Category: Politics

There are two schools of thought on whether Democrats should attend Trump’s State Of The Union. On one side are the Democrats who don’t want any of their members to attend and be what they view as props in Trump’s audience.

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The flip side of that argument is people who are going to the speech to protest the president, or they are inviting guests like the Epstein survivors and people who have been harmed by ICE to raise awareness and attention about Trump’s policies.

There is no right or wrong answer.

Here are some of the Democrats who are bailing on Trump’s SOTU:

The tactics depend on what each Democratic member of Congress feels comfortable doing.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) gave in my view the best reason for not going:]

I’ve been to Trump’s State of the Unions before and really don’t need to go again. He uses his speeches to pillory his political enemies and spread lies – not to mention they’re long and boring.

Trump’s SOTUs are long, meandering, and pretty dull for Democrats to have to sit through. For some of them, it is a waste of an evening.

The Democrats who are going are using the platform to highlight important issues.

Story continues below.

Donald Trump’s newest business partner is assuring Australians that the Trump Tower he’s building Down Under won’t be nearly as tacky as they fear.

On Monday, David Young—who runs the Queensland-based Altus Property Group—announced that the $1 billion Gold Coast development would contain 91 floors, 270 apartments, and a “6-star” resort. It will briefly be the continent’s tallest building, though a neighboring property, already approved for construction, will quickly surpass it. Young said his deal with the Trump Organization was signed earlier this month at Mar-a-Lago.

It’s just the latest foreign business entanglement from the Trump Organization, which is run by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. but is still owned by the president. Recently, the Trump brand has launched real estate projects in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.

Importantly, Young wants to make clear that the Australian development won’t actually be ugly. In a statement trumpeting the deal, he noted there were certain “misconceptions” about Trump properties.

“Firstly, the file footage that Australians see, of Trump hotels and resorts with gaudy gold-plated bathrooms fixtures, mirrors and heavy chandeliers, is old footage from the 1980s and 90s,” Young said. “The modern Trump package is high-end design and fit outs, with a premium feel. It’s tasteful and expensive – when you walk into a modern Trump property, the impression is ‘quality’ and ’boutique.’”

According to Young, the new property “will follow the same Trump design manual” as the ongoing Trump projects in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Based on renderings in an Instagram post from Eric Trump, it will also be very large and gold-colored.

Democratic turnout in Texas’ primaries is surging, with over 100,000 more people taking a Democratic ballot than a Republican one, according to data compiled by VoteHub on Sunday.

With more than a week to go before the March 3 primary, Democratic turnout is more than 87% of the final primary turnout from 2022, while Republican turnout is at just 43% of the final turnout the same year, according to VoteHub. That’s a sign that Democratic turnout will blow past 2022 even before a single Election Day ballot is cast.

So what does the primary turnout mean?

Not to burst everyone’s bubble, but not all that much.

First, this year’s Democratic primary features a high-profile, competitive Senate contest between U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico, while 2022 did not. In a sense, comparing 2022’s turnout with this year’s is apples to oranges. 

And a Democratic organizer in Texas analyzed the results and found that many of the people casting ballots in the Democratic primary are habitual voters who likely would have turned out in a general election anyway.

“I’m about to ruin a lot of people’s timelines. You know that massive Democratic primary surge in Harris County everyone’s losing their minds over? I looked up whether these ‘new’ voters actually show up in general elections. Spoiler: 82% of them already do,” Levi Asher, who works on Democratic campaigns in Texas, wrote in a post on X.

More than that, primary turnout is not a good indicator of what will happen in a general election.

For example, in the 2008 presidential primaries in Texas, more than 2.8 million people voted in the Democratic contest between then-Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Meanwhile, less than 1.4 million people voted in the Republican primary, which then-Sen. John McCain won. But come November, McCain beat Obama in the state by nearly 12 points.

Still, the fact that Democrats are engaged in the primary is a good sign that Democratic enthusiasm is strong. And an enthusiasm gap is a good sign ahead of a midterm election.

Democrats will walk over hot coals to punish the Republican Party for not only refusing to stand up to Donald Trump’s destructive behavior and policies, but also for enabling them at every turn.

And polling does show that Democrats have a chance in Texas in November, especially if GOP Sen. John Cornyn loses the Republican primary to scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

An Emerson College survey from January found the race tied at 45% if Crockett or Talarico face off with Paxton.

In other words, Democrats might just get their white whale and win Texas in November—in large part because Trump is unpopular and losing the support of Latino voters, who constitute a large chunk of the Texas electorate.

But primary turnout isn’t the best indicator of those ultimate results. 

With the exception of Bill Clinton, presidents usually don’t get more popular in their second term than they were in their first. Trump being less popular in his second term is a special case because Donald Trump was also the least popular president of this century in his first. Trump is the only president in history to never top 50% job approval.

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An unpopular president who spent his first year pursuing policies that made him even more unpopular while ignoring the reason that voters elected him is a recipe for political disaster.

The level of Trump’s unpopularity before the first State Of The Union of his second term has never been seen in this century.

Video of Sarah Jones talking about the country and the culture turning on Trump:

George W. Bush’s net approval rating was (-11) before his first second term SOTU. Barack Obama’s was a net (-15). Donald Trump is nearly twice as unpopular as Obama and almost three times as unpopular as Bush at a net (-27).

Tariffs, inflation, and immigration are wrecking Trump’s approval rating, and the president has shown no sign of willingness to adjust these policies to make himself and his party more popular ahead of the midterm, but there is one specific group of voters, who also happen to be the largest group of voters in America, who have soured on Trump.

We’ll talk about them below.

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

Read: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson told Politico. But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem.

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush repudiated the former Klan leader David Duke, who was running as a Republican to be Louisiana’s governor. Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?

When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. A liberal Black Republican, Edward Brooke, had just finished two terms as our junior senator from Massachusetts; the liberal Republicans Lowell Weicker and John Chafee represented Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. In college, I worked in the Massachusetts state House for our hometown representative, a young and principled working-class Democrat (my GOP membership was not a disqualifier; imagine that). I got to know Republican legislators on Beacon Hill because they were close friends with my Democratic boss. Party affiliations were about political disagreements among Americans, not markers of antithetical worldviews.

I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants (something I objected to at the time).

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

From the November 2018 issue: McKay Coppins on the man who broke politics

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

From the October 2022 issue: Kim Phillips-Fein on the long unraveling of the Republican Party

Soon after McCain’s loss to Obama, the Tea Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party? To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. When I told him how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But Reagan’s dominance of the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Some of these trolls are merely pasting swastikas on their nihilism, but their ideological sincerity is irrelevant. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, his 1961 novel about a man posing as a Nazi: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “That 1930s Feeling.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.

President Donald Trump has shared over 800 news articles on his Truth Social account since retaking the White House. His favorite outlet is Fox News, as you might expect. But his second-favorite is one you probably haven’t heard of: Just The News.

Between Jan. 20, 2025, and this past Tuesday, Trump has shared 185 links to Fox News and 112 links to Just The News, according to a Daily Kos analysis of his Truth Social history. Of the over 50 news outlets we identified him having shared links to, those are the only two for which he’s shared more than 100 links in that time period.

But what exactly is Just The News? 

Much like Fox News, Just The News claims to deliver coverage in “a neutral voice,” but even a cursory read of their homepage reveals the outlet’s right-wing leanings. Founded in 2020, it regularly refers to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” has dabbled in conspiracies around the 2020 election, and pushes narratives that stoke fears of transgender people. It’s also one of the rare media outlets to have accounts on right-wing sites like Truth Social, Twitter-clone Gettr, and video platform Rumble.

Tellingly, in November, the parent company of Just The News, JTN Network, acquired far-right websites The Post Millennial and Human Events, both of which are linked to conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who is best known for promoting the Pizzagate hoax, which falsely claimed that famous Democrats were running a child-sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington-based pizza parlor. In a bit of cross-brand promotion, Just The News launched a podcast called “The Pod Millennial” last month.

Less tellingly, though much more oddly, Just The News also circulates audio versions of “The Liz Truss Show,” hosted by the infamous former United Kingdom prime minister who lasted just 44 days in office. A review from The Guardian dubbed the show “hapless ravings from a cupboard.”

And yet there are lots of right-wing news sites out there, so what has led Trump to Just The News?

Not only does the site largely validate Trump’s skewed worldview, he also seems to have a special fondness for its founder, reporter John Solomon.

Solomon previously worked at mainstream outlets like the Associated Press and Washington Post. However, his work was criticized for being poorly reported, with the Columbia Journalism Review writing in 2007 that Solomon’s work “masquerad[ed] as serious news.” Since then, he has drifted over to right-wing outlets—and right into Trump’s personal orbit.

In 2019, near the end of Trump’s first term, his allies sought to dig up dirt on Democratic rivals, like Joe Biden. Much of this effort sought to tie Biden and other Democrats to alleged corruption in Ukraine, and multiple news outlets reported that this brought Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, close to Solomon, who was writing for The Hill at the time. 

As The New Yorker documents, “As Giuliani conspired this past spring with questionable Ukrainian sources, Solomon pumped out a string of eye-catching stories echoing those sources’ claims about the Bidens. This appears to have been no coincidence.”

As a result, Solomon’s name was frequently brought up during closed-door testimony for Trump’s first impeachment inquiry. One witness told Congress that Solomon’s articles on Ukraine were chock-full of “non-truths and non sequiturs,” and another joked that Solomon had gotten nothing right except for maybe “his grammar.” 

Either way, Solomon’s willingness to push a Trump-friendly pseudo-scandal seems to have endeared him to the president. On the last day of his first term, Trump secretly met with Solomon, giving him access to documents related to the FBI’s probe into allegations of whether Russia worked with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to ABC News.

Since then, Solomon has spent much of his time sucking up to Trump. During an October 2024 interview, he pitched Trump this softball: “[Democratic nominee] Kamala Harris has been out on the campaign trail offending Christians. You’ve been out on the trail reaching out to Christians, talking to them. Her notion that people who believe in Jesus don’t belong in her rallies—I’d like to get your reaction to that.”

But Solomon’s subservience to Trump runs even deeper. 

Trump loves few things more than being called “sir,” and he often puts the word in people’s mouths when recounting their praise of him. And Solomon seems to know this. In a 2025 interview with Trump, Solomon and Amanda Head, Just The News’ White House correspondent, called him “sir” 17 times in less than 23 minutes. 

That was by no means an outlier. In a 2024 one-on-one interview, Solomon called Trump “sir” six times in about 10 minutes. 

It’s a level of sucking up not even matched by Fox News. Host Sean Hannity called Trump “sir” just once during the aired version of their January interview. He said it only three times in a 22-minute interview from October. And last November, Fox anchor Bret Baier said nary a “sir” during their nearly 13-minute interview. 

Trump seems to love how much Solomon loves him. 

“The media is the absolute worst, with the exception of you, of course,” Trump told him in October 2024. “We are lucky to have you, and I’m talking about ‘we’ as a country. We’re lucky to have you because you’re really one of the great people. You’re a real journalist, what they used to be when they were great. We don’t have too many of them left, John. We’re lucky to have you, man.”

Any updates?

• Good news for people who love bad news: New polling shows Democrats remain in danger of locking themselves out of California’s governor’s mansion, a risk this column first tackled in December. In the state, candidates from all parties will appear on the same June 2 primary ballot, and the primary’s two top vote-getters advance to November’s general election. The race is swamped with Democrats, while the Republican side is consolidated around two candidates. As a result, Republicans have been leading primary polls, such as a new Emerson College survey. Republican Steve Hilton leads the poll, with 17%, while a second Republican, Chad Bianco, is tied at 14% with Democrat Eric Swalwell. Worse, a new internal poll from Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra shows the two Republicans outright leading the field. If Hilton and Bianco win the top two spots in the primary, the state’s voters won’t have a Democratic gubernatorial candidate on the ballot in the fall, thereby ensuring a Republican succeeds Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

• And now some plain-old good news: The latest YouGov/Economist poll finds Democrats with their largest lead yet on the generic congressional ballot, which asks respondents which party they intend to vote for in the next House election. The poll shows Democrats leading Republicans by 7 points. That’s very close to Democrats’ lead at this time in 2018, when FiveThirtyEight’s polling average showed the party ahead by about 8 points. 

Vibe check

We can’t go back in time and change the result of the 2024 presidential election … but if we could, a new poll finds that Democrat Kamala Harris would defeat Trump in a blowout.

The poll, conducted for NBC News by SurveyMonkey, asked the question: “If you could go back in time to November 2024 and vote again, who would you vote for?” Harris wins 40%, Trump wins 32%, and the remaining 28% either wouldn’t vote or would vote for someone else.

Harris’ 8-point lead in the 2024 redo is far larger than Trump’s roughly 1-point victory in the 2024 popular vote—and for what it’s worth, it’s also much bigger than her 2-point polling lead ahead of the election. In fact, if that lead panned out in an election, it would be the biggest popular-vote win since 1996.

If only voters in 2024 had had any previous experience with how Trump would act as president …

Learning Resources v. Trump may seem like a very important decision today, but I’m not sure how much it will matter in the near future.

First, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. The Chief, per his usual style, said very little. He purported to simply apply longstanding doctrine, even where he broke new ground, especially on the application of the major questions doctrine for foreign affairs. Moreover, Roberts did not fully engage with most of the historical precedents advanced in Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent. Roberts opinions are, as a general matter, not good teaching tools. Students invariably are left feeling unfulfilled.

Second, it isn’t clear to me whether this case even belongs in a constitutional law casebook. I think classes on statutory interpretation could benefit from this decision. The major questions doctrine also makes sense for an administrative law class. But the majority opinion says very little about constitutional law. Sure, the Chief Justice gestures to Article I, which reserves the taxing power to Congress. And that principle does some work with the major questions doctrine. But the real work is not based on the text of the Constitution, but instead on how Congress over time delegated the power to impose taxes to the President. Again, this is not really about constitutional law. (I suspect the birthright citizenship will also be resolved on statutory grounds, removing another possible entry to a constitutional law casebook.)

Third, what should students make of the disagreement between Justice Gorsuch and Justice Barrett? I feel like not much new is added from Biden v. Nebraska. Indeed, Justice Barrett, as well as Justice Kagan, seem annoyed that Justice Gorsuch is still making them expend time on this dispute. Is any of this back-and-forth helpful to students in a class on statutory interpretation? I am doubtful. This opinion took nearly five months after oral argument to publish. Query how much of that delay was caused by Justice Gorsuch responding to the four “camps.”

Fourth, what about the non-delegation doctrine? After oral argument, I suspected that Justice Gorsuch would at least discuss the non-delegation doctrine, but ultimately it made only a few brief appearances in his opinion. By contrast, Justice Thomas introduced an entirely new line of thought: the non-delegation doctrine only applies to core legislative powers that affect life, liberty, and property. But powers outside that core, that do not affect public rights, can be delegated without limitation. Is Justice Thomas right? I need to think about it some more. Justice Gorsuch raises some questions, but he doesn’t really have a strong response. The Thomas dissent may be the only part of the entire case that belongs in a constitutional law casebook. I’ll admit it is strange to only include a dissent, but students will benefit from Thomas’s careful study.

Fifth, what about Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent? It is nearly twice the length of the majority opinion. I found it more persuasive than I expected. Even though I have been following this issue for the past year, I never took the time to carefully walk through the statutory history. I don’t think the issue is as “clear” as Kavanaugh said, but I am convinced this issue is close. There is no way that Justice Kagan could be right that the government loses based solely on the statute. I think the government loses only through an application of the major questions doctrine. And I need to think a bit more about Justice Kavanaugh’s historical account of the tariff power controls. I almost wish that the Chief assigned the majority opinion to Justice Barrett, as she would have taken the time to fully engage the dissent. But Roberts kept this one for himself.

Ultimately, like much of Trump law, I don’t think this decision will have much staying power. It is just another application of the major questions doctrine, even if the Justices still do not agree what that doctrine is.

Donald Trump is still trying to play tough guy around the world, and it is not working. The Iranian regime is an enemy of democracy and freedom. Iran has been a bad actor that sponsors terrorism for decades. The world would be a safer place if the regime were replaced by a form of government that reflected the will of the Iranian people.

All of that said, how Donald Trump has thus far been handling Iran makes the Bush lead-up to the invasion of Iraq look like a masterclass in military strategy.

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Instead of doing something while the protestors were being killed by the thousands in January, Trump claimed that the killing had stopped and started issuing threats in February.

The AP reported:

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency says at least 7,015 people were killed in the previous protests and crackdown, including 214 government forces. The group has been accurate in counting deaths during previous rounds of unrest in Iran and relies on a network of activists there to verify deaths.

The death toll continues to rise as the group crosschecks information despite disrupted communication with those inside the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s government offered its only death toll from the previous protests on Jan. 21, saying 3,117 people were killed. Iran’s theocracy in the past has undercounted or not reported fatalities from past unrest.

The time for the administration to act was in January, before the regime’s crackdown.

It turns out that Trump is backing down a month later.

Read more below.

Washington — Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that Iran has “every right to enjoy a peaceful nuclear energy, including enrichment” as the U.S. pushes for a deal on its nuclear program.

Negotiators for the U.S. and Iran met last week in Geneva, where both sides said progress was made. President Trump said on Friday, amid a massive military buildup in the region, that he’s considering a limited military strike on Iran, after warning that Tehran had a matter of days to reach a deal on its nuclear program, or “bad things” would happen.

Araghchi announced Sunday on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” the two sides will come together again Thursday in Geneva. 

He said that the only way to find a resolution for Iran’s nuclear program is through diplomacy, while stressing that a solution is within reach. 

“So there is no need for any military buildup, and military buildup cannot help it and cannot pressurize us,” he said. 

The Iranian foreign minister, who helped negotiate the 2015 nuclear deal under the Obama administration, said the Iranians are still working on a draft proposal for Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. Araghchi said that when the two sides meet again Thursday, “we can work on those elements and prepare a good text and come to a fast deal.”

U.S. officials have expressed widespread skepticism about Iran’s nuclear program, including the bulk of Republicans in Congress who have called on the president to demand zero enrichment and a full dismantlement of the program. But Araghchi argued that “enrichment is our right.” 

Araghchi said enrichment is a “sensitive part” of the negotiations, noting that the U.S. negotiators are aware of Iran’s position and “we have already exchanged our concerns.”

“I think a solution is achievable,” Araghchi added. 

Asked by Brennan whether demanding a right to enrich on Iranian soil is worth the risk amid the American military buildup, Araghchi said “as a sovereign country, we have every right to decide for ourselves, by ourselves.”

“We have developed this technology by ourselves, by our scientists, and it’s very dear to us,”  Araghchi said. “So that is now a matter of dignity and pride for Iranians, and we are not going to give it up. There is no legal reason to do that while everything is peaceful, while everything is safeguarded by the agency.”

Araghchi said “if the U.S. attacks us, then we have every right to defend ourselves.”

“Our missiles cannot hit the American soil,” Araghchi said. “So obviously we have to do something else. We have to hit, you know, the Americans’ base in the region.”

Still, Araghchi questioned why conflict would be necessary “when there is every possibility for a peaceful solution.”

By Paula Span for KFF

Tamar Abrams had a lousy couple of years in 2022 and ’23. Both her parents died; a relationship ended; she retired from communications consulting. She moved from Arlington, Virginia, to Warren, Rhode Island, where she knew all of two people.

“I was kind of a mess,” recalled Abrams, 69. Trying to cope, “I was eating myself into oblivion.” As her weight hit 270 pounds and her blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose levels climbed, “I knew I was in trouble health-wise.”

What came to mind? “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!” — the tuneful ditty from television commercials that promoted the GLP-1 medication for diabetes. The ads also pointed out that patients who took it lost weight.

Abrams remembered the commercials as “joyful” and sometimes found herself humming the jingle. They depicted Ozempic-takers cooking omelets, repairing bikes, playing pickleball — “doing everyday activities, but with verve,” she said. “These people were enjoying the hell out of life.”

So, just as such ads often urge, even though she had never been diagnosed with diabetes, she asked her doctor if Ozempic was right for her.

Small wonder Abrams recalled those ads. Novo Nordisk, which manufactures Ozempic, spent an estimated $180 million in direct-to-consumer advertising in 2022 and $189 million in 2023, according to MediaRadar, which monitors advertising.

By last year, the sum — including radio and TV commercials, billboards, and print and digital ads — had reached an estimated $201 million, and total spending on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs topped $9 billion, by MediaRadar’s calculations.

Novo Nordisk declined to address those numbers.

Should it be legal to market drugs directly to potential patients? This controversy, which has simmered for decades, has begun receiving renewed attention from both the Trump administration and legislators.

Related | Trump to Big Pharma: You’re all in trouble—but I won’t say how

The question has particular relevance for older adults, who contend with more medical problems than younger people and are more apt to take prescription drugs. “Part of aging is developing health conditions and becoming a target of drug advertising,” said Steven Woloshin, who studies health communication and decision-making at the Dartmouth Institute.

The debate over direct-to-consumer ads dates to 1997, when the FDA loosened restrictions and allowed prescription drug ads on television as long as they included a rapid-fire summary of major risks and provided a source for further information.

“That really opened the door,” said Abby Alpert, a health economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The introduction of Medicare Part D, in 2006, brought “a huge expansion in prescription drug coverage and, as a result, a big increase in pharmaceutical advertising,” Alpert added. A study she co-wrote in 2023 found that pharmaceutical ads were much more prevalent in areas with a high proportion of residents 65 and older.

Industry and academic research have shown that ads influence prescription rates. Patients are more apt to make appointments and request drugs, either by brand name or by category, and doctors often comply. Multiple follow-up visits may ensue.

But does that benefit consumers? Most developed countries take a hard pass. Only New Zealand and, despite the decadelong opposition of the American Medical Association, the United States allow direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising.

Public health advocates argue that such ads encourage the use and overuse of expensive new medications, even when existing, cheaper drugs work as effectively. (Drug companies don’t bother advertising once patents expire and generic drugs become available.)

In a 2023 study in JAMA Network Open, for instance, researchers analyzed the “therapeutic value” of the drugs most advertised on television, based on the assessments of independent European and Canadian organizations that negotiate prices for approved drugs.

Nearly three-quarters of the top-advertised medications didn’t perform markedly better than older ones, the analysis found.

“Often, really good drugs sell themselves,” said Aaron Kesselheim, senior author of the study and director of the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law at Harvard University.

“Drugs without added therapeutic value need to be pushed, and that’s what direct-to-consumer advertising does,” he said.

Opponents of a ban on such advertising say it benefits consumers. “It provides information and education to patients, makes them aware of available treatments and leads them to seek care,” Alpert said. That is “especially important for underdiagnosed conditions,” like depression.

Moreover, she wrote in a recent JAMA Health Forum commentary, direct-to-consumer ads lead to increased use not only of brand-name drugs but also of non-advertised substitutes, including generics.

The Trump administration entered this debate last September, with a presidential memorandum calling for a return to the pre-1997 policy severely restricting direct-to-consumer drug advertising.

That position has repeatedly been urged by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has charged that “pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs.”

At the same time, the FDA said it was issuing 100 cease-and-desist orders about deceptive drug ads and sending “thousands” of warnings to pharmaceutical companies to remove misleading ads. Marty Makary, the FDA commissioner, blasted drug ads in an essay in The New York Times.

“There’s a lot of chatter,” Woloshin said of those actions. “I don’t know that we’ll see anything concrete.”

This month, however, the FDA notified Novo Nordisk that the agency had found its TV spot for a new oral version of Wegovy false and misleading. Novo Nordisk said in an email that it was “in the process of responding to the FDA” to address the concerns.

Meanwhile, Democratic and independent senators who rarely align with the Trump administration also have introduced legislation to ban or limit direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads.

Last February, independent Sen. Angus King of Maine and two other sponsors introduced a bill prohibiting direct-to-consumer ads for the first three years after a drug gains FDA approval.

King said in an email that the act would better inform consumers “by making sure newly approved drugs aren’t allowed to immediately flood the market with ads before we fully understand their impact on the general public.”

Then, in June, he and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont proposed legislation to ban such ads entirely. That might prove difficult, Woloshin said, given the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling protecting corporate speech.

Moreover, direct-to-consumer ads represent only part of the industry’s promotional efforts. Pharmaceutical firms actually spend more money advertising to doctors than to consumers.

Although television still accounts for most consumer spending, because it’s expensive, Kesselheim pointed to “the mostly unregulated expansion of direct-to-consumer ads onto the web” as a particular concern. Drug sales themselves are bypassing doctors’ practices by moving online.

Woloshin said that “disease awareness campaigns” — for everything from shingles to restless legs — don’t mention any particular drug but are “often marketing dressed up as education.”

He advocates more effective educational campaigns, he said, “to help consumers become more savvy and skeptical and able to recognize reliable versus unreliable information.”

For example, Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, a late colleague, designed and tested a simple “drug facts box,” similar to the nutritional labeling on packaged foods, that summarizes and quantifies the benefits and harms of medications.

Related | The secret gamble at the FDA that exposed Americans to risky drugs

For now, consumers have to try to educate themselves about the drugs they see ballyhooed on TV.

Abrams read a lot about Ozempic. Her doctor agreed that trying it made sense.

Abrams was referred to an endocrinologist, who decided that her blood glucose was high enough to warrant treatment. Three years later and 90 pounds lighter, she feels able to scramble after her 2-year-old grandson, enjoys Zumba classes, and no longer needs blood pressure or cholesterol drugs.

So Abrams is unsure, she said, how to feel about a possible ban on direct-to-consumer drug ads.

“If I hadn’t asked my new doctor about it, would she have suggested Ozempic?” Abrams wondered. “Or would I still weigh 270 pounds?”

On Sunday, more than a dozen Arab and Islamic governments condemned statements made by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee after he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Israel had the biblical right to take over land belonging to other states in the Middle East. 

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee told Carlson in the interview released on Friday when questioned on whether Israel had been promised almost all the land in the Middle East in the Bible. The statement was part of a heated exchange where Carlson pressed Huckabee on his beliefs in Christian Zionism. (Huckabee later added that Israel was not interested in acquiring other countries’ land.)

In a joint statement released by the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, several governments—including US allies like Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—called Huckabee’s remarks “a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations” that threaten security in the region. The countries stated that the ambassador’s statements “directly contradict” Donald Trump’s 20-point plan from last October to end the war in Gaza. 

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime supporter of the country’s expansion in the Middle East, had another response. He posted on X on Saturday: “I [heart emoji] Huckabee.”

Huckabee clarified later on in his Friday interview on The Tucker Carlson Show that his statement that Israel could take it “all” was “hyperbolic.” 

In July 2024, the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice, said that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violate international law by infringing on the Palestinian people’s rights for self-determination. 

Despite that, Israel and US policy has facilitated the expansion of settlements. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote in February 2025, Trump has not just supported permanently displacing Palestinians from Gaza—he has also stated that he wants the US to take control of the region and have a “long-term ownership position,” manifesting in his administration’s “New Gaza” real estate project, complete with skyscrapers and industrial centers.

Donald Trump is very angry about the Supreme Court taking away his power to act like a king and impose tariffs of any amount on the American people, because tariffs are taxes paid by businesses, which are passed along to consumers in the United States.

The current president doesn’t care about policy or governing. There is little evidence that his television viewing habits go beyond Fox News, Newsmax, Fox Business, and hate-watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNN, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel.

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There is no evidence that Trump has ever spent a single second of his presidency watching C-SPAN unless he fell asleep in front of the television, or lost his remote while channel surfing during commercials on Fox News.

All of this makes this clip of someone referring to themselves and John Barron and trying to sound a lot like Trump seem a little dubious.

John Barron was the name Trump used to call media outlets, pretending to be a staffer to give statements to the tabloids during his New York days. John Barron is Donald Trump. Everybody knew it, but Trump would make people attribute statements to John Barron that he didn’t want his name on.

The tariff decision, Trump’s history, and C-SPAN’s open line created the perfect climate for a prankster to have a bit of fun.

Keep reading as we compare the voices below.