple and red states. And they can’t fear primary fights—as long as those fights nominate contenders who are prepared to go big in November.

What does going big look like? Democrats must offer voters an affordability agenda that:

• expands access to healthcare and offers a path to the Medicare for All reforms that polls show most Americans favor;

• replaces the minimum wage with a living wage;

• puts forward comprehensive strategies for affordable childcare that follow the lead of New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham;

• creates a Marshall Plan for the construction of affordable housing nationwide; and

• offers an AI regulatory agenda that addresses the real fears that Americans have for their jobs and the social costs of a technology that prioritizes tech-bro profits over humanity.

Democrats should also have the courage to acknowledge that Americans are horrified by the genocide in Gaza, the prospect of war in the Caribbean, and Trump’s nuclear brinkmanship.

Above all, the party must, as California Representative Ro Khanna argues, “understand the political moment we’re in.” That won’t be easy for party leaders who are addicted to caution. But the results from 2025 tell us that a Democratic Party that is prepared to fight everywhere—and not just against Trump, but for an inspired vision of an affordable and humane America—can win a mandate in 2026. If it does so, it will help pull our country back from the brink.

Even within the freak show that is Donald Trump’s cabinet, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a singular knack for dominating the headlines with the most disturbing sort of carnivalesque spectacle.

In recent months, he’s amplified harmful disinformation linking Tylenol and autism and dismissed the entire CDC vaccine advisory committee, replacing them with skeptics and conspiracy theorists. And even as that agency debated and ultimately scrapped its hepatitis B vaccination recommendation for newborns, Kennedy courted further controversy for his alleged involvement in a tabloid-fodder love triangle.

But focusing exclusively on RFK Jr.’s transgressions risks overlooking the broader exploits of the Make America Healthy Again movement. While his never-ending font of personal and professional controversies draws national news coverage, a dangerous array of MAHA initiatives flies under the radar—including hundreds of state-level legislative efforts to roll back public health advances.

According to a recent AP investigation, more than 420 such bills have been introduced in states across the US this year, primarily targeting favorite MAHA fixations like immunization, fluoridation, and raw milk. Dozens of measures have already become law. In October, Idaho passed its Medical Freedom Act, making vaccine requirements illegal within the state. Arkansas approved a law expanding raw milk sales in April, while Utah and Florida enacted water fluoridation bans.

Some of the most extreme legislation thankfully faces slim odds of passage, like the attempt by Minnesota Republicans to ban mRNA treatments as “weapons of mass destruction.” The bill, which was reportedly drafted not by legislators or public health experts but by a Florida-based hypnotist, would criminalize the distribution of the Moderna and Pfizer Covid vaccines as an act of bioterrorism.

Each of these initiatives runs counter to decades of science. US childhood vaccines have prevented more than a million deaths since 1994. Raw milk causes 840 times more illness than its pasteurized alternative—and just last month Illinois saw 11 instances of raw milk–linked food poisoning. Fluoride, meanwhile, decreases cavities by 25 percent.

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Why, then, promote such bills at all? While MAHA followers are quick to point out the financial incentives propelling major food and drug companies, their movement is also rife with moneyed interests, including several groups connected to Kennedy himself. The AP also reported on a California farmer, Mark McAfee, who claims to run the world’s largest raw milk operation. He testified in support of a Delaware law legalizing the sale of his product. Unmentioned during his statehouse visit, however, was the fact that his company’s milk has been recalled eight times and linked to a Salmonella outbreak that left 165 people ill. McAfee is projected to take in $32 million in sales this year alone.

Though state-level anti-science policy may be profitable for its peddlers, it’s profoundly harmful to the American public—and in fact might even yield more long-term damage than RFK Jr’s federal-level wreckage. While future presidential administrations and Congresses can reverse his HHS guidance, repopulate the CDC, and restore funding for lifesaving research, state legislation—particularly in states with effective one-party rule—can more stubbornly persist.

And unlike many other local policies, regional public health regulations can have irreversible national effects. During the Covid-19 pandemic, lax local restrictions fueled spillover infections across state lines. The ongoing measles outbreak that began in Texas in January has since spread to states including Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Utah—largely through unvaccinated individuals. A virus knows no political boundaries.

Thwarting the circulation of measles, whooping cough, and the disinformation that often precedes their transmission requires urgent public health reform, and in states across the country, officials and healthcare experts are attempting to meet this moment. This October, 15 Democratic state executives created the Governors Public Health Alliance to share data and coordinate preparedness efforts. And earlier this year, the liberal PAC 314 Action launched a $25 million campaign to elect more science-supporting physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers—not only in Congress but also in statehouses and governors’ mansions.

Health experts are also attempting to win back public trust in medical advice. In Boston, researchers launched a pilot program that found them partnering with TikTok influencers to share fact-based guidance on weight supplements. Though viral videos won’t be enough to restore our endangered measles elimination status, they may help spread medical messaging that is backed by science, yet does not reek of the intellectual arrogance that often accelerates science skepticism.

For when it comes to the epidemic of MAHA misinformation, RFK Jr. is merely patient zero. To stifle the spread of the anti-vaccine, anti-science ideology that has already emerged in hot spots across the country, it’s going to take a combination of reclaiming traditional political power and winning over hearts and minds on new terrain. In other words: an alternative, holistic approach.

It’s not often that a mayor-elect’s transition hires are national news. However, most mayors-elect aren’t Zohran Mamdani—and most of their transition teams don’t include former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

Fresh from his landmark progressive victory, Mamdani has assembled an experienced array of veterans of local government to lay the groundwork for his mayoralty. But it’s his selection of Khan, the acclaimed legal scholar feared from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, that has attracted the most attention.

While leading President Joe Biden’s FTC, Khan injected trust-busting vigor into an agency that for decades looked on as corporations concentrated their market power, inflating prices, suppressing wages, and stifling innovation. Under her tenure, the FTC racked up impressive accomplishments, including blocking the proposed $24.6 billion merger of chain grocers Kroger and Albertsons, banning hidden “junk fees” that inflate costs for hotel stays and concert tickets, and securing price caps for asthma inhalers. Since joining the Mamdani transition, she has reportedly been poring over New York law in search of mechanisms the administration can use to enforce fairer business practices. (Remember the Martin Act of 1919?)

Antitrust efforts, however heroic, might seem marginal to the work of city governance. And Mamdani’s administration will confront plenty of more direct challenges, from intransigence in Albany to a president who has threatened to starve New York of federal funding. But as antitrust analyst Matt Stoller pointed out in a recent edition of his newsletter, Mamdani will likely also face “economic termites”—the under-scrutinized monopolies that hinder municipal functions, compromising the provision of crucial services and leaving local governments with hefty bills.

Consider firefighting rigs. For decades, local fire departments’ trucks, engines, and other specialized vehicles were manufactured by dozens of independent, often family-owned companies. In the 2000s, however, the private equity firm American Industrial Partners began acquiring and consolidating a series of truck manufacturers. Today that conglomerate, since rechristened Rev Group, controls almost a third of the fire-apparatus industry. Toss in fellow manufacturers Oshkosh Corporation and Rosenbauer, and three companies capture up to 80 percent of the market.

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As this fire truck oligopoly took hold, the price of rigs doubled and timelines for the delivery of new parts and vehicles ballooned. According to the International Association of Firefighters labor union, one engine model cost around $600,000 in 2014 and was delivered in around eight months. A decade later, the same machine was priced at over $1.2 million, with delivery expected in 20 months. Wait times for ladder trucks can now stretch past four years, leaving local fire departments to battle flames from jalopies as they await new vehicles purchased many months earlier.

In 2021, as the company sat on a backlog of orders, Rev Group closed two of its factories. And why not? After all, it’s not as though their customers had a robust range of competitors to decamp to.

Today, budget-strapped fire departments are often forced to use outdated equipment and endure regular breakdowns that impede their lifesaving work. In January, a Chicago firehouse held a tongue-in-cheek birthday party to mark a truck’s 30th anniversary. The vehicle, which is now older than many firefighters, was designed to have a 15-year lifespan. The brakes on another Chicago rig, this one comparatively youthful at 20, failed last winter, and the truck crashed into a church. Worse still, fire suppression efforts at a fatal blaze in Camden, New Jersey, were disrupted in 2024 when an engine’s hose malfunctioned. And as wildfires raged across Los Angeles in January, causing hundreds of excess deaths, 100 of the city’s 183 fire vehicles were incapacitated.

Economic termites are also devouring other vital infrastructure. The fire retardant sprayed from planes to smother wildfires is controlled by a single company, which has increased prices by up to 30 percent in the last four years. And during Texas’s fatal summer floods, rescue work was stymied by patchy Motorola Solutions emergency radio coverage. The company dominates as much as 80 percent of its market, and has seen profits grow from 10 percent to nearly 25 percent of sales since the early 2010s. These days, its billionaire CEO is sufficiently flush with cash to hire Elton John to perform at his wife’s Cape Cod birthday party.

Stoller argues that even municipalities far smaller than New York City can fight back by filing joint lawsuits against monopolistic actors. La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Augusta, Maine, are already among the plaintiffs against the big three firetruck manufacturers, in suits alleging that the companies fixed prices and throttled production. In Congress, a bipartisan group of senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, is now also scrutinizing the fire-apparatus industry.

The firefighters’ union has called for Department of Justice and FTC investigations. And though Donald Trump’s FTC certainly isn’t Lina Khan’s, the president has shown an appetite for some antitrust measures—at least those that he finds politically useful. As part of his effort to co-opt affordability messaging in the wake of Democrats’ recent electoral victories, Trump ordered an investigation into the meatpacking monopoly earlier this month.

Mayor-elect Mamdani, for his part, says that he is open to working with the president to reduce the cost of living. If Trump is truly serious about bringing prices down—as unlikely as that may be—perhaps his administration will recognize that tackling monopolies is one critical way to make things affordable again.

In October, millions rallied across America to remind Donald Trump that this nation obeys no kings. Last week, however, a scene worthy of Versailles unfolded: While Trump built his $300 million ballroom, the US prepared to face widespread hunger.

With Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding scheduled to run dry due to the government shutdown, the Trump administration not only refused to prevent the crisis—it fought in court to deprive 42 million SNAP recipients of their grocery money. Thankfully, a federal judge ruled against the government and ordered that SNAP payments proceed. On Monday, the administration said it would fund just half of recipients’ typical benefits. And 2.4 million people soon risk losing their benefits nonetheless, as the $186 billion SNAP cuts in Trump’s benighted budget bill begin taking effect.

America has always faced hunger, yet its leaders have long shown some responsibility to help poor people meet their most basic nutritional needs. That even this small measure of decency is seemingly a thing of the past signals the dawn of an unprecedented era of cruelty.

SNAP, or food stamps, is one of the core provisions of the nation’s frayed social safety net. Over 12 percent of the population receives SNAP benefits to buy groceries, and the program is available only to those whose net household income lands them at or below the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that’s just $32,150 per year.

While top Republicans have insisted that safety net programs are abused by healthy young men who prefer playing video games to holding down a job, most SNAP recipients are excluded from the workforce by age or ability—approximately 40 percent of recipients are children, while another 30 percent are over 60 years old or have a disability. Many of the remaining able-bodied and working-aged SNAP recipients work, as even a full-time job offers no guarantee of lifting a household out of eligibility. Walmart and McDonald’s supersize their profits in part by offering wages so low that, as of 2020, both companies ranked among the top employers of SNAP recipients.

Since the shutdown began last month, the Trump administration has contorted military budgets to fund service members’ salaries, and accepted a possibly illegal $130 million donation, reportedly from the Republican megadonor Timothy Mellon, to bump the payroll stores. But despite sitting on a $5 billion SNAP contingency fund, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) insisted that it lacked the authority to use this cash.

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It’s a patently disingenuous argument. Just weeks ago, the agency’s website featured a shutdown plan outlining its intention to use the emergency chest to keep SNAP afloat. But the information was scrubbed from the site, as, in hopes of pressuring Democrats to end the shutdown, Republicans decided to play a game of chicken that jeopardized 42 million people’s ability to eat. On Tuesday, 25 states sued the USDA to force the agency to fund SNAP. The Rhode Island district court judge John J. McConnell Jr. saw through the government’s flimsy claim and ordered on Friday that the USDA tap its contingency cash.

The White House budget office issued no immediate comment to The New York Times on this setback in its efforts to deprive Americans of food. However, the president did post to Truth Social some striking photos of his all-marble Lincoln bathroom renovation.

The ruling, and the administration’s Monday announcement, are sure to offer some relief to SNAP users. But for those targeted by Trump’s cuts to the program, hunger still looms. Most refugees, asylum seekers, human trafficking survivors, and other non-green-card-holding legal immigrants are set to lose their payments. If they turn to food pantries—newly stripped by the Trump regime of $500 million in federal funding—they’ll find that even these venues of last resort are buckling under rising need. SNAP’s work requirements will also now apply to groups previously exempt from them, including unhoused people, veterans, and young adults who’ve aged out of foster care.

The idea that people out-of-work do not deserve to eat runs contrary to the original purpose of food stamps, which were first introduced during the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. As late as the early 1970s, the simple moral mandate to feed the hungry carried a degree of bipartisan cachet. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson inaugurated the modern food stamps program, but Richard Nixon expanded it, and even vowed to “put an end to hunger in America.”

Under Ronald Reagan, however, Republican antipathy toward food stamps took on its now-familiar form. Reagan named food stamps among the misbegotten spoils of his infamous welfare queen, and warned of “strapping young bucks” using the program to buy T-bone steaks. He tossed a million recipients from the rolls his first year in office.

Today, Reagan-style demonization of the poor lives on in Newsmax segments that falsely claim most SNAP recipients are immigrants, and in viral but entirely fictional AI-generated videos of Black women raging about losing their benefits. Concerns about luxury purchases have also persisted. In 2015, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, signed off on a measure that attempted to prevent SNAP users from buying shellfish. Heaven forbid a low-income family cook shrimp scampi.

Decades of punitive and dehumanizing deeds and rhetoric have apparently convinced the Trump administration that it can condemn millions of Americans to hunger without facing devastating political consequences. However, as the White House attempted to abandon the nation it’s tasked with safekeeping, other institutions and individuals rallied to help their communities fend off hunger. Virginia’s and Delaware’s governors, Glenn Youngkin and Matt Meyer, promised that their states would fund SNAP benefits for residents throughout November. Many other states pledged emergency support to food banks. And in local Facebook groups, strangers paired off as “grocery buddies,” with one helping the other buy food.

Still, emergency measures and good deeds are not a long-term solution, particularly for those whose benefits are on the chopping block. As Joel Berg, CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free America, wrote for The Nation this week, progressives should push for a full slate of social and financial reforms to ensure that Americans are able not just to “get by but actually get ahead.” Until then, far too many Americans will continue to live on a precipice, their next meal determined by White House whims.

Zohran Mamdani has no higher responsibility than to be a great mayor of New York City. It is, after all, his job, now that more than one million New Yorkers have overwhelmingly elected him to the highest office of America’s largest and most dynamic municipality. Yet, as he succeeds, Mamdani has the potential to transform not just a city but the politics of a nation that desperately needs a robust antidote to Donald Trump’s oppressions. As Mamdani told The Nation after his Democratic primary win in June, “You cannot defeat this attack on democracy unless you also prove its worth.”

What took Mamdani’s candidacy from impossible to inevitable was his fundamental understanding that to prove the worth of democracy, leaders must make the lives of the people who elect them measurably better. Trump has failed miserably in this regard. But so, too, have many Democrats. One of the primary reasons the Democratic Party lost in 2024 was that its technocratic response to the affordability crisis struck Americans as lacking in both urgency and ambition. So Mamdani, a democratic socialist who takes his inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, and Bernie Sanders, set a higher bar. “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few,” he declared. “It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker.” He coupled this vision with practical proposals for a rent freeze, fast and free buses, universal childcare, and city-owned grocery stores in food deserts. And he pledged to fund his plan by taxing the very billionaires that Trump has enriched and establishment Democrats have coddled.

Prominent pundits refused to accept the prospect that New Yorkers would elect a democratic socialist as mayor (hello, cable news commentators), as did newspaper editorial writers (hello, New York Times) and top Democrats (hello, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse his party’s nominee for mayor of his hometown). The elites were slow to catch on to the fact that this 34-year-old Muslim immigrant from Uganda, after serving three terms in the relative obscurity of the New York State Assembly, had captured the imagination of the city’s multiracial, multiethnic electorate. Of course, Mamdani’s mastery of social media helped. He presented himself with a confidence that belied his age, a calm that countered the hysterics of his critics, and a clarity that both inspired and reassured voters. Tens of thousands of young volunteers rallied around a candidate who was comfortable speaking truth to power. When he called out the genocide in Gaza, Mamdani was attacked by the New York Post and a billionaire-funded smear campaign. Yet he won a mandate from New Yorkers who demanded moral clarity amid Republican cruelty.

Mamdani framed his year-long campaign against the failed politics of the past—as exemplified by the increasingly desperate former governor Andrew Cuomo—and around an under­standing that, while democracy is surely under attack from authoritarians in Washington, “it is also under attack from the inside, [because of] the withering of the belief in its ability to deliver on any of the needs of working people.”

Mamdani’s determination to renew faith in democracy by delivering economic justice is not new: FDR made the connection with his “Economic Bill of Rights.” Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are doing the same with their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. But Mamdani’s relentless focus on putting government in the service of the working class captures the zeitgeist of 2025. So powerful is his vision that Trump pulled out every stop to derail Mamdani’s campaign: threatening to impound funding for the city, to send in federal troops, and to arrest the Democrat if he kept his promise to protect immigrants. While Mamdani relied on public funding and volunteers to carry his message, billionaire-funded political action committees directed $19 million into a bitterly divisive campaign against him.

With Mamdani’s election, the attacks from his avowed enemies in Washington and on Wall Street will only intensify. To counter them, he must surround himself with tough, experienced managers. In the face of hostile media and corporate lobbying, Mamdani’s determination to maintain his viral social media campaign will be essential to mobilizing his base, unifying New Yorkers, and keeping the pressure on cautious Democrats in Albany.

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State and national Democrats have an interest in Mamdani’s success. The party ran well November 4 in races nationwide. But to win big in 2026, its leaders must abandon their feckless resistance to the big ideas that inspire voters who seek alternatives to the false promises and dark machinations of Trumpism. That doesn’t mean every Democratic nominee in 2026 must mirror every position of Mamdani’s, but they need to channel his energy and boldness.

Mamdani will take office in daunting times for his city and his country—much as La Guardia did after his election in 1933 as the radical mayor of a city of immigrants and working-class families impoverished by the Great Depression. La Guardia captured the imagination of New York and the nation, becoming a beacon of hope at a time of chaotic economics and looming fascism. Mamdani’s campaign celebrated La Guardia’s legacy. He recalled when we interviewed him that his predecessor “took on these twin crises of anti-immigrant animus and the denial of dignity to working people, and did so with an understanding of what the fruition of democracy looked like—and even what the fulfillment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness looked like—understanding it in the language of the urban sphere: of more parks, more beauty, more light.”

Mamdani’s sweeping victory proves the political promise of democracy. And if he governs as he campaigned—as a courageous and deeply principled, yet always results-oriented, champion of economic justice and social uplift—he will prove, as La Guardia did before him, that the people have the power to shape their own future. This is what Trump and the billionaires truly fear, because Zohran Mamdani is right when he says, “They are the authoritarians who seek to keep us pressed beneath their thumbs, because they know that once we shake ourselves loose, we will never be held down again.”

In parched Los Angeles, residents are forbidden to hose down their driveways, and risk fines of up to $600 if they trigger their sprinklers on the wrong day.

But while Angelenos must curtail their water use, California data centers won’t even be forced to disclose their water consumption. Earlier this month, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required the facilities, which can guzzle millions of gallons in a single day, to report their water usage.

Amid the artificial intelligence boom—or bubble, as seems increasingly likely—tech companies are pouring money into AI infrastructure. Spending is expected to reach billion next year. In a memo addressing his veto, Newsom wrote that, given the “unprecedented demand” for data centers, he was currently “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements about operational details on this sector.” In other words: Why kill (or, in this case, mildly regulate) the golden goose?

Data centers house the computers, servers, and other hardware used to process and store digital information. With their enhanced processing capabilities, large “hyperscale” complexes are the preferred data centers for the computation-heavy training and use of AI models. They can cover an area of over 1 million square feet, roughly equal to 17 football fields. Water is used to maintain humidity and as a coolant for the heat-generating machines, and as American data centers have grown in size and number, so has their water consumption, from 5.6 billion gallons in 2014 to 17.4 billion in 2023.

Communities are already feeling the squeeze. In Newton County, Georgia, a single Meta-owned center accounts for about 10 percent of all water use. Homeowners near the facility told The New York Times they believed the data center’s construction had damaged their wells: Their taps yield brown water, or no water at all. The community is also facing water shortages, and prices have skyrocketed; in the future, locals may have to resort to rationing. That’s a steep price to pay so that Mark Zuckerberg can sell AI-enabled spy glasses.

It’s no wonder that companies are often silent about exactly how much water their facilities use. The Data Center Coalition, an industry lobbying group, opposed the California disclosure bill—the one that Newsom then vetoed. In 2021, a city in the neighboring state of Oregon sued a local newspaper to prevent it from reporting on Google’s water use. (The $3 trillion tech giant was kind enough to pick up the city’s legal tab.) After the case was finally settled, news reports revealed that Google’s data centers accounted for more than a quarter of local water consumption.

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Less water-intensive cooling methods tend to burn through more electricity—and AI data centers already devour plenty of that. A standard complex uses the electrical equivalent of 100,000 households, which places a significant demand on electrical grids. Utility companies pass the costs to customers: Residents near data center hubs have seen electricity prices rise as much as 267 percent over the last five years. To top it off, data centers often emit a loud hum and may be floodlit at all hours. Noisy, electricity-poaching night owls—it’s hard to imagine a worse neighbor.

To keep up with rising usage, utility companies are altering their energy plans. Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, host to the worst nuclear accident in American history, is restarting one of its reactors to fuel Microsoft data centers. In Mississippi and Georgia, coal-fired plants once slated for retirement will be kept in operation, belching climate-altering carbon dioxide.

In response to the industry’s critics, data center boosters point to the economic investment their construction brings, often to small-town locales. But many jurisdictions attract investment by doling out tax breaks that cut into public profits. In Virginia, home to “Data Center Alley,” the largest concentration of server farms in the world, the state generates 48 cents in revenue for every dollar in sales tax it exempts data centers from paying. And while building the facilities can create thousands of temporary construction jobs, operating them requires a relatively light staff. A Microsoft center in Illinois, for example, created 20 lasting jobs—but reaped $38 million in tax exemptions.

Around the country, communities are increasingly aware of the shortcomings common to many data center deals. They’re circulating petitions, organizing protests, and urging their representatives to regulate the industry. A bill in New Jersey would require centers to use power generated with renewable energy and optimize their water usage, while a new law in Oregon will force data centers and other industrial energy consumers to pay more for electricity.

And activists are seeing results. Last week, local backlash caused Microsoft to abandon a proposed 244-acre complex in Wisconsin. In September, Google withdrew a proposal for a data center just moments before an Indianapolis city council vote on the project’s future. Attendees, some of whom waved signs saying “No Big Tech” and “Stop Oligarch Bailouts,” celebrated the victory.

No one asked for AI to threaten their jobs, or wanted students to have plagiarism machines in their pockets. But AI nonetheless became mainstream with astonishing speed, while everyday Americans have had little power to halt its encroachments. When it comes to data centers, at least, communities are proving they can fight back—and win.

For four years, New Mexico has been on a distressing losing streak. The state has consistently ranked last in the nation for child well-being, as determined by factors including household income, educational outcomes, and child mortality. And over the past decade, whenever New Mexico hasn’t placed 50th, it’s been 49th.

But in its ongoing efforts to shake off that unenviable distinction, the state is poised to achieve a significant first. In September, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham—who made affordable childcare a centerpiece of her 2018 campaign—announced that New Mexico will offer free universal childcare. No other state in the US currently provides this essential service.

The program is projected to save families an average of $13,000 each year. That’s a windfall almost anywhere, but it’s a particularly life-changing sum in a state that has, by one measure, the highest child poverty rate in the nation. And New Mexico may offer a model for other jurisdictions seeking to strengthen the social safety net, particularly as the Trump administration does its level best to shred it.

Childcare for a single infant is now more expensive than public college tuition in 38 states, and each year, the price of daycare pushes 134,000 families below the poverty line. In New Mexico, childcare can cost over a third of the median single parent’s income. The resulting financial toll has nationwide consequences: According to one study, the inadequate childcare system costs the economy $122 billion each year.

Meanwhile, the personal toll disproportionately falls on mothers. Amid sky-high daycare prices and return-to-office policies, workforce participation among women with young children is declining, threatening their career development and future earnings.

The market alone can do little to lower prices. Providing kids with well-trained, nurturing caregivers in a safe and engaging environment is labor-intensive, with teacher-child ratios as low as one-to-three recommended for the youngest charges. Plus, there’s limited room for cost-cutting in an industry that is, by strict necessity, highly regulated. All of this means that care costs more to provide than most families can afford, making it, in former treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s words: “a textbook example of a broken market.”

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Despite this, the United States spends a smaller proportion of public dollars on early childhood education than almost all other wealthy countries. The Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan infused the industry with funding that helped keep centers open, employees in work, and moved kids off of wait lists and into care. However, this subsidy expired in 2023, and Donald Trump’s return to office has since imperiled the already meager federal childcare offerings.

The perennially underfunded Head Start program, which marked its 60th anniversary last year and provides education and healthcare to children from very-low-income families, appears firmly in the Trump regime’s crosshairs: the administration closed half of its regional offices this spring. These days, Trump no longer denies that Project 2025 is his handbook for filleting the federal government—and that plan calls for defunding Head Start entirely. The White House briefly considered carrying out the recommendation in its 2026 budget.

This makes New Mexico’s commitment all the more necessary. Under Lujan Grisham’s administration, the state has made astonishing strides in addressing the childcare crisis. Since 2022, it’s offered free care to families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, and now, by broadening the program to include families of all incomes, another 12,000 children are expected to gain access. In addition to supporting kids and parents, New Mexico incentivizes higher wages by providing more money to daycares offering entry-level salaries of at least $18 per hour. That’s below a living wage for a childless adult, but it’s considerably more than the state’s $12-an-hour minimum. The state legislature must vote next year to sustain the funding—and, as it’s controlled by Democrats, is expected to do so.

New Mexico primarily pays for its program through its Early Childhood Trust Fund, which the state endowed using revenue from oil and gas. However, it’s entirely possible to support families without relying on extractive industries. Connecticut is deploying its budget surplus to create a childcare endowment that’s projected to fund free daycare for families earning less than $100,000 a year. And Washington, DC, raised taxes on high earners to increase pay for early childhood educators, making it easier to recruit staff while expanding the number of available daycare seats.

Even more ambitious models are found abroad. In Denmark, all children over six months old have a guaranteed right to care, either in centers that are part of the broader public education system or with home-based providers. Parents pay no more than a quarter of the fee. And Canada’s Liberal Party government is implementing a plan that hopes to lower childcare costs to about $7 a day. Although not all provinces are on track to reach the 2026 target deadline, prices have declined across the country.

The idea of creating similar resources for working families in the US isn’t mere fantasy—policies addressing childcare affordability are broadly popular, particularly among those who have kids. Fully 92 percent of American parents of children under five support universal childcare, as do 79 percent of Republicans with kids under 18.

With all hope, New Mexico won’t long hold the distinction of being the nation’s only jurisdiction offering early childhood education for all. In New York City, where a year of infant care costs $26,000, mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani has made free public daycare a pillar of his campaign. Enacting such a program in America’s largest city likely faces a steep uphill battle, despite the fact that it would allow thousands of mothers to join the workforce and produce $670 million in annual earnings. But three-quarters of New Yorkers support universal childcare—which suggests that voters may be ready for the fight.

After 160 years of suffering the slings and arrows of official objection to this publication’s mission of speaking truth to power, it’s easy to get jaded about attacks from politicians. Yet we were still surprised when Vice President JD Vance used a mid-September podcast from his vice-presidential office to go after The Nation.

We appreciated that Vance described The Nation as a “well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.” We were less appreciative, however, of his clumsy critique of our coverage of the death of Charlie Kirk, which elided the fact that our columnists condemned the political violence that took the conservative activist’s life while pointedly criticizing his record. And we wish the vice president had gotten his facts straight before inaccurately painting The Nation as a tool of “George Soros’s Open Society Foundation…and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.” We respect Soros’s efforts on behalf of democracy, but he’s not funding our reporting and analysis of the Trump-Vance regime. The essential support for this magazine comes from readers who value our independent journalism, our commitment to economic and social and racial justice, our relentless advocacy for taxing “wealthy titans,” and our determination to expose and thwart this president’s crude authoritarianism.

If Vance’s attack were an isolated incident, or simply the latest expression of a prickly administration’s discomfort with a dissenting publication, we’d move on to the next issue. Unfortunately, destroying press freedom is a core focus of the Trump administration’s agenda. In the same week that Vance attacked The Nation, President Trump called The New York Times “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” while his lawyers filed a $15 billion suit against the newspaper for publishing articles that documented the president’s “lifetime of scandals” and inclination to “rule like a dictator.” A Florida federal judge immediately rejected the suit as “decidedly improper and impermissible”—not to mention “tedious and burdensome.”

But that was just the beginning. Enraged that ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had dared to comment on the crude politicization of Kirk’s death by Republicans, FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC in language that was the stuff of Hollywood cliché: “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Unsettled by the prospect that the licenses of network affiliates could be revoked and that regulatory negotiations with the vindictive Trump administration could go awry, ABC opted for the “easy way”—announcing Kimmel’s indefinite suspension.

That made Kimmel the most public target of the astonishing assault on free expression that was carried out by Trump’s MAGA devotees in the days following Kirk’s murder. Journalists were fired, teachers dismissed, and students expelled, merely for exercising their First Amendment rights. Trump declared that news reports he considered “bad” were “no longer free speech” and advocated for the firing of late-night hosts whose comedy offended his delicate sensibilities.

Few Republicans dared challenge the authoritarian overreach—until Kimmel was actually knocked off the air. Suddenly, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was decrying Carr’s comments as “absolutely inappropriate,” while Texas Senator Ted Cruz compared them to something “right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

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Americans agreed with Cruz that the Trump administration’s attempts to silence Kimmel were “dangerous as hell.” Within days, Kimmel was back on the air. And as Trump presided over a shutdown of the federal government, Kimmel got the last laugh—telling his newly expanded TV audience, “I was recently the victim of a government shutdown. They are reversible.”

Kimmel won that round. But the First Amendment is still in danger, and it still needs defending—especially by those of us who know that a robust, free, and independent press forms the vital underpinning of democracy. Decades of media consolidation, cost cutting, and layoffs have obliterated much of this country’s local journalism. Social media delivers a slurry of disinformation. Cable-­channel talking heads offer scant insight and even less diversity of opinion—as has been agonizingly demonstrated by the failure of so many outlets to entertain even basic debates about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once-bold news networks are now owned by multinational corporations that are inclined to cut backroom deals with a president who has a history of dismissing the press as “the enemy of the people.” No wonder Trump and Vance think they can make the American media amenable to autocracy.

But we’ve seen their kind before. During the anti-communist Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, American dissenters were blacklisted, fired, censored, and deported. The damage done by McCarthyism extends to this day. Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and publisher of The Nation, warned that “stigmatizing people with the red brush had deprived the rest of us of interaction with people…whose advocacy, intelligence, passion, and information might have brought us to an improved understanding of the political and cultural situation, and perhaps even have transformed it.”

It’s easy to feel despair about what looks like a new age of McCarthyism. But being around for 160 years gives you perspective. This magazine is old enough to have fought McCarthyism the first time, alongside great journalists such as the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, who counseled Americans not to be “driven by fear into an age of unreason.”

We were on the side that won that fight. We know from experience that America’s witch-hunt fever has been broken before—and we proudly take the side of muckraking journalists, constitutional lawyers, and undaunted jurists, of the artists and actors who are fighting for their creative freedom, and above all, of the Constitution-­defending citizens who will not yield until Trump, Vance, and Brendan Carr are consigned to the same dustbin of history that Joe McCarthy so ignobly occupies.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s threat to ABC was the stuff of Hollywood cliché: “We can do this the easy way,” the Trump appointee said in a recent interview, “or the hard way.” In the preceding days, the network’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! had become a target of conservative ire over Kimmel’s remarks on the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. So, with its affiliates’ broadcast licenses imperiled, ABC and its parent company, Disney, had opted for the easy way. Later that day, the network announced the indefinite suspension of Kimmel’s show—now quasi-overturned largely due to public pressure and protest.

The Trump administration and its MAGA devotees have carried out an astonishing attack on free expression in the weeks following Kirk’s horrific murder. Workers ranging from journalists to airline employees have been fired, and students expelled. Thirty-three House Republicans have called for the creation of a select committee to probe the “radical left’s assault on America.” Attorney General Pam Bondi promised, and then walked back, patently unconstitutional hate speech prosecution. Meanwhile, at the newly rechristened Department of War, journalists must function as Pentagon stenographers or risk losing their press passes. And, as guest host of Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance personally attacked The Nation’s journalism and spread misinformation about the magazine’s funding.

In his remarks at Kirk’s memorial service Sunday, Trump dismissed his critics as merely “screaming fascism over a canceled late-night TV show where the anchor had no talent and no ratings.” However, the right is clearly using Kirk’s death as cover for escalating the repressive tactics that have marked the second Trump term. Since his inauguration, the president has presided over a regime of government suppression unseen in the US for decades—a regime designed to chill activism and dissent.

The administration has pursued wide-ranging assaults on the media. In February, the White House blocked the AP from its presidential press pool because of the news agency’s refusal to adopt Trump’s “Gulf of America” coinage. Later, the administration seized control of pool assignments from the White House Correspondents’ Association. HuffPost and Reuters were out—Newsmax and The Blaze, in.

Last week, on the heels of his lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, the president sued The New York Times for defamation. (A judge promptly dismissed the Times case, though Trump reportedly plans to refile.) Experts agree that his suits against news outlets are meritless, yet ABC and CBS’s parent companies settled with the president for the tidy sums of $15 million and $16 million apiece.

CBS delivered another line item on Trump’s media suppression wish list when it canceled Stephen Colbert’s Late Show this summer, and 60 Minutes’ top producer quit, citing infringement on the program’s journalistic independence. Outlets beyond US borders are feeling the squeeze, too: The administration is pushing to shorten the length of international journalist visas from five years to only 240 days.

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Universities and museums are also among the administration’s many targets. The Smithsonian’s exhibits are currently under review, as the White House scours them for evidence of “woke” thought crimes, like paying undue attention to slavery. In its war on universities, the administration is holding federal funding hostage and threatening schools’ tax-exempt status, all in an attempt to bend higher education towards its conservative ideological goals.

The institutional wreckage is vast, but individuals have not been spared, either. Earlier this month, UC Berkeley notified 160 students and faculty, including acclaimed philosopher Judith Butler, that their names had been delivered to the Trump administration in connection with unspecified allegations of antisemitism. “Will I now be branded on a government list?” Butler asked in a letter published in The Nation, “Will my travel be restricted? Will I be surveilled?” And just last week, a judge ordered the deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and the husband and father of US citizens.

Nor are the rights of citizenship inviolable. Florida Representative Brian Mast introduced a bill that initially featured a provision granting Secretary of State Marco Rubio the authority to revoke the passports of American citizens accused of supporting terrorism. After critics pointed out that the provision could be used to police political speech, Mast proposed an amendment repealing it.

Jobs lost, papers revoked, names compiled: America has been in similar territory before. During the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, millions of federal workers were vetted for potential communist associations; 2,700 were fired, and 12,000 more resigned. In Hollywood, hundreds were blacklisted, while university professors were dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee. When playwright Arthur Miller—a longtime contributor to The Nation—applied for a passport in 1954, his application was denied because the State Department suspected that he harbored communist sympathies. Miller had wanted to visit Belgium to see a production of his now-classic McCarthy-era allegory, The Crucible.

The witch hunts subsided with the help of those who, when forced to choose between the easy way and the hard way, mustered the courage to take the latter path. Broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and his network, CBS, played an important role, producing a series of searing reports on Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting demagoguery. But thousands of everyday Americans also braved the political headwinds to fight censorship and restore freedom of speech. In 1954, after Republicans lost the midterm elections, the Senate censured McCarthy. Twenty-two of his fellow Republican senators joined with Democrats to condemn him.

Dissent is always possible. A few weeks ago congressional Democrats pledged to introduce a bill to strengthen legal protections for individuals politically persecuted by the government. With the party out of power, the move is largely symbolic. However, given the Trump administration’s efforts to cow its political rivals into silence, even symbolic opposition is preferable to none at all. Liberal nonprofits have also banded together to fundraise in support of democracy-bolstering efforts, such as waging legal challenges to Trump administration policies.

In an editorial on McCarthy, Murrow urged Americans not to be “driven by fear into an age of unreason.” It’s difficult not to feel that we’re currently living through such an age. But America’s witch hunt fever has broken before—and it will again.

The United States is aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza. This horror has the support —like so many of our most disastrous foreign debacles from Vietnam to Iraq—of both political parties.

As more and more children die of starvation and the famine deepens, as the Netanyahu government begins its attack on Gaza City, moving to occupy all of Gaza, as Israeli soldiers and bulldozers systematically level city after city in Gaza, the criminal horror is reaching its obscene goal: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza (and, if Netanyahu’s ministers have their way, all of the occupied West Bank).

While all signatories to the Genocide Convention have the right—and indeed the duty—to intervene to halt this slaughter, only two countries have the power to actually stop the genocide: the Israeli government that is committing it and the US government that is aiding, abetting, and arming it. The US could stop this criminal assault by ending its support for Israel, cutting off the flow of arms, ammunition, bombs, and military coordination and demanding and helping to organize immediate, emergency humanitarian relief. To do any less makes us complicit in the ongoing crime.

Across the world—and within Israel itself—some brave leaders have demanded an end to the horror.

David Grossman, Israel’s leading literary and moral voice, says that for many years he has refused to use the word genocide, but now he must—“with immense pain and with a broken heart.”

Two leading Israeli human rights groups—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel—released a report on “Our Genocide,” detailing the unfathomable violence and concluding that there is “no doubt” that since October 2023, the Israeli regime has been responsible for carrying out genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza strip.” Physicians for Human Rights Israel provided a medical-legal analysis documenting Israel’s deliberate destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, as well as other systems critical for the survival of the Palestinian civilian population.

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The special rapporteur of the United Nations has reported on the companies and countries profiting from the “economy of genocide.”

Back In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that there was a plausible risk that Israel’s actions amounted to genocidal acts—long before the systematic starvation became apparent. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a former Hamas commander on the suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A growing number of countries have suspended all or part of their arms shipments to Israel, including Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada. Last month, in a resolution passed by 86 percent of its members, the oldest and largest association of genocide scholars concluded that Israel’s nearly two-year military campaign in Gaza meets “the legal definition of genocide,” The resolution, by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, added to a growing chorus from human rights organizations and academics concluding that Israel is committing genocide by “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” according to Emily Sample, a member of the association’s executive board.

Across the world, citizens of conscience demonstrate in greater and greater numbers, demanding an end to the horror.

And in the United States where the responsibility and the complicity are the greatest?

Courageous Jewish scholars like Omer Bartov and writers like Peter Beinart have spoken out early against the calamity.

More than 1,000 rabbis have called for Israel to allow humanitarian aid, stating “we cannot condone the mass killings of civilians…or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.”

After months of looking the other way, more and more of the mainstream US media are beginning to awake to the humanitarian catastrophe that is being inflicted on the Palestinians.

But among those who could actually bring the horror to an end, courage is in short supply.

Only 13 members of Congress have been willing to state the obvious: that Israel is committing genocide. House minority whip Katherine Clark declared that the “genocide and destruction” in Gaza needs to end—only to walk back her comments a few days later.

The Senate Resolution submitted by Senator Bernie Sanders to block some weapons sales to Israel received not one Republican vote. Instead, Republicans line up behind Donald Trump, who muses about beachfront properties in Gaza and tells Israel to hurry up and finish the job.

A Gallup poll showed only 8 percent of Democrats support Israel’s military action in Gaza. The Sanders Resolutions received support from a majority of the Senate Democratic caucus, yet those still refusing to stand up include Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, as well as Senator Corey Booker, who styles himself as a voice for human rights.

This is no longer a policy debate. This is now an urgent question of basic humanity. Will the United States continue to arm genocide in Gaza? Will legislators continue to support an unconscionable crime against humanity—or act to end it? As more Palestinians starve to death, as more doctors and aid workers and journalists are murdered, as needed food and water continues to be withheld, as families are huddled into smaller and smaller open-air camps, no amount of censorship, doubletalk, lies, or excuses can hide the true horror.

There is no excuse for inaction. There is no escape from responsibility. Each legislator, official, and officer will have to look in the mirror. Complicity in this crime will destroy their reputations. Growing numbers of their constituents, their neighbors, even their own children will demand to know why they chose complicity rather than courage.

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

America is aiding, abetting, and arming that genocide.

Every American should stand up to protest the horror being committed in our names.

Every leader should move now to end our complicity.

When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to rural Viroqua, Wisconsin, in late August, his speech featured a fervent call for ending military aid to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The crowd responded with a standing ovation. Viroqua, population 4,407, is far from New York City, where clueless pundits and political operatives keep telling us that Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s advocacy for an end to the genocide in Gaza is too extreme. But the news from Viroqua offers a reminder that Mamdani and candidates like him are not on the margin of the national debate. Nor do they threaten Democratic prospects in 2026. They’re pulling the party toward the people.

The people know that the United States must stop supplying arms and coordinating militarily with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as it pursues its criminal war against the Palestinian population of Gaza. The people know that the US should be leading in the organization of immediate emergency humanitarian relief to the Palestinians. The people know that to do anything less makes us complicit in the ongoing crime.

Yet, top DC Democrats—including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries— continue to stand obstinately, and horrifically, on the wrong side of history. They refuse to endorse candidates like Mamdani and fail to recognize that tens of millions of Americans see Gaza as a moral-compass measure of human decency.

The people know that Hamas launched a gruesome attack on Israeli kibbutzim on October 7, 2023. But they also know that the Israeli response has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians in Gaza—most of them women and children—and reduced the enclave to a wasteland. Close to half of all Americans, and 66 percent of Democrats, identify the slaughter in Gaza as a genocide, according to an August Data for Progress survey. Those numbers are from before an August 25 Israeli air strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital killed at least 20 people, including five journalists. And from before a United Nations–backed panel declared that a famine is taking place in Gaza, warning that “over half a million people are facing the most devastating form of hunger.” One thousand rabbis signed a letter calling on Israel to lift blockades on humanitarian aid to Gaza, because “we cannot condone the mass killings of civilians…or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.”

Politicians supposedly take polling and public pressure seriously. Yet, for all the data, for all the organizing and demands by grassroots Democrats and progressives for coherent opposition to Trump’s support of Netanyahu’s murderous policies and territorial ambitions—which include the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and, if Netanyahu’s ministers prevail, from the occupied West Bank—top Democrats in Congress stubbornly stand on the wrong side of history. Their complicity is as glaring as it is indefensible. There are no excuses.

After looking the other way for the better part of two years, mainstream US media outlets are finally covering the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians. But among those who could actually end the horror, courage is in short supply.

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Most members of Congress employ empty language to describe what the world recognizes as an ongoing war crime. And when it comes to linking words to deeds, action is thwarted not just by right-wing Republicans but by many Democrats.

Senate Republicans rejected Sanders’s resolution to block key weapons sales to Israel, while nodding along as Trump mused about developing beachfront properties in Gaza. Yet, even as the Sanders resolution secured support from a majority of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Schumer opposed it, as did New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who styles himself as a voice for human rights.

This is no longer a policy debate. This is a moral test for every official, every candidate, every Democrat. When the famine in Gaza was formally recognized, Mamdani tweeted, “The U.S. government is not a bystander to this genocide. We can end it today.” In fact, it will end only when our elected leaders get a clear signal from the people. People in Viroqua sent their signal in August. People in New York can do so November 4, when they elect Zohran Mamdani.

For a week, it was MAGA versus meatloaf. Last month, the rustic restaurant chain Cracker Barrel committed the grave offense of introducing a new logo. Gone were the titular barrel and overall-clad Uncle Herschel, the Tennessee-based eatery’s mascot. In a saner universe, this switch would have been a mundane exercise in corporate repositioning. Instead, Christopher Rufo and Donald Trump Jr. accused the company of abandoning its heartland roots in favor of “wokification.”

Cracker Barrel’s stock value promptly fell by $94 million. Finally, President Trump himself weighed in, taking to Truth Social to urge the casual dining chain to undo the logo change. Later that day, the company announced that it would do just that. On X, one Trump staffer crowed that the chain’s executives had called the White House to personally telegraph their capitulation.

But this wasn’t just another skirmish in America’s never-ending culture war. Instead, it was a deliberate and profoundly disingenuous distraction from the real crises facing the heartland—crises that the Trump administration’s policies are exacerbating. Trump has won rural voters in each of his presidential campaigns, and his share of their vote increased every cycle from 2016 to 2024. But he is repaying this loyalty with policies that endanger the lives and livelihoods of rural Americans.

Take healthcare. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts are expected to disproportionately impact rural areas, where nearly a quarter of the population is Medicaid insured and the program covers almost half of all births. Republicans, alert to the political perils of subjecting their voters to literal bodily harm, have tacked on a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund. But it’s projected to cover just 37 percent of the Medicaid dollars rural communities will lose. Labor and delivery wards, which hospitals often operate at a loss, are especially vulnerable. In Kentucky, one hospital has already suspended the opening of a birthing center in anticipation of the cuts. That this is unfolding under the self-proclaimed “fertilization president” only compounds the hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, Trump’s trade war has whipsawed American agriculture. Facing metal tariffs and weak crop prices, John Deere, which netted record profits two years ago, is now struggling to sell tractors. China, the largest market for American soybeans in 2024, has yet to order even a bushel from this season’s harvest. Last month, the American Soybean Association penned a letter to the president warning that its farmers were at a “financial precipice.” And the gutting of USAID, which last year purchased $2 billion of food from American farms to distribute as aid, will certainly hurt the heartland.

The administration is also cutting infrastructure relied on by rural areas. With “equity” now a dirty word, Trump defunded the Digital Equity Act, which supported programs providing tech access and education to remote communities. Congressional Republicans erased public media funding, leaving at risk 245 rural radio stations, which broadcast crucial local updates and emergency alerts. And Trump has long mulled privatizing the US Postal Service, which could result in cuts to mail service in rural areas.

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But Democrats share some of the blame for these looming disasters. The party seems to have all but given up on organizing in rural communities. According to one recent study, they haven’t bothered to name party chairs in a fifth of rural counties since 2016. And in that election year, as well as in 2020 and 2022, a similar share of rural counties hosted an uncontested congressional race thanks to Democratic absenteeism.

Yet these communities are far from a lost cause. In fact, if only 3 percent of rural voters had shifted to Kamala Harris last year, she might have won the presidency.

Organizers are working to change this trajectory. Contest Every Race, which recruits Democratic candidates in areas with little party infrastructure, has pledged to invest $12 million in rural mobilization. In a previous column, I covered The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative’s calls for a 10-part Rural New Deal. The organization has since asked the DNC to contribute 10 percent of its budget to rural and working-class districts. If the Dems had done so last year, $400 million would have been funneled to the cause.

If the right funding meets the right candidates, Democrats can be competitive in rural areas come the midterms. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn is running again as a populist independent after his long-shot Senate bid far outperformed Harris in the state last year. And in Iowa, gold medal–winning Paralympian Josh Turek is campaigning as a “prairie populist” seeking to raise the minimum wage and create affordable housing and healthcare.

No campaign, though, can succeed without robust grassroots organizing. In June, hundreds of rural communities staged No Kings protests in every state. And last month, as MAGA-world was hectoring Cracker Barrel, Bernie Sanders—himself a representative of one of the nation’s most rural states—brought the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to tiny Viroqua, Wisconsin. In a town with a population of 4,400, hundreds gathered for the event.

Cracks are starting to appear in Trump’s base. Between February and April of this year, the president’s rural approval rating slumped from 59 percent to 40 percent. It opens a space through which Democrats might be able to drive a wedge—if only they can offer the progressive populist solutions needed by town and country alike.

Gavin Newsom’s recent mockery of Donald Trump proves that imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery. Amid the ongoing battle over congressional redistricting, Newsom’s pitch-perfect posts about Trump’s “TINY HANDS” and California’s “PERFECT MAPS” have been wildly entertaining, and, at least by one measure, wildly successful—the posts have garnered millions of views and counting.

While it’s refreshing to see a prominent Democrat unapologetically standing up to the current administration, Newsom’s jabs also reinforce the staying power of Trump’s blustery and incoherent style. And they reveal the degree to which the attention economy has disrupted our focus and degraded our language.

Trump continues to benefit from the steady decline in the American attention span driven by social media. His style of short, punchy, inflammatory language—and his strategy of flooding the zone with a new federal freak show day after day—is engineered to succeed in this chaotic environment. But some recent online victories seem to indicate that progressives can also win on this battlefield if they deploy the right combination of profane style and policy substance.

It’s possible the Trump era would never have been inaugurated without the concurrent smartphone era’s reshaping attention spans and media habits. One survey has found that Americans check their phones an astonishing 144 times daily, and about 40 percent of adults report being “almost constantly online.” As a result, Americans are reading less. In 2024, less than half of adults said they had picked up a book in the past year, continuing a consistent downward trend.

The MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes has analyzed this regression in his book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (a story that millions of Americans could benefit from understanding, if only they were still reading). He argues that the relentless competition for attention erodes thoughtful discourse while incentivizing the most thoughtless voices. It has contributed to mental health crises, the decline of journalism, and political polarization. It also fueled the rise of Donald Trump, who long ago proved himself to be a malignant savant of attention manipulation.

Trump’s understanding of the new media ecosystem propelled all three of his presidential campaigns. In 2016, he received an estimated $5.6 billion worth of free media. By that September, the word Americans associated the most with Hillary Clinton was “e-mail,” while they connected Trump with “speech,” “president” and “immigration.”

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Fast-forward to 2024, and he kept courting online attention with stunts such as working a choreographed 30-minute “shift” at McDonald’s. He dominated news media with mendacity that demanded journalistic coverage, such as his promotion of the xenophobic falsehood that Haitian migrants were eating Ohio pets. As Hayes wrote, Trump’s approach to politics over the last decade has been the “equivalent of running naked through the neighborhood: repellent but transfixing.”

Now Trump is not just benefiting from but intentionally accelerating these reversals. He has defunded and harassed leading research universities, censored historical exhibits at museums, and created Truth Social—an imitation of Twitter that has emerged as a playground for conspiracy theorists.

He is attempting the governmental equivalent of a lobotomy.

These setbacks have led progressives to increasingly understand that electoral victory requires digital dominance. And squaring up with Trump on social media appears a prerequisite for rallying the public around any political vision. As one strategist put it while praising Newsom’s Trump impersonation: “Democrats are over being the ‘nice guy’ party.”

Already, there is some delightful needling of the right easily found in the proverbial social media haystack. The streamer Hasan Piker has been described as a “gateway drug” for progressive politics, while his engaging brand of explicit quips led GQ to name him “the hottest left-wing political commentator online.” When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez streamed herself playing the game Among Us with Piker before the 2020 election, she almost broke a livestreaming record on the Twitch platform, drawing about 440,000 concurrent viewers.

Elected Democrats are also taking off their virtual gloves. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker responded to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico by threatening to rechristen Lake Michigan “Lake Illinois.” In an example of game respecting game, Zohran Mamdani’s strategy of speaking directly to voters through social media received unlikely praise from Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is less a fan of Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, who went viral for describing Greene as having a “bleach-blonde bad-built butch body.” And in Maine, the oysterman and Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner is drawing headlines for a pugnacious campaign launch video in which he declares: “The difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us out and not giving a damn.”

Still, talking the talk also requires walking the walk by implementing bold, authentically progressive initiatives. One of Newsom’s Trump-mocking posts announced an aggressive redistricting plan to counter Republican gerrymandering in Texas. Bernie Sanders has endorsed that move, just as he endorsed Mamdani, whose affordability agenda represents another ambitious stance to match pugilistic rhetoric.

Otherwise, adhering to the philosophy of “when they go low, we go high” risks failing to meet voters where they are. It seems Americans seek a fighter on their behalf and at their side.

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

New data from the CDC suggests a grim back-to-school tradition emerging: In 2024, kindergarten vaccination rates declined for the fifth consecutive year. Meanwhile, vaccine exemptions reached a record high.

These statistics became all the more disturbing last fall when, shortly after 286,000 children began their educations without proof of full immunity against measles, a man who has bragged about never getting a flu shot was reelected to the presidency. Since then, the United States has contended with its largest measles outbreak in three decades, while the leaders who should be stamping out this crisis are instead fanning the flames. In just eight months, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, have made every effort to undermine one of the major civilizing advances of the 20th century—our public health infrastructure. In doing so, they risk endangering millions of people and kick-starting a doom loop of mistrust from which it could take decades to recover.

As usual, the Trump administration’s stance on vaccines is motivated less by sincere populism and more by personal profit. Before Kennedy launched his own presidential campaign on a platform of “making America healthy again,” he earned $20,000 every week helming a nonprofit dedicated to fostering vaccine skepticism. Now in the cabinet, he has fired the entire CDC vaccine advisory panel and replaced it with a ragtag crew, half of whom have never published peer-reviewed research on vaccines. Just last week, Kennedy canceled $500m of federal funding for mRNA vaccines, which prevented 14 million deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic. And he has made these rollbacks while retaining a financial stake in ongoing litigation against a vaccine manufacturer.

All the while, the US has seen more than 1,300 measles cases and three deaths this year. In response, Kennedy has alternately endorsed and undermined the most effective method of prevention—widespread immunization.

The evisceration of funding has extended across the sciences, with Trump cutting support for research to a 35-year nadir. At the National Institutes of Health, 1,800 grants have been terminated, a move that the Government Accountability Office deemed illegal. The administration also continues to freeze grants to universities over culture-war phantasms like DEI, including $339 million at UCLA and $2.2 billion at Harvard. So it’s not surprising that 75 percent of US scientists polled by the journal Nature are considering leaving the country, which raises the prospect of a lost generation of American talent and lifesaving innovation.

Internationally, Trump’s heartless and thoughtless budget cuts are causing devastation. The administration has dismantled USAID, one of the most successful preventers of contagious disease in history. In doing so, it defunded programs that vaccinated more than 800 million children against fatal illnesses like malaria. Researchers have found that 300,000 people have already died because of these cuts, which could lead to another 14 million preventable deaths over the next five years—all to gut an agency that managed the equivalent of 4 percent of the annual national defense budget.

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Back in the US, medical associations, local officials and individual doctors are collaborating to buy vaccines directly from manufacturers and lobbying insurance companies to continue covering the costs of those shots. Their efforts reflect a tried-and-true strategy to counter under-immunization. Before the current outbreak, Ronald Reagan–era cuts to public health caused a more widespread measles pandemic, with 27,000 cases in just 1990. But locally led outreach campaigns and grassroots vaccination programs turned back the crisis, as did an eventual restoration of federal funds under Bill Clinton’s administration.

Budget cuts can be reversed, but trust may be more difficult to recover. Long before RFK Jr.’s ascendancy, disasters like the CDC’s infamous Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee and the Food and Drug Administration’s glacial response to the AIDS crisis cast long shadows over public health institutions. Today, a plurality of Americans are already predicting that they will lose faith in medical guidance under the current administration. That would undermine the very basis of public health, which depends on people choosing to follow guidelines grounded in research they did not personally conduct and whose results they are ill-trained to parse.

Repairing that breach will require years of effortful relationship-building, but it might also require rallying Americans with the classic tactic of patriotism. For all of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, he misses that our nation’s most extraordinary scientific and medical advances have drawn bipartisan enthusiasm in part because they reinforced a perceived American exceptionalism. At the height of the cold war, RFK Jr.’s uncle chose to go to the moon, and Richard Nixon brought that dream to fulfillment. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Americans helped fund it by mailing in more than 2.5 million dimes, hence its christening as the March of Dimes. That money supported Jonas Salk’s development of the polio vaccine. Within two years of its introduction, annual cases of polio had fallen by 90 percent.

Even Trump, who botched the initial response to Covid-19, managed to oversee the historic Operation Warp Speed. If only he could recognize that this is the kind of achievement which makes America great.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in June made the 33-year-old state legislator from Queens more than just the party’s nominee to lead the nation’s largest city. For a Democratic Party desperate to reclaim political momentum, Mamdani’s laser-like focus on affordability issues offered a clear path forward. The Ugandan-born immigrant who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor also managed to overcome many of the wrenching, personality-based pitfalls of New York politics by projecting an accessible, enthusiastic, and joyful determination to open up conversations and heal past electoral divisions—an approach that starkly contrasts with Donald Trump’s dark vision of an America at odds with the world and with itself. Mamdani still faces a tough November race, with his chief opponent in the primary, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, reentering the contest as a third-party contender alongside the scandal-plagued incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams. Perennial Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and independent Jim Walden round out the field.

On the day that Mamdani sat down with Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and executive editor John Nichols for one of his first extended post-primary interviews, he had just secured the endorsement of 1199SEIU, the largest healthcare union in the country and a historic force in New York politics. At the same time, he’s still looking to win the support of national Democratic figures—notably heavy hitters from his home state like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries—who suggest that the proud democratic socialist is too progressive on both domestic and foreign-policy issues.

Seated at a small table in the Little Flower Cafe, an Afghan eatery that he frequents in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria, Mamdani sipped a pink sheer chai and spoke about the inspiration he takes from past New York progressives such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia. He also discussed how he came to highlight affordability as the essential political issue of the moment, the future direction of the Democratic Party, and the legacy of “sewer socialism”—the breakthroughs achieved by socialist municipal governments in the past. Along the way, Mamdani highlighted key challenges for New York governance, such as protecting the city from the depredations of ICE and the vendettas of the Trump White House and navigating relations with the city’s billionaire class. He also spoke about the punishing media landscape and his efforts to address “a caricature of myself that is a responsibility for me to correct,” as well as his earnest hope—in a time of so much cynicism and despair—that democracy might finally deliver for working people. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
 

The Nation: In your victory speech on primary night, you quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, telling the crowd: “As FDR said, ‘Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people dislike democracy but because they have grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness…. In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.’ New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two.” How did you come to adopt that quote and to link it to your governing vision?

Mamdani: I was taken by this quote because it so eloquently speaks to the fact that for democracy to survive, it cannot be treated as simply an ideal or a value. It has to be something that has a resonance to the needs of working people’s lives. And in this moment especially, there’s a temptation to say that democracy is under attack from authoritarianism in Washington, DC, which it is. And it is also under attack from the inside, [because of] the withering of the belief in its ability to deliver on any of the needs of working people.

It’s not that we must convince people to believe in democracy as a notion or as a political aspiration; it’s that we have to convince them of its resonance in their lives. And it’s a joy to be here with you at Little Flower, because that’s the nickname of the greatest mayor in our history, Fiorello La Guardia, who took on these twin crises of anti-immigrant animus and the denial of dignity to working people, and did so with an understanding of what the fruition of democracy looked like—and even what the fulfillment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness looked like—understanding it in the language of the urban sphere: of more parks, more beauty, more light. You cannot defeat this attack on democracy unless you also prove its worth.

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The Nation: FDR and La Guardia campaigned in difficult times—during the Great Depression, with fascism rising in Europe. They each captured the imagination of the people and used it to build electoral and governing coalitions. Is that something you were thinking about when you picked that quote?

Mamdani: It is part of the inspiration for this campaign.
 

The Nation: Roosevelt had a huge agenda, and he was a masterful politician. Yet he couldn’t achieve all of it. The same with La Guardia. Today, as you seek to implement an equally bold agenda, there are people who say you’re too inexperienced, that you won’t be effective. That will, undoubtedly, be a theme of the fall election, in which your leading opponent is a former governor whose father, another former governor, famously said, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Tell us how you see governing, and how you intend to deliver on your campaign’s promises.

Mamdani: I only promise that which I intend to deliver. I will be judged at the end of my tenure as mayor—after I win this general election—by my ability to deliver on this platform. Most especially, I’ll be held to account on the central planks of this platform: commitments to freeze the rent, to make the slowest buses in the country fast and free, to deliver universal childcare in a city where it costs $25,000 a year to provide that for a child. The challenge of politics is to meet each moment. What we’ve shown in this campaign is our ability to do so from the beginning, when I was managing two people, to this point where we now have more than 52,000 people [as campaign volunteers].

This is not to say that campaigning and governing are the same challenge, but it is to say that they both present you with an ever-developing landscape—one in which you can only succeed if you hire a team of the best, the brightest, and also the hungriest. What we did in this campaign was showcase our ability to do that, and what we’ll do in governing is the same: hire on the basis of expertise, and trust our convictions, our commitments, to also hire those who are not characterized by the speed with which they say yes to an idea I come up with, but rather by the track record they can show in fulfilling a mandate such as this.
 

The Nation: Might your administration include City Comptroller Brad Lander, one of your closest primary rivals, as deputy mayor or in some other key position?

Mamdani: I have yet to make any personnel commitments. But I would say that it has been a joy to run alongside Brad and to work alongside him, and to see his leadership as both a colleague for years prior but also amidst this race, in showcasing what a new kind of politics can be. I know that many others felt the same. At a moment when the language of politics is so dour and so dark, it’s important to understand that the tonic to the darkness is not imitating it, but rather to marshal the same lightness and joy that also characterizes our lives.
 

The Nation: In your victory speech, you seemed to be trying not merely to claim an election win but to give people a deeper sense of your governing philosophy and focus. It didn’t sound like you wrote it that night.

Mamdani: No, the foundation of the speech was written before that evening. But we wrote the conclusion on election night. There was a sense of “Things look good—but it’s too early.” And then once I got the phone call from Andrew Cuomo, we realized that this was actually a victory speech. It was not too early to declare. And so we had to bring that clarity to what we had written.

The Nation: You promised to “govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party, where we fight for working people with no apology.” That spoke to the circumstances of the Democratic Party, not just in New York City but nationally. Today there’s this debate over how the party should reconnect with working-class voters. If you’re elected mayor, your success or failure is primarily going to be measured by what you do for people in New York. But do you also see the potential for a model of a new politics in America?

Mamdani: It has often felt as if we in the Democratic Party are embarrassed by some of our convictions—that at the first sign of resistance, we may back away. And what I have found as a New Yorker is that the thing New Yorkers hate more than a politician they disagree with is one that they can’t trust. And so I have run a campaign that is unabashed about its commitments, its principles, its values—while always ensuring that that lack of apology never translates into a condescension, but rather a sincerity. It allows for an honest debate with New Yorkers, where even when I go and speak to hundreds of CEOs, we have a conversation all in the knowledge that my fiscal policy, as I state it in that room, is the same as I state it on the street: a desire to match the top corporate tax rate of New York to that of the top corporate tax rate of New Jersey, a desire to increase personal income taxes on the top 1 percent of New Yorkers by 2 percent. It’s an honest desire, and it is also one that doesn’t preclude me from sharing it with those who may be taxed by it.

There is a temptation, when you see how successful Republicans have been with their style of politics, to believe that we have to mimic it in order to compete with them. In fact, it is a challenge for us to showcase our alternate vision. It’s not just a vision with regard to commitments, it’s not just a vision with regard to ideals, but it comes across even with regard to the manner in which we share our politics with others. And I think sincerity is at the heart of that.

The Nation: There’s been a pressure—a good bit before the primary, more since—to get you to back off from things you’ve said on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict and taxing the rich. You’ve responded by meeting with critics, explaining that these are the things you believe in and engaging in discussions of where you are coming from. That’s different from how many candidates operate.

Mamdani: If I’ve made policy commitments, I’ve made them because I intend to keep them. I want to be honest about them. That doesn’t stop me from continuing to learn how to be a leader for this entire city. But that learning is not something that can come at the expense of the core of what this campaign is, which is a commitment to the very same policies we began with on October 23, the very same values we ran with for eight months prior to the primary. That marriage of consistency and growth is what I hope to show as the leader of this city.
 

The Nation: If you are elected mayor, you will have to deal with political leaders in Albany and Washington. You’ve said that you want to use your power “to reject Donald Trump’s fascism.” How do you Trump-proof New York City? And how do you do that when the administration is directly attacking you? Just this morning, the White House spokesperson denounced you as “Zamdami.”

Mamdani: I hope they find that guy. [Laughs.]
 

The Nation: So how do you Trump-proof the city?

Mamdani: There are a number of ways: You raise revenue, such that you not only are able to protect the city against the worst of the federal cuts that are to come, but also that you are able to pursue an affirmative agenda at the same time. It is not enough to fight Trump’s vision in purely a defensive posture. We must also have our own vision that we are fighting for—and that we deliver on.

And New York City [can also push back against Trump’s White House] by enforcing and strengthening our city’s existing sanctuary-city policies. This is a contest, also, of values that concern the fabric of our city and our country. And when I was saying that too often it feels as if we Democrats are embarrassed, just think about these policies, which have been spoken of by Eric Adams as if they are an attack on what makes us New Yorkers, when in fact they’ve been in existence for decades and have been defended prior to him by Republicans and Democrats alike. We know that these are the very policies that can prevent so much of the horrors that we are seeing in our own city.

Finally, we can fight by instilling hope in New Yorkers who are living through despair in this moment—be it a despair over how expensive the city that they call home has become, or despair watching in anguish as their tax dollars are used to kill civilians in Gaza, as was recently reported by NBC News, where the Israeli military killed 10 children waiting in line for a health clinic, one of whom was a 1-year-old child who had just spoken his first words. It is incumbent upon us, as Democrats, to fight back against that, and to also lift New Yorkers out of that despair with an affirmative vision.

I am running to be the mayor of this city, and my focus will be on the welfare of New Yorkers across these five boroughs. I will lead with a vision of protecting these New Yorkers and ensuring that we do more than simply survive in this city—that there is also a language and a reality of aspiration in our city once again.
 

The Nation: The president recently questioned your citizenship and threatened to arrest you. Were you surprised by that? Do you have any capacity to be surprised by Donald Trump?

Mamdani: Very little. He has spoken about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, what I believe in, my naturalization status. I think much of it is to distract from who I fight for, because for all of the many differences between Donald Trump and me, we both ran campaigns on the cost of living, campaigns that spoke about the need for cheaper groceries. While he’s betrayed those same commitments—most obviously through this recent legislation that will throw millions of Americans off their healthcare, steal food from the hungry, continue in his now well-known tradition of wealth transfers of trillions of dollars from the working class to the 1 percent—we will actually deliver on those commitments. And our delivery on them will throw his betrayal into stark relief. That is a threat to his politics, and it motivates so much of this language and this focus that he has.

The Nation: Instead of referring to you as a democratic socialist, Trump has claimed that you are a communist. So let’s talk about what you are—a democratic socialist. How do you define the term?

Mamdani: I think of it often in the terms that Dr. King shared decades ago: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism. But there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”

In a moment when income inequality is declining nationwide, it is increasing in New York City. And within the context of city government, I understand [democratic socialism as a way to honor] the responsibility to ensure that every New Yorker lives a dignified life. I often speak of Fiorello La Guardia—a Republican who once ran on the Socialist Party line and worked closely with the left—because he delivered that dignity through so much of what he did as the mayor of this city. This was a mayor who created the Parks Department, a mayor who built housing for 20,000 New Yorkers at a scale and pace which is considered unfeasible today, a mayor who understood what it meant to fight for working-class New Yorkers.

I am well aware of the immense responsibility that comes with this position, and I am also excited by the opportunity that it represents to deliver for those same New Yorkers for whom politics has seemed less and less relevant to the struggles of their lives.
 

The Nation: When you talk about democratic socialism, you put it in an American context, which a lot of our media never even imagines. But there is a long democratic socialist tradition in this country, and one of the best examples of it is the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee. One of the interesting things about the sewer socialists was that they championed small business. They fought to protect small businesses, often against chain stores and big business. You’ve done something similar.

Mamdani: Yeah! And the extreme concentration of wealth and power hurts small businesses as well.

The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks. You win someone’s trust through an outcome, and that is what I am working backward from: an outcome of an affordable city and a desire to show that government can in fact live up to its responsibilities to working residents.
 

The Nation: So you’re not the candidate of the billionaires?

Mamdani: No. [Laughs.]
 

The Nation: Yet you met recently with leaders of the business community—some of whom are billionaires. As mayor, how are you going to navigate relations with the business community?

Mamdani: First, by showing that I see them as a part of this city, and that my vision for the city includes even the same corporations that I’m looking to increase taxes on. I know no matter what our disagreements are, there’s a shared interest in the success of this city.

There are points of disagreement, no doubt. But also, I enter into those rooms [for meetings with business leaders] having been preceded by a caricature of myself that it is a responsibility for me to correct. I do not blame many New Yorkers for having that caricature, for they were subject to more than $30 million in television commercials, mailers, and radio hits with those very examples of smear and slander. I, too, would have questions if that was the only way I understood someone. I also go into those meetings making clear that, though we may—and likely, for many, will—leave with the same disagreements about fiscal policy and the tools we must use to deliver that affordability, agreement on those issues is not the basis by which I will determine who I’m willing to speak to about other issues. There are many conversations I’ve had that begin and end with disagreement about that fiscal policy, but also include shared areas of interest with regard to our parks or our streetscape, or thoughts of what this city could be. That is why I speak so often of partnership. Politics, to me, must be an act of making the principle into the possible. And you do so by extending your hand to all who are interested, not all who agree on every single idea that you have.
 

The Nation: Do you think you’re opening up imaginations that have been shut down? There are people living here in New York who are surprised when they learn that city universities were once free. So there’s a tradition that has been lost in the past 40 or 50 years that you may be retrieving.

Mamdani: I leave it to you to make the judgment. I will say that we have been very inspired by the tradition, in this city especially, of the campaigns that came before us. One of the many reasons that I was so excited by the idea of walking the length of Manhattan when it was proposed by a team member of ours was that it reminded me of the video I had seen a few weeks earlier of David Dinkins walking through the streets of Harlem. It reminded me of the photo I had seen of John Lindsay being lifted into the air by a crowd, and of an understanding among New Yorkers of the necessity of politics to take place in public. Much of our sense of politics is grounded solely in the now—when in fact we have to continue to connect to that which has existed before, because even in the mere act of knowing our own history, we are reminded of our own possibilities.

While it’s tempting to think of the passage of time as innately meaning the arrival of progress, we know that in many ways we have had a fairer New York City in the past. That does not mean that we should engage purely in nostalgia, but that we are reminded of what we can accomplish and that, in doing so, we are honoring what this city has been.
 

The Nation: Your campaign has focused on the fact that the city has become harder and harder to afford—perhaps more so than at any time in its history. How did you come to that as the focal-point issue for your campaign?

Mamdani: If you speak to enough New Yorkers, you’ll come to this conclusion. It’s the difference in whether or not people can keep living in the city. People feel it in rent; people feel it in the job market; people feel it in groceries; they feel it in their MetroCard. One in five New Yorkers cannot afford a $2.90 subway fare in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. And it’s offensive that we have allowed this to continue and that we consider ourselves witnesses or bystanders to it, as opposed to those with the choice of exacerbating it or bringing it to an end. We’ve seen exacerbation under Adams, and now it’s time for a city government that actually uses the tools at its disposal to deliver a different kind of city.
 

The Nation: Since the primary, you’ve met with a lot of people who did not back you. There are still some Democratic Party leaders who remain resistant to your candidacy, and you’ve been meeting with them. You’ve also put a lot of effort into meetings and direct campaigning that seeks to expand your coalition: seeking to win over older Black voters, union members, and others who were with Cuomo in the primary. You’ve gone to the neighborhoods, to Little Haiti and elsewhere, talked with people—and won endorsements. You’ve met with and won over unions that backed Cuomo in the primary. Isn’t this what mayors need to do: to say to people who didn’t back you, “Let’s find our places to work together. Let’s find our common ground”?

Mamdani: You have a choice of what you want to do with your hand. Do you want to pat yourself on the back, or do you want to extend it to someone else? Your decision has to come from the question of “What is your goal?” My goal is to be the mayor of this entire city. It is not to settle scores and look to the past; it’s to look to the future. Looking to the future means continuing to welcome people into a coalition, and not asking them why or when they joined, but knowing that they have just as much of a place in this fight for an affordable city as those who helped come up with the idea of the campaign in the first place. It’s that same ethos that we practice as New Yorkers when we look to defend those who have been here for generations and those who got here the same day. It’s the way that this city has raised me.
 

The Nation: There’s a huge media story to this campaign. Some of New York City’s legacy media has not exactly rolled out the red carpet. The New York Times editorialized that “We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” At the same time, you’ve created your own media. How do you think about media and communications in New York City?

Mamdani: Oftentimes, the left is forced into a choice between the conventional and the creative, forced in part by financial realities when running a campaign. Thanks to the matching-funds system [which allows qualified candidates in New York mayoral races to get public funding], we were able to build a campaign that could do both. And we sought to do both throughout the entirety of the campaign, whether it meant our advertising strategy, our field strategy, but also as it pertained to our comms strategy. We wanted to engage and respect the longstanding institutions—newspapers and radio and television stations—and sought out opportunities to speak to them at every occasion, [while] knowing full well that more than 50 percent of Americans get their news from social media. So we wanted to both speak to those who tell the stories of this city each and every day and to tell our own story at the same time.
 

The Nation: Was it frustrating when, for instance, The New York Times editorialized so aggressively against you in the primary?

Mamdani: I took that editorial as the opinions of about a dozen New Yorkers—ones that they have a right to, and that I disagreed with, and ones that will not be a reason that I do not engage with them in the future. That’s how I’ll approach much of this, in telling the story of this campaign and in continuing to do so—and in ensuring that my disagreement with any piece of analysis will never extend into what too many politicians do today, which is seeking to clamp down on both the access they extend to the media and the media’s ability to continue to do their jobs.
 

The Nation: Will your focus on producing social media—which has gotten a lot of national notice—continue if you are elected mayor?

Mamdani: Yes. There is much of this campaign that will, and must, continue into governing, and the way in which we communicate is one of those things. It is a critical part of ensuring that New Yorkers see themselves in their own democracy: that they actually hear from those whom they have elected through a medium that they actually use.
 

The Nation: You could become mayor at a time when the president is openly attacking you and when politicians in Albany are saying there’s no money for you. As you struggle to deliver on the things you want to deliver on, is it important that you keep lines of communication open so that people can see how the process works—and what you are trying to accomplish?

Mamdani: The caricature of me will only grow, which means that our ability to reach New Yorkers must grow in the same manner. I take inspiration from many leaders who have sought to speak to their constituents directly, be it the examples I’ve seen of Senator [Bernie] Sanders and Congresswoman [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez through the use of digital media at a national scale, or [President] Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.

The use of digital tends to be described as if it is an optional part of our politics today. It is a necessity. [Mamdani campaign communications director Andrew Epstein’s] idea was to place our donation link under Andrew Cuomo’s relaunch video, and that raised more than $100,000. That is not an optional part of a campaign or of our politics. It is just as important and as necessary as so much of what we consider to be the building blocks of how we run a campaign and how we govern the city.
 

The Nation: You just mentioned Claudia Sheinbaum. The mayor of New York is a global figure. If you’re elected, how will you address national and international issues? How will you build those relationships?

Mamdani: You have to keep your focus on the city. This city is its own gateway to the world. Almost 40 percent of the people who live in this city were born outside this country, myself included. I will be the first immigrant mayor of this city in generations, and I take that both as an honor and as a responsibility. Yet my focus is on the five boroughs, and if there are lessons and models for what we achieve here elsewhere, so be it.

The Nation: You’ve acknowledged that people may have serious differences with you on particular issues, Middle East issues—Gaza, for instance. But you’ve made a point of talking about a commitment to make sure that everyone who lives in the city is safe.

Mamdani: Yes. This is a city that each and every New Yorker belongs to. They belong to it not on the basis of their political beliefs, or their religion, or their race, but because of the fact that they are a New Yorker. And I will be each of those New Yorkers’ mayor. Even amid a disagreement, there will always be an understanding of a shared sense of humanity and that shared sense of belonging.
 

The Nation: Do you ever get mad?

Mamdani: I do. I do get mad! You know, I was quite mad when I met [Trump border czar] Tom Homan in Albany. I am mad when I see the horrific consequences of this right-wing federal administration. It’s an anger that I know many feel, and yet it is not one that we can let corrode our spirit and our soul.
 

The Nation: Do you have a favorite film that captures the New York City ethos?

Mamdani: I’ve often said [Spike Lee’s] Do the Right Thing.
 

The Nation: You seem like a guy who reads a lot.

Mamdani: [Laughs.]
 

The Nation: As a candidate, do you still read books?

Mamdani: Not much.
 

The Nation: Do you listen to music?

Mamdani: I listen to music because it’s something that I can do as I do something else. I listen to music as I get ready in the morning; I listen to music as I take the train, as I’m walking. Some mornings I listen to a song called “O Sanam” by Lucky Ali; some mornings I listen to soca music to wake myself up and get ready for the day. And I don’t know that I could do this without that music. It either gives you that which you hoped you had already awakened with—the energy, the hope, the belief—or it takes you out of that which is consuming you.
 

The Nation: Do you have a book that shaped you?

Mamdani: You know, I read American War by Omar El Akkad many years ago, and there was a phrase within it: “What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?” And it has stayed with me for a long time and informed the way in which I not only see the world, but the world that I’m also trying to win.
 

The Nation: Do you think much these days about not just making this a great city for working people to live in, but maybe even about how a mayor might make the world better?

Mamdani: I try to keep my sights squarely focused. You know the New Yorker cartoon of a View of the World from 9th Avenue? That’s how I try and wake up every morning.

Thousands of famished people waiting for hours in 90-degree heat to secure bags of flour that run out after 10 minutes—this is a typical scene at the four aid distribution centers remaining in Gaza. The cause of this desperation isn’t shortages per se, because the World Food Programme has 116,000 metric tons of food waiting to be delivered to malnourished Palestinians.

Instead, the problem is Israel’s monthslong blockade of aid, which over 100 humanitarian organizations have stated is causing “chaos, starvation, and death.” And though Israeli authorities began allowing a trickle of convoys to resume deliveries over the weekend, the face-saving gesture is too little for the one in three Gazans who hasn’t eaten in days, and too late for the dozens who have already starved to death.

Amid this manufactured famine, however, Israel has permitted another kind of shipment to flow freely. Weapons imports have continued unabated, with thousands of pounds of bombs, guns, and ammunition pouring into the Israeli Defense Force. A new report by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has uncovered the major supplier of this fatal equipment: the United States.

Titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” the exposé lays bare how major American corporations have been all too eager to facilitate Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in exchange for billions of dollars in revenue. It also reveals our nation’s now undeniable complicity in what has been described as the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century.

War profiteering is a phenomenon as ancient as war itself, but Albanese’s investigation shows that the military-industrial-technological complex is reaping uniquely horrible payoffs in Palestine. Albanese describes how Lockheed Martin has built fighter jets for Israel that have carried out bombings that have killed or wounded almost 200,000 Palestinians. She details how Palantir inked a deal with the Israeli military to provide AI-generated target lists, then consummated that partnership by holding a sycophantic board meeting in Tel Aviv. And she brings to light how Caterpillar Inc. has provided equipment to demolish homes and hospitals, crushing to death civilians stuck inside those structures.

Perhaps the most hypocritical offenders are the members of the Magnificent Seven. Google’s unofficial motto was once “Don’t be evil,” but now the company has joined Amazon to provide cloud computing services to the IDF for a persuasive $1.2 billion. Albanese quotes an Israeli colonel who calls this technology “a weapon in every sense of the word,” a cloud as deadly as any poison gas.

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The Trump administration has responded to Albanese’s research with its classic combination of denial and retribution. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sanctioned her, calling her work “political and economic warfare.”

But Albanese’s conclusions align with those of several prominent Jewish and Israeli figures. Former IDF soldier and leading genocide historian Omer Bartov defended Albanese by writing, “I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.” On Monday, two major Israeli human rights groups announced that they agree with that description. Journalist Peter Beinart, editor at large of Jewish Currents, has called Israel an apartheid state, and recently condemned the crisis in Gaza as “an astonishing level of death and suffering that has been normalized.” A simple scan of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz turns up recent headlines like “The Mathematics of Starvation” and “Israel’s Destruction of Gaza.”

In the US Capitol, progressive lawmakers such as Representative Rashida Tlaib and Senator Bernie Sanders have repeatedly called for ending the transfer of US arms to Israel. A handful of other Democrats have also introduced the Block the Bombs Act, which would prohibit the sale of certain weapons without congressional approval, including those made by American companies like Boeing and General Dynamics.

While the bill has gained little traction, outrage over Gaza has become a bipartisan consensus among voters. Only 23 percent of Americans deem Israel’s military actions to be justified. But with activists like Mahmoud Khalil facing deportation over their pro-Palestinian advocacy, and with other protests worldwide being met with brutal and even deadly repression, crystallizing sentiment into a social movement seems an increasingly daunting task.

Amid so much pushback, though, grassroots organizing against weapons exports to Israel still represents a concrete if challenging opportunity for change. Students in Israel, the United States, and across the globe have already been providing a moral witness on this front, despite the threat of retaliation, expulsion, and blacklisting. Now, a broader coalition will be necessary to convince lawmakers that they should fear constituent backlash more than a primary challenge bankrolled by AIPAC.

Beyond pouring into the streets, Americans can also boycott the corporations living large while the population of Palestine dwindles. The employees of those very companies can do the same, like the 50 now-terminated workers at Google who led “No Tech for Apartheid” protests last year. Otherwise, the warning recently issued by Peter Beinart will remain true: “Blood is on our hands as Americans because it is our weapons that are responsible for those children starving to death.”

In the meantime, the thirsty toddlers of Khan Younis will continue to wait for some drops of salt water to drink, and the emaciated doctors of Gaza City will continue to scrounge for a few cans of expired food to eat.

If last week was the best of times for Zohran Mamdani and the working people of New York, it was the worst of times for the billionaires who spent a small fortune trying to stop him from securing the city’s Democratic mayoral nomination. Media mogul Barry Diller, to name just one, donated a cool $250,000 to Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, only to see the disgraced former governor lose by a decisive margin.

But Diller would soon be able to drown his disappointment in Great Gatsby–themed cocktails as he joined Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump, and at least three Kardashians for the cheeriest event on this year’s oligarchic social calendar—the Venetian wedding of journalist Lauren Sánchez and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

It was a juxtaposition that even CNN questioned, as the network cut from an interview with Mamdani to coverage of the gilded spectacle. The reportedly $50 million affair booked all nine of Venice’s yacht ports, closed parts of the city to the public, and forced the relocation of hotel guests to make room for the happy couple. It all served as a stark if sumptuous reminder that there is no expense the mega-rich won’t pay to secure their own comfort—except, of course, the toll their extravagance takes on the communities from whom they extract their wealth.

The lovebirds’ choice of Venice alone demonstrates their carelessness. Because the city comprises more than 100 islands in the Adriatic Sea, it’s uniquely vulnerable to rising sea levels driven by warming global temperatures. Though Sánchez claims to be “dedicated to fighting climate change,” and Bezos has called the issue “the biggest threat to our planet,” their guests arrived in the City of Bridges via 96 private jets, the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation. Bezos has also made splashy commitments to fighting climate change, like pledging $10 billion to his Bezos Earth Fund, while Amazon has promised to become carbon neutral by 2040. But emissions from Amazon’s delivery fleet nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023, and its newest data center will guzzle millions of gallons of water and the energy equivalent of a million homes every year.

This disingenuousness is as much a business strategy for Bezos as Prime’s two-day delivery, enabling him to launder his reputation without hurting his bottom line. This pattern certainly played out last year with his ownership of The Washington Post—where, as soon as he felt threatened by an ascendant Donald Trump, journalistic integrity fell overboard more quickly than an inebriated wedding guest on a luxury gondola.

As I covered in a column earlier this year, Bezos killed the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, directed the editorial board to publish op-eds that only support “personal liberties and free markets,” and oversaw the exodus of more than 20 reporters and editors. Pamela Weymouth, granddaughter of trailblazing Post publisher Katharine Graham, described this capitulation in a recent piece for The Nation as endangering “the very thing that makes America a democracy.”

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In fairness to Bezos, though, charity-washing is an occupational hazard for billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg initially donated to organizations fighting the California housing crisis that he helped exacerbate, before quietly ending his funding this year. The Gates Foundation gives 90 percent of its funding to nonprofits in wealthy nations rather than the impoverished ones whose GDPs are smaller than its namesake’s net worth. The magnanimity of the über-wealthy tends to produce what journalist Anand Giridharadas has called “fake change,” or efforts that stop short of systemic change because those systems underpin the benefactors’ vast wealth.

That’s why any vision of progressive change cannot rely on Bezos or his celebrity wedding guests to operate against their self-interest. (No, not even Oprah.) A Green New Deal will not come from oligarchical guilt but from mass movements. Like the one that deployed almost 30,000 door knockers and pooled funds from 27,000 donors to share Mamdani’s message of genuine economic empowerment.

His victory on Tuesday added to a growing body of proof that even billionaires don’t always get what they want. Last year, Elon Musk spent over a quarter of a billion dollars electing Republicans, but no amount of money could save him from Donald Trump’s mercurial temper. Nor did his wealth sway the voters of Wisconsin, where he contributed $21 million to a state Supreme Court candidate who ended up losing by 10 points.

Voters’ growing skepticism of the 1 percent is no doubt being stoked by grassroots activism. Like in Venice, where local protesters threatened to fill canals with inflatable crocodiles, forcing the wedding of the century to relocate to the city’s outskirts. Back stateside, progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continue to draw record crowds across the country on their Fighting Oligarchy Tour. At a recent stop in Oklahoma—a state Trump won by 33 points—Sanders spoke to a standing-room-only crowd.

Might an anti-billionaire backlash be building? If so, it’s just in time for next year’s midterms.

With a week left until New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, one might have thought that former governor Andrew Cuomo would be measuring the drapes at Gracie Mansion. Real estate developers, corporations like Doordash, a smattering of billionaires and even Billy Joel have shoveled cash into his campaign, with his Super Pac spending more money than any other outside force in the city’s political history. This is on top of his entering the race with a major name-recognition advantage, amounting to a 20- or 30-point lead as recently as May.

But according to a new poll, Zohran Mamdani—the insurgent state assemblyman and democratic socialist whom The Nation recently co-endorsed along with fellow mayoral candidate New York City Comptroller Brad Lander—has pulled ahead of Cuomo for the first time.

And while Mamdani’s campaign deserves credit for offering a clear, inspiring, progressive message, the fact that he is competitive can also be partly credited to New York City’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system. It’s a winning system for candidates who would otherwise be sidelined or would cannibalize one another’s support—and for voters who can finally cast their ballots based on policy rather than pragmatism.

America’s politics have long been dominated (or diluted) by first-past-the-post voting. In it, citizens cast their ballot for one candidate, and whoever receives the most votes wins. Straightforward as it seems, this method forces an either/or choice, often resulting in voters’ deciding between the lesser of two evils. Not only does this reinforce a two-party duopoly in general elections, but it also incentivizes a binary choice between the two leading candidates in primaries.

For the candidates themselves, the system encourages scorched-earth campaigns that divide parties and inflame the narcissism of small differences. The progressive Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren came into the 2020 Democratic presidential primary as allies with much more in common ideologically than their centrist opponents. But there was no electoral incentive for either of them to form an alliance with the other. Instead, they fought to consolidate a minority faction within the party, and got mired in a grisly and public feud. The mudslinging did leave one person standing—Joe Biden.

In contrast, RCV makes it possible for dark-horse candidates to work together. After Mamdani’s campaign reached the fundraising limit, he urged his supporters to donate to a fellow anti-Cuomo candidate, Adrienne Adams. Adams, in turn, has maintained a focus on criticizing Cuomo, even deleting a tweet that was perceived as a swipe at Mamdani. These contenders are making it clear they truly believe—as The Nation’s editorial board wrote in our endorsement—New Yorkers deserve better than Andrew Cuomo.

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Critics of ranked-choice voting argue that it’s too confusing, but successful implementations of the system in other jurisdictions suggest otherwise. In Alaska’s 2022 congressional special election, the first statewide RCV election there, 85 percent of people who cast their ballots said they found the method to be simple. It also enabled the Democrat Mary Peltola to fend off an extremist challenge from Sarah Palin. Maine has also seen promising results from RCV, with 60 percent of its voters favoring the system. Cities like Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have enjoyed higher turnout after the implementation of RCV.

But RCV is only as effective as its participants make it. Ahead of New York City’s mayoral primary in 2021, I wrote a column expressing high hopes for how the debut of RCV could reshape the city’s politics. But that race became chaotic for other reasons.

Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales’s campaigns collapsed. Advocacy groups had to un-endorse and re-endorse—in some cases, multiple times. There was a progressive effort to coalesce around Maya Wiley, including a belated endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Meanwhile, pragmatists who felt Eric Adams and Andrew Yang lacked substance turned to the sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia. If Wiley and Garcia had cross-endorsed, one of them might have defeated Adams. Instead, Adams won the primary in the final round by just over 7,000 votes.

This time, the mayoral candidates seem to have learned. On Friday, Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed each other, encouraging their supporters to rank the other second. Mamdani explained the decision with a refreshing mix of idealism and realism: “This is the necessary step to ensure that we’re not just serving our own campaigns—we’re serving the city at large.” This was followed by another cross-endorsement, between Mamdani and former assemblyman Michael Blake, on Monday. And the national progressive movement is much more united than it was in 2021, with both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders endorsing Mamdani in the home stretch this time.

By treating each other like allies rather than adversaries, the anti-Cuomo coalition might just prevail. If anything, it is the establishment wing of the New York Democratic party that is struggling to coalesce—as evinced by The New York Times’ non-endorsement endorsement that, if you squint, could be perceived as encouraging New Yorkers to support Cuomo, Lander, hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson, or flee the city.

The Nation has a long history of covering New York’s mayoral races. Although no New York mayor has been elected to higher office since 1869—just four years after the magazine was founded—the office has long held fascinating implications for American progressivism.

Fiorello La Guardia, whom Mamdani and Lander have both named as the greatest mayor in the city’s history, took office at the height of the Great Depression and led the city through the Second World War. Over 12 years of cascading crises, he transformed the city with a bold vision characterized by expanding public housing and public spaces, curbing corruption, and unflinchingly supporting the reforms of the New Deal.

Now, nearly a century later, New Yorkers have an opportunity to bring the city into a new era once again. And ordinarily, making that kind of change possible would require making a tough choice. But if it happens this time, it will be because of a ranked choice.

The blush is off the rose, or, rather, the orange. The erstwhile “First Buddy” and born-again fiscal hawk Elon Musk recently said he was “disappointed” by Donald Trump’s spendthrift budget currently under debate in the US Senate. Squeaking through the House of Representatives thanks to the capitulation of several Republican deficit hard-liners, this “big, beautiful bill” certainly increases the federal debt bigly—by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade.

Equally disappointed are those who have been busy burnishing Trump’s populist veneer. Steve Bannon had repeatedly promised higher taxes for millionaires, but he has confessed that he’s “very upset.” That’s because the bill would cut taxes by over $600 billion for the top 1 percent of wage-earners, also known as millionaires. It amounts to the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.

Yet this double betrayal will do nothing to impede the sundry Maga apparatchiks’ breathless support for their dear leader. Musk has already tweeted his gratitude to the president for the opportunity to lead Doge (that is, slash funding for cancer research). So this bill has once again proven Republicans’ willingness to relinquish their convictions as long as they can keep their grasp on power. And for Trump, it has reaffirmed that his pledged golden age is really just a windfall for the über-wealthy like him. Now there can be no mistaking that Republicans’ governing philosophy is neither conservatism nor populism but unabashed hypocrisy.

Expecting the self-proclaimed King of Debt to balance the budget—or hoping workers would be protected by the billionaire whose personal motto is “You’re fired”—was always imaginative thinking at best. In his first term, Trump added $8 trillion to the national deficit. Even excluding Covid relief spending, that’s twice as much debt as Joe Biden racked up during his four years in the White House. Almost $2 trillion of that tab came from Trump’s vaunted tax cut, which delivered three times more wealth to the top 5 percent of wage earners than it did to the bottom 60 percent. Nor did its benefits trickle down, with incomes remaining flat for workers who earn less than $114,000.

Trump’s disingenuousness on the deficit continues a hallowed Republican tradition. All four Republican presidents since 1980 have increased the federal debt. By combining reckless militarism with rampant corporatism, George W Bush managed to balloon it by 1,204 percent. When Bush’s treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, expressed concern about that spending, Dick Cheney, the then–vice president, reportedly retorted: “Deficits don’t matter.”

Except, of course, when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. During his campaign for the US Senate in 2022, JD Vance derided Biden’s signature $1 trillion infrastructure package as a “huge mistake” that would waste money on “really crazy stuff.” Like improving almost 200,000 miles of roads and repairing over 11,000 bridges across the country.

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Now, there can be no mistaking that Republicans’ governing philosophy is neither conservatism nor populism but unabashed hypocrisy.

Apparently less crazy, but certainly more callous, are the vertiginous cuts to the social safety net proposed in Trump’s current budget bill. Its $1 trillion evisceration of Medicaid and SNAP would leave 8 million Americans uninsured and potentially end food assistance for 11 million people, including 4 million children. When the Democratic Representative Ro Khanna introduced an amendment to maintain coverage for the 38 million kids who receive their healthcare through Medicaid, Republicans blocked it from even receiving a vote.

But for all the budget’s austerity, it also provides $20 billion in tax credits to establish a national school voucher program. And equally outrageous are its provisions that have nothing to do with the pecuniary, from easing regulations on gun silencers to hamstringing the power of courts to enforce injunctions.

Perhaps most breathtaking of all, though, is how shamelessly the bill enriches the already mega-rich. In its first year, its tax breaks will grace Americans in the top 0.1 percent of the income bracket with an additional $400,000, while decreasing the earnings of people in the bottom 25 percent by $1,000. In other words, those who can least afford it are financing relief for those who least need it.

When the 50 percent of working-class Americans who broke for Trump in last year’s election realize they voted for a pay cut, they might begin to feel a bit disillusioned with the crypto trader-in-chief. They might even feel pulled to the authentically populist vision outlined by the progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their nationwide Fighting Oligarchy Tour.

In the meantime, it is almost an inevitability that Republican senators will wring their hands before pressing the green button to vote “yea.” Josh Hawley has called the budget bill “morally wrong and politically suicidal,” criticism Trump has previously mocked as “grandstanding.” The insult contains a typically Trumpian flash of psychological insight, because Hawley and his colleagues will no doubt do exactly what their counterparts in the House have already done—cave.

Once Trump has scribbled his oversize signature on to the bill, his vision for the US will have become unmistakable. Try as they might, not even the spinmeisters at Fox News will be able to deny that he runs this country the way he ran his Atlantic City casinos, leading working Americans to financial ruin while he emerges all the richer for it.

For the last several months, the Trump administration’s reckless use of executive power, trade policy, gutting federal agencies and defying court orders has gone largely unchecked. National Democrats have limited means of opposition—so the best hope for accountability will be electoral accountability.

This may help explain why last Tuesday’s election results in America’s 41st biggest city generated such outsized excitement from progressives. John Ewing Jr., a longtime county treasurer, was elected the first Black mayor of Omaha, defeating the incumbent Jean Stothert, who was seeking a fourth term after holding that office since 2013. More than that, Ewing won big, by nearly 13 points, marking a huge shift after Stothert won her last race by 30.

Ewing ran a substantive, highly localized campaign that built upon decades of credibility he earned as a public servant—supplemented by the long-standing work of the Nebraska Democratic Party to build coalitions in a traditionally deep-red state. In swinging this race by 43 points, they have both inspired hope that the political winds may be shifting, and provided a model for Democrats to succeed in 2026 and beyond.

The results in Omaha are meaningful not for the scale of the city but for how it may reflect the country as a whole. Omaha’s congressional seat—Nebraska’s second—is a true swing district, one of only three in the country that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 while also electing a Republican to Congress. It’s a diverse, medium-size, Midwestern city—and if that isn’t enough to convey its heartland status, it’s nearly in the geographic center of the contiguous United States.

For all of these reasons, it’s instructive for Democrats to understand the strategy of the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, who now serves as president of the Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC) and a DNC vice-chair: Jane Kleeb. In a moment when so much media attention has been focused on internal procedural drama surrounding certain other vice-chairs, Kleeb and the Nebraska Democratic Party have continued their long-standing focus on the day-to-day work.

In the waning days of the Omaha mayoral election, Stothert attempted to negatively polarize voters against Ewing by nationalizing the race—and, in particular, hammering the GOP’s favorite wedge issue target of late: trans people. As my colleague John Nichols wrote about last week for The Nation, this did not work. Instead, Ewing refused to take the bait and kept his focus on tangible municipal issues—such as housing, street paving and even a struggling streetcar project. In a simple graphic released three days before the election, the Nebraska Democratic Party proudly declared: “Jean is focused on potties. John is focused on fixing potholes.”

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As thousands of Democrats across the country seek election up and down the ballot in 2026, they too could decline to debate on Republican terms and instead run campaigns relentlessly focused on improving their constituents’ lives.

Successful as this campaign was, it also builds upon statewide efforts from the Nebraska Democratic Party to compete in unfavorable territory. Kleeb has long advocated for Democrats to perform direct outreach to rural voters—and it’s not the same thing as pandering. Instead, it means recognizing real problems that, say, farmers are experiencing and offering practical solutions.

In her words: “In rural and small towns we may not use the word ‘climate change’ in the first five sentences, but everything we’re doing is talking about protecting the land and water.”

And progressives in Nebraska know a thing or two about the value of avoiding toxic political labels. When the navy veteran, mechanic and union leader Dan Osborn ran a populist, independent campaign for Senate last year, the Nebraska Democratic Party stepped aside and chose not to run a candidate. While Osborn and the state party had their differences—and he ultimately lost—this unorthodox strategy showed serious upside. Osborn came closer to defeating the incumbent Republican than any other challenger in the 2024 cycle; now he’s looking at a 2026 run in much more favorable circumstances.

With lessons to learn from the success in Nebraska, it is encouraging that Kleeb now holds a prominent leadership position in the national Democratic Party—the same role that Ken Martin held before he became chair. As head of the ASDC, Kleeb is well positioned to work with all 50 state chairs to get them the resources they need—and it will be all 50, as she and the DNC recently announced that the national organization will be contributing more to state parties as part of a reemerging 50-state strategy.

But even if Kleeb’s ascendance only meant that the Democratic Party got better at competing in Nebraska, it could prove decisive. Given that the House is currently held by Republicans by a handful of seats (give or take whatever disgraced resignations happen between now and next November), the race in Nebraska’s second district could very well be the tipping point for control of the lower chamber. Representative Don Bacon, who held on to his seat by less than two points in the last cycle, may well retire before he has a chance to lose.

Whether the race for Congress in 2026 comes down to Omaha itself or someplace like it, Democratic victories will depend on a nationwide effort to invest as deeply in local concerns as Kleeb and Ewing have. That strategy can be summed up with a mantra that Kleeb has repeated time and time again—what you may call Jane’s refrain: “When we organize everywhere, we can win anywhere!”

Mother’s Day is here, and while President Trump may seem an unlikely celebrant of the occasion, his administration has recently floated several proposals to incentivize motherhood—or, more accurately, giving birth. There’s the $5,000 “baby bonus” for every American mother, free classes educating women on their menstrual cycles, and a National Medal of Motherhood for moms who have at least six children. (Want to guess which regime also awarded such a medal?)

As usual, Trump has offered ridiculous solutions to a very real problem. He’s certainly right that every American should be able to afford to raise children, and that programs like Social Security depend on stable demographics. But of course, every other action he has taken to undermine gender equality would suggest that this sudden interest in the well-being of mothers is less than sincere. That’s exactly why progressives have an opening to break up what the Republican Party believes to be its ideological monopoly on pro-family policies.

The roots of the fertility crisis engage the bread-and-butter issues that have long been the domain of Democrats. US birthrates have hit a record low not because the nation has become “almost pathologically anti-child,” as JD Vance asserted to The New York Times. Instead, surveys have shown that would-be parents want to own a home, repay student debt, and have money for childcare before starting a family. Yet the average age of a homebuyer has climbed to 56, almost double what it was 40 years ago. And 43 percent of young people currently carry student debt, compared to 28 percent in 1993. The problem isn’t lack of interest—it’s too much interest being paid on record high loans.

But most of the Trump administration’s floated fixes are unoriginal swipes from the undemocratic leaders they admire. In 2017, Vladimir Putin declared a “Decade of Childhood in Russia,” an innocent name for a program that calls for everything from defending so-called family values to encouraging conjugal trysts during workplace coffee breaks to censoring “childfree propaganda.” Meanwhile, Viktor Orbán has dedicated 5 percent of Hungary’s GDP to pronatalist policies, which include nationalized IVF services and lifetime tax exemptions for mothers with three children. These men are carrying on an authoritarian tradition begun by the original strongman, Benito Mussolini, whose “Battle for Births” portended literal battles that decreased Europe’s population by 20 million people.

That’s why those who really care about real solutions would be wise to start offering their own plans, and, in fact, some already have. What the Trump administration didn’t plagiarize from plutocrats, they took from progressives, which is why “baby bonuses” sounds an awful lot like the “baby bonds” proposed in 2021 by Senators Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker and Representative Ayanna Pressley. The legislation would put $1,000 in a savings account at birth for every American child. The Biden-era American Rescue Plan also almost doubled the child tax credit, which nearly halved the child poverty rate. Though making that expansion permanent received bipartisan support, it was ultimately killed by the centrist triangulating of Joe Manchin.

Four years later, Democrats have the chance to embrace a genuinely progressive agenda that doubles as a pro-family platform. Bernie Sanders has long called for canceling all student debt; Elizabeth Warren has campaigned for universal childcare; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the first politicians on Capitol Hill to offer three months of paid parental leave to her entire staff. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has also called for a whole raft of policies that would lower the cost of living, from expanding Medicaid to investing $250 billion in affordable housing. They understand that real relief will come not from handing out medals but from having the mettle to fight for working families.

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Still, even if Democrats manage a progressive populist revival not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it likely wouldn’t be enough to lift birthrates. In social democracies like Finland and Sweden—which offer 13 months of paid parental leave and cover 90 percent of preschool costs, respectively—fertility remains below replacement levels.

Does that indicate that the problem may be more fundamental? One sociologist, Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, has attributed this dilemma to apprehension: “People really need to feel confident about the future.” But whether it’s 60 percent of young people feeling very worried about climate change, or 80 percent of new mothers feeling lonely, or 90 percent of voters feeling that American politics is broken, the state of the world doesn’t seem too conducive to domestic bliss. The right’s response to this anxiety is embodied by Elon Musk, who keeps siring children with women he meets on X to create a “legion-level” brood “before the apocalypse.”

To help avert said apocalypse, what should be on offer are authentically family-friendly policies that benefit parents and nonparents alike. In doing so, there’s a chance to persuade Americans that the next generation still might have a brighter future than the last. Or, at the very least, that progressives have a more compelling vision for American families than the one whose budget is about to take billions from children’s education, food, and healthcare.

It’s one thing to incentivize giving birth. Americans deserve leaders who will fight for those kids after they’re born.

In the US Capitol, an unstoppable force is about to meet an immovable object—respectively, Republicans’ insatiable desire for tax cuts and the nation’s trillion-dollar budget deficit. But as conservative legislators contort themselves to square profligate kickbacks for billionaires with their perpetual insistence on “fiscal responsibility,” Americans are increasingly worried about another kind of debt—their own.

The desperate state of the average American’s finances was made clear last month when DoorDash announced a partnership with Klarna, a “buy now, pay later” company. If you can’t scrape together $25 plus fees for your next meal, you can now pay for it in installments. In theory, these payments can be interest-free. In practice, anyone who needs a multi-month plan to afford lunch is also at risk of missing those deadlines, and racking up late fees that fuel the profits of largely unregulated BNPL companies.

This widely mocked “solution” is more than just the latest step on our march toward techno-dystopia. That someone can now fall into arrears on their Crunchwrap Supreme reflects a broader debt crisis that’s only being exacerbated by predatory practices camouflaged as corporate beneficence. In a time when consumer sentiment has already collapsed to almost record lows, America cannot afford so many Americans being unable to afford.

According to the Federal Reserve, consumer debt has reached an all-time high, with the average family owing over $100,000. Total household debt in America now exceeds $18 trillion. And when that debt is measured as a percentage of national GDP, Americans find themselves in worse fiscal straits than their counterparts in Russia, Pakistan, and the Republic of the Congo. We might like to think that our world-leading consumer spending expresses national prosperity, but it really reflects individual peonage.

Now, this ballooning liability is threatening to burst for those who can least afford it. Subprime borrowers are falling behind on car payments at the highest rate in 30 years, and defaults on Federal Housing Authority loans are nearing pre-pandemic highs. This debt gap stems from a corresponding savings gap. Low-income Americans spend, on average, more than they make every month—crucially, as documentarian Astra Taylor has argued, not because they “live beyond their means but because they are denied the means to live.” And what few dollars they do have are literally un-spendable thanks to the rise of the cashless economy. As a result, credit card delinquencies have spiked to levels not seen since the Great Recession.

Another parallel with the century’s worst economic downtown? Massive deregulation. A retrospective federal report on the financial crisis blamed a lack of oversight by regulators across the Clinton and Bush administrations. In the wake of that crash, which cost nearly 9 million jobs, President Obama established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—as proposed by then–law professor Elizabeth Warren—to avoid repeating the same mistakes. In its 14 years of existence, the CFPB has cracked down on exploitative corporate practices, saving consumers $21 billion. That success has naturally made it a prime target of Donald Trump, who is currently trying to cut the agency’s staffing by almost 90 percent.

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The chances of federal relief look bleak, but tentative steps are being taken at the state level to address medical debt, a rare source of bipartisan outrage. Healthcare bills are the nation’s leading cause of bankruptcy, a fact that has drawn the ire of even Florida Republicans. There, Ron DeSantis recently signed a law that makes it easier to contest medical costs, while also shortening how long hospitals have to collect on that debt. At the same time, blue cities from Los Angeles to Toledo have used federal Covid aid to buy up medical debt. For example, Cook County, Illinois, spent just $12 million to unlock $1 billion for low-income residents.

But dissolving our nationwide indemnity will require even more expansive solutions. The Poor People’s Campaign has one such ambitious proposal. A movement for economic justice led by the poor, it advocates a “Jubilee Platform” that would cancel housing, utility, and student debt for low-income people. Of course, Mike Johnson isn’t going to bring that idea to the House floor anytime soon. But the campaign regularly holds protests in cities across the country, and public pressure could push Democrats to make debt forgiveness a central issue of next year’s midterms.

The Poor People’s Campaign also calls for another, more philosophical, reform—a national “moral revival” that shifts our conception of debt entirely. How we might begin to do that was laid out by another voice of conscience in this arena, David Graeber. Almost 15 years ago, he published Debt: The First 5,000 Years. One of this subject’s definitive texts, it analyzes how the most stratified societies are also the ones most fixated on economic obligation. Though he died suddenly in 2020, his magnum opus’s fundamental query still haunts us: “What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal?”

Today, as our dealmaker in chief continues to shatter alliances in the name of a monomaniacal focus on deficits, resistance can begin with individuals simply taking Graeber’s cue. Rather than obsess over who owes us what, we owe it to ourselves to find a new way of relating to each other, one that exchanges transaction for trust.

“They’ve been ripping us off for years.”

It took Donald Trump less than 70 days to turn decades of close alliance with Europe into an abusive relationship. First, Elon Musk celebrated Trump’s victory with a Nazi salute—a symbol so noxious that it’s been banned in several European countries. Then, Trump scorned the allies as “freeloaders,” moving to cut a deal with Putin over Ukraine over their heads (while making it clear that he’d grab Ukraine’s mineral resources and stick the allies with the bill for rebuilding what is left). Vice President JD Vance shamelessly lectured Europeans on democracy, while embracing the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party. Declaring that the EU “was formed in order to screw the United States,” Trump then slapped on 20 percent tariffs across the board (10 percent for the United Kingdom) as part of his trade war with the world, before “pausing” them for 90 days. The Europeans might earn relief, he suggested, if they bought another $350 billion in US fossil fuels.

Even as European leaders reel from Trump’s crude attempts at extortion, they face growing right-wing movements at home. Frustration with the established parties across Europe—both on the center right, as in the current governments of France and Germany, and on the center-left, as in the UK—has opened the way for more extreme alternatives. A closer look at the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—leading countries of the region—shows how right-wing movements have grasped this opportunity. What remains to be seen is whether the perpetually divided left in each country can rally in response.

The Establishment Failure

Trump’s assault on Europe’s security, economics, and politics pummeled countries that were already hurting. Behind vibrant, tourist-filled capital cities, the once-prosperous region has suffered years of economic stagnation, deindustrialization, growing inequality, and the visible decline of public services and infrastructure, with wages failing to keep pace with the prices of necessities like housing, food, and energy. Deprived of access to cheap oil and gas from Russia, Germany’s economy, the most powerful in the region, has shrunk for two consecutive years. German railroads don’t even run on time anymore. A report by the former head of the European Bank, Mario Draghi, argued that Europe would need to invest the equivalent of a modern day Marshall Plan for a decade, or be left in the dust by China and the US in the emerging advanced technology industries.

For decades, the established political parties—conservative and social democratic alike—have embraced a neoliberal globalization that served the few but failed the many. Now laden with debt, faced with the rising costs of aging populations, the center parties rotate in and out of office, changing little, unwilling or unable to break out of the austerity regime that they claim ties their hands.

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In the United Kingdom, for example, the collapse of the Tory government gave the Labour Party an overwhelming majority of Parliament in 2024 (although it won fewer actual votes than in 2019 when it suffered its worst defeat in nearly a century). Upon taking office, the government led by Keir Starmer, a lawyer who prides himself on having no ideology at all, embraced “growth” as the target, with an appeal to international investors as his core strategy. Continued austerity was the price of appeasing the market barons. Instead of using Starmer’s majority to move boldly, his government put forth an austere budget plan. In recent weeks, the government announced its plan to cut payments to the disabled, following a decision to limit heating supplements to the elderly. On the left, former leader Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, noted in an interview that there was widespread “opposition to what the government is doing.” Continuing this path, he suggested, would be the ruin of the Labour Party.

The Center Will Not Hold

The 2024 United Kingdom elections also featured the rise of the far-right Reform UK Party, led by Nigel Farage, the champion of Brexit. Reform UK captured 14 percent of the vote, drawing votes largely from the Conservative Party.

Now with Labour in power and enforcing austerity, polls suggest that Reform continues to rise, and now is running essentially neck and neck with Labour and the Tories.

The same dynamic is seen in Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally led in the run-up to the 2024 parliamentary elections. Only a last-minute mobilization of the left—uniting into a National Popular Front—blocked her rise. National Rally still came in third, trailing the NPF and French President Macron’s centrist coalition. With Macron refusing to appoint a leader from the left, his centrist prime ministers survive only by the good graces of Le Pen. Polls now show Le Pen leading in the run-up to the 2027 presidential race, although the fallout from her conviction for misusing funds from the European Parliament, with a sentence that bans her from political office for five years, is yet to be played out.

In Germany’s February elections, voters punished the parties of the incumbent “traffic light coalition”—Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democrats (FP), and Greens, each of which cratered, with the SPD losing one-third of its support. The conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) eked out a victory, but coming in second—despite a massive mobilization to expose its Nazi roots and authoritarian threat—was the AfD (Alternative for Germany), which was a fringe movement merely a decade ago. The AfD won the most votes from workers, and came in second among young voters.

Now, only weeks after the election, as the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats negotiate a governing coalition, AfD has risen level with the CDU/CSU in polls.

All three of these parties on the far right serve up similar versions of the MAGA Kool-Aid. Like Trump, all spew a toxic venom aimed at migrants, portraying them as the source of crime, rising housing and energy prices, fiscal deficits and social division. In Germany, AfD’s leader Alice Weidel calls for “remigration,” i.e., forced deportation. In France, Le Pen embraces “national priority”—putting migrants at the back of the line for everything from jobs to social services.

All three embrace conservative social reaction, scorning what they label as cosmopolitan betrayal. All echo Trump in assailing action against climate change. Farage mocks “climate hysteria”; Weidel has promised to “tear down all wind turbines”; Le Pen’s National Rally condemns “punitive ecology.”

All are skeptical of the European Union. Weidel and Le Pen seek to weaken the EU, turning it more into a coordinating body like the G-7. Farage led the Brexit movement that ripped the UK out of the European Union.

All three express sympathy for Putin and oppose sending arms to Ukraine. All embrace Israel in its destruction of Gaza.

On economics, despite their growing support among workers, all three espouse a traditional Thatcherite conservativism: tax cuts largely for the rich, spending cuts largely from the vulnerable, deregulation for corporations, and curbs on unions and worker protections. Le Pen has moved recently to embrace some pro-worker reforms—although her protégé and deputy Jordan Bardella notably has not.

Xenophobic, racist, reactionary, they gain protest votes from being out of power but offer no viable answer to their countries’ dilemmas.

The Trump Effect

Trump’s clear scorn for NATO, his break with Ukraine, have galvanized Europe’s leaders. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen won support for an €800 billion package billed as ReArm Europe. Starmer pledged an immediate increase of UK military spending to 2.5 percent, to be paid for by slashing foreign aid. Labour’s National Wealth Fund was opened to invest in defense. Macron floated extending France’s nuclear guarantee to all of Europe, and joined with the UK to seek “a coalition of the willing” to create a “reassurance force” in the event of a ceasefire agreement.

The boldest response came from the newly elected German chancellor, the CDU’s Fredrik Merz. Merz used the rump parliament still sitting while the new government was formed to exempt military spending from the constitutional debt brake that limits German deficits, and to pass a €500 billion fund over 10 years to invest in infrastructure and climate projects (exacted by the SPD and Greens for their support).

The prospect of an industrial policy founded on military Keynesianism appeals to both industrial trade unions and German manufacturers struggling with high energy prices and falling exports. The infrastructure fund offered a down payment for addressing an increasingly dilapidated infrastructure. German rearmament might galvanize a new sense of national pride and surely give Germany a stronger voice on the world stage.

The irony, of course, is that Europe is asserting its independence from the US by doing exactly what Trump and prior American presidents have called for: building up their own military forces, taking greater responsibility for Europe’s defense, so that the US can turn its attention toward China.

The response’s shortcomings are apparent. Europe’s centrist parties are evidently prepared to break the supposed iron bars of austerity for military spending, but not for the welfare of their own people. The choice is particularly stark in the United Kingdom where Starmer will be forced to cut social programs even further to meet his goal of hiking military spending.

Moreover, the hyperbolic rhetoric painting Russia as a security threat isn’t particularly convincing. The European countries in NATO collectively have been increasing their military spending dramatically since Russia invaded Ukraine. Why Russia, a country of 150 million people that has struggled to defeat Ukraine, a country of 45 million, would want to take on the forces of 450 million Europeans is far from clear. Not surprisingly, Russia’s former satellites—led by Poland and the Baltic states—sound the alarm, but the farther from Russia’s borders one gets, the less compelling the threat seems.

As an industrial policy, military spending also leaves much to be desired. While French President Macron has insisted that the EU money be spent on European producers, with the focus on high tech weaponry, much will no doubt end up subsidizing American manufacturers. Europe already is the largest recipient of American military exports. Germany, with its industry crippled by high energy prices, would gain a more immediate boost from a rapprochement with Russia to regain access to cheap oil and gas—or a more long-term benefit from investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Politically, the military buildup may also be less popular than expected. In France and England, Le Pen and Farage have mocked the posturing of the leaders in power. Early March polling by YouGov show majorities opposed to cutting public services, increasing government borrowing, or paying more in taxes to pay for more military spending.

Whither the Left?

The collapse of the center has also opened opportunities on the left. The stark difference, however, is that far-right movements are more unified than the left.

There is rough common agreement on the broad elements of an alternative course. The platform put forth by the National Popular Front in France, drawn largely from La France Insoumise, the most powerful party on the left, illustrates the elements:

• increased public investment in infrastructure, healthcare, and education;
• a commitment to lift wages, benefits and empower workers;
• instead of a military buildup, investment in “ecological planning” to meet the climate transition, raising taxes on wealth and on corporations to pay for it;

In the UK, the Labour left, as Jeremy Corbyn summarized, would add “municipalization” of mail, rail, water, and energy. Differences also remain over Ukraine and support for Israel.

But even those areas of broad policy agreement are not reflected politically. In France, for example, the last elections suggested that voters are split roughly evenly between far right, center, and left. In the run-up to the 2027 presidential election, however, while the right is unified, the left is divided. According to his colleagues, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, is gearing up to run for president to succeed Macron. He is the best known, best strategist, best orator of the left—and one of the most unpopular politicians in France, the target of unrelenting attacks from the mainstream media. One or more candidates may also run from the Socialist Party. If the left remains divided, Le Pen (or her protégé) and Macron’s centrist successor are more likely to end up in the final run-off.

The German elections saw a stunning turnout—82 percent—with voters showing an increased willingness to switch parties. Just as the far-right AfD doubled its vote, so did the Left Party, Die Linke, winning nearly 9 percent of the electorate. It led among young voters (18–29-year-olds), and especially among young women. The Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), a spinoff off from Die Linke, won nearly 5 percent of the vote in its first national election. BSW made a largely unsuccessful effort to woo voters from the right by combining a harsh stand on migration and an embrace of peace—opposing the arming of Ukraine and Israel—with a left economic agenda.

Die Linke’s new leaders, Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Akin, focused on the rising cost of living—particularly housing—while defending the rights of migrants. For the first time, they competed with AfD on social media and ran a targeted canvassing operation (knocking on doors is a relative rarity in Germany). Membership in the party has exploded, with 23,000 new members in the first months since the election.

Die Linke’s Schwerdtner argues, there are “majorities on crucial topics like rent policies, on prices, and on taxing the rich.” In the last election, the Left Party, BSW, the Greens, and the SPD together garnered 41.57 percent of the vote. But the SPD will join the CDU/CSU as a minority member of the ruling coalition. The Greens became known largely as a war party. Die Linke leaders dismiss BSW as “not a party of the left,” largely because of its hard line on immigration.

In the United Kingdom, after the Labour Party’s devastating defeat in 2019 under the leadership of Corbyn, Starmer and the right of the party moved dramatically to take control of both membership and the selection of parliamentary candidates. Discredited by a vicious and relentless attack that weaponized accusations of antisemitism, Corbyn was purged. He ended keeping his parliamentary seat, however, by running as an independent.

In interviews, both Corbyn and John McDonnell, the best strategist on the Labour left, believe that Starmer will face increasing opposition internally as slower growth combined with rising military spending force more and more cuts in social welfare. The scope of any revolt from the left will no doubt depend on what the more progressive labor unions do—and who emerges to succeed Corbyn as the Labour left’s standard-bearer. Opposition will also be bolstered by the growing protests against British military support for the Israeli assault on Gaza, with demonstrations bringing literally hundreds of thousands to the street.

The British Green Party also succeeded in raising their vote in the past election and capturing four parliamentary seats. In an interview with the Nation, Zack Polansky, the Green Party deputy leader, argued that “there’s a party of the left waiting to be born—uniting trade unions, working-class people, university students who have graduated, people who care about the climate crisis.” He suggests that the Green Party is the natural home for such voters.

The Green Party, says Polansky, works only if the climate movement understands that we “can’t tackle the climate crisis without tackling inequality.” The Greens, he says, need to go beyond lifestyle issues, offering a new class-based politics that addresses the central concerns of working families: jobs, the cost of basics, healthcare.

“Our product,” Polansky argues, “is homes that are more efficient, so energy bills are cheaper. Public transport that is more affordable, more efficient, and more available.”

In the most recent election, the Green Party focused on “housing, housing, housing.” The lack of housing is one of the things driving anti-migration politics. The Greens argued that the answer isn’t hate; it’s building affordable social housing on abandoned land and retrofitting homes to make them energy efficient.

Polansky sees the 20 or 30 disaffected Labour and independent MPs as “having the crucial leverage.” If they left, he says, that “would be a clear challenge to the Labour Party. They must move to the left, or if they continue their current course, we could build a Green Party that exposes the real choices.” Britain’s electoral system, like that of the US, impedes the formation of new parties, but for now British elections are likely to feature five parties, including Reform and the Greens.

Europe’s Future

The basic context for European politics remains unchanged. Economic stagnation feeds growing frustration. The military buildup is more likely to squander billions than to meet real economic needs or bolster political prospects. Trump’s trade war will inevitably slow growth and add to the economic squeeze. Rising voter disaffection is likely to feed the parties on both the right and left.

The threat posed by the extreme right isn’t going away, although Trump’s embrace may cost them some support. The centrist governing parties may respond, as the Le Pen prosecution suggests, by employing the law to curb the right.

More likely, if the far right continues to grow, conservative parties in Germany, France, and the UK will find ways to coordinate or unite with them. JD Vance has condemned “firewalls,” urging embrace of the AfD. Already, the parties of the center have started to echo the right’s harsh rhetoric and adopt harsher treatment of migrants.

On the left, the center-left parties that have been part of government—Labour under Starmer, Germany’s SPD in various coalitions, France’s Socialist Party under Hollande—have been punished for their failures in office. The left is growing but remains divided. Trump’s assault on Europe and his trade war with the world should elicit a powerful response from Europe. One thing is clear: Without a bold response, Europe will continue to stagnate, and the extreme right will continue to fester.

The latest hit Netflix show has surpassed 100 million views and cracked the top five of the platform’s all-time biggest English-language series—without CGI monsters, ornate gowns or Jenna Ortega. Instead, Adolescence is a four-episode limited series about a 13-year-old British boy accused of stabbing his female classmate to death. And as the story unfolds, the pernicious influence of cyberbullying and social media radicalization on the main character comes into focus.

The show has sparked conversations about the much-discussed male loneliness epidemic and the pervasive influence of hypermasculine online personalities. It has set off public debate from India to Australia to the United States about how we raise boys in an era when social media increasingly serves as an endless trough of misogynist messaging. In the United Kingdom, where the series became the first streaming show to top the country’s TV ratings, it has stirred intense conversations on news panels and in Parliament. Even the prime minister jumped into the fray after watching the show with his teenage children.

But while Adolescence has become a lightning rod for these debates, the show itself takes a nuanced approach to topical themes of male isolation, vulnerability, and violence. Adolescence never lectures its audience, and it is not prescriptive; instead, it leaves viewers with more questions than answers. And the popularity of the show could help foster meaningful conversations about a healthier approach to media consumption and participation for all.

Adolescence’s protagonist, Jamie, is far from alone in his loneliness. In the last few years, writing about the post-Covid escalation in isolation has become something of a cottage industry. From Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation to Jean Twenge’s Generations, youthful despair is the issue that has launched a thousand podcast appearances. Despite this abundance of coverage, the problem persists that young people remain lonely: In the UK, 16-to-29-year-olds are the loneliest age group, and in the US, 40 percent of teens report feeling chronically hopeless. Youth suicide rates have increased by almost two-thirds since 2007.

More than half of US teens have come to spend almost five hours on social media every day, on platforms that can not only exacerbate loneliness but also encourage antisocial behavior. The two most popular platforms among 13-to-17-year-olds are YouTube and TikTok, both of which use algorithms that are as powerful as they are dangerous. YouTube, for example, recommends right-leaning videos even to viewers who haven’t interacted with that type of content. The Department of Homeland Security has also reported that TikTok promotes extremist discourse, including “tactical guidance” from the January 6 insurrectionists.

The results have been tragic. Last July, a 26-year-old man in England murdered his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, along with her sister Hannah, and her mother, Carol. Prosecutors later revealed that he had binge-watched videos of Andrew Tate, a kickboxer facing rape allegations in the UK and a criminal investigation in Romania over alleged human trafficking. Crimes like this one bring Adolescence disturbingly close to the threshold of documentary.

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But what is too easily missed is that it’s not only young men being manipulated and radicalized online. More than a decade ago, a 12-year-old girl stabbed her friend in tribute to a fictional online character called Slender Man. While girls are far less likely to commit acts of violence against others, they are more likely to adopt self-harming behaviors such as self-injury, eating disorders, and suicide attempts, all of which are inflamed by YouTube algorithms.

Now, Adolescence’s creator is offering a well-intentioned solution: banning access to social media for teenagers. Australia has already passed such an embargo for anyone under 16, and though it won’t take effect until later this year, it still exemplifies the idea’s unfeasibility. The law will enforce restrictions through age-verification technology, which the platforms will have to implement themselves, a bit like asking Al Capone to enforce temperance.

Even if they do, patronizing young people by telling them they can’t be trusted with a technology they’ve been using their whole lives is unlikely to work. Those who want to keep using social media will find a way to do so. VPNs can easily circumvent regional barriers, as Russians discovered when Vladimir Putin banned Facebook and Instagram in 2022. And websites like YouTube don’t require an account to view videos, granting them an almost un-closeable loophole.

That’s why this crisis seems better addressed through pragmatism than prohibitionism. After all, teenagers themselves recognize the harm that social media can pose—perhaps better than anyone—and 94 percent of them say they want their schools to offer instruction in media literacy. The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, intends to kick-start that education by screening Adolescence in secondary schools nationwide. But in the US, our official head of state owns a multibillion-dollar social media company—as does our unofficial head of state—so a similar move seems unlikely.

Then again, if there is going to be a cultural shift toward mitigating the risks of social media, it will probably not come from senators hectoring parents and their children about screen time. Instead, it will take more delicate, patient, thoughtful conversations like the kind organically taking place in response to Adolescence. And in the classroom, there may not be a one-size-fits-all approach, but Media Literacy Now’s database of more than 130 lesson plans—on everything from digital citizenship to detoxing your feed—could be a good start. (And to be clear: Adults would benefit just as much, if not more, from brushing up on these topics.)

Adolescence has resonated so deeply with so many by presenting a complex, human story that defies simple answers. In that spirit, it seems unlikely that anything would be solved by trying to get young people to quit algorithms cold turkey. But perhaps with enough empathy, respect, and humility, we could all help each other scroll responsibly.

When Disney announced yet another round of layoffs at ABC News last week, it came on the heels of a year in which almost 15,000 media jobs were lost—and capped off a quarter-century in which we’ve seen thousands of independent publications shut down or merged with larger conglomerates.

The upshot is that Americans now find ourselves trapped in an information environment more tightly controlled than ever by a handful of oligarchs.

The media has trended in this direction for decades, but the story lost all subtlety when Jeff Bezos issued the X post heard round the world. He declared that The Washington Post will focus its opinion section on “personal liberties and free markets.” That surely means more editorial attention on stifling monopolies like Amazon, right?

Mainstream media outlets have long faced dwindling audiences and, as a result, relied more and more on corporate benefactors. Now that those benefactors are competing to prove loyalty to their own benefactor in the White House, these essential institutions are stuck carrying water for the billionaire class, or else disappearing altogether. The task of rebuilding truly independent news outlets, then, falls to journalists, readers, and any concerned citizens who recognize how imperiled our free press has become—if there is to be any hope of the fourth estate holding the line against the second Trump regime.

Editorial encroachment by corporate interests dates back to the inception of the media age, when the competing newspaper empires of the ultra-wealthy William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer engaged in a sensationalist race to the bottom, publishing incendiary headlines, exaggerations, gossip, and rumors that (among other ramifications) helped provoke the Spanish-American war.

Yellow journalism, as it was called, abated thanks to the regulatory efforts of independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which established the fairness doctrine requiring equal coverage of conflicting viewpoints on consequential issues (like Trump’s ongoing attempt to take over the FCC). But Ronald Reagan, in his laissez-faire frenzy, repealed that rule. Not to be outdone, Bill Clinton signed the deregulatory Telecommunications Act of 1996, which critics have deemed “essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies.”

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That same year, The Nation published a special issue on what we called the National Entertainment State. It detailed the growing media-industrial complex, where the corporations programming our news were increasingly programming public opinion. We represented this syndicate via a glossy centerfold diagram of an octopus with four tentacles, one for each of America’s dominant media conglomerates: Disney, General Electric, Time Warner, and Westinghouse (now CBS). Today, six tentacles control over 90 perent of our information.

Things are different now, and not for the better. While the news has represented a small cog in larger corporate structures long before this second Trump administration, we are now witnessing mass public capitulation from corporate owners in a way that feels unprecedented. Whether today’s billionaire media owners are angling for large federal contracts or anticipatorily bending the knee so their companies are not seen as “the enemy,” the chilling effect is the same: Major media publications are even more incentivized now to treat the rich and powerful with kid gloves, if not outright sycophancy.

The few that refuse to do this will have to face the wrath of our notoriously censorious, litigious head of state. The most powerful man in the world is currently suing Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for merely predicting that Kamala Harris would win the state last November; what he calls “election fraud” most people call “polling.” With that context, is there any reason to expect that prominent players like Paramount and Skydance would do anything but hold the line if it means getting FCC approval for their merger?

The natural counterbalance to for-profit media would seem to be nonprofit newsrooms. They need not go cross-eyed from trying to keep in view both the public’s interest and that of their owner. In the US alone, there are at least 475 independent outlets, from the Marshall Project to the Center for Public Integrity, which has won several Pulitzer prizes for its investigative reporting. And independent journalism is currently enjoying a renaissance on self-publishing platforms like Substack and the newly launched Noosphere. These sites offer refuge for writers that have renounced (or been renounced by) corporate news, including Mehdi Hasan and Matt Taibbi. The journalistic equivalent of farm-to-table, it cuts out any meddlesome middle-moguls between the writer and the reader. (The Nation has been independent since 1865.)

Yet neither of these alternatives offer a true one-to-one replacement for mainstream outlets. For all their latent bias, our media behemoths are uniquely positioned to furnish the resources to fund years-long investigations that often incur legal backlash, such as the Pentagon Papers—which might not have resonated as deeply with the Mailchimp logo at the bottom.

Not so long ago, Jeff Bezos was proud to bear this torch. At the inception of his ownership, he claimed Katharine Graham’s pugnacious leadership as his model, and seemingly sincerely so, even if the Post did go soft on its coverage of Amazon of its own volition. I experienced Bezos’s benign neglect firsthand. From 2011 to 2022, I penned over 500 columns for the paper, most of them during Bezos’s tenure—including columns directly criticizing Amazon’s labor practices and even the corporate bias of the Post itself. I never received any note remotely resembling the kind of editorial restrictions that he is imposing today—the likes of which just led the columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus to resign after four decades at the paper. Nevertheless, for a time, at least in this case, corporate ownership didn’t have to be mutually exclusive with editorial independence.

But until that détente between owner and editorial is reestablished, audiences and reporters will continue to flee compromised publications. In his e-mail to The Washington Post’s team, Bezos argued that this newspaper of record could dodge offering a variety of perspectives because “the internet does that job.” It will take a new movement of responsible readers and benefactors to ensure that this is true.

Three days after Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, a Long Island farm began euthanizing 100,000 ducks due to an outbreak of bird flu. It marked the latest spread of a virus that has also killed more than 100 million chickens and turkeys nationwide. Though fewer than 70 Americans have contracted the illness so far, scientists have warned that this strain may be just “one mutation away” from achieving the capacity for rapid transmission.

Whether or not those predictions go the way of Chicken Little’s, bird flu has already proved a disaster for humans and animals alike. From infected pets to egg prices soaring by 37 percent, Americans have abundant cause for concern and complaint. Amid the pathogenic unpredictability, another fact remains clear: The main culprit here is factory farming.

By cramming animals into facilities so crowded they often can’t even sit down, industrial agriculture has assembled the perfect laboratory for novel viruses. That’s why stopping bird flu in its tracks, and preventing untold future pandemics, depends on regulating factory farming now.

Over the past couple of decades, corporate agriculture has finally begun facing scrutiny for its cruel and unusual treatment of animals. At the Obama era’s idealistic outset, documentaries such as Food, Inc., and books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals did much to expose the outrages being committed by the now-infamous conglomerates Monsanto and Tyson Foods. Chickens bred to grow so fast they can’t walk, pigs locked in crates too small to turn around in, dairy cows that never step outdoors or graze—these are the daily living conditions for the 1.7 billion animals currently trapped on US factory farms.

The journalist Eric Schlosser, one of Food, Inc.’s primary interviewees, has also reported on this industry’s human toll. Thanks to Reagan-era deregulation, meatpacking plants eliminated unionized positions and replaced them with undocumented immigrants toiling for half the pay, despite their job’s carrying the risk of toxic fume exposure, antibiotic-resistant E coli, and loss of limbs. Because these largely uninsured farm workers face termination and even deportation for seeking medical care, they have little incentive to self-report illnesses like bird flu, fostering ideal conditions for a virus to spread undetected.

But no amount of scandal seems to stall factory farming, which has grown by 6 percent since 2017. The explanation is the typical one for Washington: lobbyists. Big Agriculture donated nearly $200 million during the 2024 campaign, mostly to Republicans. Agribusiness also spent more than half a billion dollars to influence the farm bill that doles out the industry’s lucrative subsidies. In his first term, Trump killed new USDA regulations burnishing animal welfare standards, including for the chickens currently ravaged by bird flu. Though Joe Biden reinstated those rules, he slow-walked new restrictions by insisting on further “evaluation.”

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Still, a few brave politicians have waged a rather lonely crusade against factory farming, with arguably none more devoted to the cause than now-retired representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon. The progressive environmentalist spent 28 years in Congress advocating for animal welfare and family farms. As cochair of the Animal Protection caucus, he gathered bipartisan support for legislation that cracked down on animal fighting, wild animal trading, and cruel horse training techniques like soring. But his passion project was the Food and Farm Act, which would have reined in funding for factory farms. Naturally, it never left committee.

There are some signs, albeit with significant caveats, that the Trump administration could stumble into progress on this issue. The presumptive health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be the strongest critic of Big Food to join the cabinet in half a century. He has ambitiously pledged to “reverse 80 years of farm policy,” although much of that decision-making belongs to the secretary of agriculture. Still, he could use his authority over the FDA to ramp up agricultural inspections, investigate the pollution of drinking water by manure, and halt the dangerous overuse of antibiotics on factory farms. But Kennedy’s repeated endorsement of raw milk, one of bird flu’s primary vectors, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

For that reason—and some others—whether he will be confirmed remains an open question.

The mantle for raising the alarm falls, then, to the adviser Trump heeds most reliably: the headlines. But right now, the outcry from corporate media has sounded muffled at best. During the 2024 presidential debates, moderators didn’t ask a single question about the previous pandemic or this incipient one. While The New York Times has published a smattering of articles about bird flu, calling out the link between industrial farming and our current public health emergency has been mostly consigned to letters to the editor and a few stray op-eds. In contrast, nonprofit outlets like Sentient and Civil Eats have dedicated their entire newsrooms to covering industrial agriculture. If cable news and papers of record follow their lead, the consumer in chief’s attention or aggravation just might be piqued.

It might also inspire some déjà vu. In October of 2020, Trump lamented: “You turn on CNN, that’s all they cover. ‘Covid, Covid, Pandemic, Covid, Covid.’”

Should Trump choose to wait and see on factory farming, the chances are increasing by the day that such a chant returns—and once again, his hopes for a soaring legacy will be for the birds.

With Donald Trump’s inauguration, the lame-duck period has finally ended, but another unnerving countdown is upon us. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will update the Doomsday Clock—a metaphorical device to warn the public about our proximity to self-destruction, especially through the use of nuclear weapons—on January 28.

For the last couple of years, the hands of the clock have remained at 90 seconds to midnight, its most perilous position since its creation in 1947. The Bulletin has cited the emergence of artificial intelligence and bio-threats like bird flu as influencing its impending update. No doubt it has also taken note of an emboldened and expansionist Donald Trump, who is already threatening to invade Mexico, annex Canada, and seize the Panama Canal.

Though Trump’s surreal efforts to reignite American imperialism are rightfully making headlines, the grave threat of nuclear weapons is virtually absent from political attention. Might Trump’s parade of underqualified national security cabinet nominees bring renewed scrutiny to these threats? So, too, will an almost certain advancement of the Doomsday Clock. The challenge for the media and political movements and electeds will be to sustain that attention—and turn it into action.

Thirty years ago, the United States was dismantling warheads at a historic pace. But in 2002, John Bolton—then the undersecretary of state for arms control—persuaded George W. Bush to withdraw from the cornerstone of anti-nuclear scaffolding, the decades-long Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Absent bilateral guarantees and incentives to the contrary, Russia has increasingly incorporated nuclear weapons into its military planning. That normalization culminated last year, when Vladimir Putin authorized using tactical nukes in response to nonnuclear attacks, perhaps the most hazardous military doctrine since the Cold War’s mutually assured destruction.

Unsurprisingly, the incoming administration has divulged no intentions for a detente. The New START Treaty, a continuation of a nuclear reduction strategy begun under Ronald Reagan, will expire next year, and it’s uncertain whether President “Fire and Fury” has any intention of renewing it. (The first Trump administration had the opportunity to renew the treaty in 2020, but reached a stalemate and left the Biden administration to extend it in 2021.)

Trump has also hinted at withdrawing from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, just in case upending the Iran nuclear deal, suspending the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and abandoning the Open Skies Treaty during his first term weren’t disastrous enough. Combined with the fog of war continuing to billow from Ukraine, just one more ill-timed provocation—or miscommunication—could very well lead to a nuclear exchange.

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Given the executive branch’s belligerence, the responsibility of raising this issue falls to an engaged media. Whether the corporate media understands the weight of that responsibility, however, remains totally unclear. Neither presidential debate featured a single question about nuclear weapons. Still, some publications have become more active in their coverage. The New York Times, for example, recently dedicated a 14-piece series to “the threat of nuclear weapons.” This examination may have been partly inspired by the recent surge of pop-culture interest in the atomic question, from the 2023 blockbuster film Oppenheimer to Annie Jacobsen’s 2024 bestseller, Nuclear War: A Scenario.

As public consciousness around this threat continues to swell, voters will inevitably begin to ask: What is the Democratic Party’s position on all of this? The 2024 Democratic National Convention didn’t provide solace or answers, with presidential nominee Kamala Harris pledging to make America’s military “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Other than a sculpture of a mushroom cloud at an off-site art installation, the convention—and the resulting party platform—offered few specifics about nuclear policy.

In contrast, a handful of Democratic politicians have used their bully pulpits for peace. Earlier this week, Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) urged imposing guardrails on the executive authority to launch a nuclear strike, deeming it “terrifying, dangerous, and unconstitutional.” Markey, alongside the cochairs of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, has also cautioned against overspending on nuclear modernization. A small group of representatives that includes Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rules Committee chairman James McGovern (D-MA) has gone further, calling on the US to join an international agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons altogether.

As we wait for more politicians and journalists to treat the prospect of nuclear annihilation with, well, gravity, this country’s most reliable driver of progress is already organizing: the American people. To name one effort, Back from the Brink is a national coalition of almost 500 organizations aiming to make nuclear weapons “a local issue.” In 2021, it convinced 300 state and local officials to write to President Biden urging action toward nuclear disarmament. Despite receiving too little attention, it inspired further engagement, like high schoolers successfully lobbying the mayor of Burbank to call for abolishing nuclear weapons.

Amid this activism, US nuclear bunker sales are also on the rise. That money and energy would be better invested in preventing the need for such a shelter in the first place. But this trend nonetheless reflects prevailing concerns. Pundits and candidates alike are fond of asking: “Should this person have the nuclear codes?” But that misses the more fundamental question: Should anyone have any nuclear codes at all? The longer we take to answer this quandary—or even begin to debate it—the closer the Doomsday Clock ticks to midnight.

With his characteristic dyspeptic vitriol, Donald Trump scorns Joe Biden as the “worst president in the history of America.” The historian Robert McElvaine hails him as a “great president,” arguing that his accomplishments rival those of “both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, the two most effective of 20th-century presidents,” and since Biden didn’t enjoy the congressional majorities of those giants, he had to do it, “as was said about Ginger Rogers doing everything that Fred Astaire could do, backwards and in high heels.”

What is clear is that after four contentious years, Biden leaves Washington as a remarkably consequential one-term president.

His greatest successes came in domestic policy. Inheriting an economy in shutdown from the pandemic, Biden orchestrated the best recovery in the industrial world, leaving his successor an economy with low unemployment and low inflation, “an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” in the words of Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.

This wasn’t simply luck. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, noted that Biden delivered “the largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower, the most judges confirmed since Kennedy, the second-largest healthcare bill since Johnson and the largest climate change bill in history.”

By sustaining Trump’s tariffs and integrating them with a new industrial policy—focused on alternative energy and high-tech investment—Biden consolidated bipartisan support for the break with market fundamentalism that had governed US policy since Ronald Reagan. He also revived antitrust policy and sensible regulation—putting limits on prescription drug company rip-offs, going after the new monopolies.

Ironically, Democrats—and Kamala Harris in particular—paid a steep political price for the limits of Biden’s domestic policy. Trump rightly attributed his stunning victory to “groceries and the border”—the inflation coming out of the pandemic that hit working families hard and the influx of immigrants that gave Trump a race-laden cudgel to wield against the administration.

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More telling, perhaps, was the evanescence of the Biden accomplishments. The measures in the Recovery Act—particularly the extended tax credit for children—expired after a year or two. The tax credit had reduced childhood poverty by some 40 percent which rose immediately upon its repeal. Voters felt little impact from the infrastructure and climate investments that took a long time to roll out. And the limits of a one-term president are particularly apparent, since Trump promises to repeal as many of Biden’s accomplishments as he can.

The greatest failures of the Biden presidency came in foreign policy. His promise of dramatic change—a “foreign policy for the middle class”—proved empty rhetoric, beyond the change in trade policy. Biden announced that “America is back,” reasserting the US as the “indispensable nation,” and proceeded to act as if America remained the unipolar power of three decades past. He confronted Russia in Ukraine, China in the South China Sea, Iran in the Middle East and sustained the misbegotten War on Terror across the world. He sought to enlist allies to make up for the obvious limits of US power and resources, while summoning the world to a quixotic global struggle of democracy against autocracy.

He was assuming a world that no longer existed—and the result was calamitous. Unwillingness to negotiate with Russia over Ukraine sparked an invasion that will leave that country broken and in ruins. He disdained reviving the agreement on nuclear weapons with Iran. His backing of Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza violated US laws and gave lie to all the US prating about a “rules-based order.” Biden preposterously sustained economic sanctions on one-third of the countries of the world, including 60 percent of developing countries. Defining the threats in military terms, his military budget reached $1 trillion per year, starving resources for real security threats like pandemics and climate change.

Biden claimed as he departed office that America was stronger for his efforts and our adversaries weaker. In fact, conflict zones across the world increased by two-thirds in the last three years. His backing of Israel left America more isolated—and more despised. He geared the country for a military conflict with China in the South China Sea that it cannot win. And the basic notion of a foreign policy for the middle class—that we would curb military adventure abroad to focus on rebuilding the country at home—was lost in the bluster. To our enduring shame, Guantánamo prison remains open and the embargo on Cuba remains in place. In his final speech at the State Department, Biden urged Trump to face the reality that climate change was “the single greatest threat to humanity.” But with the US at peak oil, and the military consuming twice as much money in a year as Biden’s touted climate bill allocated over 10 years, his policies were far from reflecting that threat.

As Ben Rhodes, a former Obama speechwriter noted: “Biden and Trump are really two sides of the same coin on foreign policy: their platforms—Make ‘America great again’ and ‘America is back’—both represent different flavors of nostalgia for a world that structurally cannot exist anymore.” The emerging multipolar world requires abandoning both Trump’s “aggressive nationalism” and Biden’s “missionary liberalism” in favor of something far more realistic.

History will judge whether Biden was a consequential president; instant assessments are written in the wind. Yet some conclusions seem obvious. Biden consolidated the break with the failed market fundamentalism of the conservative era that Trump began. That era is over. In contrast, Biden sought to assert America’s role as the “indispensable nation” abroad that can no longer be sustained. What comes next remains to be seen. And with Trump, a cynical, ill-informed, transactional grifter returning to the presidency, it is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.

Former president Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. After leaving office in 1981, he enjoyed by far the longest retirement of any president in history—just over 42 years.

Recent tributes have invariably described Carter as a decent, dedicated public servant; a longtime Sunday school teacher who built homes with Habitat for Humanity. A humble man who lived modestly and who, unlike his successors, did not enrich himself

But this narrative belies the quietly radical approach Carter took to the post-presidency. By fiercely advocating for peace, and playing an active and transpartisan role in international diplomacy, Carter set a venerable standard for how politicians can serve the public long after leaving office. He did more to advocate for peace as an ex-president than most politicians do in the entirety of their careers.

President Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Carter Center in 1982, with an explicit mission to alleviate human suffering. The Center “wages peace” by resolving global conflicts, advancing human rights, and monitoring over 100 elections in almost 40 countries. The Nobel Committee cited these efforts as a reason for making Carter the first ex-US president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. (Other presidents have received the prize, but all while in office.)

His commitment to peace has made Carter a go-to envoy to North Korea for decades. In 1994, he and Rosalynn were the first people to cross the demilitarized zonesince the Korean War—and President Carter engaged in talks with President Kim that defused then-intensifying nuclear tensions. He went again in 2010, on behalf of the Obama administration, to secure the release of an American prisoner, after North Korea specifically requested his presence. He even offered to represent the Trump administration, though, needless to say, they didn’t take him up on it.

In 2007, he cofounded The Elders, a group of statesmen committed to world peace and human rights, alongside former Irish president Mary Robinson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former South African president Nelson Mandela. Carter played a key role in the group’s inaugural trip to Sudan to bring attention to the war in Darfur. He later led delegations to Israel and Palestine in support of a two-state solution, and in 2015 met with President Vladimir Putin in Russia to discuss, among other topics, the conflict in Ukraine.

Carter took positions few American elected officials would dare to take, let alone former presidents. In his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, he charged Israel with human rights abuses in occupied Palestinian territory. The book generated outrage—he faced accusations of antisemitism, condemnation from leaders within his own party, and resignations from the Carter Center—but Carter stood firm. (Years later, Steve Berman, who led those resignations, would write a letter apologizing to the president for doing so. Carter responded with a handwritten note insisting that the apology was unnecessary, that he understood the way his critics reacted, and that Berman would be welcome to return to the Center.)

Carter had no qualms about criticizing his successors, either. In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, he called on President Barack Obama to recognize the state of Palestine. He published another the year before, criticizing Obama’s call for the resignation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In that piece, he recalled stepping in when the US withdrew ambassadors from Syria, and in so doing he perfectly articulated his unique position in global diplomacy: “Bashar and his father, Hafez, had a policy of not speaking to anyone at the American Embassy during those periods of estrangement, but they would talk to me.”

For 42 years, Jimmy Carter has been the quintessential elder statesman. In a time when former presidents are more likely to spend their days promoting themselves rather than the general welfare, Carter stands head and shoulders above the rest. Leaders today could learn from how he leveraged his post-presidential power.

In the coming days and weeks, Carter’s legacy will be written about at length. His presidency will be discussed, as will his decades out of office. Across the entirety of his career, we should remember his fearlessness in the cause of peace, and his faith in the democratic institutions he fought to protect. As he himself said, “We take peace not as a dormant situation, but as one to be fought for—like winning an armed conflict.” The best way to honor Carter’s legacy would be to wage peace for as long as we can, everywhere in the world, with everything we’ve got.

It’s déjà vu all over again, again. In the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive reelection, his transition team has moved to pack his cabinet and advisor positions with figures straight out of the Star Wars cantina—some of the most dangerous and bizarre sideshows from every corner of his chaotic galaxy.

In the Trump Cinematic Universe, loyalty usurps qualification. That’s why Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host who wants to eliminate “woke” officials from the military, got tapped to oversee our national defense. And it’s why Matt Gaetz might helm the very Department of Justice that was investigating him for sex trafficking.

But perhaps no figure better captures the cartoonish nature of Trump’s staffing philosophy than Elon Musk, the literal richest man on Earth who has somehow grabbed the wheel of a presidential transition that’s navigating the road ahead about as well as one of his Teslas.

From offering his two cents on presidential appointments, to joining calls with the Ukrainian president, to adjudicating the race for Senate majority leader via an X poll, the man who broke Twitter now has his sights set on breaking the federal government. He’s poised to hack the budget, ramrod in his half-baked policy musings, and push through deregulation that will inevitably benefit his fleet of companies.

As in any great rom-com, Musk and Trump got off to a rocky start. Two years ago, before he donned a “dark gothic MAGA” cap himself, Musk was urging Trump to “hang up his hat,” and Trump was calling Musk too chicken to buy Twitter. But then Musk did buy Twitter, and began diligently turning it into a bastion of right-wing misinformation called X. The arc of this entanglement reached its inevitable conclusion when Musk rewired the platform’s algorithm to promote his own conspiracies about immigrants and election interference, while also giving free advertisement to Trump to the tune of two billion views. Though Trump was already the first major party nominee to own a social media platform in Truth Social, he now essentially leases a second one for free.

While Trump received support from Musk gratis, his voters received million-dollar checks. For all Musk’s hand-wringing about “ballot harvesting,” he engaged in a brazen election interference scheme when he more or less paid citizens to vote for Trump. His so-called sweepstakes, which a Pennsylvania court waved through, culminates Big Money’s political playbook. Billionaires no longer need to launder their bribes through super PACs with vaguely patriotic names. They can avoid that rigmarole, cut out the middleman, and offer direct financial incentives for supporting whichever candidate they deem most favorable to their business interests.

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And now that Musk’s doubtfully legal efforts have paid off in the election of the country’s first president with a felony conviction, the true singularity can begin—the merging not of humans with AI supposedly portended by Neuralink but of Musk’s agenda with Trump’s. There’s no shortage of “catastrophic conflicts of interest,” to quote former chief of government ethics Walter Shaub. Sure enough, Musk’s corporate empire has received $15 billion in public contracts, while facing 20 federal investigations. But it would be no more than coincidence should that first number skyrocket and the second number plummet over the next four years.

More troubling than his informal heft as Trump’s self-proclaimed “first buddy,” though, is Musk’s appointment to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency—which, as many have pointed out, takes two people to lead. This glorified task force has a mandate to slash government costs, regulations, and employment. With his typical spunk, Musk has pledged to eliminate a third of the $6.75 trillion federal budget, not unlike how he cut half of Twitter’s workforce. Fortunately, that austerity doesn’t extend to his own bank account, which has received a generous Trump bump. Postelection Tesla stock surges have already earned him $70 billion, and Musk’s appointment may also qualify him to receive a massive tax break. That seems only appropriate given that this faux-department’s name abbreviates to DOGE, a cryptocurrency that Musk owns “a bunch of.”

Nevertheless, the patent absurdity of the Musk-Trump pact just might offer a silver lining for Democrats. First, analysts and casual observers alike remain skeptical of how long the honeymoon can last between two narcissists whose power is exceeded only by their pettiness. Their relationship, like Trump’s coalition at large, is perilous and fragile.

Second, DOGE’s recommendations are just that: nonbinding. Trump himself has described Musk and Ramaswamy as offering “advice and guidance from outside of government.” That means the Department of Government Efficiency is not actually a department, nor is it government—so its proposals can be dispensed with efficiently. This cuts both ways. The few worthy, populist ideas that could expand the Trump administration’s appeal—like reining in the Pentagon—will never get past a Republican House. And if they dared touch entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, there won’t be a Republican House for much longer.

Musk is clearly attempting to emulate Trump’s governing style. But Trump has consistently proven a more effective huckster than head of state. On the campaign trail, he was a Rorschach test. Voters projected their grievances and aspirations onto his concepts of a plan. But a record is concrete. Soon enough, reality will sharpen into undeniable focus, one bad bromance at a time.

It’s grim—and official: Donald Trump is returning to the White House. No doubt the time between now and January 20 will be a time of reckoning and recriminations about how the Democratic Party failed to fend off a profoundly flawed authoritarian—for the second time.

But all the while, the White House will remain occupied by Joe Biden. And now the first one-term Democratic chief executive since Jimmy Carter has a few weeks to make a last-ditch effort to salvage his legacy—and shore up the governmental guardrails that Trump imperils.

There is far more good that the Biden administration could do in its waning days than can possibly be named here. (The list of worthy pardons alone would be staggering.) But in particular, President Biden has clear opportunities when it comes to reforming criminal justice, brokering global peace, protecting immigrants, taking climate action, and fending off authoritarianism.

First, he can bring to fruition a reform he’s already begun to explore: legalizing marijuana. Back in May, Biden initiated a review of cannabis’s status as a Schedule I drug, a pivot away from his long-standing opposition. It’s debatable exactly how much authority the president has to change marijuana’s legal status. But Biden could certainly conclude his administration’s needlessly lengthy review process—how long does it take to say, “It’s not a gateway drug”?—and officially recommend de-scheduling to federal agencies. He could also pardon anyone currently languishing in federal prison for nonviolent drug offenses. Since these prospective pardon recipients are disproportionately Black, the move would advance not just criminal but also racial justice. And crucially, making such moves would deny Trump the easy victory of making any of them himself.

In another commonsense change that would undo decades of senseless policy, the president could also finally normalize relations with Cuba. That would mean the restoration of official diplomatic ties, removal of the island from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List, and honoring the 22 bilateral agreements signed during the Obama administration before being torn up by Trump. It would also mean lifting sanctions that have fueled Cuba’s ongoing economic crisis, and providing robust aid to people beset by severe fuel shortages and food rationing. Closing Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and returning it to Cuba as a hospital would disassemble the starkest symbol of American domineering on the island. And though Trump will almost certainly seek to reverse any executive actions on Cuba, Biden could make that politically complicated by opening up private-sector investment there.

That’s not the only unfinished diplomacy at stake. The backdoor conversations between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—and ”backdoor” here means “openly discussed”—were dispiritingly evocative of the alleged Republican efforts in 1980 to delay the release of American hostages in Iran until after Reagan defeated Carter and took office. Now, whether the horrors escalate or a ceasefire is brokered that Trump gets undeserved credit for, this conflict is set to go down as Biden’s signature foreign policy failure. But he still has time, in the twilight of his presidency, to assert some moral authority by enforcing the Leahy Law—which prevents the US from providing military aid to a country that has violated human rights—and halting, even temporarily, arms shipments to Israel.

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As he makes his final efforts to curb humanitarian crises in Gaza and Cuba, Biden might also try to avert a future one along the United States’ southern border. Trump has threatened to double down on the cruel immigration policies of his first term through “the vast arsenal of federal powers.” That could include the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants, as well as a resumption of his family separation policy at the border. President Biden can try to stymie this sadism by fast-tracking citizenship applications, reversing an executive order restricting asylum, and expanding work permits for undocumented immigrants. These compassionate reforms could profoundly change the outlook for many people who might otherwise be under threat in January and beyond.

Meanwhile, with at least 3 million Americans already forced by extreme weather to become climate refugees, Biden has more than enough reason to declare a climate emergency. He claims to have “practically” done so, but actually doing so would enable him to circumvent a stubborn Congress to allot additional climate funding. Then, he can implement a raft of overdue executive orders, from more niche but nonetheless consequential reforms like decarbonizing the maritime industry, to sweeping (and promised) changes like banning offshore drilling. Such action would cement Biden’s legacy as arguably the greenest president in modern history—and force Trump to make unfavorable headlines if he wants to undo that progress.

Finally, Biden must take concrete steps to fend off the threat of authoritarianism that Trump’s second term poses. American democracy may now be in its most vulnerable position since the Civil War. That’s why filling all 46 judicial vacancies with judges who will uphold the rule of law is nonnegotiable. He can also reach across the aisle to address concerns about election integrity—before Trump takes that matter into his own paws—by replacing antiquated voting machines, conducting audits, and protecting poll workers and election officials.

Above all, a productive, placid lame-duck period would do much to demonstrate for the first time in eight years what a peaceful transfer of power looks like—even as Biden hands it back to the person responsible for that lapse.

Weeks after he had conducted a different kind of transfer of power, on the first night of this year’s Democratic National Convention, Biden summed up his hopes for his legacy: “Let me know in my heart…that I gave my best to you.” Between now and January, he can do his best to align that self-evaluation with history’s judgment.

Last night, we gathered at The Nation—journalists, editors, friends, and allies—as election results rolled in.

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right Supreme Court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

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A guy in his garage, just outside of Omaha, dressed in denim, proclaims that he wants nothing to do with the Democratic Party. If that sounds like the median Nebraska voter, then the fact that it also describes Dan Osborn, the independent candidate running to unseat incumbent US Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), might be promising for his chances.

Sure enough, Osborn—a Navy veteran, steamfitter, and union leader—is giving Fischer a run for her money in a deep-red state. The two are locked in a dead heat in a race where the Democratic Party opted not to run a candidate. Osborn has staunchly declined the Democrats’ endorsement and distanced himself from either camp. His declaration of independence understandably upset Democratic party officials, and yet Osborn’s obstinacy may still benefit progressives in the long run amid an otherwise bleak Senate map. And it has allowed Nebraskans to hear from, and perhaps even vote for, a leader whose platform works for them precisely because he’s worked alongside them.

Osborn has held only one previous office: the presidency of his local union. But he used this supposedly minor position to notch a major victory, organizing a strike at a Kellogg factory in Omaha that rescued 500 jobs. While his insurgency may seem like a glitch in the political simulation, his simple approach—focusing on the most important issues for the working class and having a credible background to back it up—has a venerable history in heartland America. In so-called “flyover” states, emulating this tactic could go a long way toward reviving progressive hopes where conservatives have taken voters for granted.

Nebraska is the birthplace not only of Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz but modern American populism. William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner and 1896 People’s Party presidential nominee, began his political career in the Cornhusker State. Over the next century, US senators across the Midwest would follow Bryan’s creed and take their pro-farmer, pro-worker, and pro-consumer convictions to Congress, including Fred Harris in Oklahoma, Birch Bayh in Indiana, and George McGovern in South Dakota. The breadbasket of the country, it turns out, has a record of helping working people put bread on the table.

Along with this grand tradition, Osborn’s campaign fits into a more recent trend of bold attempts to crack conservative strongholds. The weapons of choice in these campaigns? Civility, credibility, and championing the needs of working-class constituents. Representative Mary Peltola’s (D-AK) 2022 victory over Sarah Palin, which I covered at the time, exemplified this approach. Unlike Palin, Peltola didn’t run to represent herself. She ran to represent fishermen and rail workers, blue-collar parents and caretakers, and union members and public school teachers. She neatly captured this ethos in her campaign slogan: “Fish, Family, and Freedom.” That same hyperfocus on everyday voters’ needs was at the heart of Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s triumph in 2018, the first blue norther in years to blow through solid-red Tornado Alley.

Despite supporting Trump by almost 20 points in 2020, Nebraska has a political landscape with deeper quirks that could favor Osborn’s campaign. The state is home to the nation’s only nonpartisan, one-house legislature, which has fostered successful bipartisan coalitions for abolishing the death penalty and allowing DACA recipients to obtain driver’s licenses. The “Unicam,” as Nebraskans endearingly call it, is also where a single GOP state senator recently held his ground against instituting a winner-take-all electoral system, one that would have inevitably favored Trump this fall. Despite Republicans’ claiming two-thirds of its seats, Nebraska’s legislature—and, by extension, the state—doesn’t suffer from the toxic polarization that abetted Trump’s rise in the first place.

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And though Osborn has held the Democratic Party at arm’s length, he may nevertheless indirectly benefit from the small but strong contingent of progressive state activists who have been selflessly organizing against long odds for years. Jane Kleeb, the populist leader of the Nebraska Democratic Party, has risen as one such force to be reckoned with. Known for her fierce activism against the Keystone XL pipeline, Kleeb has long called for Democrats not just to mobilize long-ignored rural voters but to mobilize for them. She’s written extensively on what Democrats can do to re-inspire the trust of rural voters who have long found the party both unresponsive and unrelatable, insights that are embodied by Osborn’s campaign strategy, even if without an official “D” insignia.

To be sure, Osborn has his work cut out for him. Over the past few years, independent US Senate candidates like Alaska’s Al Gross and Utah’s Evan McMullin have put up remarkable fights, only to be considerably knocked out by GOP incumbents. But even if Osborn’s campaign falls short, his efforts won’t be for naught. He doesn’t need to win the hearts of all heartland voters—he just needs to open them. No matter the result in November, Osborn is making electoral inroads that will pave the way for real victories in 2026 and 2028. With the right long-term strategy, a more progressive Senate—one that can actually work for the working class—just might be in striking distance.

Osborn himself believes his candidacy could inspire future campaigns by and for working Americans. “Imagine…the ramifications on American politics if Nebraska elects an independent mechanic to the United States Senate,” he said in a recent interview. “Teachers, and nurses, and plumbers, and carpenters… they could also realize that they could run for higher office.”

While Democrats try to divine their path to victory just four months before the election, Republicans are practicing presidential politics by predestination. From the first-ever RNC address by a Teamsters leader, to the selection of a running mate miraculously under the age of 40, to evangelical claims of divine intervention ensuring Donald Trump’s second term, the Grand Old Party last week attempted to project not just vivacity but inevitability. A 2016 redux, they seem convinced, is all but assured.

And yet in some ways, the 2016 campaign this raucous convention most evoked was not Trump’s but Clinton’s—a campaign that mistook self-assurance for strategy and paid the ultimate electoral price. (Just swap “Fight Song” for “God Bless the U.S.A.”) Arrogance often invites unforced errors, like Trump ordering his staff to curtail their ground game and focus on “election integrity.” Rather than get out the vote for his supposedly imminent landslide victory, he seems more concerned with contriving evidence to contest a potential defeat. Somehow, both parties have forgotten that, for all the elite-level drama that makes this campaign feel unprecedented, the fundamentals of electioneering have remained the same since Cicero ran for consul of Rome.

Victory this November demands sweat equity, no matter the ascendancy of digital influencers, technocratic consultants, and social-media gimmicks. For proof that the ground game remains indispensable to every campaign, look no further than Representative Jamie Raskin’s Democracy Summer program. Every year, it puts over a thousand young people around the country through democratic boot camp, and the current cohort has already begun pounding the pavement to energize voters. The program is leading the work necessary for progressives to prevail in this election and beyond: mobilizing young people to participate in, and eventually lead, our democracy.

At a time when voters—and especially young voters—are deeply dissatisfied with their choices, Raskin’s project offers a model for renewing Americans’ confidence in the power of civic engagement.

Despite President Biden’s overwhelmingly winning the young adult bloc in 2020, recent polls unbelievably show Trump becoming highly competitive among voters under 30. From the youth and campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war to increasing pessimism about the economy, listing the plentiful reasons for Gen Z’s sudden swing would take more than a few TikToks (even with a 10-minute time limit). But the starkest statistic is that over half of Americans age 18 to 29 may not vote at all. Having never participated in a presidential election that didn’t feature Donald Trump and a centrist Democrat, they’re fed up with voting for the lesser of two evils.

And when it comes to campaigning themselves, younger Americans can hardly find an open office to pursue. In the House of Representatives, Boomers maintain a plurality of seats. The upper chamber, meanwhile, has as many senators over 70 as under 50. Of course, being younger isn’t always better. Nancy Pelosi, to name just one Democratic stalwart, didn’t win higher office until her late 40s. But the best political talent often does attain office at an early age: FDR was a 31-year-old assistant secretary of the Navy, LBJ a 28-year-old congressman, and Joe Biden a 30-year-old senator. What future leader is currently losing valuable experience because octogenarian incumbents continue to white-knuckle their way to reelection?

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That’s why Jamie Raskin’s efforts to engage young people in the tough but necessary work of field organizing are notable. Though he is a comparatively boyish 61 years old, Raskin became a star during the Trump impeachment hearings, and almost certainly has ambitions beyond the House, Raskin continues to devote himself to Democracy Summer. He describes the program as a “school for democracy.” Over the course of six weeks, high school and college students in 38 states complete a virtual curriculum while working in local congressional campaigns—including in battleground districts from Washington to Pennsylvania. Whether it’s hearing from luminaries like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or canvassing their own neighborhoods, the fellows gain on-the-ground experience while completing essential tasks like campaign research and organizing rallies.

Raskin has long understood the possibilities of mentorship. All the way back in 2006, during his very first campaign, he tapped into the power of engaging young people. By mobilizing the youth of his district, as volunteers and voters, he managed a come-from-behind victory against a 32-year incumbent that launched his political career—and Democracy Summer. As Raskin recounted during a recent talk hosted by the grassroots organization Partners 4 Democracy, pundits initially called his chances “impossible.” After his victory, they switched to describing it as “inevitable,” a testament to the potential held by real organizing. From these humble beginnings—from impossible to inevitable—the passion project has grown to collaborate with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and now partners with over 100 campaigns. (Disclosure: I supported Raskin in his first campaign, and following ones. And three generations of Raskins, from Jamie’s father to his son, have written for The Nation.)

This expansion hasn’t dulled the program’s focus on the unglamorous but crucial art of organizing. In that first campaign, Raskin personally knocked on over 17,000 doors. Democracy Summer emphasizes the same gritty brand of personal politics. Fellows become experts in voter registration, phone banking, and door-to-door campaigning, while having genuine conversations with community members about the issues that matter most to them.

These tactics show the way forward for reengaging the entire body politic. Many Americans only ever see their elected officials on television, not their front porches. Over half of AAPI voters, for example, have never been contacted by a political party. That distance creates disillusionment, which turns into disengagement. By bringing campaigns to voters’ doorsteps, Democracy Summer helps Americans from every generation feel less like political props and more like active participants.

I was on the phone with my daughter when e-mails started streaming through. “Trump has been shot.” She teared up, asking in a fearful and trembling voice: “What does this mean for our country?”

What it means, I think, is that we have entered a moment when, more than ever, we need perspective, context, history, and clarity about the threat of political violence in a time so charged as this.

Being the victim of a shooting is terrifying. Donald Trump and those wounded and killed deserve our sympathy and concern. We should not forget the risks that political leaders take in a society as polarized and as gunned-up as this one.

The shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania yesterday—which authorities have labeled as an assassination attempt on the ex-president—ended with two people critically injured and two killed: a rally attendee and the shooter himself, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Trump crouched down immediately, having suffered a wound to his ear.

In this era of 24/7 propaganda, the incident was quickly turned into campaign grist. Fox News suggested Trump’s reaction made him into a hero, a symbol of American strength and courage. MAGA zealots—most vociferously Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a suitor of Trump for the vice presidential nomination—blamed Biden’s criticism of Trump for spurring the shooting. Vance ignored the reality that no one has done more to coarsen our political dialogue than Trump, whose language has grown ever more violent and divisive over time. It was Trump who called on Iowans to vote for him and defeat “all of the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” just as it was Trump who slandered political opponents and immigrants as “vermin.”

It is not an exaggeration to note that Trump has gloried in the language of political violence for more than a decade. He has configured his campaign around a paranoid martyrdom. He shares a strong currency of violence with his followers—during this and previous elections.

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What should we take from this horror? We should begin by decrying all political violence as unacceptable. President Biden has condemned the shooting ardently and unequivocally. So too did prominent Democrats who fundamentally disagree with the former president. Hopefully, leaders from across the political and ideological spectrum will join in these condemnations. Just as, one hopes, they will condemn the growing threats of violence that public officials from the president to poll volunteers to judges and jurors now receive.

But this is about more than politics and public life. This country has too much gun violence and too many guns. Most of the victims are not famous, or powerful. With children in grade schools now forced to take part in active shooter drills, it is long past time for all of us to get serious about curbing gun violence.

But surely, we also recognize that when a former president is shot at, this stirs up our already agitated politics. While we condemn political violence, we should understand that getting shot does not ennoble the target or transform victims into moral leaders. A presidential race is not a WWE wrestling drama. Trump should be assessed, as anyone who would lead this country, based on his behavior, his character, and his agenda. That responsibility does not disappear because someone took a shot at him. The prospect of a Trump presidency was as deeply unsettling before Saturday’s shooting incident, and it remains so after it.

With his instinct for vaudeville and venom, and the Republican Convention about to convene, Trump is likely to use this dangerous moment and event for political advantage.

No one should be fooled. Donald Trump deserves sympathy for the attack he experienced. That does not, however, make him an acceptable candidate for the presidency.

Tonight, the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees for US president, Joseph R. Biden and Donald J. Trump, will face off on CNN in Atlanta. Below are 10 questions we suggest moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash might usefully pose to the respective candidates on US foreign policy, US-Russia relations, and the war in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden, you have said with regard to the war in Ukraine, “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there…. He’s going to keep going…” Can you explain to us the difference between this theory of Russian expansion and the domino theory that was used to justify the US war in Vietnam?

Mr. Trump, under your administration a number of crucial Cold War–era arms control treaties between the US and Russia were torn up, including the landmark 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty or INF and the Open Skies Treaty. Russia has suspended its participation in the New START treaty, which is set to expire in February 2026. Yet arms control agreements such as these have been crucial in keeping relations between the nuclear superpowers stable. Given the heightened nuclear risks we now face, do you plan on rebuilding the ravaged infrastructure of arms control in your second term? If not—what do you see as the alternative?

To both candidates: Over the weekend the Kremlin accused the US of being behind the deaths of civilian beachgoers in Crimea, going so far as to summon US Ambassador Lynne Tracy on Monday to accuse Washington of waging a “proxy war” while promising that retaliatory measures would “definitely follow.” Given this, do you see any significant risks of escalation in Ukraine—possibly even nuclear escalation? If not, why not?

President Biden, earlier this month various peace plans have been put forward, one by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and another by a peace conference near Lucerne, Switzerland. Yet the US has not come forward with any substantive plans for negotiations—why not? Would now not be the time to seek a cease-fire or undertake tough diplomacy? If not, why not?

Mr. Trump, in only the last two days or so, it was reported that your advisers have presented you with a peace plan that would, among other things, take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table for a unspecified period of time, while tying future US aid with Ukraine’s participation in peace talks with the Russians. What would your administration’s response be if neither Russia nor Ukraine come to the table?

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To both candidates: Will you commit to never sending American men and women to fight in Ukraine?

President Biden, figures show that, far from damaging the Russian economy, various sanctions packages put in place against Russia have done more damage to the economies of our allies, in particular Germany, than to Russia. The IMF projects the Russian economy to grow 3.2 percent this year. Russia is also outproducing the US and our Western allies in the production of artillery shells at a rate of three to one. Given this, can you explain why you think sanctions have been successful?

Mr. Trump, your former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who is said to be vying for a key position in a second Trump term should you win, wrote a programmatic article for Foreign Affairs in which, among other things, he asserts that America “must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the world.” Do you agree? If so, why?

President Biden, do you believe that NATO, at its upcoming 75th anniversary summit in Washington, should offer Ukraine a “Bridge to NATO” as has been previously suggested by members of your administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken? If so, can you explain how Ukraine’s membership in NATO would strengthen the alliance, and by extension, strengthen US national security?

To Both Candidates: President Richard Nixon’s 1972 opening to China was made in part to drive a wedge between what was seen as a Sino-Soviet bloc. Today, Russia and China are closer than perhaps they have ever been—they are, for all intents and purposes, allies—which is something Nixon and Kissinger would have considered a strategic failure. Are American policies partly responsible for driving together Russia and China, and has it been in America’s interest to do so? What is your plan to deal with this new global balance of power?

Finally, a polarized nation has found something to bridge its generational and geographic divides: Ozempic. One in eight American adults have now tried the injection or a similar weight-loss drug. And with the hashtag #ozempic pulling over 1.2 billion views on TikTok, there’s no sign that the craze is slowing down.

But like “calories in, calories out,” access to the drug has proven, in some cases, to be a zero-sum game. While it’s officially intended—and federally approved—to treat diabetes, reports have surfaced of diabetics being denied the medication due to a global shortage. And many people to whom the drug is available cannot actually use it because of the $969 price tag for a 2-milligram dose.

The astronomical cost of Ozempic and similar drugs reflects an ongoing crisis in America. Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to curb prescription drug prices for consumers, they remain nearly three times as expensive in the United States as in peer countries. It might be time for the government to put Big Pharma on a less gluttonous financial diet.

The company behind Ozempic has profited from diabetes treatment for a century. Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Denmark, pioneered the commercial sale of insulin in the early 1920s and today produces half of the world’s supply of the medication. Its fortunes have skyrocketed since Ozempic launched in 2018. It recently became Europe’s most valuable company, with a market cap of over $600 billion—bigger than the entire Danish economy.

Much of that value has been driven by the United States, where 66 percent of Ozempic sales came from in 2023. For Wegovy, another weight loss drug from the same company, that figure is over 90 percent. As it happens, Novo Nordisk charges type 2 diabetics over 15 times more for Ozempic in the United States than it does in Germany, where patients can get a monthly dose for just $59.

Part of the reason it can charge outrageous prices in America is because it has a patent monopoly on semaglutide—the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy—preventing other companies from producing generic alternatives. The United States is unique among wealthy countries in allowing drug companies to charge whatever they see fit for life-saving medication. Perhaps that has something to do with Big Pharma outspending all other industries on lobbying: Washington, DC, is home to over 20 lobbyists for each member of Congress, and Big Pharma does more than its part by paying for three lobbyists per senator and representative.

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But greed is a condition that can be treated. And while President Biden hasn’t exactly engaged in Teddy Roosevelt–style trust busting, he has taken promising first steps. The Inflation Reduction Act empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with manufacturers. Even amid Big Pharma lawsuits crying “unconstitutional” (when they really mean “unprofitable”), the administration moved forward on securing lower prices for drugs like Eliquis, a blood thinner deemed an “essential medicine” by the WHO and taken by 3 million Americans. And the administration’s policies have moved the needle for Novo Nordisk itself, which last year announced steep price cuts for its insulin after the IRA scaled back the hormone’s out-of-pocket cost for Medicare recipients to $35 per month.

But truly taming drug prices requires bolder reform, as other countries demonstrate. The European Union keeps pharma in check with shorter patent periods, bans on ads for prescription drugs, and, perhaps most consequentially, negotiations for the launch price of drugs. Meanwhile, earlier this year, Colombia issued the country’s first compulsory license to allow for generic versions of the HIV medicine dolutegravir to be produced without the patent owner’s permission. The advocacy group Public Citizen has argued that the Biden administration has a similar authority to break up prescription drug monopolies in the United States.

And it seems the American public would overwhelmingly support more ambitious pharmaceutical regulations. Biden’s drug price policies are universally popular: His capping of insulin prices is even supported by 90 percent of Republicans, and three quarters of voters want Medicare to negotiate prices on more drugs. Yet this has failed to translate to support for the president and party responsible, with less than half of older voters reporting that they know Biden secured drug price negotiation in the first place.

That’s why Bernie Sanders’s recent push to haul pharmaceutical executives in front of Congress is critical. Already, this pressure has compelled the CEO of Novo Nordisk to agree to testify. The eventual hearing promises to revive a much-missed tradition: After the 2008 financial crisis, for example, executives from Goldman Sachs faced blistering questions and condemnation from Republicans and Democrats alike, informing the American public and holding seemingly untouchable plutocrats accountable. Sanders can do the same for Big Pharma, all while foregrounding drug prices in election year discourse. The Biden campaign would be wise to follow suit.

The contrast is stark: While Donald Trump brags about protecting American trade and putting America first, his administration allowed, and even abetted, pharmaceutical price gouging. If President Biden wants to drive up his electoral margins, cracking down on drug prices might be just what the doctor ordered.