Category: Politics

In electoral politics, it is usually the party that is out of power that promises that a victory will end the rule of an unpopular congressional majority or president.

The usual message coming from a minority party during a midterm election is that they should be elected to serve as a check on the president. The message of checks and balances has an inherent appeal to many voters, because the system of checks and balances between the three branches of government is baked into America’s national DNA.

In modern American electoral politics, one party’s control of the federal government is never popular for very long. Our system of governance was meant to be representative of all voices, so when a set of voices becomes too dominant, voters tend to push back to restore balance.

What is very strange is the party in power trying to maintain their majorities not by touting their accomplishments of laying out a vision for the future, but instead promising that their power will come to an end if they lose, which is exactly what those who are trying to defeat them are seeking.

It is a bizarre and counterproductive argument, but it is the one that Republicans have settled on.

Mike Johnson seems to be trying to lose the midterm election, as you’ll see below.

If you have ever questioned how bad a president’s State Of The Union address has to be for members of his own party to grade it relatively low, Trump’s 2026 SOTU address provided some answers.

Usually, viewers of State Of The Union addresses tend to be two things. Viewers follow politics, and they tend to also be fans of the current president. Therefore, it is difficult for a president to get low marks on a viewer poll after the State Of The Union address.

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After each SOTU, CNN conducts a poll of speech watchers to see what they thought.

CNN Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian reported on the results of the network’s poll after Trump spoke:

 I just wanna take a moment here to explain. This is a poll of speech watchers, so it is not a poll that is reflective of the population overall and what we know about people who tune in to State of the Union addresses. They tend to be fans of the president, whichever president is giving the speech.

So the polling universe here is about 13 points more Republican than the overall population usually is, so just keep all that in mind as we go to the results of our instant poll.

Get this reaction from those that watched the speech tonight. 38% said they had a very positive reaction to the speech.

25%, somewhat positive, 36% negative. So roughly two-thirds are in the positive territory, one-third negative, among speech watchers. How does that very positive number stack up against previous addresses? Well, look here. It’s about six percentage points lower than Donald Trump was at with the very positive score last year.

President Donald Trump delivered an unhinged, lie-filled, racist, and disturbingly dark State of the Union address Tuesday where he gaslit Americans about his accomplishments yet ultimately did nothing to change his abysmal standing in approval polls.

In fact, he spent just a few minutes talking about the economy—the most important issue to voters as midterm elections approach—and instead spent the rest of the never-ending speech talking about murders and blood and other dark and depressing things that likely had average viewers wondering what on earth he was blathering about. 

Worse for Trump and Republicans is that when he did talk about the economy, he only boasted about how great it’s doing, saying it is “roaring like never before.” Yet he did not offer any plans for how he would bring costs down and help Americans afford their rising cost of living, which is what Americans want to hear. 

Related | Americans are pissed at the state of Trump’s union

For example, he boasted that “100% of the jobs created under my administration have been in the private sector.” Yeah, all 181,000 of them—the lowest annual job creation number in decades? 

He crowed that the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 50,000 under his tenure, even though the market is now 800 points below that. And the stock market in the United States is actually faring worse than other countries’ markets. 

Americans don’t believe Trump’s economy is great, no matter how many times Trump declares it to be true. In fact, CBS News released a poll before the speech that found 60% of Americans say that Trump makes things seem “better than they really are.”

Aside from rambling like a buffoon and being a raging asshole—reminding a national audience why they dislike him so much—Trump bragged about other head-scratching things that are unlikely to help boost his popularity. 

He gloated about having “lifted 2.4 million Americans—a record—off of food stamps.” Again, that’s not because he helped people but because he cut the program and stripped food aid from millions.

He waxed poetic about his illegal and destructive tariffs, saying they are “saving our country.” Of course, the tariffs are hurting the economy and Americans hate them, so highlighting this policy is again idiotic. 

And he even spoke about how he is working to fix health care—one of his worst policy issues—even though he has absolutely no plan, slashed Medicaid, and let Affordable Care Act tax credits expire, raising insurance premiums for millions of Americans. 

In fact, Trump slammed Democrats for not voting for the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—which slashed health care for the poorest Americans in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Rather than cower, Democrats stood and clapped, proud of themselves for not voting for that unpopular legislation.  

Trump’s speech coincided with his approval rating hitting second-term lows—rivaled only by the dismal approval ratings he notched after he incited a violent and deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

A spate of polls released before Trump’s address found a host of bad news for Trump, including that his approval with independents is at just 26%, that Americans disapprove of his performance on every major issue, and that his approval has fallen even among Republicans who he needs to turn out for midterm elections in November.  

The nonsense he spewed in Tuesday’s speech—the longest on record—is unlikely to change that.

While we all just suffered through that absolute buffoonery, here’s a final reminder: This utterly embarrassing display won’t matter when it comes to the November midterms. Feelings about Trump are baked in, and nothing he said in that speech will change the minds of Americans.

Trump started the night staring down a blue wave, and he ended it in the same position.

House Speaker Mike Johnson says the allegations against GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales regarding an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide “detestable,” but he says “we’re trying to sort it out.” 

“My understanding is he’s denied a lot of this, and we’re trying to sort it out,” Johnson told “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil in an exclusive interview ahead of President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night. “Now, it has been reported that the Office of Congressional Conduct is investigating this, and has been for some time. And what we do here is we allow all the facts to play out.” 

Months before her death, the aide, Regina Santos-Aviles, revealed the alleged affair with the Texas congressman in a text message to a colleague that was published last week. Other text exchanges  between Santos-Aviles and Gonzales that came to light Monday showed Gonzales asking Santos-Aviles for a “sexy pic” and contained other sexual banter. 

Gonzales faces several challengers in the March 3 Republican primary, and last week, he accused one of his challengers of spreading the affair allegations. Gonzales was endorsed by the GOP campaign arm, but Johnson noted Tuesday that was “before any of this came up.”

“Of course, he’s an incumbent,” Johnson told Dokoupil. “We’ve made an endorsement of Tony Gonzales back in the fall —  before any of this came up. The allegations are — I mean, it’s detestable what is being alleged.” 

Santos-Aviles died in September 2025 after lighting herself on fire, according to an autopsy report. She was married and has an 8-year-old son. 

Gonzales has previously denied having an affair, and he alleges he is being extorted by Santos-Aviles’ widower. Gonzales is married and has six children. 

He insisted Tuesday that he would not resign, despite calls from some within his own party. He and Johnson met Tuesday after Johnson spoke to Dokoupil. 

“I will not resign, I work every day for the people of Texas,” Gonzales told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “There will be an opportunity for all the details and the facts to come out. What you’ve seen are not all the facts.”

The allegation that Donald Trump sexually abused a 13-year-old girl decades ago when he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein has been on the Internet since Trump’s first presidential campaign.

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The allegation has floated around for years and years, but never seemed to go anywhere.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice may have given the allegation new life when they chose to illegally withhold the FBI interviews of the accuser that were done in 2019 from the Epstein files release.

NPR reported:

Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.

NPR reviewed multiple sets of unique serial numbers appearing before and after the pages in question, stamped onto documents in the Epstein files database, FBI case records, emails and discovery document logs in the latest tranche of documents published at the end of January. NPR’s investigation found dozens of pages that appear to be catalogued by the Justice Department but not shared publicly.

House Oversight Committee Democrats were already investigating the allegations made by the woman against Trump, but they have opened a second investigation into the conduct of the Department of Justice.

Story continues below.

When the US Supreme Court unanimously blocked a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration in 2024 over the agency’s regulation of the abortion drug mifepristone, conservatives were disappointed but undeterred. The justices ruled that anti-abortion doctors didn’t have standing to sue. But in a hopeful sign for those opposed to abortion, they left the courthouse doors open to other parties who might be able to make a more convincing case.

Louisiana eagerly took up the challenge. On Tuesday, that lawsuit—another potential blockbuster—has its first major test, when lawyers for the state and a woman who says she was coerced into having an abortion by an ex-boyfriend will try to persuade a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction against FDA rules that allow abortion pills to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail. 

The case is part of an increasingly urgent—and panicked—anti-abortion campaign to make abortion pills much harder to obtain, not just in Louisiana but nationwide. “Telemedicine has been a game changer for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned, which is exactly why Louisiana wants to eliminate it,” Rachana Desai Martin, chief US program officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “They see what a lifeline abortion pills have become—especially for people in states that ban abortion—and they want to squash it.”

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has asked the judge to halt the proceedings until the FDA finishes a review of mifepristone’s safety that it launched last fall. The Louisiana case “threatens to short-circuit” that study, Department of Justice lawyers contend. 

Louisiana bans abortions with almost no exceptions, classifies mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled substances,” and equates abortion providers with “drug dealers.” But nearly four years after Roe was overturned in June 2022, out-of-state abortion providers are mailing hundreds of boxes of abortion pills to Louisiana patients every month. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill blames this state of affairs on a rule change by the Biden administration that permanently ended the FDA’s requirement for in-person dispensing of mifepristone.

The 2023 rule change was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and “avowedly political,” Murrill claims, pointing to an executive order by President Joe Biden after the Dobbs decision that directed his administration to “identify all ways to ensure that mifepristone is as widely accessible as possible.” She says the rule change exceeded Biden’s authority and violates the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era obscenity law, unenforced for decades, that prohibits the mailing of abortion drugs, supplies, and equipment.

Echoing the claims of abortion opponents going back to the 1980s, Murrill insists abortion pills are too dangerous to be prescribed to women under any circumstances, much less remotely. Fact check: Scores of studies from around the globe have shown that mifepristone is safe and effective.

Murrill also argues that telemedicine makes it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want. That’s what Murrill’s co-plaintiff in the case, a Louisiana woman named Rosalie Markezich, says happened to her in 2023. Markezich alleges that her boyfriend at the time used her email address to order drugs from a California doctor, then forced her to take the medication against her will. “The trauma of my chemical abortion still haunts me,” she says in court documents. “Had the FDA required an in-person visit with a doctor…my boyfriend would never have been able to obtain the drugs that he made me take.”

Murrill’s efforts to prosecute the California physician, Dr. Rémy Coeytaux, and another abortion doctor, New York–based Dr. Margaret Carpenter, have been thwarted by shield laws in those states that protect telemedicine providers. For all these reasons, Murril argues, the FDA’s 2023 changes “must be held unlawful, stayed, set aside, vacated, and preliminarily and permanently enjoined.”

Louisiana’s suit reflects widespread anger within the anti-abortion movement over the continued availability of abortion pills in the post-Roe era, even in states with near-total bans. According to the most recent data, medication now accounts for almost two-thirds of abortions in the US. More than a quarter of all abortions occur via telemedicine. 

Anti-abortion leaders’ frustration with President Donald Trump has also been growing as he has ignored the pleas of his conservative allies to crack down on the pills. The FDA study on mifepristone announced last fall, for example, was widely seen as a delaying tactic to avoid more sweeping action. Last October, Trump’s FDA went so far as to approve a new generic form of mifepristone, potentially making the drug more, not less, available. 

Trump’s foot-dragging is thought to be predicated on his concern that federal limits on abortion would further harm Republicans’ rapidly eroding prospects in November’s midterm elections. As abortion historian and law professor Mary Ziegler told me recently, “I think that, left to his own devices, Trump might just run out the clock on abortion stuff for the entirety of his presidency.” But abortion opponents like Murrill aren’t going to sit back and let that happen, Ziegler adds. “He’s not going to be left to his own devices.” 

On the contrary, lawmakers across the country are passing increasingly severe laws, like Texas House Bill 7, which gives private citizens broad new powers to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers. Activists have mounted new attacks on the safety of mifepristone, including a campaign pushing false claims that the drug is contaminating drinking water. If Murrill’s lawsuit isn’t successful, several other deep-red states have their own cases advancing through the courts. 

Mifepristone, approved by the FDA in 2000, is the first of two drugs that make up the standard medication-abortion protocol. It works by blocking the production of progesterone, the main hormone that supports the developing pregnancy. The second drug, misoprostol, causes the uterus to contract, expelling the pregnancy. 

As Smith College professor Carrie N. Baker, author of Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, told me last year, the FDA’s initial approval was under “a very restrictive protocol.” The rules became even more stringent in 2011 when mifepristone was consigned to a program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs. Only doctors could dispense the pills during in-person visits to clinics or medical offices. Patients were required to have three appointments and could only use the medication through seven weeks of pregnancy. Inclusion in the REMS program “wasn’t because mifepristone was unsafe,” Baker told me, but because it was so controversial:

“There was an enormous amount of research showing that it was safe, including widespread clinical trials. The FDA was worried if something went wrong, the drug would lose approval and go away forever. The restrictions were a way of closely monitoring the abortion pill, not because it was dangerous, but because they wanted to have a good, solid safety record so that they could then justify expanding access. The theory was that they would loosen that protocol after a couple of years of evidence showing how safe it was.”

Starting in 2016, the FDA began relaxing some of those rules, including allowing mifepristone to be used up to 10 weeks’ gestation. In 2021, as the pandemic wreaked havoc on medical and reproductive care, Biden’s FDA said it would no longer enforce the in-person office-visit requirement, opening the door to telehealth consultations and mailed pills. After still more study, the Biden administration permanently dropped the in-person requirement in January 2023, six months after Roe was overturned. The new FDA rules also made mifepristone more readily available in pharmacies.

By then, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a coalition of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors, had already gone to federal court in Texas, seeking to overturn the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as well as the more recent rules’ changes. Representing the coalition was the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal behemoth that has played a pivotal role in most of the significant anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ policy and court battles of recent years. 

The judge in that case, anti-abortion ideologue Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, gave the doctors what they had been hoping for, issuing an unprecedented nationwide order that suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. His decision, subsequently scaled back by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled 9-0 that the doctors lacked standing to bring the lawsuit because they could not show that the FDA regulations caused them any direct harm.

The justices, however, left open the possibility that Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas—which had intervened in the case in 2023—might have standing to sue the FDA on their own. Louisiana and Texas had also sought to intervene, but the two states were too late in joining the suit. Last fall, Louisiana brought its own case in federal court, as did Texas and Florida in a separate lawsuit. 

The case being heard on Tuesday has key similarities to the Hippocratic Medicine lawsuit. The Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Rosalie Markezich. As in the doctors’ suit, Louisiana argues that the mailing of abortion pills violates the Comstock Act, which, if enforced, would amount to a national abortion ban. 

But the Louisiana case is narrower than the earlier one, focusing on the 2023 Biden rule change and telemedicine. Markezich’s allegations are also a new addition, although her story echoes a growing theme among abortion opponents. Telemedicine, ADF’s senior counsel, Erik Baptist, told States Newsroom, “enables and emboldens people in coercive situations.”

“This goes beyond arguments about safety and efficacy to claims that it’s being widely misused, which there really isn’t evidence of,” says University of Texas law professor Rachel Rebouché. To the contrary, she says, women are more likely to be coerced or tricked into getting pregnant and staying pregnant. “They’re more likely to experience domestic violence and coercion during pregnancy.”

For its part, the Justice Department argues that Murrill doesn’t have any more right to sue the FDA over its regulation of abortion pills than the anti-abortion doctors did. “Louisiana suffers no sovereign injury because it remains free to make and enforce its pro-life policies,” the DOJ says. Regarding Markezich’s claim, it argues, “That past injury (though of course tragic) is not redressable by the prospective relief she seeks.” The idea that Markezich’s injury was caused by the FDA’s rules—rather than, say, by her ex-boyfriend—”is exactly the kind of attenuated theory” rejected by the Supreme Court in 2024, the DOJ contends. 

The surprising part of the argument is that Trump’s DOJ is taking the same position that Biden’s DOJ might have taken, Rebouché says. “The FDA is basically saying, you haven’t connected the dots and shown that their lifting of a restriction [in 2023] is what has caused these harms. So what you’re asking the court to do”—issue a preliminary injunction—”is not going to fix the problem.”

In requesting a delay in the legal proceedings until the FDA study is concluded, the Justice Department says the preliminary injunction “may prove as unnecessary as it is disruptive, if FDA ultimately decides that the in-person dispensing requirement must be restored.” The Biden rule has been in effect for three years, the DOJ notes, which undercuts Louisiana’s argument that the need for an injunction is urgent.

“Ordinarily, I’d assume the judge would just grant the request for more time,” says abortion historian Ziegler. “The request is pretty nebulous, though—is it for a year? More? So that makes it more unpredictable.” 

As in the Hippocratic Medicine case, the Louisiana lawsuit is being heard by a Trump appointee, US District Judge David Joseph. Last year, Joseph ruled that the EEOC’s inclusion of abortion as a pregnancy-related medical condition under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was contrary to the legislative intent of the law. But he has also decided against GOP attorneys general on immigration asylum procedures, and gun rights supporters on gun silencers.

In a sign of the high stakes, numerous groups have filed amicus briefs as if the arguments were taking place before the Supreme Court instead of in the Western District of Louisiana. Lining up for Murrill and Markezich are such anti-abortion stalwarts as Students for Life of America and Heartbeat International. In the FDA’s corner, supporters include former FDA officials, domestic violence organizations, disability rights groups, and Medical Students for Choice.

“The abortion pill is an existential threat to the anti-abortion movement,” Rebouché says. “If you want to end abortion in America, mail-order pills are a huge impediment to doing so.”

Last Thursday, the White House tried to get President Trump to focus on the economic concerns driving the midterm elections. Instead, he issued a 10-to-15-day ultimatum to Iran, claimed that his wife’s documentary was so good that some women had seen it four times, and accused his predecessor Barack Obama of releasing classified information about space aliens.

Few actually watched his 68-minute speech on the economy later that afternoon at the Coosa Steel Corporation in Georgia. But even if they had tuned in, they would have found Trump’s recitation of his economic talking points overshadowed by his banter about wanting to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor, claims that the FBI found “plenty of stuff” when it raided Fulton County’s election office, or the suggestion, denied by his own advisers, that inflation was no longer an issue: “I’ve won affordability.”

So it fell to aides at the White House to email reporters with the message top political advisers have tested and refined as the best way to move voters in 2026. Their strategy is to highlight the accomplishments of the administration—tax cuts, lower gas prices, foreign investment—while promising that more is to come. “Republican leadership is building a brighter, more prosperous future for all Georgians—and today’s visit underscores President Trump’s unrelenting commitment to finishing the job,” the press release said.

Trump will have another chance to sell his economic agenda tonight, when he delivers his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress, in what is likely to be his most-watched speech of the year. But top White House advisers and Republican strategists have so little faith that he will stick to the script in the months ahead that they are reverting to a 2024 playbook: They will let Trump be Trump, while demanding discipline from the rest of the GOP ecosystem.

Many of Trump’s top advisers gathered with the Cabinet last Tuesday at the Capitol Hill Club, not far from the House chamber, for a briefing on the new strategy. James Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff in charge of midterm efforts, explained to the group that the message had to be nuanced, recognizing both Trump’s accomplishments and the continued economic struggles of many voters, one of the Republicans in the room told me, requesting anonymity to discuss the private meeting. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1934 midterms, did not go around saying that everything was great, Blair told the crowd. Instead, Roosevelt’s team argued that things were getting better, and that if Democrats stayed in power, much more improvement awaited.

The challenge, of course, is similar to the one Trump’s team faced during the previous presidential election, when they rolled out an advertising strategy largely focused on economic concerns that felt disconnected from everything Trump was saying. That difficulty is amplified because Trump is now in the White House, and this is his economy. The president fills his speeches with superlatives—the best, the greatest, the biggest—not nuance. He has for months been focused elsewhere, on foreign policy, building projects, getting revenge on those who he feels have done him wrong—all areas where he has more control. Inside the White House, aides have tried to keep Trump from becoming fatalistic about losing the House, after he told a reporter, “When you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” in January. He has committed to traveling the country about once every two weeks until the start of spring, when his travel is expected to increase to weekly or more.

At the Capitol Hill briefing, Blair and the pollster Tony Fabrizio asked Trump’s top deputies to drive the economic storyline that Trump sometimes discards. “The president will have his message. And that works for him. But you are not the president, and here are the messages that the data show work,” the person who attended the meeting told me, summarizing the strategy. “Going on Fox News and reiterating what the president says every day—that is a problem.”

From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’

Asked to comment for this story, the White House spokesperson Kush Desai sent me a statement that argued the economic benefits of Trump’s efforts are just beginning: “President Trump pledged to turn the page on Joe Biden’s inflation and affordability crisis, and the Trump administration is embarking on an ambitious agenda of reform across every sector of our economy to deliver.”

Strategists at the National Republican Congressional Committee have been making the case that tax refunds are up and more benefits will be felt late in the year. They have also pointed to low approval ratings for the Democratic Party, following the 2024 wipeout. “After inheriting Joe Biden’s economically disastrous spending spree, President Trump and Republicans are delivering real relief for the American people,” Mike Marinella, a NRCC spokesperson, told me. “The contrast is clear: Republicans are delivering relief where it counts while Democrats want to get back to their status quo of failures.”

Democrats, for their part, are counting on Trump to continue to bungle the economic messaging. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has for months summed up his party’s argument as a focused antidote to Trump’s more scattered priorities. “America is too expensive, and Donald Trump is doing nothing about it,” Jeffries said in a January interview with Jim Acosta. “He’s focused on Venezuela or Greenland or Iran or Syria.”

It’s a story that Democrats say resonates with voters. Just after Trump took office last year, Democratic polling by Navigator found that 59 percent of voters thought inflation, along with the cost of living, was the most important political issue. Only 29 percent thought this was the issue that Trump and Republicans in Congress were most focused on. Now, one year later, that 30-point gap has grown to 38 points, and voters report that Trump and his colleagues are far more focused on issues such as foreign conflicts and immigration than they are.

“His obsession is on everything other than what matters to people’s lives,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, told me. “If Bill Clinton is ‘I feel your pain,’ Donald Trump is ‘I want you to feel my pain.’ He is all about what makes a ballroom and getting FIFA World Cup peace prizes.”

Republican strategists tell me they have seen similar warning signs. When a national GOP organization recently assembled a focus group of independent swing voters, those involved were alarmed by the number of people who described Trump as distracted or not caring about the right issues, including one voter who questioned why the president was so focused on gaining control of Greenland. Several Republicans told me they are worried about Trump’s continued obsession with unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud in the 2020 election, which they said is not only too far afield of voter concerns but could also backfire if it depresses turnout among Republican voters who don’t trust elections, increases turnout among Democrats, or alienates independents.

Read: ‘The trust has been absolutely destroyed’

A national Republican election strategist noted that the GOP lost the Senate in 2020 after Democrats flipped seats in Georgia and Arizona—the epicenter of the fraud claims—and then lost numerous House and Senate races in 2022 after candidates embraced the false theories. “President Trump was in large part elected again because he was disciplined enough to focus on issues that voters cared about—inflation, jobs, border security, and the economy,” the strategist told me, “but any efforts to relitigate the ‘stolen election’ would be a disaster for Republicans this fall.”

Democratic candidates are proceeding on the same assumptions. On the western edge of North Carolina, the farmer Jamie Ager hopes to push out Republican Representative Chuck Edwards from a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2024. The region is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Helene, which blasted through the area that year, and waiting for federal compensation to rebuild.

“I met a woman still living in a camper, and she is not able to get her home rebuilt. I have an employee whose family house floated away in the river,” Ager told me, before making an argument that will be repeated hundreds of times by Democrats this year. “To hear that we want to give money to Argentina, to spend money on Greenland, and to build a ballroom all feels like, Wait a second. We were all promised a lot of money down here, and that is not coming.”

Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to take up an effort by energy companies to end a lawsuit filed in state court that seeks billions of dollars in damages for the impacts their fossil-fuel products have had on the global climate.

The decision from the Supreme Court could impact the ability of state and local governments to hold oil and gas companies accountable in state courts for the consequences of climate change. Dozens of cities and counties have filed similar cases around the country, but the justices had turned down similar disputes that have landed before them.

The court will likely hear arguments in its next term, which begins in October.

The legal battle was brought by the city of Boulder, Colorado, and Boulder County against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil Corporation in state court in 2018. Local officials argued that the companies, which produce and sell fossil fuels, contributed to climate change, which in turn harmed Colorado. 

Boulder officials alleged in their lawsuit that the “unchecked production, promotion, refining, marketing and sale of fossil fuels” around the world led to “unchecked fossil fuel use” and an increased concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, which has then warmed the planet. The effects of climate change, they said, led Boulder to experience more extreme weather events, including heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods.

The city claimed the energy companies violated state law, in part because they altered the climate by selling fossil fuels at levels they know would “bring numerous catastrophic injuries to Colorado.” The suit sought billions of dollars in damages.

The oil and gas companies attempted to move the case to federal court. The dispute landed before the Supreme Court, which in 2023 declined to hear the case. 

The energy companies then unsuccessfully sought to have the complaint dismissed in state court, arguing in part that the Clean Air Act overrides the state-law claims seeking relief for harms allegedly caused by the effects of international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate. The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s decision allowing Boulder’s lawsuit to move forward last May.

In urging the Supreme Court to step in, lawyers for the energy companies argued in a filing that state and local entities are devoting “enormous resources” to litigating cases against them. They said allowing the disputes to proceed in state court could mean the industry is forced to pay billions of dollars in awards. 

“In these cases, state and local governments are attempting to assert control over the Nation’s energy policies by holding energy companies liable for worldwide conduct in ways that starkly conflict with our constitutional structure, as well as the policies and priorities of the federal government,” the energy companies argued. “That flouts the Court’s precedents and basic principles of federalism.”

The Trump administration is backing ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy. Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in a filing that the case raises a question of “vast nationwide significance,” and warned that if Boulder’s lawsuit can proceed, every locality in the country could sue “essentially anyone in the world for contributing to global climate change.”

Boulder’s claims, Harris wrote, “seek to hold petitioners responsible for all of their fossil-fuel activities, anywhere in the world — extending the reach of Colorado common law well beyond Colorado’s territorial limits.”

Lawyers for Boulder officials argued it was too soon for the Supreme Court to intervene. They said in a filing that the city and county want the energy companies to “share a portion of the financial burden their communities must bear in coping with an altered climate brought about in part by” their conduct.

Beyond the lawsuit brought by Boulder and the surrounding county, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal from 15 energy companies last year that sought to quash lawsuits brought by Honolulu officials in Hawaii state court, which cleared the way for the case to proceed.

The high court also turned away a bid by Republican-led states to block lawsuits brought by Democrat-led states that sought to hold the energy industry liable for allegedly deceiving the public about the dangers of their fossil-fuel products.

After a Winter Olympic Games of athletes celebrating each other as much as they did winning, the response from the Trump administration is equal parts disheartening and gross. 

These are people who are functionally incapable of seeing the Olympics as anything but an opportunity to display their xenophobic loathing of other countries and to celebrate victory as a sort of violent domination. 

In short, the Trump team simply didn’t understand anything about these Olympics. 

Perhaps the highest-profile example of this was the diminutive FBI Director Kash Patel partying with the U.S. men’s hockey team on your dime. 

Or maybe it’s that, after the men’s hockey team beat Canada for the gold, the official White House X account posted a picture—which we can all safely assume is AI slop—of a bald eagle attacking a Canadian goose on a frozen lake. Beating Canada in a hockey game apparently means we have subjugated the entire country? Terrific. 

Or perhaps it’s the AI slop video of President Donald Trump—the biggest, most pathetic starfucker there ever was—inserting himself into the game so he could punch a Canadian hockey player. 

This behavior would be disgusting at any time, but it’s especially jarring after an Olympics where the athletes themselves made conscious decisions to show care for each other—including their rivals.

Nowhere was this clearer than in figure skating, where U.S. skaters banded together to cheer other countries’ skaters on, with Ilia Malinin taking time to congratulate Mikhail Shaidorov for his gold medal—even after Malinin’s didn’t place at all for his free skate performance. 

And after Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto was inundated with reporters forcing cameras in her face, she learned that she lost the gold to U.S. skater Alysa Liu. Liu’s teammate, Amber Glenn, rushed to comfort Sakamoto, telling one reporter to stop trying to film her crying. 

But it wasn’t just figure skaters. 

After Australian snowboarder Valentino Guseli unexpectedly made it into the finals of the big air competition, Swiss snowboarder Jonas Hasler carried Guseli around on his shoulders in celebration.

And we also were treated to the adorableness of “Dads Podium,” where all three dual moguls winners were joined by their partners and young children. 

It also wasn’t just athletes. 

The closing ceremony highlighted how important togetherness was to the games, with International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry  telling athletes in her final remarks, “You showed us that the Olympic Games are a place for everyone. A place where sport brings us together.”

She also thanked the Italian people for their graciousness toward the athletes.

“You celebrated your champions and you cheered for athletes of every nation, showing that passion and respect can live side by side,” Coventry  said.

The notion that people can care for each other—even as sports rivals—and that connection matters more than jingoism and xenophobia is utterly foreign to people like Trump. The only thing he knows how to celebrate is the subjugation of others. 

Related | Why the Olympics turn Republicans into sore losers

Sadly, it looks like the U.S. men’s hockey team is totally down for this sort of thing, eagerly accepting Trump’s invitation to his State of the Union address on Tuesday. 

The plans for it already sound gross, with House Speaker Mike Johnson trying to break the House rule that says that no special guests are allowed on the floor. He says he’s “trying to work out logistics to see if there’s some way to perhaps get them into the gallery and the doors, wave and receive the applause they’re due.”

Proposing to break legislative rules to do some xenophobic screaming about AMERICA is so on brand for this administration that it feels like the writers’ room for this season is getting lazy. 

But unfortunately, it’s real. At least the rest of us can fall back on our memories of what it looks like when athletes come together and care for each other.

Here’s how much things have changed since Donald Trump last addressed Congress: A year ago, he shouted out a beaming Elon Musk, who was watching in the gallery.

At the time, Trump was triumphant. But tomorrow night, when he returns to the Capitol to deliver the State of the Union address, he will be trying to turn around a stumbling presidency. His prized tariffs have been sharply curtailed by the Supreme Court. His most visible immigration push—federal surges into U.S. cities to carry out mass deportations—has become broadly unpopular since two Americans were killed by his masked agents. War with Iran seems to be approaching, yet Trump has not tried to sell the public on the conflict, articulated his goals, or laid out what would come next. He is facing an onslaught of questions about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the dead and disgraced sex offender, as well as his efforts to use the Oval Office to enrich himself and his family. And his poll numbers have slumped just months before Americans are set to render their midterm verdict on his performance.

In early 2026’s whirlwind news cycles, and the nation’s splintered media landscape, it’s unlikely that any one speech will permanently alter a presidency. But the address presents Trump with a clear opening—and a national audience. Ever the showman, Trump will have the spotlight as he seeks to sell his victories and convince a skeptical public that he is indeed focused on improving their lives. His aides believe that the address, with its pageantry and tradition, will reignite the presidency’s momentum. But Republicans are worried.

Never before has a president so completely dominated the political landscape and national discourse. Trump, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way. But that’s less of a positive for Republicans who are left to defend a series of unpopular decisions. Voters have made their unhappiness clear: Since last fall, the GOP has lost a series of elections, including recent stunners in deep-red Texas and Louisiana districts that Trump won by double digits in November 2024. The GOP worries that a blue wave could be approaching this fall, allowing Democrats to win the House and—although it seemed unthinkable just a few months ago—put the Senate in play.

Few congressional Republicans remain willing to publicly defy the president, but more and more are sending private notes down Pennsylvania Avenue expressing concern about Trump’s overreach and obsessions, be it weaponizing the Justice Department for his retribution campaign or bulldozing his way through a slew of Washington-area vanity projects. They are pleading with the president to not lose sight of what got him reelected and to get back to the basics.

Read: The art of the retreat

But there’s a problem with the idea that Trump can simply rerun his 2024 campaign and expect the same result: Over the past two years, many of his most popular issues have turned into political liabilities.

Trump has, on more than one occasion, declared that tariff is his favorite word—an odd but instructive choice. Trump is a politician with few core ideologies, but one consistent belief over the decades has been the power of taxing imports. He made tariffs a central pillar of his economic policy, unveiling them last spring on his so-called Liberation Day and using them to forcefully negotiate trade deals. He declared a national emergency to allow him to bypass Congress, normally the overseer of such matters, and directed the measures himself from the Oval Office.

The markets were not always happy, leading Trump to roll back and adjust some of the duties. That, in turn, created an atmosphere of uncertainty, frustrating businesses and foreign leaders alike. But Trump has largely stayed the course and, at times, wielded the tariffs like a geopolitical weapon, drawn to punish countries that have angered him and holstered when favorable agreements are obtained. That unilateral approach helped persuade the Supreme Court to reject most of his tariffs last Friday; the majority of justices made clear that the president has exceeded his constitutional authority.

The decision was a major blow to Trump, who has invested so much political capital in his tariffs and has rarely seen his power checked during his second term. He did not handle it well. Later that day, he eviscerated the justices in a remarkably angry news conference. This morning, in a particular fit of pique, he declared on social media that he would no longer use capital letters to refer to, as he put it, “the supreme court.” But some Republicans privately celebrated the tariffs’ demise, believing that they were dragging down their party and that the Court had handed the president a lifeline. Others worried that Congress was giving up too much of its authority; Representative Mike Turner of Ohio told me, “You don’t want that type of power to be vested in one person because of the creep of the use of tariffs” for use in foreign policy or personal score-settling. Trump, however, is not ready to quit: He has declared that he holds powers to impose tariffs (10 percent! 15 percent!) or licenses to raise revenue. His latest moves threaten to compound the confusion, boost inflation, and hinder the economy.

Immigration is another former Trump strength turned problem. Many voters liked his plan to fortify the southern border and deport violent criminals who were in the United States illegally. But, pushed to meet extraordinary daily arrest quotas, the administration’s efforts expanded to target migrants who, in many cases, had lived in the country for years without committing crimes. Images of masked agents shooting dead two Americans—Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 years old—spawned a backlash and forced the administration to retreat from Minneapolis, though its overall deportation goals have not changed. Balking at supercharged funding for ICE, Democrats triggered a partial government shutdown that will continue as lawmakers fill the chamber tomorrow night. The sense of mayhem that fueled those fatal confrontations has fed into the perception, some Republicans fear, of a lawless presidency, one consumed by the Epstein scandal and favoring the rich over the working-class voters who put Trump into office twice.

Read: What would war with Iran look like?

To that mix now comes the possibility of a new war in the Middle East. Trump, back in 2016, railed against the “endless wars” of Iraq and Afghanistan, vowing to not engage in any new military campaigns. But he has become besotted with his nation’s military might, which was on display in the seizure of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela last month and the powerful bunker-buster bombs Trump ordered to be dropped on Iran’s nuclear program last summer. Tehran has, once more, drawn Trump’s ire, for its crackdown on protests and for allegedly continuing its nuclear-enrichment program. Trump has deployed a fleet of warships to the Middle East and has discussed a range of options with his advisers, from continued diplomacy to a limited strike to a much larger attack. But Trump has yet to make a convincing public case for any sort of conflict; he has not engaged Congress or explained to the American people why a strike—which could lead to the very sort of prolonged war he once vowed to avoid—would be in their interest. And that may continue: Aides told me that foreign policy is unlikely to be a central theme to his State of the Union address.

When Trump begins speaking during prime time tomorrow night, the nation he leads will need some convincing. In a CNN poll released today, just 32 percent of Americans said that Trump has had the right priorities, and 68 percent said that he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. (That is the president’s most negative reading on that question during either of his terms in office.) Trump’s overall job-approval rating in that poll is 36 percent, and only 26 percent of independents think he is doing a good job.

Trump, naturally, dismisses any negative indicators in surveys. “I had polls for the election that showed I was going to get swamped, and I won in a landslide,” Trump said today.

White House officials I spoke with painted a bullish picture of the state of the nation and told me that the president will spend tomorrow night focused on his record of accomplishment. Among the highlights: a Dow Jones Industrial Average that recently crossed 50,000, the release of Israeli hostages from Gaza and Trump’s claims of cooling several global conflicts, the tax cuts from the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer, the closed border, plans to reduce mortgage rates, and a new government website for buying prescription drugs. Even though Trump has thoroughly rewired the nation’s economy with his tax cuts and trade wars, aides told me that blame for any sluggishness would be aimed squarely at his predecessor, Joe Biden (“Watch the State of the Union. We’re going to be talking about the economy. We inherited a mess,” Trump claimed last week). The White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me that Trump’s “overarching agenda has already cooled inflation and cut prices of many household essentials, with more progress in store for the American people.”

At the time of Trump’s most recent address to Congress—which was not technically a State of the Union—he seemed invincible. Armed with the Project 2025 playbook, he was in the midst of a 100-day sprint to expand executive power. Democrats struggled to keep up. Musk was the GOP’s golden boy, overseeing dramatic DOGE cuts to the federal bureaucracy. Trump that night delivered a swaggering and lengthy speech (one hour and 40 minutes!) and boasted about his electoral victory. A short time later, he talked about running for a third term. Few people laughed.

Read: Doomsday-prepping for Trump’s third term

Although his fortunes have faltered, counting Trump out would be foolish. He remains the author of two of the most unlikely victories in American politics. Even so, there will also be a focus on the pair of men seated behind him in the well of the House of Representatives. One will be Vice President Vance, an early GOP front-runner for 2028. He has taken a few tentative steps to inherit the MAGA coalition, and his presence will be an inherent reminder that Trump’s remaining time in office is limited. The other will be House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose hold on that office feels tenuous. If the Democrats this fall take the lower chamber, as many expect, that spot for next year’s State of the Union could very well be filled by newly elected House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries.

Trump has long groused about how, in his first term, he felt upstaged during the State of the Union addresses by then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi being positioned behind him. One year, Pelosi went viral for sarcastically clapping for one of Trump’s applause lines; the next, she tore up her copy of the president’s speech. But beyond those two moments, Pelosi’s presence meant that the Democrats were armed with committee chairs and the power of the subpoena. They were able to investigate Trump and his administration. A Speaker Jeffries would surely do the same. Tomorrow’s State of the Union might just be Trump’s best chance to begin the sort of comeback he needs to avoid that fate again.