The die is cast

I would never claim to be the first person to compare Donald Trump, with his dominion over the Republican party, to Bane, the primary antagonist of Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. (I also don’t think I’ll be the Last.) But I’ve been struck once more by the analogy in recent days.

In the opening scene of Nolan’s masterpiece, Bane grabs the shoulder of a fanatical deputy and informs him, “They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother.” The line captures something about the administration’s approach to its memorandum of understanding with Iran. It’s clear, here as it is in so many policy areas, that someone will need to sacrifice it all so that the boss can survive.

Enter JD Vance, the vice president whose stock in the party as MAGA heir apparent has plummeted in recent months.

Vance has been handed primary responsibility to sell the MOU, which is a sort of minimally binding agreement between the United States and Iran that is meant to lead to a more permanent agreement. And as details about the preliminary deal finally started to enter the public discourse late Monday morning, it became readily apparent how hard it would be for him to go unscathed.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posted some of his concerns about the deal on X, emphasizing both the need for Congress to ratify any arrangement and exactly who he believes is the “architect.”

“I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress,” Graham wrote. “Congratulations to all in getting us to this point. Time will tell.”

Later on Monday, I asked Graham if he was explicitly saying Vance was the architect of the MOU, to which he replied, “I think he is.”

Graham added that he likes the particulars of the MOU that he’s heard about, but he articulated a simple criterion for judging the final product.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as the JCPOA,” he said. “If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal.”

A bit cryptic, for sure. But that’s just one senator, right?

When a reporter asked Senate Majority Leader John Thune if he thinks the full Senate should get a briefing from Vance on the still-under-wraps MOU, he expressed noncommittal support.

“Somebody will need to, whether it’s the vice president—but for sure, our members are going to have a lot of questions about it.”

Other Republican senators offered varying takes on the ownership they believe Vance has of the MOU. Their comments ranged from propping him up as integral to the process to claiming they haven’t yet seen him address it.

“It sounds to me like for two months he’s played a significant role,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said of Vance. But Grassley withheld judgment on the MOU itself, telling me he’s still waiting to take an actual look at it.

“I haven’t seen anything JD’s said yet,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “I’ve been on a plane today.”

Part of the job of any vice president is to eat the shit that the president himself doesn’t want to digest. And Trump, who understands how to play the public relations game better than nearly anyone, clearly is not interested in personally absorbing this deal. He’s already begun dropping Vance’s name any time the question comes up as to who is responsible for it. Asked about whether he would be present for a hypothetical signing ceremony—the most public-facing component of any deal—Trump seemed intent on getting his foremost deputy there in his stead.

“It depends. JD is coming in for it, he was originally going to do it. I will probably be gone by then, we are having dinner, in a day and a half, I think staying quite late,” Trump told reporters Monday, sounding a bit like a man explaining why he might have to miss a pickleball meet-up. “So I may be involved, I may not.”

The same day, Vance actively took up his new role as the administration’s chief spokesman for the MOU, appearing on major television networks to tout the accomplishment and bat down skepticism.

“I don’t trust anybody,” Vance told CNN. “The benefits of the bargain only accrue, again, if Iran actually complies.”

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Vance did not rule out the possibility of future uranium enrichment. Instead, he said the deal requires Iran to “eliminate the enriched stockpile.”

Responding directly to Graham’s comments expressing concerns about the differences between Iran’s account of the MOU and the administration’s claims, Vance told ABC News, “I’d caution Lindsey Graham and anybody else not to believe the hard-liner propaganda in Iran but to believe what’s actually in the agreement.”

The fact that Vance appears to be positioning himself as a potential fall guy for the nascent deal is registering with other interested parties, too. Democratic senators, who broadly support an end to the war,1 are taking note of the vice president’s outsized role in the process.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told me, “I heard [Lindsey Graham] say, ‘Vance needs to come up and explain it to us.’”

“So if there’s gonna be a deal, a bill that I helped write, the [Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015], requires any such deal to get submitted to Congress for a review,” Kaine added. “And I heard Graham say that should happen, and we should get VP Vance and others to come describe it. So I don’t know what his role is, but I’m glad that we’re entering into a ceasefire that I hope we can actually get signed [on] Friday.”

This is a fraught moment for the veep. Accepting the frame that you are the main architect of a major initiative means accepting the blame if it fails. That can destroy or at least significantly hinder aspirations for higher office. Just ask Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who spent more than a decade in right-wing political rehab on account of his involvement in the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform agenda, which Trump and others happily used against him in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Or talk to Kamala Harris, whose role as “border czar” for Joe Biden was widely misunderstood (she was tasked with dealing with the roots of migration not the physical entry points into the country) but nevertheless effectively deployed against her in 2024.

Vance, whom some reporters described in March as an original skeptic of the war against Iran, is evidently making yet another career pivot as he steps in to attempt to heroically end it. But he would do well to watch those steps. The position he’s taken might be the worst place to be in the coming weeks.

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Making haste slowly

Despite not having seen any details of the Trump administration’s preliminary deal with Iran, lawmakers now have to grapple with the question of whether they should ratify it, or if they should even have to consider it at all.

The Constitution requires Congress to ratify or reject all treaties. Both the executive and legislative branches have gotten around that responsibility by characterizing various deals, which could be interpreted as treaties, instead as “non-binding instruments” or “soft law pacts” like “executive agreements.”

Discussing the prospect with Senate Republicans, I quickly got the impression that this deal—again, merely an MOU—isn’t one they consider to rise to the level of a treaty, and some take this distinction to remove the burden of the ratification requirement. Once again, there’s nothing legislators hate more than actually legislating.

“I think they’ve got an MOU right now versus a treaty,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). “I haven’t seen the text of the agreement, so we’ll wait and see what comes out.”

There is some intraparty disagreement over this. “We’ll have to see exactly what this is, but you would think it’d have to be ratified [by Congress],” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told me.

Despite some waffling, though, quite a few GOP senators did imply they would want to review the nascent MOU in a formal capacity at some point in the process.

“I do think it needs to [be ratified by Congress]—a final resolution, if there is one,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “I go into it very skeptical of the government of Iran. I’m not skeptical of the agreement because I can’t assess it. But I congratulate the president and his team for confecting it—whatever it is.”

“Any agreement we make with them has to have guardrails,” Kennedy added. “It has to have a way to judge—through independent inspection—if they’re doing what they say they’re doing.”

The confusion about whether this is a memorandum of understanding, an agreement, or an actual deal apparently didn’t get past Trump, who told reporters Tuesday morning in France that Congress should probably handle the hot turd going forward. He even wondered aloud how he could get Democrats to vote for it.

“What I would like to do is send it to Congress and say, ‘You shouldn’t approve it,’” he said. “And they will approve it.”

As for those Democrats, they no doubt want a say in whether this deal goes ahead. Sen. Kaine told me Democrats are eager to bring the war to a conclusion, even if the MOU is imperfect.

“I think on the Democratic side, we’re almost completely unified—with the exception of Senator Fetterman—that this war is both illegal and deeply foolish,” he said. “And so we want the off-ramp. . . . But we do believe that bringing tension down is the right thing for us and the right thing for the region.”

“We’ll see what the terms are when it comes out. I mean, it’s been a waste, because there was no need for a war, fourteen [American] deaths, billions of billions of dollars, we’re paying more for gas—it was extremely foolish,” Kaine added. “But I’d rather we be moving into a more protracted ceasefire than that.”

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Crying havoc

I want to share a piece from 2019 with you by Tom Holland,2 in which the mega-popular historian and author argued that compounding problems in America, while bad and dramatic, simply do not meaningfully resemble the problems that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. I’d also love your thoughts on it, so please let me know your take on Holland’s essay in the comments.3

Since the garish UFC fight at the White House, I’ve seen a lot of fairly predictable tweets and commentary comparing these late-seeming days of the United States to the decline of ancient Rome. In line with Holland, I consider these comparisons a bit foolish. For starters, gladiatorial fights were a fixture during much of Rome’s expansion and great success, not a symptom of its decline.

Second, arguing for simple parallels between America and Rome will lead you into a maze of factual problems. For starters, as a matter of settled strategic doctrine, the United States does not wage wars for conquest (though let’s wait and see with Greenland); it has no formally recognized nobility; and frankly, our country is a much, much safer place for the average citizen. But stressed-out Americans love to relate our situation to the eternal city, as they have since our country’s founding.

As Holland wrote:

The conviction that Trump is single-handedly tipping the United States into a crisis worthy of the Roman Empire at its most decadent has been a staple of jeremiads ever since his election, but fretting whether it is the fate of the United States in the twenty-first century to ape Rome by subsiding into terminal decay did not begin with his presidency. A year before Trump’s election, the distinguished Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye was already glancing nervously over his shoulder at the vanished empire of the Caesars: “Rome rotted from within when people lost confidence in their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, corruption increased and the economy failed to grow adequately.” Doom-laden prophecies such as these, of decline and fall, are the somber counterpoint to the optimism of the American Dream.

And so they have always been. At various points in American history, various reasons have been advanced to explain why the United States is bound to join the Roman Empire in oblivion. In 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, The New York Times warned that the Huns and the Vandals were massing again. “The Roman Empire and its civilization were destroyed by barbarian hordes coming from the East—and it is from the east that comes the wind.” Thirty years earlier, visiting the abandoned Roman city at Baalbek in Lebanon, Brooks Adams—the great-grandson of John Adams—had been inspired by the spectacle of shattered greatness to dread that his own country’s gilded age was bound to end in similar ruin. In the decades before the Civil War, opponents of slavery repeatedly cited the fall of Rome as a warning of what might happen to a slave-owning society. In the 1830s, opponents of Andrew Jackson cast him as a dictator and a demagogue whose tyranny would inevitably bring the infant republic to share in the fate of the ancient empire. Present anxieties that Trump’s presidency portends America’s decline and fall are the contemporary expression of a tradition quite as venerable as the United States itself.

In short, our problems are our own. The Romans couldn’t hold a candle to the extraordinary accomplishments of our republic. Also, we wear pants.

Read the whole piece, and if you need some more context, pick up a copy of one of Holland’s many great books on Rome, including Pax, Dynasty, and Rubicon.4

I scream social

Mike Johnson did something very out of character Monday. Normally coy in public, the speaker of the House openly admitted to a radio interviewer that if Republicans retain their majority heading into next year, they are planning to flatten their palms against the hottest stove in politics—and he broadcast this just months before an election in which many forecasters are already projecting a Democratic wave.

“The reason we’re in trouble is because over seventy-four percent of federal spending is on autopilot—mandatory spending, that is your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security—they have to be adjusted and fixed,” Johnson said on a radio show. “We have a plan to do that next year, and it’s critical, because we’re at $40 trillion-plus in debt. At some point, you get into a hole so deep you can’t climb out of it, so desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Johnson later called the circulation and discussion of his comments “fearmongering” and said, “Everyone knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is rampant waste, fraud, and abuse throughout government programs.”

Johnson continued to leave it unclear exactly what he’d do about that waste, fraud, and abuse, which, frankly, is not as prevalent as he and other Republicans often insist. But any proposed reform would almost certainly involve further restricting eligibility for those programs to exclude more of their current beneficiaries—along the lines of what Republicans did with Medicaid last year.

The bigger picture takeaway though is that this was dumb. There are a few general rules for survival in politics. Chief among them is to never, ever fuck with Social Security. Suggesting that the widely popular, essential program could be on the chopping block if your party holds the majority is a kind of political malpractice almost unthinkable for how stupid and self-damaging it is.1 Johnson obviously knows this. He serves under President Donald Trump, who has made it very clear he is never going to touch Social Security, even if he also said the same once about Medicaid. Johnson was also in Congress in 2022 when Sen. Rick Scott proposed an 11-point plan sunsetting all federal programs (Social Security included) after five years. It was a big deal in those midterms!

Why in the world would Johnson make that same mistake?

I wanted to know what Johnson’s colleagues and Senate counterparts made of his admission. So I went looking for them.

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Submission

The House Freedom Caucus, a group of former congressional rebels who have over the past few years evolved into Trump lackeys, is on the verge of total irrelevance. In a scenario where House Republicans become the minority, the caucus will lose whatever semblance of leverage it has, and current members know it; half a dozen of them will be leaving Congress at the end of the year.

Founded in early 2015, the caucus has routinely disrupted regular business by noisily complaining that their leaders made too many concessions before eventually committing to support must-pass legislation. They have had some impact along the way. Its most rogue members took down a speaker of the House. And during Donald Trump’s second term as president, Freedom Caucus members played a pivotal role in forcing the release of the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files by way of a discharge petition.

But these displays of power and rebellion have largely been isolated incidents, and they have become more isolated over time.

A quick refresher:

• HFC holdouts caved to support Mike Johnson’s speakership bid, which has since yielded few accomplishments for the caucus.

• HFC members voted for a continuing resolution to fund the government despite many of them having long opposed the practice on principle.

• Despite feigning hardline opposition, HFC members voted to significantly increase the federal deficit by supporting the Senate’s version of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” reconciliation package.

I could list many more examples, but there would not be enough space left over for this newsletter to be about anything else. The group’s recent squishiness is owed to the fact that Trump can easily work them over with a White House visit or a phone call. And it has prompted a running joke in the Capitol Hill press corps that they’d be better described as the House Folding Caucus.

The self-neutering has been remarkable. The entirety of the caucus’s power comes from its ability to stall important votes on must-pass legislation, knowing that party leadership needs them to be brought on side for that legislation to pass out of the chamber. Under Trump, they’ve surrendered that influence. In the event of a Democratic wave election, they will lose it completely.

“I think if we do lose the House, obviously, everybody in the conference—not just Freedom Caucus—loses leverage,” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) told me. “But the joke within the Freedom Caucus is that when we’re in the minority, everybody becomes Freedom Caucus. Because everybody votes ‘no’ on everything.”

Crane’s view of the landscape is one shared by other HFC members. Far from reassessing how they’ve bungled things while in the majority, many wax whimsical about life in the minority.

“One thing I think we’ve always tried to do is make sure that the newer, younger men and women get mentored,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who’s running for governor, told me Monday. “I don’t think you’re gonna have a big hiccup.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a former HFC chairman who is well positioned to run for minority leader in a Democratic-controlled House, told me he didn’t think Republicans would lose the House this cycle. But if they did, he added, it could do wonders for the HFC ranks. “When they did [lose the House] back in 2018, you saw the Freedom Caucus—saw a number of us—who were really engaged on the weaponization of government and all the oversight work we did.”

It goes without saying that HFC members have the ability to engage in oversight right now, too. In fact, they have more power—since the majority party on the oversight committees can set committee agendas and issue subpoenas. But what Jordan was getting at is actually something core to the HFC experience: power doesn’t come from acts of Congress, it comes from political messaging.

“In the minority, you’re trying to craft a message and push back on all the crazy policies that the Democrats—or the left—are trying to do,” he said. “I think that’s the key element in this campaign . . . pointing out all the crazy positions they have, and we’re for the common-sense position.”

But if being in the minority may seem liberating, many Freedom Caucus members aren’t sticking around for it. Instead, they’re heading for the exits. So far, at least six members1—and four former members2 who’ve already left the group—are not seeking re-election. In addition, one member and one former member resigned during the 119th Congress.3 There are currently 32 HFC members at this moment, well below the high of 45 it had in 2022.

Asked whether they view this exodus as more a result of the group’s declining record of accomplishments or a happy graduation to better endeavors, the Freedom Caucus members I chatted with didn’t sound very chippy.

“I prefer to think of it as seeding out,” Biggs said. “People are going on to other ways to serve and go home. And I’m also a big believer that much more than ten years here is really not the ideal.”

“It is interesting that we have so many guys running for governor, attorney general, we got one guy running for Senate,” Crane told me. “It’s kinda cool to see as a new guy—you definitely feel like you’re losing a lot of talent and experience. So it’s kind of that next-man-up mentality.”

The Freedom Caucus will most likely spend at least the next two years—possibly longer—in obscurity. That may just be what they want. Or it may just be a just outcome for their behavior.

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The Hoax

The Los Angeles mayoral primary is moving to a runoff between the Democratic incumbent and a progressive challenger, and because a very-online conservative upstart candidate failed to make the cut, conservatives are once again claiming without evidence that the election was corrupted by fraud. President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, an online chorus of DMV-based political operatives, and many others across MAGA world seem incapable of imagining that Spencer Pratt, a technically nonpartisan but MAGA-coded reality TV heel, could lose to Democrats in a city in which Democrats regularly defeat Republicans by more than 30 points.

While exiting the Capitol Monday night, I caught up with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a conservative who’s represented Southern California off and on for the last quarter of a century. I asked him whether he bought into the theory that L.A. was rigging its election to make incumbent Mayor Karen Bass face a more difficult re-election fight against a liberal challenger than she would have had against Pratt.

“I mean, they kept counting until they won,” Issa said. “What’s new about that? We have a corrupt system. They mail ballots to people who are dead, people who have moved, and then they count them endlessly. The system is inherently flawed in California.”

“It doesn’t mean that the outcome would’ve been the same or different,” Issa added. “We won’t know that. But what we do know is that we’re the only state in the union that will still be counting—that we don’t have an election day, we have an election month.”

Issa’s comments are slippery. He repeated virtually every conspiratorial Republican talking point about fraudulent elections with the caveat that the outcome probably wouldn’t have changed if the state’s election system were set up differently. Perhaps he wants to keep relations decent with some folks in his state’s political establishment while not being totally ostracized from Trump land. Or perhaps he just knows there aren’t contingents of shy MAGA voters in Los Feliz or Silver Lake.

Outside the Capitol Monday night, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said that the president’s claims of a rigged election were both “disgraceful” and nothing new.

“This is just palpable falsehoods—lies—about California elections,” Schiff said. “[Trump] understands that, but he is still willing to denigrate the California election system to try to cast doubt on it, to try to inflame the public, maybe set the pretext to intervene in the midterms if the vote is not going his way.”

However, Schiff added that California needs to figure out a swifter method for counting ballots to instill confidence in its process and tamp down on the fraud conspiracies.

“Everyone understands how the California voting system works. We vote by mail,” Schiff said. “It takes a long time to count the ballots and yes, we can improve the speed and we should address that and address resources to improve how quickly we process the ballots. But there’s no evidence of the kind of fraud the Republicans [are claiming].”

Something tells me that nothing the state does will ever be enough to satisfy its critics on the right.

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Men of Respect

The United States Constitution prohibits titles of nobility for Americans. Still, some Yanks want their own coats of arms as a sort of cosplay.

Helen Lewis writes in the Atlantic:

Today, if you can find an ancestor who was “armigerous”—noble enough to bear arms—then you have an inherited right to their coat of arms. Otherwise, you can design your own, complete with chevrons, castles, and all the heraldic animals that you desire. Ingram said his heart “sinks a bit” when someone wants a lion: “There’s so many lions already.” He appreciates those who choose something unusual, such as a frog or a flamingo. A more traditional choice might be a mythical beast, such as a unicorn, a griffin, or an enfield—“sort of like a fox but with the legs of a chicken.”

The demand for arms is so high that scammy companies have sprung up online, claiming to award arms and even titles. “I went to several different vendors on the internet only to be let down in the process,” Harry Rossander, a retired Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant colonel in Rapid City, South Dakota, told me. He eventually ended up with a design of a bald eagle perched on a tower, registered with a college of heraldry in America.

Maybe it’s because my family came from the poorest province4 in one of the poorest regions of Italy, but I don’t think you should be rocking a coat of arms in the year of our Lord two-thousand and twenty-six. It’s embarrassing.

Read the whole article.

Ghost in the shell bill

The rapid, power grid–draining growth of the AI industry has led to a surprisingly intense popular backlash—one divorced from other criticisms of AI that focus on its plagiaristic regurgitating of anything that can be sucked into the machines’ “training.” The data centers’ power demands are great enough that they are contributing to increased energy costs for the Americans who live near them, and the prospect of widespread AI-driven job loss isn’t helping the industry much with its PR problem, either.

Few mainstream politicians seem overly concerned about these data centers and the way the industry building them is reshaping the U.S. economy, which some critics argue could be setting it up for a catastrophic bubble burst. But some lawmakers are keyed in, and they are introducing legislation to either promote AI or take significant steps to curb its growth. For those seeking to implement restrictions on the industry, it’s unclear whether their primary goal is to address the genuine concerns Americans have about the disruptive new technology, or to instead harness AI’s unpopularity to advance their preexisting populist policy goals.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has two bills right now that directly address artificial intelligence. The first, which he unveiled in March, would impose a moratorium on the development of new data centers for AI pending the adoption of safeguards for the industry “to ensure the safety of humanity.” The second, debuted in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, would have the federal government take a 50 percent ownership stake in AI companies. The federally expropriated stock would in turn create a sovereign wealth fund, a state-owned investment program to manage the United States’ surplus wealth and pass along some of the proceeds to the American people.

You may have noticed that these two proposals seem to run counter to one another: A moratorium on data center construction would result in an immediate reduction in the value of these companies, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, the primary purpose of a sovereign wealth fund—as with running any for-profit company—is to generate money. It’s not meant to be like the Postal Service, which Republicans often characterize as a money-losing business but in reality is an essential government service. The proposed moratorium would shut down the AI industry’s means of expansion and operation, crippling its financial growth. It makes no sense for the government to be taking partial ownership of a company it is simultaneously hindering. That would seem to be putting on hold its fiduciary duty to the taxpayer. When I asked Sanders how these two pieces of legislation would mesh together, he appeared a bit stumped—a rare state for the Vermont senator.

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The creep

Maine Democratic Senate primary candidate Graham Platner and Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton are different candidates dealing with different scandals. Paxton’s infidelity is not the same as Platner’s, nor is Paxton’s pattern of corruption and other moral shortcomings the same as Platner’s Nazi tattoo and history of racist comments online. I am not equating their wrongdoings, nor do I propose doing so.

But the scandal-infused coverage about each candidate has given rise to a similar debate in their respective parties. It’s a debate about fitness for office and whether character—that fickle quality that is separate from a candidate’s policies, but which can result in good or bad policymaking—should be a consideration at all in a time when voters are demanding wins at any cost.

I asked some senators from both parties, many of whom either jettisoned all principles after coming to Washington or came to power in the first place simply by not having any, whether Americans should demand more of their elected officials on the character front.

Yes, they all seemed to agree: Americans should hold politicians from the other party to a higher standard.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he’s “of course” backing Paxton.

“You know who his opponent is, don’t you?” Grassley asked me. “If you look at who the opponent is and what he believes about transgender and all that stuff, you’d have a whole different view of Paxton.”

Asked about both candidates, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) expressed support for Paxton but opposition to Platner, although not for character-related reasons, exactly.

“I’m gonna support the attorney general. On Mr. Platner, that’s something the Democrats—I can give you my opinion about Mr. Platner—I’m sure Jesus loves him, but everybody else thinks he’s an idiot.”

When I asked if he considers it a double standard that Republicans are judging Platner for character problems while skating over Paxton’s issues in that domain, Kennedy wouldn’t hear of it. “Well that’s your opinion” he replied, curiously treating my question as a statement of the facts instead.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), whom Paxton defeated in last week’s primary, told reporters he stands by his characterization of his triumphant opponent as a “crook.”

“I’ve said no, he’s not [fit for office],” Cornyn said. “But he won the race fair and square.” Cornyn has pledged to vote for the ticket in November—implying that Paxton will get his support.

Democrats I spoke with also tended to downplay the relative importance of character in today’s political environment. But they also did seem to feel a need to offer a lot more excuses for this.

I spoke with Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), a man who understands better than most the political risks that lawmakers take on when they embrace open corruption and immorality. Kim succeeded longtime Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) after a jury found the latter guilty of accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent.

When I asked for his thoughts on Platner’s situation, Kim said, “I’ll take a look where things stand, but we’re gonna fight everywhere we can.”

Asked if character is an important component in assessing a candidate, Kim said it is, but he added the caveat that policy is an equally significant part of the assessment.

“Look, I’m in the Senate by virtue of a corruption scandal,” he said. “There’s a reason I took on this race—my race—because I certainly have concerns about that. And character matters. It matters not just in terms of their personal behavior, it also depends on who they vote for for Supreme Court justices [and] in terms of what is ultimately our job, which is trying to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and whether or not, you know, people can be trusted.

“So, look,” he concluded, with a bit of a punt: “the voters will take all of that into account.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of Platner’s early and most high-profile backers, remains a Platner backer.

“I think it might be a good idea if we focused on the important issues facing the working families of Maine and this country,” Sanders told a gaggle of reporters on Monday. “My understanding is that Amy—Graham Platner’s wife, who I met—is working with her husband, loves her husband, feels that their marriage is working, and maybe as a nation we focus on issues more important than the Platner marriage.”

“Is he a saint?” Sanders said elsewhere of Platner. “I guess not. I don’t know too many saints here.”

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Selective moralizing has been around in politics as long as the profession has been practiced. The prominent Republicans who admonished Bill Clinton for his peccadilloes in the 1990s were hardly men of high character themselves. White evangelicals grew more supportive of Donald Trump the more his traditionally sinful behavior came to light. Many Democrats who admonished Trump for his character are now biting their tongue about Platner. That’s the way this stuff goes.

If control of Congress is the only goal you consider meaningful for this fall’s election, then the character issues these candidates have either don’t matter, or they are of only minor relative importance in the larger scope of things. And, as of right now, current polling rates Platner’s political prospects more highly than Paxton’s. But both have a real shot at a seat in the upper chamber.

But candidates like this are still a massive risk, and not just because we don’t know what is yet to come out about either. Just consider the recent spate of expulsions, resignations, and absences in this Congress alone. Very thin majorities are often just one scandal away from stopping regular business for an entire chamber.

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Incredible thoughts

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has a plan to make everyone’s lives a lot worse. He is proposing to pull customs agents out of airports in cities that flout federal immigration laws, which would result in a de facto ban on international flights to and from those destinations.

Mullin has repeatedly brought up the plan, both on television and reportedly in the middle of unrelated White House meetings.1 Despite one Fox News host’s claim the policy would be “a boon to red states,” other airports simply do not have the capacity to assume all the extra international flights. Besides, would, say, a family intent on visiting New York City from Europe simply accept that they need to fly into Dallas or Oklahoma City instead?

In truth, I have a hard time thinking of a dumber policy proposed by a member of any president’s cabinet since I started working in political journalism. So my question for the senators on the Commerce Committee’s aviation subcommittee was basically, “Is Mullin’s plan even possible?”

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who chairs the Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on aviation, told me that he hasn’t spoken about it with Mullin or anyone else in the administration.

“It’d certainly be a very complicated and messy circumstance,” Moran said. “I don’t know what our capacity could be in that circumstance.”

“Well, I understand the secretary’s frustration,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said. “I’m not sure that the flame is worth the candle. It would be terribly disruptive for American commerce, including international commerce. I know Secretary [Sean] Duffy has counseled against it.”

Kennedy added he would ask Mullin “more about it” when the DHS head testifies before the Senate this week.

The senators’ skepticism about Mullin’s harebrained plan is warranted. To put the plan into context, think of how this would affect just one part of the country: California. Sanctuary City San Francisco’s SFO can host around 120 international flights in a day from 50 different countries. Other international airports nearby belong to cities, like Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento, that would also likely be subject to Mullin’s customs staff pull, meaning they would not be able to receive the extra flights; theirs would also be forced to find new places to put down.2 Ultimately, finding a nearby international airport that isn’t in a sanctuary city would require crossing state lines and traveling more than 200 miles to Reno, Nevada, which currently receives passengers from just one international destination on flights that come in typically once a day, if at all. Receiving potentially hundreds of new international flights per day full of irate international travelers meaning to go elsewhere would complicate the lives of many innocent Nevadans who work at the airport.

“I don’t know why he keeps raising this,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) told me. “It would do so much damage to our country as a whole.”

But Kim isn’t brushing off the possibility of Mullin’s proposal the way some of his Republican colleagues have been.

“I mean, this administration has demonstrated that if they want to do things and use [them] for political retaliation, . . . they are capable of doing it,” he said.

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We like sportz

If you read this newsletter, you probably know ball. It turns out that there’s a further corollary to that proposition, which is that you’re probably also not running for office.

That’s because politicians—and Democrats, in particular—often flub when trying to discuss sports, something they typically do in a bid to reach elusive male voters. Even the ones who seem like they’d be sports-conversant have had problems; recall Gov. Tim Walz posting an embarrassing tweet about running “a mean pick 6.”

Nathaniel Frum writes in the Atlantic:

As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk. A popular meme mocks men for being content to sit and name obscure athletes to one another for hours. It’s popular because it isn’t far from the truth. The politically disengaged male voters whom Democrats are so desperate to reach aren’t at bars arguing about Medicare funding. They are arguing about a roughing-the-passer penalty. Bettors on Polymarket give Stephen A. Smith higher odds of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential primary than Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, and Ruben Gallego. Nothing gets attention like sports takes.

Political consultants often overthink things. Perhaps they should just force candidates to memorize the names and career stats of obscure wide receivers from the 2000s. Rattling off some of that material in the right context could do wonders for them at the ballot box.

Read the whole article.

Correction (June 2 2026 4:15 p.m. EDT): Because of an editing error, as originally published, this article described San Francisco as being in Southern California. It is not.

The Best of Both Worlds

Earlier this week, I put out an ask to Bulwark readers to share any direct communications they received from their members of Congress about the January 6th cop-beater compensation slush fund currently causing outrage and consternation on Capitol Hill. The constituent letters I reviewed show just how differently Republican lawmakers can sound when dealing one-on-one with constituents instead of addressing the public at large, when they know the world’s most prolific media consumer might be watching what they say.

For example, after the administration announced the “settlement”1 establishing the “anti-weaponization” slush fund, Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) expressed tepid skepticism and a desire to see more details, as did many of his similarly cautious and ambivalent Republican colleagues.

“I have, I guess, more questions than answers about this fund, in general, as to how it would be executed, how it would be put together. I mean, I think we’re also a little scant on detail. I do think it needs congressional oversight,” he said, according to Erie News Now.

“We have to have really tight scrutiny, a really high burden of proof as to how those monies are going to be distributed,” said Langworthy. “I don’t think this should be seen as some direct slush fund for one particular event. I mean, there’s obviously a lot of arguments about people that claim to be falsely imprisoned. Just because they were pardoned, doesn’t mean that they were falsely imprisoned. They were charged and convicted of crimes—and there were juries of their peers that did that. I just think that we need far more answers, and I think that there’s many of us asking our leadership to go get to the bottom of that.”

In a separate comment posted by Chataqua Today, Langworthy echoed the Trump administration’s line that the government had in the past employed “lawfare” against innocent people.

“People’s lives and livelihoods have been ruined by lawfare and, you know, excessive aggression by the government,” he said. “But, you know, the way that this came together with a settlement, I think we have a little ways to go.”

But in a letter to a constituent this week, Langworthy was more forthright in personally opposing the fund, writing that under no circumstances should taxpayer dollars be used to settle the president’s grievances.

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Keep Ya Head Up

President Donald Trump’s “settlement”1 with his own Department of Justice to establish a fund to disburse completely unaccountable payments to pardoned January 6th rioters and others who claim to have been unfairly investigated and prosecuted by the federal government has met significant opposition in Congress. Even Republican lawmakers have spoken out publicly against it. The situation has gotten bad enough that regular legislative business has gotten jammed up.

Intense intraparty disagreements over the slush fund derailed Republicans’ own plans to vote on a series of proposals for their upcoming reconciliation bill last week. During a conference lunch on Thursday in which acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sought to address lawmakers’ concerns, dozens of Republican senators spoke up—many more than usual—according to a source in the room. It seems as though their concerns were not addressed to their satisfaction: Lawmakers ultimately left town without finishing the week’s business.

“These people don’t deserve restitution. Many of them deserve to be in prison,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters Thursday. “But this is just stupid on stilts.”

“They need to speak up,” Tillis said of his Republican colleagues who’ve opposed the settlement in private. “I mean, this is beyond the pale. This is not good for my colleagues. There’s not one positive thing that could be spun out of this between now and November. This is bad policy, it’s bad timing, and it’s bad politics.”

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement.2 “Utterly stupid, morally wrong—Take your pick.”

In the House, where Republican opposition to the fund is weaker and more diffuse, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill that would ban the use of federal funds for Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund.

Fitzpatrick and Suozzi co-chair the Problem Solvers Caucus, the long-dormant bipartisan collective whose stated goal is, well, solving problems. And the government shoveling huge piles of taxpayer money into the beds of more than a thousand pardoned convicts' Dodge Ram 2500s might be just the sort of problem they are well positioned to solve.

“It’s really up to the Republicans to join with the Democrats. Everybody knows this is wrong,” Suozzi told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “That’s the purpose of the checks and balances in government, so that [when] one branch of government does something stupid or wrong, the other branch holds them accountable.”

While many share broader concerns about corruption and the precedent that would be set by the creation of such a fund, the primary sticking point about it on Capitol Hill is whether money will go to any of the hundreds of individuals convicted of assaulting police officers.

In response to a question about concerns that violent rioters would be eligible to receive money from the fund, Blanche told CNN, “People that hurt police get money all the time.”

The Fitzpatrick–Suozzi bill would effectively kill the president’s plan to compensate the rioters and criminals he pardoned hours after being sworn in for his second term. Unlike a number of popular pieces of legislation that have been brought up through the discharge petition process in defiance of House Speaker Mike Johnson over the course of this Congress, though, the anti-anti-weaponization fund bill may struggle to reach the threshold of the 218 votes required to override chamber leadership and force a vote.

While many of the successful discharge petitions have been direct rebukes of Trump’s policies and stated positions—notably the Massie–Khanna bill mandating the release of the Epstein files and the recent package of additional military aid to Ukraine, which will come up for a vote soon—those bills have also touched on key areas of interparty frustration. Johnson’s habit of slow-walking any legislation that isn’t a favor to Trump has inflamed tempers among both moderate3 Republican and Democratic members.

There is also the timing component. This tool can’t be used to force a vote overnight. Bills are not eligible for a discharge petition until they’ve sat in committee (in this case, the House Judiciary Committee) for at least thirty legislative days.4 At that point, a petition can start to circulate for signatures. Once the 218 threshold is reached, the curing process can further put off a vote by days or even weeks. But it’s not clear that a sufficient number of House Republicans are willing to go against the president on this for the Fitzpatrick–Suozzi bill to gain enough bipartisan support to reach the magic number of signatures

If Senate Republicans can manage to stake out a genuine policy position against the settlement fund, it’s possible they could actually dismantle it. Their similarly minded House colleagues may face an uphill battle to join them, but given the thinness of the GOP majority in the chamber and the party’s continuing attendance issues, anti-anti-weaponizers might find enough leverage to stop Trump’s slush fund before the trucks start backing into the Treasury Building to load up on the public’s money.

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So Many Tears

Libertarians tend to style themselves a bit differently from their peers across the rest of the political spectrum. (This predilection dovetails nicely with some of their other signature preferences.) In a political environment where the men of the two major parties can sometimes be distinguished only by the color of their ties, Libertarians are easy to pick out for how they often resemble (or literally are) magicians or Bay to Breakers runners.

In the lead-up to the most recent Libertarian National Convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an attempt was made to rein in some of the fringe party’s most adventurously dressed representatives. Predictably, this caused quite the uproar.

Alexander Nazaryan reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Live free or die, but would it kill you to wear a tie?

That was the essence of Ben Weir’s plea ahead of the biennial Libertarian National Convention in Grand Rapids, Mich.

In a May 15 post on X, Weir, 36, declared that he’d had it with the wacky costumes, which have long been a staple of political party conventions but seem particularly popular among do-what-thou-wilt libertarians.

No more using a boot for headwear, as one convention mainstay named Vermin Supreme did. No more see-through clothing to promote government transparency.

Weir, who is running for Merrimack County sheriff in New Hampshire and couldn’t attend the convention, wrote that he was calling on the party’s national committee to establish “a baseline professional dress standard for participation in official proceedings.” His proposal called for business casual attire, neat facial hair and closed-toe shoes.

Weir, who is a member of the party’s “emo caucus,”5 faced immediate backlash for his post from his fellow Libertarians.

“BOOT HATS FOR EVERYBODY !!!” declared Vermin Supreme, a perennial candidate for president often affiliated with the Libertarian party.

Melissa Wong, the chairwoman of the Montana Libertarian party, joked, “If we could just get them to bathe, wear pants, and cover their toe fungus with shoes I’d be content.”

Some of the reactions were more serious. Ray Walden, the acting chairman of the Libertarian Party of Illinois, replied to Weir’s post, “You hate freedom of speech my dude.”

“Fuck you, I’m wearing band merch,” responded Justin O’Donnell, a former Libertarian candidate for Senate in New Hampshire.

Bottom line: Libertarians don’t like being told what to do, even if what they’re being told to do is in their best interest. Join me in wondering if this example of people failing to act in their best interest could have wider-ranging political and economic implications.

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Only God Can Judge Me

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on Sunday. Titled Magnifica Humanitas, the document called upon the developers of artificial intelligence to put aside their obsession with profit for the sake of the “common good” and encouraged them to “remain human.”

Gerard O’Connell writes in America:

He recalls that the Tower of Babel was “a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.” But the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, described in the Book of Nehemiah, “shows how the city is reborn…through the shared responsibility of all. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.”

Pope Leo sees humanity today at a historic crossroads, symbolized by those two images, and writes, “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible.”

“Yet,” he writes, “every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world,” and “we must ask God for the wisdom to interpret the great trends of our time, particularly technological advances.”

He emphasizes that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” saying that it “has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity.” At the same time, he adds, “each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good.”

Read the whole piece. If you have the time, have a look at Leo’s entire 42,000-word encyclical.

Fortune Teller

Donald J. Trump has used his position as president of the United States of America to enrich himself in a variety of ways. From accepting luxurious gifts and suing his own government for billions of dollars to pooling revenues from the sale of seized Venezuelan oil in Qatari bank accounts and demanding payments from other countries to join a private “board of peace” organization he controls unilaterally, the president has shown that when it comes to the hustle, he’s never stopped hustling. But alongside these grand tactics of malfeasance, the president has also found time to ply more relatable styles of corruption. For instance, he’s bought and sold staggering volumes of stock in companies whose fortunes he’s had a hand in elevating or diminishing.

In the Office of Government Ethics’s recent disclosure, Trump conducted more than 3,600 trades with a combined value of up to $750 million during just the first three months of 2026. His purchases and sales included the stocks and bonds of top corporations, small ones, and companies the administration has directly promoted through policy and public statements. He did brisk business in the technology, banking, and entertainment sectors.

Filling in as press secretary on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters “the president doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his Robinhood account buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd.” True enough—someone (or a team of people) is obviously making the trades for him. But they’re still his transactions being conducted in his name using his money. The whole thing reeks of the same unethical behavior that earned Congress its reputation for corruption over the years.

These types of trades, which are at best unethical and at worst horribly corrupt, are hardly new in Washington. Members of Congress frequently buy and sell stakes in companies under the direct purview of their respective committees. Their transactions sometimes signal that a company is set to receive special treatment of some kind—through a contract or grant, perhaps, or some form of regulatory relief. And barring that, these transactions at least suggest the policymaker knows which way the wind is blowing for the company or its industry, and for reasons that may not be visible to the public.

But Trump’s case is different. And it’s not just because of the brazenness of his approach but the sheer volume of his trading.

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Monsters, Inc.

Paid partnerships are a ubiquitous feature of video and photo–forward social media like Instagram and TikTok. Some of the posts are obvious, and they may even include tags like #ad or #sponcon (“sponsored content”) to make clear that the creator is being remunerated for their breathlessly enthusiastic opinion. But sometimes the commercial backing is not so obvious, and this sort of gray-zone #sponcon goes beyond dog food, jeans, and unnecessary supplements. It’s also getting made for political candidates.

Campaigns are starting to more heavily rely on partnerships with social media influencers to generate interest in their candidates and causes through paid endorsements and custom-ordered content—and the material is very often being served up with no disclosure informing the viewer that what they’re viewing is actually an advertisement.

In the California gubernatorial race, billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer has reportedly paid influencers $10 per post in support of his campaign; his failure to explain to his ad-hoc social media brigade that they need to disclose the payments in the sponsored posts likely resulted in numerous violations of a state law requiring such disclosures. (Team Steyer’s offer has since changed to a $1,000/month partnership, with the disclaimer requirement included in the new listing.) In addition, a California elections watchdog is probing his campaign for an “interview” conducted by a TikTok influencer that came with an undisclosed $10,000 honorarium.

Beyond the ethical concerns about proper disclosure, enlisting influencers carries the risk that they might turn on the campaign that recruited them, switching allegiances to rivals offering more money or even attempting to extort candidates to pony up more cash. As Kamala Harris’s 2024 digital director Rob Flaherty wrote in The Bulwark last week in his personal postmortem for the former VP’s failed presidential campaign:

There are a number of tactics that have become standard practice on the right that are probably going to move over to the left—such as paying creators under the table through LLCs for consulting contracts or otherwise. Each campaign in a 2028 primary is going to need a plan for this sort of thing. Does the money flow? If so, where from? You will encounter (as we did in 2024) creators who say something like ‘Pay me $5,000 or I’ll endorse your opponent’—what’s your plan for that?

I asked some senators of both parties whether they would try out this new approach to political advertising, if they believe it’s ethical to do so, and whether they would entertain the idea of contracting with a potentially mercurial and vengeful content creator.

“I’m very familiar with that. That’s a very common thing,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told me when I mentioned Flaherty’s claim that influencers often seemed willing to extort campaigns for higher fees. “I would also say that used to happen offline, too.”

“There’s definitely a whole world there [in which] you can interact with them, and if you choose not to form a business relationship, you can have the political equivalent of a review bomb,” Schatz added.

Schatz said that, like many policy areas, the United States’ impotent enforcement mechanisms are to blame.

“I think if we had a good Federal Election Commission—or even a functioning one—then we could do something about that,” he said.

When I asked Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) about all this, he at first expressed confusion about whether these influencer payments would need to be disclosed.1 When I noted there are loopholes to legal requirements for #sponcon diclosure—for instance, paying social media partners through consultancies or LLCs, as Flaherty alluded to—Scott said dryly, “I think there’s always a risk in any check you write.”

Members of a free society make important decisions about money, political participation, and more on the basis of their best judgment of information they get through the news, and most of us nowadays consume news through our phones. Knowing whether a piece of content you’re consuming is an ad or not is crucially important for assessing its trustworthiness, which is why it helps none of us for sponsored content to go undisclosed. Unfortunately, the key decisionmaking factors are different for the candidates themselves: They can afford to add another risk to their campaigns if doing so will mean they can pull in a bit more attention during a high-stakes campaign, especially if lax enforcement nullifies the risk.

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Toy Story

Artificial intelligence is the hottest new tool in the world of political campaigns. In federal and local elections, campaigns are using it to give voters the impression of things hitherto unseen—and in some cases, things that are simply unreal.

Chief among AI’s political power users is the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans. In the past year, the NRSC has used AI to reconstruct reported quotes from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to give the misimpression he said them at a press conference, created fake direct-to-camera testimonials from Texas Senate candidate James Talarico using a mix of his tweets and totally made-up self-congratulations, and depicted Maine Governor Janet Mills in a bizarre 1980s QVC–esque commercial where she sells gender-transitioning treatments to minors, or something.

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, the officially nonpartisan but conservative-leaning Spencer Pratt has leaned heavily on AI in his campaign ads. Pratt’s fans have generated completely bonkers cinematic ads depicting his opponent, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, as the Joker presiding over a burning city, and spun up videos of him fighting her with a lightsaber against the backdrop of (again) a burning city.

To my surprise, when I asked about this issue around the halls of the U.S. Senate Monday evening, I found quite a bit of bipartisan enthusiasm for restricting the use of AI in campaign ads, whether through required watermarking on videos and images or by banning it from political advertising altogether.

“We should have broader restrictions on AI-produced content,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I mean, watermark and identify all of it, and ban it in politics.”

“Oh heavens yes,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) told me in response to a question about enforcing AI use in campaign materials. “Because now they’ve got to where the voice is synced up so perfectly with the AI image that you can’t tell that it’s not an AI image. You cannot tell. It should have to be disclosed.”

In the case of Pratt’s mayoral bid, in which he relies on fan-made videos he then promotes on his official channels, Lummis was less sure-footed.

“Well, I’ve never even thought about that,” she said. “I think if it’s campaign-related, it all needs to be disclosed.”

At the moment, there is one bill in the Senate to restrict AI use in campaigns, authored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). The Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act aims to prohibit “materially deceptive audio or visual media that is generated by artificial intelligence” from being used in federal races.2

The bill has just four additional cosponsors, two Republicans and two Democrats. Unfortunately, as in most cases involving election enforcement or emerging technologies (both of which feature here), bipartisan support doesn’t necessarily translate into political will.

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The Aristocats

When I can, I like to stop by estate sales. Sometimes my goal is to get a glimpse into the life of a corrupt former congresswoman; other times, I’m just after interesting and well-loved clothing items, jewelry, and knick-knacks, which can be had at estate sales for much cheaper prices than you’d ever find shopping new.

Then, too, the things left behind by those who’ve lived a full life are often of much greater value—materially and otherwise—than some fresh find from a department store. While sorting through a recently departed relative’s possessions to help organize a sale can be emotionally trying, there can be solace in knowing that someone will care for the items the way they did.

In the case of legendary fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, that someone might be his pet cat, Choupette.

As Chris Heath writes in the Atlantic:

Karl Lagerfeld, the great German fashion designer, lived in a surreal kind of grandeur. The creative director of both Chanel and Fendi, he owned apartments in Paris, Rome, and the Côte d’Azur, as well as villas in Biarritz and his native Hamburg; enormous collections of Art Deco furniture, antique jewelry, and couture garments; a personal library of some 300,000 books, by his own estimation; paintings and sculptures by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and John Baldessari; three Rolls-Royces; a curious assemblage of 509 iPods; and hundreds of pairs of his trademark wraparound sunglasses and fingerless biker gloves. According to a conversation that his biographer, William Middleton, had with the Parisian florist Lachaume, his annual flower budget appears to have been about 1.5 million euros. Lagerfeld never married or had children, and when he died of cancer, in 2019, the press quickly began to speculate about the immense fortune he’d supposedly left behind, which a number of outlets, including Bloomberg, Forbes, and The Guardian, ballparked at more than $200 million. Speculation also swirled about where these riches would end up.

More than seven years later, here is what is known for certain about the details of Lagerfeld’s will and estate: nothing. (Under French law, such matters are not made public.) But plenty has been rumored. Various figures close to Lagerfeld have been suggested as beneficiaries, including several male models and fashion executives, his bodyguard, his housekeeper, and the princess of Monaco. Even so, from the start, one improbable name has stood out: Choupette, Lagerfeld’s blue-cream Birman cat. . . .

The swirl of scuttlebutt about other beneficiaries, totals, tax liabilities, and relative shares has continued ever since, and there are consistent reports that, even now, no one has received any money. Nonetheless, it has been printed as established fact that, separate from his will, Lagerfeld had arranged a sizable sum, generally said to be about $1.5 million (though sometimes as much as $4 million), to ensure that Choupette would live on in the style to which she had become accustomed. She was, it was sometimes claimed, the richest cat in the world.

I understand wanting someone to care for your pets after you’ve departed this world. But there’s also only so much that a cat needs. Then again, I’m not Karl Lagerfeld.

Read the whole story.

Valar Dohaeris

Each House speakership ends up having its own unique character—forged through a combination of successes and failures. Nancy Pelosi, for example, is remembered for ruling her majority with an iron fist; she also regularly defeated internal party challenges and cleared the pathway for landmark legislation like the Affordable Care Act. Paul Ryan and John Boehner passed some substantial bills, too, and both departed Congress for lucrative second acts. Kevin McCarthy was not so lucky. He failed to quell a rebellion that resulted in his tarring and feathering (not literally) on the House floor. He has not found his way into the sort of plum position his predecessors have enjoyed since their speakerships ended.

Mike Johnson’s speakership is somewhat different from all these. His overriding project has been to cede whatever power and decision-making he can to the White House, and this has, in turn, given shape to an unusual legacy, one defined by impotence.

In recent months there has been a strange spirit of bipartisanship among frustrated House members, who have relied on the previously rare tactic of discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson. The latest such bill directly pushes back on the Donald Trump administration in a policy area the MAGA movement finds particularly divisive: aid to Ukraine.

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The holiday

President Donald Trump is floating a national gas-tax holiday to give some relief from the brutal prices at the pump he has helped to keep high through his war with Iran. Trump rarely credits former President Joe Biden for anything, so it’s no surprise that he has refused to acknowledge that his predecessor floated a similar idea in response to similarly war-fueled price pressures. Biden didn’t get credit for it back then, either: Democrats and Republicans alike panned the proposal. But this time around, for some reason, Senate Republicans have really taken a shine to it.

“Well, I know that [Trump] is working multiple avenues to find ways to lower the price of gas. The best answer is to bring the Iran conflict to an end and open up the Strait of Hormuz,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) told me. “Then we’ll see oil prices drop and gas prices drop. I know the president is suggesting also a possible gas holiday. I think that ought to be an option on the table.”

When I asked if he liked the concept of a gas-tax holiday when Biden was president, Daines said, “If we can find ways to reduce taxes, that’s not a bad short-term option.”

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But Daines did not support Biden’s plan in 2022. Instead, he called that earlier proposal “more gimmicks and bandaid solutions to his manufactured energy crisis.”

The most blatant reversal came from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who called the Biden plan “treacherous” in a 2022 Fox News interview.

“We still have to pay for the upkeep and the maintenance of our interstate transportation network,” Lee said at the time.

But when faced with an open-ended proposal of the same policy under Trump, Lee decided it was worth it to rework it—to put his thing down, flip it, and reverse it:

Some Republicans I spoke to did oppose the plan right away on Monday, citing the critical tax revenue that comes from the gasoline tax, as well as the administration’s ability to lower prices through other means.

“We don’t have a demand problem, we got a supply problem, and I think the president can take a lap on that one by saying what he has done to increase discovery, and getting as much energy out of the ground as he can,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told me.

“I would not [support a gas-tax holiday] right now,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) told reporters. “We obviously have to watch the debt and deficit as well as a country. Those are also things we got to be able to take care of.”

Senate Republicans are in a bind once again. While they historically have opposed taxes of any kind, they also feel it necessary to oppose tax relief when it comes from Democratic presidents. Combine those psychological pressures with their ultimate political duty—never publicly disagree with Trump—and you can easily see why your elected officials end up in such extraordinary contortions on TV.

All the king’s men

The Senate returned to Washington on Monday, and they got right to work solemnly deliberating over several agenda items. Among the most important is deciding whether to agree to provide $1 billion in taxpayer funding for “security” enhancements for the new White House ballroom, which is currently being built over the ruins of the former East Wing.

Despite the bill text having been public for a week, most Republicans weren’t keen on discussing it.

“I have not seen the final proposal on that,” Lankford told me. “I’ve heard numbers thrown around, but I have yet to see, ‘Here’s an actual proposal. Here’s what’s needed.’ So we’ll see what that is.”1

Apart from Lankford, quite a few had seen the bill slotted for Republicans’ next reconciliation package, which would allow them to pass it without Democratic votes as long as the parliamentarian gives each item a green light.

“My understanding is it’s supposed to be paid for by private donations,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters in her classic noncommital style. “That’s what the president has said. We’re going to be hearing from the head of the Secret Service on what the enhanced security needs for the White House and others are in this heightened environment of political violence.”

“I think most of our members, as they are getting briefed on what the money’s going to be used for, are probably going to be in a good place,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Monday. “I think everybody has an understanding of what [the $1 billion is] going to be used for. As I said earlier, it’s to secure the building. And not just the ballroom—the entire East Wing.”

“There’s a lot of subterranean things that are classified that are part of the project,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) told me. “It’s not for the ballroom. The ballroom just happens to sit on top of that.”

When I noted that the bill specifically aims to allocate money for the East Wing Modernization Project, which the National Capital Planning Commission describes as the establishment of “a permanent, secure event space that provides increased capacity for official state functions,” otherwise known as a ballroom, Moreno briskly walked away and said, “No,” adding, “No, no, no, no.”

Providing such a large sum of taxpayer money for the ballroom, whether for aesthetic purposes or not, forces each senator to go on the record with their support for or opposition to the unpopular project. Vulnerable incumbents in battleground states don’t get a special exemption. But the parliamentarian could always bail them out by not allowing the ballroom security-boost money to be included in the final package.

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Contagion

Measles is on the rise again in the United States, which means that more American children are dying needlessly, and their schools are becoming less safe. These ghastly developments are happening thanks to a surge in anti-vaccine beliefs, something for which the secretary of health and human services—a conspiracy theorist who happily engages vaccine doubters, deniers, and denigrators—bears a large measure of responsibility.

Things never had to be this way, a fact that registers with real pain for those who remember what life was like before we had the life-saving inoculation. Fran Moreland Johns recounts in the Atlantic the pride and hope he and other Americans felt when the measles vaccine finally became a reality:

It was a time of singular, optimistic patriotism. No one thought the road ahead would be easy; everyone believed that peace and shared prosperity were possible. For nearly a century, I’ve been privileged to watch the fits, starts, and swings of that optimism: the forward leaps of science and technology, the backward falls into tragic wars, the sidesteps into misguided ideologies. But the collective effort behind those hot cross buns and front-porch flags? That is still who we are, if we choose to be.

Read the whole piece.

The Grassley is always greener

When President Donald Trump first floated his plan to build a White House ballroom, which turned out to require a complete demolition of the East Wing, he did so while promising that the new building would go up at no cost to the taxpayer. Putting aside the ethical problems entailed by allowing wealthy CEOs and corporations to donate undisclosed amounts to fund special government projects at the behest of the administration, Trump’s promise was a joke.

Senate Republicans now want to appropriate $1 billion in taxpayer funds for the project, which they are attempting to do by tucking the provision into a new proposal to spend even more money on the president’s mass deportation effort.

The bill, which Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released Monday night, notes that the $1 billion is meant “for the purposes of security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House Compound to support enhancements by the United States Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.”

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Oil of oy vey

Rising gas prices often provide a convenient index for dissatisfaction with the current president, even if the increases have little to do with the administration’s policies.1 When a war breaks out in major oil- and gas-producing regions, prices go up. When gas prices rise, so do the anxieties of political candidates who belong to the party in power. And this year, that includes many Republicans whose campaigns are crucial to maintaining a GOP Senate majority.

At the onset of the Trump administration’s unilateral military action (war) against Iran, gas prices in the United States skyrocketed, which immediately spooked Republicans concerned with holding on to their Senate majority. In the two months since the opening of hostilities, prices have fluctuated in some states while continuing to climb in others, with those around the Great Lakes seeing particularly challenging increases.

“We’re gonna be fine, we got plenty of oil,” Mike Rogers, a Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan, said in March. “You’ll get your oil, because we’re going to pump our oil right here in America, and we got plenty.”

Six weeks later, though, GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan reported gas prices leaping upward in several middle-American states. In Rogers’s Michigan, they went up 88 cents. In Ohio, they climbed 94 cents. In Wisconsin, 33 cents. And in Indiana, prices grew by a calamitous dollar and nine cents.2

On Thursday, Rogers addressed the issue once again. When Newsmax host Ed Henry asked the candidate, “Are you nervous . . . about these stubbornly high gas prices?” Rogers finally acknowledged the reality of higher costs at the pump:

Listen, high prices of anything hurt people in Michigan. . . . Iran is about stopping their nuclear program, stopping their ballistic missile program so they can’t hurt others. I think most Americans are there. We all want this to come to a quick end—I think including the president of the United States. The president’s also taking really direct actions to try to bring those prices down and I support those actions to bring those prices down. I’ll tell you this, Ed. I get around and talk to voters all around this state. The main thing about affordability is they do not trust Democrats.

Well, Rogers sure doesn’t trust Democrats on affordability, at least. That might be why he framed the situation so differently when gas prices surged to four dollars per gallon during the Joe Biden administration.

“I’m not sure we can survive $3.99 a gallon going forward,” Rogers said in a 2024 video campaigning against Democrat Elissa Slotkin. “Listen, the [Democratic] agenda moving forward on gas prices is only gonna make that worse. We must get America back on track.”

The national average price per gallon now sits at just under $4.50 per gallon, according to AAA. In Rogers’s Michigan, it’s over $4.80 per gallon.

Sen. John Cornyn, who is hanging by a thread in the Republican primary for his long-held Texas Senate seat, told me in March that on the subject of higher fuel prices, “we gotta compare that to the threat of a nuclear Iran.” Within that frame of reference, he seemed untroubled by his constituents’ pain at the pump: “I would say it’s a small price to pay to avoid a nuclear weapon in the hands of the number-one state sponsor of terrorism.”

However, Cornyn quickly acknowledged that Republicans aren’t doing a very good job of helping everyone else see things the way they do.

“I think we have to do a better job of explaining it,” he said. “But I think if the American people understood, they would certainly agree that a nuclear Iran is a terrible idea.”

In Ohio, where gas prices are hovering above $4.80 per gallon, Republican Sen. Jon Husted has been largely silent on the issue. His Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, has been slamming him over his reticence.

“It’s clear this war is hurting people financially and in other ways. There’s no end in sight. [Republicans] have no idea how to end this war. They didn’t plan anything,” Brown said at a campaign event last week. “Husted hasn’t raised one voice against this war or any idea about how to end it.”

Another battleground-state Republican who has been avoiding the subject is Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). While Collins said in mid-March that she hoped the Iran war effort would be “both brief and successful,” her stock portfolio has benefited from the protracted engagement: It includes oil and natural gas investments that are booming thanks to the price increases. Collins owns stock in ConocoPhillips, which has grown substantially since late February, when Trump started the war.

The two House Republicans vying for a chance to face off against incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) in Georgia’s Senate race have been vocal in their support of the Iran war while staying relatively quiet on the increased price of gas.

Rep. Mike Collins touted lowering gas prices two months ago, but since then has avoided the issue. Nevertheless, Collins supports the war effort.

Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) briefly addressed the high gas prices in a Fox Business interview on Friday, shifting blame toward Democrats and asking viewers to remember previous fluctuations.

“He’s made us more prosperous through the Working Families Tax Cut Act3 that has put more money in people’s pockets,” Carter said of Trump. “Now, yes, we’ve seen some gas-price fluctuation. Gas prices will go back down. Remember: High gas prices are the work of the Democrats. Remember 2022: five and six dollars a gallon. That was the Democratic leadership that led to those high gas prices. But gas prices are gonna come back down.”

Georgia residents can get gas for about a dollar cheaper per gallon than folks can around the Great Lakes. Average prices in the Peach State are sitting at $3.91 as of this morning.

In a party that demands complete loyalty to the president, members’ silence on a given issue is often a key indicator of stress. That very few have even attempted to discuss high gas prices suggests the matter is top of mind for them amid the midterm election cycle.

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Small-dollar donors

In Florida’s 19th Congressional District, the Republican primary for the open House seat is attracting a very particular type of candidate: carpetbagging criminal ex-congressmen whose last names start with a “C.”

Former Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina have both relocated to DeSantisland in a bid to fill the vacancy left by Byron Donalds, who is campaigning for governor. Unfortunately for both candidates, there isn’t much enthusiasm for their campaigns: The primary donor to each campaign is the candidate himself, and by a massive margin.

Cawthorn donated $500,000 of his own money to his race in October. He’s also received smaller donations from a handful of other contributors, including right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck, bringing Cawthorn’s total donations up to almost $520,000. According to the FEC, Collins has not raised any outside funds at all, but he has given his own campaign more than $900,000, including an in-kind donation of approximately $8,000 worth of his autobiography, My Remarkable Life: The First Sitting Member of Congress to Endorse Donald J. Trump for President. Beyond Collins and Cawthorn, Sun Broadcasting President Jim Schwartzel—who is actually from Florida and does not have a criminal record—is also dealing himself into the race: He donated over a million dollars to his own 19th-district campaign last year.

As mentioned in the subtitle of his book, Collins famously endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 before any other elected federal official. He was later sent to prison for insider trading before catching a pardon from Trump, who has shown similar beneficence to many other criminal members of Congress. Cawthorn pleaded guilty to attempting to bring a handgun through airport security. He did not receive prison time as part of his sentence, and Trump has not indicated that he intends to pardon him again.

Collins’s and Cawthorn’s fundraising totals seem even weaker when set alongside the donations pile of Catalina Lauf, who served as a Commerce Department adviser during Trump’s first term. Lauf has raised more than $900,000 from a diverse pool of large- and small-dollar donors, which is more in line with traditional campaign behavior.

There isn’t polling on how either of the criminal carpetbaggers are expected to perform in the state’s August primary, but both campaigns have paid for internal polling services. The 19th district remains largely unchanged following Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signing of Florida’s new congressional map, so we’ll get to see how all the candidates ride this one out. How wonderful for all of us.

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The many-faced god

My Bulwark colleague Jared Poland ventured to D.C.’s hottest club (the U.S. Capitol Building) to ask members of Congress how they felt about Trump putting his face on U.S. passports to “celebrate” America’s 250th birthday, along with the follow-up question of what the president should add his mug (shot) to next.

Give the video a watch, and please let us know in the comments if you have ideas for further TMZ-style questions we can pose to lawmakers.

SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE MIDTERMS, seats in the House of Representatives are already, in effect, changing hands. It’s not happening in primaries or special elections. It’s happening in partisan redistricting.

Republicans started the latest round of gerrymandering last year. They grabbed five seats in Texas, one more in Missouri, and another in North Carolina. Then came the Democratic counterattacks, taking five districts in California in November and another four in Virginia last week.

This week, the GOP struck back, making a move for four more seats in Florida. And on Wednesday, in a ruling that upended the previous rules about factoring race into congressional maps, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to redistricting in other states. Seven states could, in theory, redraw their maps in time for this year’s election. Even if only one or two seize the chance—and Louisiana’s governor announced on Wednesday that he would—Republicans will benefit.

It’s dizzying. But even more dizzying are the somersaults politicians are turning as they try to justify these maneuvers. Without apparent shame over their inconsistency, they gyrate from defending their own gerrymanders to condemning the other party’s.

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GERRYMANDERING HAS ALWAYS BEEN CREATIVE. You sit down with maps and voter data and figure out how to draw lines so that the other party’s voters get packed into a few congressional districts. Meanwhile, you parcel out your party’s voters to form majorities in all the other districts. Some of the resulting shapes—Texas 35, New York 24, and Illinois 13, for example—are artistic masterpieces.

Last year, Donald Trump introduced an innovation: mid-decade redistricting. Politicians used to agree that redistricting was reserved for the beginning of each decade, after the congressional reapportionment process that follows each census. But Trump decided that this rule, like others, didn’t apply to him. He prodded Republicans in Texas and other red states to change their maps to give the GOP more seats. Eventually, through ballot measures, Democrats in blue states responded in kind.

Why did Trump launch this war? Because, thanks to Republican control of the Texas legislature and governorship, he could. “We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” he told CNBC last August.

But the president wanted a grievance to justify his theft. So, a few seconds later, he concocted a moral argument. “I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas,” he said. “And we are entitled to five more seats.”

This pitch—We won the state, so we earned the seats—is a standard excuse for gerrymandering. But the math doesn’t add up. In 2024, Trump won 56 percent of the vote in Texas. At that time, the state’s congressional map gave Republicans 25 of its 38 seats. That’s 66 percent. Under the new Texas gerrymander, Republicans are expected to get 30 of the state’s 38 seats. That’s 79 percent. Trump is claiming that his vote share of 56 percent entitles his party to nearly 80 percent of the seats.

When Virginia struck back last week, passing a referendum that would give Democrats 10 of its 11 seats, Trump suddenly discovered proportionality. On Truth Social, he objected that the ratio was unfair. He’s right. But the point of the Virginia referendum was to counter the unfair ratio in Texas.

Normally, Trump complains that activist judges are blocking his executive orders. But since the Virginia referendum, he has learned the wisdom of judicial intervention. “The language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive,” he protested in his post. “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

IT’S EASY TO LAUGH at Trump’s hypocrisy. But Republican leaders in the House are just as brazen. Last July on Fox News, Brian Kilmeade asked House Speaker Mike Johnson about the GOP’s redistricting scheme in Texas. “Look, we have to fight for every inch of ground in the country,” Johnson argued. “I’m convinced the red states will, and we will probably have a few more seats out of that. And of course, that’s good news for me.”

But when the news isn’t good for Johnson, he develops scruples. Last week, when Democrats retaliated in Virginia, he decided that fighting for every inch of ground was ruthless and indecent. “It’s a hyperpartisan gerrymandering boondoggle,” he fumed.

Johnson, like Trump, abandoned his usual rhetoric about judicial restraint and urged the courts to step in. “We are confident and calling upon the Virginia Supreme Court to do the obvious and right result, and that is to strike this thing down,” he said.

When red states gerrymander, House Republican leaders profess innocence. Usually, they decline to comment, or they defend the state’s authority to draw maps as it sees fit. But when blue states gerrymander, they cry foul.

In August, when House Majority Whip Tom Emmer was asked about the GOP’s move in Texas, he replied, “I’ll leave that to Gov. [Greg] Abbott and Texans to determine what they want to do.” Emmer said whatever decision the Texas leaders made was “their right.”

But when Virginia responded by letting its voters make the decision—not just the governor and his allies in the legislature, as Texas had done—Emmer denounced the Virginia ballot question as “very dishonest.” He joined Trump and Johnson in calling for “some type of court involvement that corrects a very unjust result.”

Richard Hudson, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, applies the same double standard. In August, he said of the Texas maneuver, “It’s up to the states. I mean, I have nothing to do with it.” But last week, Hudson called Virginia’s referendum an “embarrassment” and urged the Virginia Supreme Court to nullify it as “a clear violation of the Constitution.”

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SOME REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS in red states worry that by spreading GOP voters across more districts, gerrymandering might thin their margins and cost them their seats. But others are gung-ho. In August, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) applauded Trump for demanding “a better map” to increase Republican dominance in Texas. “Frankly, we could probably be even more aggressive,” said Roy.

Last week on Fox News, Roy gloated again. “We took matters in our hands to say that Texas, a very solidly Republican state, should be sending more Republican representatives to Washington,” he explained. “That’s a reasonable thing for Texas to do.”

But in his next breath, Roy accused Virginia of letting “a million Karens in Arlington and Alexandria represent two-thirds of the commonwealth.” The idea that a state’s dominant party should increase its representation in Washington—which Roy was happy to promote in Texas—suddenly seemed less vital than ensuring adequate representation for the minority party.

Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican who’s in line to become the state’s next governor, smiled in August when he was asked about the power grab in Texas. He declined to comment, claiming, “I do not engage in redistricting conversations.”

But last Thursday, Donalds decried the Virginia referendum. “Democrats have a history of doing these radical gerrymanders just to make sure that they have seats and they preserve power,” he huffed.

Then, on Friday, Donalds turned around and endorsed the GOP’s redistricting scheme in Florida. “I support the governor and what he’s going to try to accomplish,” said Donalds. “We want to make sure that the ethos of our state is being reflected in our districts.”

Speaker Johnson executed the same pirouette. Last Wednesday, even as he lambasted Virginia for its gamesmanship, he welcomed the gerrymandering in Florida. “Florida has the right and the intention to do it,” he declared. “And my view is that they should.”

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REPUBLICANS AREN’T ALONE in these contortions. Democrats often do the same thing, as their GOP colleagues are quick to point out.

On Tuesday, Rep. Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, was asked about the new proposed map in her state. “Democrats are already calling this gerrymandering,” a Newsmax anchor told Cammack. “How do you respond to those attacks, especially when you compare it to what just happened in Virginia?”

Cammack laughed. “The cognitive dissonance with that group is incredible,” she replied.

She was speaking, of course, about the other party.

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CHIP ROY, THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN running for attorney general of Texas, is at it again. When we last heard from Roy, he was pushing legislation that would persecute Muslims in the name of fending off sharia. Now he’s using the same tactics to go after socialists. Roy has introduced legislation that would, in effect, allow any immigrant who advocates economic equality—even immigrants who have become citizens—to be kicked out of the country.

On Monday, in a press release announcing the bill, Roy declared that he was “targeting the Red-Green Alliance.” That’s his term for a putative conspiracy between Muslims and Marxists. To spell out his point, literally, he has titled his bill the “Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists (MAMDANI) Act of 2026”—a dig at Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim, socialist mayor of New York City.

Roy is late to the MAMDANI game. Last July, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) introduced the “Measuring Adverse Market Disruption And National Impact Act,” aimed at Mamdani’s proposal to create city-run grocery stores. In November, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) filed the “Moving American Money Distant from Anti-National Interests Act,” which would have barred federal funds from going to New York City during Mamdani’s term.

But what Roy lacks in originality, he makes up for in chutzpah. His bill is a frontal assault on political freedom. It would authorize a purge of progressive citizens from the United States.

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CURRENT U.S. LAW prohibits the admission of “any immigrant who is or has been a member of or affiliated with the Communist or any other totalitarian party.” Roy’s bill would change that phrase to include anyone who has been affiliated with “a socialist party.”

The bill would also deny admission to anyone who has “advocated for, or who is or was affiliated with, any organization that advocates or advocated for the economic, international, or governmental doctrines of socialism. . . .”

That last clause is significant. Current law focuses on communism as a political ideology. It bars the admission of people who want to overthrow our government. Roy would add an exclusion for people who advocate “economic” socialism, even if they don’t support “governmental” socialism. His language would prohibit the immigration of a democratic socialist such as Mamdani or Bernie Sanders.

In fact, you don’t have to call yourself a socialist. Under this bill, you can be denied entry to the United States just for advocating economic equality.

The bill defines “socialism” to include any movement in which “political power is sought or used, through violent or other means,” to “restructure or advocate the restructuring of economic and social relations to reduce class distinctions.”

The phrase “other means,” in this context, clearly refers to nonviolent means. That pretty much covers anyone who peacefully advocates reducing the gap between rich and poor.

Furthermore, the bill explicitly defines “socialist party” to include the Democratic Socialists of America and any of its branches or affiliates. Among the DSA’s members are many current officeholders, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

THESE PROHIBITIONS ON SOCIALIST ADVOCACY don’t apply just to prospective immigrants. Under the bill, they’re also grounds to expel people from the United States.

Current law lists several categories of “deportable aliens” who “shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed” from the country. Roy’s bill would extend this list to include anyone who has engaged in “advocacy” for socialism—or, for that matter, anyone who is found to be “possessing” material that promotes socialism. The bill says such a person “is deportable and shall be removed from the United States.”

If you’re an immigrant who has already become a citizen, that won’t protect you. The bill would strip you of your citizenship so you can be deported.

Under current law, if you were naturalized as a citizen within the last five years, and during that time you’ve affiliated with an organization that would have disqualified you from getting naturalized in the first place—i.e., you’ve joined an organization that advocates the violent overthrow of our government—that affiliation is “prima facie evidence” that you were “not attached to the principles of the Constitution” and were “not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization.” Therefore, “in the absence of countervailing evidence,” your citizenship can be revoked.

Roy’s bill would extend that provision to anyone affiliated with socialism. In addition, it would remove the five-year limit, so you could be stripped of your citizenship at any time. And it would remove the clause about an “absence of countervailing evidence.” In other words, even if you have evidence that you are, in fact, “attached to the principles of the Constitution” and “well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States,” that wouldn’t save you. Your affiliation with socialism would be sufficient to get you kicked out of the country.

The bill’s removal of the “countervailing evidence” clause is just one part of its wholesale assault on civil liberties. In three separate places, it stipulates that orders to bar or expel people from the United States, under its provisions, “shall be final and shall not be subject to review by any court.’’ For good measure, it rolls back the age of forgivable past socialism from 16 to 14. If you had a pinko poster on your wall at 15, you’re out of here.

And even if you’ve never breathed a word about economics, you can be denaturalized and expelled under this bill. Alongside its prohibitions of “socialism,” it includes parallel rules against “Marxism.” It defines Marxism to include efforts—again, through violent or “other means”—to “establish or advocate for an atheistic society or government prohibitions on private religious practices.” The “or” makes it clear that you can be disqualified even if you’re against prohibiting religious practices. Promoting an “atheistic society” is enough to get you expelled.

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AS AN ELECTORAL MATTER, Roy’s bill would empower a right-wing government—the Trump administration, for instance—to strip naturalized Americans of their voting rights. In 2024, these people made up 9 percent of the electorate. By selectively purging progressives from this population, the GOP could tighten its grip on power.

As a constitutional matter, the bill would gut America’s promise of political freedom. In his press release, Roy quotes an endorsement from a right-wing immigration watchdog group: “We have absolutely no obligation to open our doors to aliens who seek to undermine the Constitution, dismantle our republic, or champion ideologies fundamentally opposed to American liberties.”

That’s true. But in this case, the guy who’s undermining our Constitution and dismantling our liberties is the guy who wrote this bill.

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Mosque-off Moment

The GOP needs a bogeyman in the midterms. The border crisis is over, DEI has been purged, and the panic over transgender bathrooms is getting old. What can House Republicans run against?

Many are turning to a familiar answer: Muslims.

Four months ago, two Texas Republicans, Rep. Keith Self and Rep. Chip Roy, founded the Sharia-Free America Caucus. Since then, the group has swelled to more than 60 members, including Majority Whip Tom Emmer. That’s more than a quarter of the House GOP.

Officially, the caucus opposes the imposition of Sharia—Islamic law—in America. It claims to have no problem with Muslims per se. But the more its members talk, the more obvious their bigotry becomes.

The caucus says certain nefarious Muslims are doing scary things in our country. That’s true if you just look at terrorist attacks. But only a few people commit acts of terrorism, which means they’re not enough to justify the broad crackdown the caucus wants. So caucus members argue that whole Muslim communities are up to no good.

To illustrate this alleged nefariousness, they point to Islamic community centers. On March 26, the caucus staged an hour of speeches on the House floor. In his closing remarks, Self decried a “pattern of Islamic centers being built next to police training facilities.” He gave all the examples he had: two.

If Muslims were planning mischief at these centers, it’s hard to imagine a more foolish place to put them. But Self found a way to portray it as sinister. He called the centers “fortresses overlooking our police academies” and insisted that “intimidation is clearly the intent.”

Another insidious trend, according to the caucus, is Muslims publicly praying on rugs. Caucus members are particularly upset that some of the prayers have happened in New York near the memorial to victims of 9/11. “People are just, you know, sick to their stomach of watching these, you know, people down on prayer rugs . . . right next to the 9/11 memorial,” Roy fumed two weeks ago on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

It’s misguided to treat the area around the memorial as a no-go zone for Muslims, since that would support Osama bin Laden’s lie that the 9/11 attack broadly represented Islam. But the larger problem is that the Sharia-Free America Caucus doesn’t just oppose displays of Islamic belief and practice near the memorial. It opposes them generally.

Take Muslim prayer calls, for instance. On February 3, the caucus held a press conference to outline its grievances. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican who was instrumental in founding the caucus, denounced the prayer calls as part of a plot:

Woke cities like Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey [sic] are replacing American civic norms with radical Islamic policies. Minneapolis became the first major U.S. city to allow amplified Islamic calls to prayer year-round. . . . Why do they do it here? They want to be seen and heard. They want to be on television. They want to rally the troops.

Two weeks later, Rep. Randy Fine (R–Flor.), a member of the caucus, followed up on that complaint. In an interview on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing network, he declared, “The call to prayer is a call for submission. And I’m not okay with that. They need to cut it out.”1

In his interview, Fine said Muslims could “do whatever they want in their mosques.” But the caucus’s founders, Self and Roy, routinely object to the number of mosques in the United States. On March 17, Roy told Bannon, “There’s 300-plus mosques and growing in Texas—more being built in Texas every year than any other state in the union. That’s a real problem.” A week later, Roy told Newsmax, “There are 330 mosques in Texas. This is a real war. . . . They are trying to wage jihad against our way of life. And we’ve got to stand up against it.”

Republicans used to distinguish radical Muslims from mainstream Muslims. The caucus is abandoning that distinction. “We have to stop the term of ‘radical Islam,’” Fine argued at the press conference in February. “It is mainstream Islam,” he said, that “want[s] to kill us.” Roy reinforced that point in his March 30 interview with Bannon:

Stop blaming this on “radical Islam” or, you know, some subset of folks. This is an overarching theme for the Muslims coming to the United States, to wage jihad against the West, take over the West, undermine our Christian heritage, our Judeo-Christian founding principles.

The caucus doesn’t deny that good Muslims exist. But its members argue that once the bad Muslims take power, the formerly good Muslims will join them. “When the jihadists take control,” Self predicted last week, most “moderate Muslims . . . will submit and begin to exercise the more radical elements of Sharia.”

The truth is that many of these Republicans just don’t like Islam. They can’t even hide it. On February 15, responding to a comment that Muslims didn’t think dogs should be indoor pets, Fine tweeted, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Later, a Newsmax host asked Fine, “Do you see how your original post, Congressman, could be offensive to some?” Fine replied, “Not at all. I’d choose dogs.”

On March 9, another member of the caucus, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), tweeted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Three days later, Fine tweeted, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” On March 17, Roy declared, “Islam is not compatible with the West.” And on Sunday, Roy told Fox News that he was running for attorney general of Texas “to defend us from this march of Islam across the state of Texas and our country.”

Some members flatly deny that religious freedom in America should extend to Muslims. At the press conference, Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas asserted,

Islam is largely alien to American history. It certainly didn’t come into the United States on the Mayflower. It’s something that we deliberately imported as a matter of immigration policy into our country, and it’s going to destroy us just like it’s destroying Europe right now.

Speaking to Newsmax on March 20, Ogles added:

The first Muslim prayer rooms didn’t start popping up into this country until about 1920. The first mosque . . . was built in Iowa in the early 1930s. And so, when the Founding Fathers were talking about freedom of religion, they were talking about Judeo-Christian values.2

Sometimes the caucus cites polls showing that many American Muslims support Islamic influence in government. At a hearing on February 10, Gill paraphrased findings from a Heritage Foundation survey. “Thirty-nine percent of Muslims in the United States want Sharia law implemented in the next 20 years,” he warned, and 33 percent “believe that Islam should be declared as our national religion.” Roy, at the same hearing, said those numbers “should be troubling to every American.”

But nobody in the caucus mentions the much higher numbers among American Christians responding to similar questions. In a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of all American Christians agreed that “the United States should be a Christian nation,” and 38 percent said that “when the Bible and the will of the people conflict with each other,” the Bible “should have more influence on the laws of the United States” than the people’s will should. Among white evangelicals, 81 percent said the United States should be a Christian nation, and 65 percent said the Bible should override the people’s will.

The caucus is especially hypocritical in its condemnation of Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim mayor of New York City. On March 12, Tuberville quote-tweeted a post that featured a picture of Mamdani on a prayer rug next to a picture of the 9/11 attack. The senator wrote, “The enemy is inside the gates.” His tweet, offering no other context, implied that a Muslim mayor was inherently dangerous.

Tuberville didn’t mention where the Sharia-Free America Caucus originated. It came from a conversation he had with Rep. Self in December. The conversation didn’t happen on Capitol Hill. It happened at the White House Christmas party. To these men, religious observance in political office is perfectly innocent, as long as the observance is Christian.

The Sharia-Free America Caucus isn’t just a fraud. It’s the opposite of what it pretends to be. Its founders and members avidly support religious control of government. “The press can call me an Islamophobe all they want. I don’t care,” Tuberville huffed at the press conference on February 3. “I love this country. I love what it stands for. I love that it’s a Christian nation, and it’s going to stay that way.” Speaking after Tuberville, Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona protested that “Sharia rejects America’s foundational roots, the Judeo-Christian ethic.” Another member, Rep. Russ Fulcher of Idaho, called Sharia a threat to “our Christian values.”

During the caucus’s hour of speeches on March 26, Self quoted John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” He denounced Islam as an assault on “our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Another member, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, argued that “the separation of church and state . . . cannot be found in the United States Constitution.”

That same day, appearing on Washington Watch, a conservative Christian show, Roy started with his anti-Sharia message but segued to his real agenda. First he decried “the March of Islam across Europe.” Then he said the real question was, “Are we going to defend our Judeo-Christian culture?” Then he warned, “We will lose the West if we do not re-center our entire existence on our biblical values.” Then he claimed that Americans had won World War II because we were “united . . . as a country predominantly if not almost entirely Christian.”

All of this might be amusing, as a display of hypocrisy, if the stakes weren’t so serious. The caucus is pushing its agenda in several bills, one of which would suspend all immigration until a series of right-wing demands are met. The bill’s author, Roy, says he’s trying to halt the “massive wave of Muslims” coming to America.

Self, the caucus’s other co-founder, might go further. A month ago, he told Newsmax, “We have got to make sure that now the people of Muslim—uh, uh, the Muslim law—are deported.”

The Sharia-Free America Caucus isn’t wrong that there’s a dangerous movement afoot to impose religious law in the United States. They’re just wrong about which religion it is.

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Mike and Yikes

Public confidence in elections is a foundational requirement for a constitutional republic. Now, more than ever, we must have confidence and trust in Utah’s elections. . . .

The election systems we built here in Utah work well because of a core tenant [sic] of the U.S. Constitution: federalism. When appropriately applied, the division of power between the federal and state governments means decisions that directly impact us are made by people closest to us in state and local government.

United States Senator Mike Lee coauthored the above for Deseret News on October 5, 2022.

I agree wholeheartedly with the senator’s argument: Utah has reasonable election laws and competent election officials, and the public can trust its election results. Mass interference in Utah’s vote is indeed “virtually impossible,” as Lee put it a bit lower in the piece. And if you don’t like the results of a particular election, you can always work harder to win the next one.

But Lee is now making somewhat different arguments than he did in 2022. He regularly posts that non-citizens will steal our elections if we don’t require voters to provide documented proof of citizenship—something Utah didn’t require for Lee’s 2010, 2016, or 2022 elections.1 He also now says that secure elections require photo identification—but the vast majority of Utah ballots are verified by signature matching, not photo ID. He tells us to be suspicious of mail ballots. But Utah is an all-mail state. And he is suspicious of states that don’t finish counting ballots within forty-eight hours of Election Day—a deadline that Utah failed to hit in 2024.

There’s nothing novel about a flip-flopping politician. Lee is already famous for making a habit of turnabout, including on Trump’s morals (“If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person”), Trump’s lies (“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK”), and Trump’s disregard for basic law (“I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution”).

But Lee hasn’t simply flip-flopped on whether this or that aspect of Trump’s character should be open to criticism; he’s belly-flopped into the deep end of the pool of Trump-style election conspiracism. Since March 16, Lee has posted or reposted content about elections and election-related legislation on his personal X account at least 300 times, including 31 times on March 20 alone. God might rest on Sundays, but Mike Lee spent Sunday, March 29, encouraging you to “ask your senators why the SAVE America Act hasn’t passed yet.”

As for the SAVE America Act—which the Bipartisan Policy Center summarizes as a bill that would require “voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a photo ID at the time of voting”—Lee is an obsessive. He has explicitly framed the legislation as the only hope Republicans have of maintaining control of Congress. And recently, he warned that if the SAVE America Act isn’t passed, Gavin Newsom could become president, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his VP and Michelle Obama (???) as his secretary of state. The AI-generated image (the man loves few things more than spreading AI-generated content around) labels Zohran Mamdani as Newsom’s attorney general, though the picture clearly does not depict the New York City mayor, and it warned that this would be the “2028 White House Administration” even though the next president won’t take office until January 2029. But accuracy isn’t really a concern when sharing stuff like this.

These posts and the obsessions they signal are bad enough coming from a sitting U.S. senator. But they could soon become even more alarmingly consequential, because Trump is reportedly considering Lee to step into the just-vacated role of attorney general.

Lee has shrugged off the idea of running the Justice Department. But that’s just the sort of thing politicians are trained to do right up until they stop shrugging and take the job.

Should Lee end up becoming AG, the implications for how we conduct our midterm elections could be serious. Federal law enforcement resources could be diverted away from national security, financial fraud, or drug trafficking to instead once again investigate the widely dismissed allegations of outcome-altering fraud in the 2020 election—the same allegations that couldn’t be corroborated by Bondi, Trump’s first-term AG Bill Barr, Trump’s private investigators, Dinesh D’Souza, MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, or any of the other fraud hunters.

As attorney general, Lee would also have a far bigger audience for his steady stream of election lies. On March 22, 2026, for argumentative purposes, he seemed to imagine a scenario in which all “Red States” had gleefully given their complete voter registration databases to the Department of Homeland Security to help them sniff out illegal voters on their rolls.2 But no states have directly shared voter information with DHS. Some states have agreed to share (or already shared) voter information with the Department of Justice, but this is true of only a dozen states—and it is not true of Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, or, yes, Lee’s own Utah. DOJ has sued thirty states for detailed voter rolls, red states included. So far, the federal government has not won any of these cases, and a number of them have already been dismissed.

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On March 23, Lee posted that Democrats “have NO IDEA how common or rare [non-citizen voting is] because the status quo makes knowing that impossible.” But it is possible to know. Two months earlier, election officials in Utah (again, Lee’s home state) thoroughly searched the state’s 2.1 million registered voters. They found one non-citizen on the voter rolls (and not for nothing, but that one non-citizen had never voted). Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Georgia, Montana, and others have also recently searched for non-citizens, yielding similarly minuscule numbers of illegitimate voters.

In January, Lee suggested that Virginia doesn’t use paper ballots (it does). And he previously claimed that it’s “illegal to show your ID at a voting location in California” (it’s not).

Those are just a sampling of the ravings to which I responded online when he wrote them. I felt obligated to try and do so because I voted for Lee in his first U.S. Senate run in 2010 and because I admired his dad, former solicitor general Rex Lee, who died in the 1990s. And, dang it, I’ve always just thought that Mormons are less inclined to lie than the rest of us, so if I just gave Sen. Lee the facts, perhaps I could disabuse him of his baseless notions about the security of our elections.

But now I realize correcting the falsehoods I see in Lee’s timeline is a pointless task. I can’t keep up with even a fraction of his lies.

I do take some solace in knowing that his posts now seem as pathetic as they do nefarious. It seems unlikely that the SAVE America Act will pass, and according to reporting from Politico, Lee’s tactics have made him highly unpopular with his Republican colleagues who see his hyper-online activism as “a self-serving attempt” at juicing his own celebrity. As one unnamed Republican senator put it, Lee’s goal is simply “the clicks.” They added that “he has almost no self-awareness.”

Right now, Lee is Congress’s election-obsessed iPad kid, the enfant terrible of the upper chamber whose real power is limited. But if you put the same guy in charge of 9,200 attorneys at the Department of Justice, the election lies of “@BasedMikeLee” start to look a lot scarier.

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Stephen Richer is the former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona. He is now CEO of Republic Affairs and a fellow of the Cato Institute.

Red light districts

Lately, you may have noticed red and green graphic cards from an organization called Track AIPAC1 making the rounds on social media. As is often the case with viral political content online, the cards do not make much sense. The problems should be obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of how to read campaign finance data.

You might expect an organization called “Track AIPAC” to have a laser focus on, well, following and publicizing the activities and political donations of the pro-Israel lobbying organization. But Democratic candidates who have been red-carded by the group aren’t always recipients of AIPAC money. Some have gotten money from other “pro-Israel” organizations or lobbyists. Some have voting records or have made decisions about sponsoring (or not sponsoring) bills that have earned Track AIPAC’s ire. And some appear to have caught Track AIPAC’s heat on account of vibes alone.2

In Maryland, for instance, Track AIPAC backs Chris Van Hollen while shaming his fellow Senate Democrat Angela Alsobrooks. In the description below Alsobrooks on her Track AIPAC profile, the organization notes the contributions she’s received from J Street, a left-leaning Zionist group, but it doesn’t do this for Van Hollen, even though his are much more extensive. (This FEC page will show you all the individual J Street contributions each candidate has received this cycle.)

The group’s misleading and confusing graphics have become hot commodities on the left. In one instance, Track AIPAC disavowed a green graphic someone had mocked up for an Ohio gubernatorial candidate to resemble one of theirs. After making clear that the graphic was a counterfeit, the group explained that AIPAC does not give to state and local candidates. Presumably, then, Track AIPAC wouldn’t either support or oppose state and local candidates. Well, see what your presuming got you: The group gave Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey a red graphic and endorsed his challenger during the leadup to last fall’s election. Frey’s graphic did not even mention any donations. It just said, “This candidate is pro-Israel.”

Track AIPAC has also changed its scoring system without explanation. In 2024, the group hit Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) with one of its signature red cards. A year later, Khanna tagged Track AIPAC in a post on X where he made clear he does not take money from AIPAC. He now appears on a list of lawmakers on the Track AIPAC website without the ominous red filter, but with the line the group appears to apply to every lawmaker about whom it is ambivalent rather than hostile: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.”

In some cases, candidates who have gotten red cards from the group were AIPAC targets in previous election cycles. Red-carded Rep. Dave Min (D-Calif.), for example, won his race despite AIPAC spending $4.5 million on attack ads to make his constituents aware of his DUI arrest.

The ex cathedra judgements from Track AIPAC about which candidates are free of pro-Israeli influence and which are not seem even more questionable when you examine the group’s stated methodology.

In a recent detailed explanation of changes to its formula, Track AIPAC indicated that its goals are a bit broader than, well, just tracking AIPAC. Here is how the group characterizes two of its basic directional commitments:

2. While we selected the name Track AIPAC as a public education tool, we have always tracked and reported on the entire pro-Israel lobby.

3. We track the lobby money wherever it goes, regardless of party identity or any personal feelings about a given lawmaker or candidate.

Scroll a bit more, and you will find the group admitting the “key ingredient” of the color-card recipe has virtually nothing to do with AIPAC itself. Instead, the most important consideration is the policy preferences of the candidate in question versus those of the individuals who run Track AIPAC.

The finance record alone is not enough to land a member of Congress (or a candidate) with a red graphic. Our scorecards represent a nexus of lobby spending and the candidate’s policy record.

Red graphics are assigned when we evaluate a candidate’s policy as pro-Israel based on their voting record (if one exists), any published policy positions, any public statements, and any credible reporting verifying that the candidate is seeking AIPAC’s support—often by circulating secret position papers favorable to Israel.

If a candidate is identified as being pro-Israel based on these public records, and campaign finance data is not yet available, we will assign a “WARNING!” label to their graphic.

The group then acknowledges that its judgments are largely sourced from the Congressional Democrat Palestine Tracker, which assigns letter grades to lawmakers based on a public spreadsheet maintained by volunteers with the Democratic Socialists of America.

But even here, Track AIPAC appears to be thumbing the scales. Have a look at three lawmakers with middling scores in the DSA-maintained spreadsheet. At 72 percent, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) has a higher “total Palestine score” than both Reps. Maxwell Frost of Florida (68 percent) and Vermont’s Becca Balint (66 percent). All three receive a grade of “C” on the “Congress Scorecard” that Track AIPAC cites as informing its judgments. But while Dexter gets a red badge from the group, Frost and Balint not only get green ones; they have each received a Track AIPAC endorsement.

And while Balint has received money from J Street, Track AIPAC doesn’t list the organization as a Balint donor even though J Street shows up in the citations for dozens of her red-carded colleagues. On the Track AIPAC landing page containing blurbs for every member of Congress, the group simply claims Balint “rejects AIPAC and champions a foreign policy based on human rights and international law.”

If this all sounds confusing, don’t worry: Track AIPAC gets it. At the bottom of the methodology page, they have added this note: “Recent feedback on our methods has made it clear to us that our graphics do not fully represent the data points that go into the process—especially the legislative and public policy record.”

“While we have always published receipts justifying the policy record when posting our red and green graphics, that context gets lost quickly when the graphics are reposted in other contexts later,” the note continues. “Our forthcoming graphic design will clearly incorporate specific policy points that factor into our analysis.”

Track AIPAC did not respond to a request for comment on its methodology and coming changes. Perhaps the group will adopt a broader spectrum of color coding to make clear just how badly a candidate has fared with its occult calculus.

Snake eyes

As I noted in my newsletter detailing Polymarket’s dud of a pop-up bar in Washington earlier this month, the big prediction-market companies are engaged in a major marketing and influence campaign to ensure they will not be scrutinized, regulated, or banned outright. Their efforts include spending more and more on lobbying elected officials and regulators, and working to sway public opinion through advertising, events, and social media.

Notwithstanding all that, their fears of the party ending early could be coming true. Since early March, lawmakers in both the House and Senate have introduced six separate bills to prohibit prediction market uses in various forms:

• The STOP Corrupt Bets Act, which would ban prediction-market gambling in a number of areas, including on government activity.

• The BETS OFF Act, which would ban wagers on government activity and other markets that can be easily manipulated.

• The End Prediction Market Corruption Act, to ban the president, vice president, members of Congress, and other high-level federal officials from insider trading on prediction markets.

• The Event Contract Enforcement Act, to strengthen the regulatory power of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over prediction markets and forcing the commission to ban contracts on things like terrorism or assassinations.

• The PREDICT Act, which would ban members of Congress and federal officials from insider trading on prediction markets.

• The Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act, which would ban CFTC-registered entities from listing prediction contracts that resemble gambling activities.

Perhaps in response to this flurry of bills that would proscribe aspects of its business, Kalshi, one of the prediction-market companies under scrutiny for its high volume of suspiciously timed trades on U.S. foreign policy decisions, has added yet another component to its frantic PR operation. On Monday, the company blanketed Washington, D.C. with advertisements that make much of its self-chosen rules.

Kalshi’s PR operation is unlikely to satisfy Congress, though. While both chambers are often ineffective and uninterested in passing any kind of regulation for emerging technologies, lawmakers are quickly growing impatient with the prediction markets, perhaps in part because they have become such an obvious vector of corruption. Even the more libertarian-leaning lawmakers are considering Congress’s options for regulating them.

“I think there should be rules against that,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told me when I asked about whether lawmakers and federal officials should be allowed to continue gambling on prediction markets. “But I’m not sure where the rules originate—if they need to be a law—some of the things are regulated by personnel regulations and they ought to be.”

“It definitely needs to be looked at,” Paul added.

It’s rare to find such broad bipartisan interest in regulating a single industry. And Republicans would normally balk at addressing a problem if addressing it could be viewed as a direct attack on the president or his family. But so far that narrative hasn’t developed, despite some initial concerns that it might.

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Man of the steeple

Vice President JD Vance announced that he is releasing another book in June. The former hillbilly elegist’s forthcoming conversion memoir is titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

The cover of the book, which will be published by Harper, the flagship imprint of HarperCollins, is decorated with a striking pastoral photo of a very Appalachia-coded countryside church. However, while Vance’s way back to faith led him to embrace Catholicism specifically, the church on his book is not a Catholic one. The building in the cover photo is Mount Zion Church in Elk Creek, Virginia—a United Methodist house of worship.

Mount Zion is undeniably photogenic, which is why it’s also a popular stock image. It’s previously been used to illustrate a satirical Babylon Bee article about how “evangelical churchgoers in the Raleigh area have begun to notice that there is a sorry excuse for a church in town that only has one service.”

Vance’s choice of photo struck me as odd, given that the vice president has been outspoken about his Catholic faith. And according to the book’s description on Amazon, Communion is pretty explicitly about Vance’s journey on the road to Rome:

Communion is a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian in all the seasons of life JD Vance has experienced—as a child, a young man, a husband, a father, and a leader.

Picking up in some ways where Hillbilly Elegy left off, Communion recounts how Vance’s pursuit of material privileges ultimately led him into a secular wilderness.

Communion reveals how Vance regained his faith and discusses his conversion to Catholicism, how his faith guides his work in public life, and how it shapes his thoughts about the future.

A spokesperson for Vance told me to reach out to the publisher instead of inquiring with the VP’s team. A spokesperson for HarperCollins did not respond to a request for comment.

Since Trump and Vance assumed control of the federal government in January 2025, the White House has often found itself at odds with the Catholic Church. Vance has also not publicly attended Mass as frequently as he said he used to before becoming vice president.

Both Pope Leo XIV and Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, have criticized the Trump administration, sometimes directly.

In September, McElroy called the administration’s mass deportation policy “a comprehensive governmental assault,” adding, “this campaign relies on fear and terror at its core, for the government knows that it cannot succeed in its efforts except by bringing new dimensions of fear and terror to our nation’s history and life.”

And in an apparent response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly praying for “overwhelming violence” against Iran, Pope Leo said during Palm Sunday Mass, “[God] does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.’”

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Respect

A little anecdote to close out today’s long edition: On June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump first announced he would be running for president, I was the first reporter in the building to check in at the press table.3 The second outlet to show up that day was TMZ.

Fast forward to Anno Domini 2026, and I like to think that The Bulwark and TMZ are equally aggressive in our reporting on the president. And I do have to hand it to TMZ: Amid the ongoing partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, the celeb gossip outlet has been working overtime to find embarrassing photos of elected officials lounging on the job.

Violet Jira writes at NOTUS:

Over the past few months, TMZ staff has questioned lawmakers on things ranging from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show to what it’s like to work on the Hill. For the most part, lawmakers told NOTUS they don’t mind a celebrity-centric outlet covering the halls of Congress.

Recently, the outlet has devoted particular attention to how members of Congress are behaving during the funding lapse at the Department of Homeland Security. TMZ requested tips on Thursday about sightings of lawmakers who left D.C. without reaching a funding deal, leaving many DHS employees to miss paychecks for at least two more weeks.

If you read this morning’s Morning Shots newsletter, you’ll remember Andrew Egger’s wry recap of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) bubble wand–wielding vacation at Disney World—a story TMZ brought to everyone’s attention.

Read the whole piece at NOTUS.

One ballot after another

The SAVE Act and its slightly altered variations—the SAVE America Act and the MEGA Act—all seek to accomplish the same goal: to protect “election integrity” by suppressing voting. For its Republican advocates, the president foremost among them, the legislation is urgently necessary to ensure that Democrats—whose supposed “electoral victories” in recent years are all totally fake and fraudulent—do not win again.

But the prospect of passing some iteration of the SAVE Act is diminishing by the day. Despite a concerted effort to bend or break the Senate’s filibuster rules, not enough GOP members are on board to do that. And if they’re not, then the bill is not going to secure nearly enough votes to make it to President Donald Trump’s desk.

In fact, it’s unlikely it will even get all of the Republican votes.

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Monitoring the monitoring of the situation

For some time now, the prediction-market companies, which allow users to gamble on everything from sports to the weather to the military activities of the U.S. government to the timing of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, have been energetically campaigning to win over the public to their vision of the good life, which centers on gambling on everything from sports to the weather to the military activities of the U.S. government to the timing of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Much of the PR effort has taken familiar shapes: The emerging industry’s major players have spent more and more on lobbying, media partnerships, and sports-league deals. But the accelerating public relations blitz has started to include riskier and more unusual ventures, including, most recently, a D.C.-area attraction meant to woo the Washington press corps.

It was a complete disaster.

Polymarket, one of top prediction-market companies, hosted a pop-up bar over the weekend a few blocks from The Bulwark’s office. The company billed the “Situation Room” as a place to grab a drink and “monitor the situation”—a meme expression intended as a gentle dig at guys who follow the news as a hobby but talk about it as though it’s much more than that, even if they don’t play a role in the policy process.

The bar was set to open at 5:30 p.m. for members of the media, and I gathered from the composition of the crowd that the term “media” was meant loosely: Both reporters and influencers were queued up, as were a few Capitol Hill staffers. I had mistakenly signed up for the general entrance list, meaning I wasn’t meant to be allowed in until 8 p.m. When I showed up at 5:30, the bouncer couldn’t find my name on the media list, but he waved me in anyway. That blithe gesture was a sign of things to come.

Neal Kumar, the chief legal officer of Polymarket, asked reporters to gather round for a brief gaggle.

“We view this as our real coming-out party in D.C. We spent much of our livelihood at Polymarket fighting to stay alive, being super scrappy. We’ve proven that the concept of prediction markets exists,1 and we’ve proven that the concept is here to stay,” Kumar said. “And we want to be a part of the conversations in D.C.—and where best to have a conversation than in a bar?”

Not long after Kumar went back inside, the pop-up team started having to deal with problems. As reporters gathered on the covered patio to get out of the rain that was just starting, a light fixture illuminating the Polymarket sign flickered on and off. A staffer set a ladder and climbed up to fix it. Moments later, one of the bouncers knocked over a fake plant, spilling its gravel soil near the entrance and breaking the planter in half. As so often happens in life, things started to unpredictably cascade.

The venue’s WiFi did not work, the rain got worse, and the roughly four dozen reporters and influencers forced to wait on the bar’s patio started to get antsy. As an NBC News reporter did a live hit from outside (instead of inside as he’d planned), waitresses approached the crowd to take drink orders. These were delivered and consumed outside. For now, we remained barred from the Room part of the Situation Room, and we were forced to monitor the situation in the old-fashioned way, using our phones.

As the patio became crowded, the line of vehicles waiting to drop off VIP attendees continued to grow. After a few black Chevy Tahoes began clogging up the street, the driver of a Jeep covered in rubber ducks became irate, laying on the horn for a bit before deciding to squeal their tires to get around the car-service parade. As the duck-covered Jeep whined by, I noticed that in the window of an Audi SUV with diplomatic plates a child was pressing his whole face against the inside glass. It was all very D.C., if you know what I mean.

As we kept waiting, I listened as a young man who claimed he works in the Senate but would not give his name told me that he regularly bets on Kalshi, Polymarket’s competitor. “Only on politics,” he said. “But I mostly just lose money.”2

After forty-plus minutes of keeping the media out, the Polymarket staffer managing the event gave up. The press would finally get to monitor the situation in the building’s interior. Inside the pop-up, however, what we found was yet another standard D.C. happy hour: A live band played chamber jazz while Washington journos and politicos networked.

The internet issues had not been resolved, but a Polymarket staffer assured us they would be at some point over the weekend. The bar featured nearly a dozen blank TV screens, which loomed like monoliths amid the room’s encroaching darkness. At least two features were working, though: a large glowing globe, and a long tabletop touch screen displaying market odds. Users could scroll this interface but not place any bets. Situation, monitored.

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There were also fake newspapers strewn about whose front pages featured political cartoons. One depicted an adviser telling the president, “Sir, the latest intelligence.” Another showed a woman at work browsing Polymarket for odds on the winner of the 2028 presidential election. A third cartoon depicted an individual gambling on her phone at a baseball game and saying, “America’s greatest pastime.”

The crowd provided a visual exercise in D.C. taxonomy. People around here often fall into wardrobe tropes that allow for quick political identification. Democratic men wear navy suits, white shirts, and no tie, to look like Obama. Republicans wear cobalt blue suits and red satin ties, to look like Trump. The reporters look tired.

Uncategorizable, you could say, is cryptocurrency influencer Nick O’Neill, who bobbed around while his friends (or employees; it can be hard to tell) took photos of him and sipped drinks. O’Neill’s presence during the press hour was curious. He’s not a reporter or even a normal influencer (they often have product-related beats) but a hype man for, well, himself. His shtick includes posting about his lack of children and the yachts, money, young women, and Labubus he has acquired instead.

When O’Neill eventually posted a recap of the evening, I was surprised to see that the WiFi and TV screens appeared to be operational. His video, which was a paid promotion, made the Situation Room seem like a great time, which it was not. He also posed while being adorned with a glittery Polymarket chain he received for winning a “top trader award.”

Public relations is a vital component of any legitimacy and sanitization effort. Since last spring, Polymarket has been spending $90,000 per quarter to establish relationships with key players in government through David Urban, a former Trump campaign adviser. Polymarket’s advisory board features the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. And the White House’s employees and allies are gaming and manipulating prediction markets to make substantial profit, according to Democrats.3

The Monday after the pop-up bar’s lackluster weekend, Polymarket updated their rules to supposedly prevent insider trading. In addition, Kalshi said that they would ban athletes from betting on their teams or leagues and political candidates from staking money on their own campaigns. The companies’ rule changes are a clear attempt to use self-imposed restrictions to take the wind out of the sails of potential future legislation that would further restrict prediction-market users and gambling topics.

Congress isn’t known for swift action, nor are members of Congress particularly experienced in regulating new and emerging technologies. But it’s obvious that the prediction-market companies are worried this might be the one area where lawmakers finally feel compelled to act. Polymarket’s dud of a party was a real sign of panic.

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Men at work

Regular Press Pass readers probably know more on average about the trials and tribulations of Australian-American and “alpha male” conservative influencer Nick Adams than any other group of political news readers do. Over the past year, this newsletter has documented Adams’s nomination to serve as U.S. ambassador to Malaysia, his efforts to tone down his online persona, his inability to keep it toned down for long, and ultimately, the Trump administration’s withdrawal of the opportunity they offered him to become a full-fledged diplomat.

Losing out on the nomination may have hit Adams hard, but Trump softened the blow by offering him a new gig. Unfortunately for us all, it’s one that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation.

Adams announced Tuesday morning that Trump has selected him to be Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values.

“I am beyond honored to serve my country, the American people and the greatest President and Secretary of State we have ever had,” Adams said in a statement.

I look forward to serving as America’s brand Ambassador, bringing the message of America’s excellence to the entire world. With America 250, the FIFA World Cup, and the Olympics coming up, the world needs to be reminded of all we have to offer. I will be a tireless spokesman for American greatness, at home and abroad.

Presidents can create or terminate special envoys with the stroke of a pen, making this a much better fit for Adams than any role that would entail a grueling Senate confirmation process. Following the many delays that affected his last appointment, too, it must be nice to be offered a job on a fast timeline: Adams already has a bio up on the State Department website touting the new gig.

What Adams is going to be doing in this role isn’t entirely clear. But you can rely on Press Pass to find out what that is, eventually.

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The war of northern depression

Conservative regions of liberal states like to flirt with intrastate secession. It’s often how they vent frustration about their unpopularity and general political impotence.

In New York City, Staten Islanders who desire to secede from the Empire State have given their cause a new head of steam after many dormant years. Naaman Zhou writes in the New Yorker:

Lately, the fever to secede has descended again. Shortly before Christmas, Sam Pirozzolo, a Republican state assemblyman who represents parts of western and central Staten Island, wrote a declaration of independence for the island—modelled after the national one—and read it out loud at the former site of a tavern where, in 1776, British soldiers first heard the original. Andrew Lanza, a Republican state senator, has also drafted legislation that would make secession possible.

Notionally, this push was prompted by the election of Zohran Mamdani, whom Pirozzolo has said epitomizes the way that New York City doesn’t reflect Staten Island’s values. But the discontent runs deeper. Staten Islanders have tried to secede from the rest of the city at least a half-dozen times. In 1900, two years after the modern City of New York was consolidated, two hundred Staten Islanders gathered at a public hearing to say they were “ready to cede.” (Staten Island, one man told the New York bureau of the Chicago Tribune, “is the Ireland of Greater New York. We want home rule.”)

The island is richer, more suburban, more conservative, more car-dependent, less dense, and cut off from the rest of the city by the deep water of New York Harbor. There is a sense on the island that the rest of the city doesn’t listen to them, and that they pay for city initiatives they don’t want.

Read the whole article.