The seat is currently held by Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), the former governor whose family owns the Chicago Cubs. Ricketts is running for his first full term, after being appointed in 2023 to succeed former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who resigned to become a college president.

To oppose him, Democrats are fielding … nobody?

The Nebraska Democratic Party announced almost a year ago that they planned to stay out of the race and instead endorsed Dan Osborn, a third-party candidate who previously ran as an Independent for the state’s other Senate seat. Osborn, a mechanic and former union leader with a heterodox mix of views — he is pro-border wall, pro-gun rights, pro-legalizing marijuana, and pro-raising the minimum wage — lost his 2024 race by seven points in a state Kamala Harris lost by 20.

“We believe a coalition of Dems, Indys and Republicans can beat Ricketts and break up the one-party rule,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair, wrote on X last year. “We like the odds of a mechanic vs a billionaire.” It’s a strategy Democrats are also pursuing elsewhere, in hopes of taking on Republicans without the Democratic Party label hanging around their necks.

The Nebraska state party couldn’t stop candidates from running in the Democratic primary, however, and soon a 79-year-old anti-abortion, Trump-supporting pastor named William Forbes threw his hat in the ring. Democrats accused Forbes of being a Republican plant, running at Ricketts’ behest to take votes away from Osborn. (“The Nebraska Democratic Party made a deliberate, principled decision not to field a candidate in the U.S. Senate race,” Kleeb said in a March statement, accusing Forbes of “running to trick voters.”) Forbes denied the allegations.

A pharmacy technician named Cindy Burbank quickly jumped in the race as well, with the explicit promise that she would drop out and make way for Osborn if she won the Democratic primary. This launched a brief legal battle, when Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state removed Burbank from the ballot, arguing that she was not a “good-faith candidate” since she was only running to drop out. The Nebraska Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Burbank’s favor.

Meanwhile, the primary for a pro-weed third party was also gripped by drama. It has been revealed that Burbank paid the filing fee for Mike Marvin, who was running as a candidate of the Legal Marijuana NOW Party. Other leaders of the party have accused Marvin of being a plant as well, alleging that he, too, plans to drop out in Osborn’s favor, which Marvin denies.

The primaries were finally held last week in the race CNN has dubbed the “craziest election in the country,” and the results yielded the best-case scenario for Osborn: both Burbank and Marvin won their primaries. That gives Osborn his best shot at a one-on-one race against Ricketts.

It will still be an uphill battle for the Democratic-backed Independent; the last time Nebraska elected a non-Republican to statewide office was 2006. (Ironically, Ricketts — then a businessman — was the Republican nominee who came up short that year, losing to Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson.) On Polymarket, Osborn’s odds of winning the race are pegged at 39%, which still makes him an underdog, of course, but is nothing to sneeze at in such a deep-red state. Strange things can happen in years when the incumbent president is polling at such a dismal low.

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Those sort of odds mean it is not ridiculous to start thinking through what it might look like to have an Independent in the Senate, a body where the two-party system is so ingrained that your party membership dictates everything from where you sit to where you eat lunch, with only two options for each.

And not an Independent like Bernie Sanders or Angus King, both of whom caucus with the Democrats and operate as party members in everything but name. (Sanders is even a member of the Democratic leadership team.) Unlike them, Osborn claims he would not caucus with either party. I recently received a reader question about how exactly this would work:

Q: Dan Osborn, an Independent, is claiming that if he wins in Nebraska he will not caucus with either party. Has that ever happened? I realize his chances are slim but I am curious. Do you think he would cave and choose a side, in order to get committee assignments, etc?

As this questioner guessed, it is very unusual to have a senator who is not a member of either party caucus.

The last five Senate independents — former Sens. Joe Lieberman (CT), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and Joe Manchin (WV), and then Sens. Sanders (VT) and King (ME) now — all caucused with a party (interestingly, all sided with the Democrats).

The last time there was a senator who didn’t caucus with either party, it was Sen. Dean Barkley (MN), but that was a bit of a special case, since he was appointed by Gov. Jesse Ventura — a member of the Reform Party — to briefly fill a seat during a lame-duck session, when a vacancy was created by a death. Barkley only served for two months, never joined a party, and apparently the issue of committees never came up, presumably since Congress was on winter break for most of the time he was in office.

Keep marching back in time, and you get Sens. Jim Jeffords (VT) and Harry F. Byrd Jr. (VA), who caucused with the Democrats; James Buckley (NY), brother of William F., who caucused with Republicans; and Bob Smith (NH), who ran for president on the Taxpayers’ Party line and briefly became an Independent but who appears to have kept his Republican committee assignments for the handful of months during which he left the GOP.

To find a senator who didn’t caucus with either party from the beginning of a Congress — when committee assignments are handed out — as Osborn would be doing, you have to go all the way back to 1953. And, friends, it did not go well.

The senator in question was Wayne Morse of Oregon. Like Osborn, he was a populist. He was also an iconoclast and a curmudgeon and, frankly, a bit of a crank. Morse was a Republican, but he left the party after Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, feeling that the GOP had moved too far to the right. Morse was then in his second Senate term. He didn’t like that Eisenhower had tapped the conservative Richard Nixon as his VP. He didn’t like that the GOP platform called for repealing the New Deal. And he didn’t like that Eisenhower hadn’t condemned McCarthyism, which Morse ardently opposed.

That meant the Senate on January 3, 1953 had 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats, and one Morse. On the first day of the new Congress, he marched into the chamber with a folding chair, which he planned to set up in the aisle, right in between the Democratic and Republican sides of the chamber. “Since I haven’t been given any seat in the new Senate, I decided to bring my own,” he told reporters.

When asked how he would receive committee assignments as an Independent senator, Osborn has invoked a Senate rule that requires every senator to sit on two committees. The rule technically doesn’t mention anything about parties, even though they are how the assignments get divvied out now.

Morse invoked the same rule in 1953. He quickly learned, however, that the rule says every senator has to sit on two committees; it doesn’t say they get to choose which two.

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At the beginning of that year’s Congress, the Republican and Democratic leaders came forward to submit their lists of proposed committee assignments for Senate approval, which is normally a mere formality. Neither party wanted to give Morse any of their slots. So they merely gave all of their own members the seats they wanted, and then offered to give Morse the two committee spots remaining, the ones nobody had claimed: seats on the Committee on Public Works (which oversaw federal buildings) and the Committee on the District of Columbia (which oversaw the nation’s capital).

Incidentally, today, you could imagine both of those committees being a prime slot for a publicity-hungry senator, since they would offer a platform with which to battle President Trump’s recent D.C. renovation projects. But in 1953, nobody wanted them, and certainly not Morse. He said that they were “garbage can” appointments, and he declined to accept them.

Morse then waged a lonely crusade to get himself more favorable assignments, citing a different Senate rule that allows for committee assignments to be made one by one — with senators filling out ballots listing out everyone they wanted to serve on a given committee. Morse wanted seats on the Armed Services and Labor Committees. For those two panels, he insisted that the Senate vote by ballot.

“The case which the Senate must decide is new,” Morse said in his typically grandiose fashion. “No such combination of facts and law has been before the Senate in precisely the same posture… I stand before the Senate, not as a member of either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but as an Independent.”

Every senator filled out their ballots for Morse’s desired committees, starting with Armed Services. The members selected for the panel by the two party leaders all received 80+ votes. Morse received seven. He did not press his motion to vote on the Labor Committee by ballot, agreeing to submit the matter to the Rules Committee to decide.

The process took months, during which Morse would take to the Senate floor every Friday afternoon to give long speeches, which he referred to as conducting “my committee work” out in the open, since he had no actual committees to sit on.

After the folding chair spectacle on the first day, he had agreed to sit on the Republican side of the aisle, but eventually, he decided he wanted his own section: a corner of the Democratic side — which he referred to as the side for the minority parties (plural) — that would be the one-man section of the Independent Party.

Other senators rose to protest; Morse traded barbs with each of them. “If we move the Senator’s seat, as he requests, what assurance do we have that he will not wish to move somewhere else in about 30 days?” Sen. Homer Capehart (R-IN) asked.

“I assure the Senator from Indiana that one great difference, of many differences between the Senator from Oregon and the Senator from Indiana, is that I take pride in my intellectual flexibility,” Morse replied.

Capehart tried another tack. “Does that mean, in the case of the Independent Party which the Senator from Oregon is trying to start, or perhaps has already started, that if I wanted to join the party I would have to wait for perhaps 60 days before joining, because at the end of 60 days the Senator from Oregon might have new facts which would convince him that he should not after all start a new party?” he asked.

Morse was ready with a quick retort. “I am sure my good friend from Indiana is speaking hypothetically,” Morse said. “I cannot imagine the Senator from Indiana ever having the intellectual flexibility which would cause him to want to become a member of an Independent Party and to place in first position an independent judgment on the facts pertaining to issues.”

Mic drop.

Frustrated, Capehart finally said, “My personal opinion is that the able Senator from Oregon thoroughly and completely and 100 percent enjoys being different.”

“I wish to assure the Senator from Indiana that I would not· enjoy being like him,” Morse responded. “I enjoy that kind of difference.”

At that point, the presiding officer interjected to express his “regret” that the Senate had no rule limiting senators to speak only about topics germane to pending business. “It would not be half so much fun,” Morse gleefully replied.

Morse had a sharp tongue, but these quick ripostes hardly helped him win his colleagues over. His effort to change his seat stalled in the Rules Committee, as did his effort to join his desired committees. Morse would continue to be a thorn in the Senate’s side for years, though his colleagues would gain a grudging respect for him. During his days giving those long Friday afternoon speeches, senators called him the “Five O’Clock Shadow”; by the time he retired in 1969, he was admiringly called the “Tiger of the Senate.” He had been one of only two senators to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in 1964. The passage of five years had vindicated one of the war’s earliest, most vocal critics.

As for Osborn, Republicans have alleged that the mechanic is merely a Democratic plant — how many plants can one Senate race have? — and that he is only pretending to be non-partisan now, so he can caucus with the Democrats if he wins. Indeed, the Senate Democrats’ main super PAC spent almost $4 million supporting Osborn in 2024; he isn’t exactly the free agent that he claims to be.

After flirting with independence, many third-party senators have ultimately decided to caucus with a major party, often finding it too logistically challenging to make it on their own, once questions like committees come into play. It’s in neither party’s interest to help someone who won’t help them win the majority; conversely, a third-party senator can often win the committee jackpot if they agree to nudge a party over the finish line.

Even the most stubbornly principled senators can fall victim to this grubby horse-trading. Morse eventually accepted his “garbage can” assignments in 1953, acknowledging that no one was in any mood to give him anything else. But when the new Congress started two years later, Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon B. Johnson offered Morse seats on the prestigious Banking and Foreign Relations Committees in exchange for joining the Democratic fold and helping Johnson become Majority Leader.

Morse took the deal. Senators who claim complete independence rarely stay that way.

If you’re curious what happened in Congress this week, I joined the team at 535 News to break it down yesterday, including an interesting bill on senators forfeiting their pay during government shutdowns and yet another discharge petition. Watch it here:

But you all know what our main dish is this morning: a mailbag issue.

In today’s mailbag, we’ll be looking at:

• The odds of a federal fix to gerrymandering

• How the redistricting wars will impact the race for the House

• Whether Democrats can win the Senate without Michigan

• How the Supreme Court went from a ruling upholding the VRA in 2023 to their ruling chipping away at it last month

• The impact gerrymandering will have on the type of lawmakers headed to Washington

• And more!

You all sent in great questions. I’m excited to answer them.

A redistricting fix

Here’s my question: can redistricting be addressed statutorily at the federal level, or would it take a constitutional amendment to curb all the recent shenanigans? I’m not talking about what’s realistic in the current political climate, just, like, could Congress theoretically pass a law requiring each state to use independent/nonpartisan commissions to draw its congressional districts? And if a federal law isn’t possible, could Congress use fiscal arm-twisting to tame gerrymandering, like they did when they standardized the drinking age & highway speed limits by threatening to withhold highway funds?

The Elections Clause of the Constitution allows state legislatures to dictate the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” but allows Congress to “at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” As a result, Congress has long passed laws regulating redistricting.

At one point, it was common for Congress at the outset of every redistricting cycle to require congressional districts to be contiguous and compact. Those requirements have since lapsed, although 23 states have passed laws of their own requiring contiguity and 18 require compactness. Congressional districts in many states (especially after this year) are far from compact; passing a new federal statute imposing a compactness standard would be one step towards reining in the redistricting arms race.

There could also be a law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, although neither party seems to be jumping to do so. Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-CA), whose district has been eliminated by mid-decade redistricting, has introduced a bill to prohibit the practice, and this week filed a discharge petition to force a vote on it. So far, his is the only signature. 217 to go!

There have also been many proposals over the years for Congress to require every state to set up independent redistricting commissions. Some scholars have raised constitutional objections to this, although Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) does stress that “Congress has regularly exercised its Elections Clause power, including to address partisan gerrymandering,” potentially suggesting that the court would uphold such a law.

The “fiscal arm-twisting” that the questioner raises is also a clever way to get around potential legal challenges (by incentivizing states to set up independent redistricting commissions rather than requiring them), and it would be an interesting test of the degree to which various state governments prioritize their political party’s control on the national level. As we’ve learned this year, there is a real competitive disadvantage for any political party that sets up independent commissions in the states they control without a guarantee the other party will follow suit. It’s possible that it would only take a few states to deciding to swallow the loss of federal dollars to their state — in exchange for shoring up their party’s position in Washington — for other states to be forced into making the same call, if enough are more worried about their party losing ground vs. their state’s fiscal health.

In that sense, it seems like for independent redistricting commissions to work, every state would need to take the leap at once.

With the revitalization of nationwide redistricting efforts, would it perhaps be more plausible for Congress (119th or 120th) to pass a nationwide gerrymandering ban?

Now, let’s talk about what’s politically feasible, not just what might be legal. Republicans currently have complete control in Washington and so far have signaled no interest in redistricting reform. That means the earliest it could probably happen is next time Democrats have a trifecta (control of the House, Senate, and White House).

As I’ve written before, I think it’s highly likely that Democrats will eliminate the Senate filibuster in their next trifecta. That will open the floodgates of legislating on many issues, including redistricting reform. In my mind, the main question, then, is what will stick and what will not: which policies would survive Democrats losing power in Washington, and which would be quickly reversed.

If Democrats were to codify Roe, for example, it would be very difficult politically for Republicans to undo that in their next trifecta. They could likely pass something smaller, like a ban on late-term abortions, but outright undoing a bill legalizing abortion (or going even further and passing a national abortion ban) would probably be hard to get enough votes for.

A reverse Republican example would be voter ID. If a GOP trifecta in a post-filibuster world passed a voter ID bill, it would be very politically difficult for a subsequent Democratic trifecta to undo it. On the other hand, a Democratic bill to allow transgender students to play on their sports teams of their choice, or a Republican bill expanding gun rights, would probably be reversed as soon as the other party rode into town.

Basically, my projection for the filibuster-less future is that there will be one layer of policies that effectively become “off limits” and get set in stone because the other party can’t muster the political will to overturn them, and then another layer of policies that flip back and forth every time the two parties trade control.

Where would redistricting reform fall? I’m not sure. On one hand, gerrymandering is very unpopular. But on the other, most people don’t care that much. A bill undoing abortion protections, for example, would drive voters to the polls. A bill undoing gerrymandering restrictions? Probably not.

All of this to say: I’m not sure gerrymandering is a problem that can be solved long-term by a single party, since I don’t think it’s an issue that carries enough salience for most voters to prevent the other party from undoing whatever bill is passed. This is probably one where you need 60 votes and support from both parties, in order to lock in the fix and not risk the status quo flipping back and forth every four years.

So far, there are not many signs of that sort of bipartisan consensus emerging on this issue. Perhaps a few more cycles of this will change that, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Zachary Donnini reminded me a few weeks ago: the longer Extreme Gerrymandering goes on, the more members of Congress there will be who owe their political careers to it (think of the California Democrats or Texas Republicans who will be headed to Washington next year only because of partisan gerrymandering). If we can’t pass a fix now, will we be able to a few years from now, when you could have 20% of Congress who would know passing such a bill would instantly mean they lose their jobs? It will only get harder and harder from here.

Predictions

Despite the impending gerrymandered district changes, the vibe in the media still suggests Democrats will take control of Congress in November. What’s your take on this?

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Tomorrow’s newsletter will be a mailbag edition. Send me your questions on redistricting, Trump’s declining poll numbers, the trip to China, the midterms, “The Apprentice” 2028 edition, or anything else that’s on your mind in the world of politics and government, whether attached to a recent headline or something bigger-picture.

As always, you can leave a comment below, click “reply” on this email, or click here to submit a question anonymously.

Send in a question!

In the meantime, if you want to hear from me today: I’ll be going live with at 11 a.m. ET to talk about my piece yesterday about Trump’s approval rating dive. You should get an email when it starts, but you can also click here to watch it at the appointed time.

And then, right after that… Some of the best reporters in the congressional press corps have started a new live show called 535, which aims to cover not the politics of Congress — but the policies, sitting down with lawmakers to talk about serious legislative proposals, not just the “he said, she said.”

I think it’s a severely under-covered space, and I’m excited to be joining them at 12 p.m. ET to talk about one of my favorite things: what Congress got done this week. As always, there might be some surprises! You can watch that here.

So: Poll numbers at 11 a.m. ET. Congress at 12 p.m. ET. And don’t forget to send in questions all day, so I can answer them in tomorrow’s mailbag issue.

Talk to you tomorrow,

Gabe

Take the two Presidents Bush, for example. They each reached incredible approval highs, during the first Gulf War for Bush I (87%) and after 9/11 for Bush II (88%). And they also sunk to astonishing lows, as the economy slumped in 1992 for the father (28%) and in 2008 for the son (24%).

That wasn’t so long ago, but that sort of range is unthinkable for a president today, now that partisanship has hardened enough that much of the president’s party will always approve of him and much of the opposition will always disapprove. That limits us to a pretty narrow band of movement in the numbers.

With that reality in mind, Donald Trump is basically as unpopular as it’s been possible for a president to get now.

Below, I’ve charted the approval and disapproval ratings for every president since Obama, using the average calculated by Nate Silver. I’ve drawn two lines, one at the lowest approval rating recorded in that time period (36.8%, by Trump in August 2017) and at the highest disapproval rating (58.3%, by Biden in July 2024).

As you can see, Trump is quickly approaching both benchmarks. His approval rating, according to Silver’s average, is currently at 38.5%, about two points above the record in the polarized era. His disapproval rating is already at 58.1%, statistically indistinguishable from the recent high.

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This puts Trump’s current poll numbers in league with some of the most unpopular moments in recent presidential history:

• Trump in August 2017, one of the most chaotic months of his first administration, as the Obamacare repeal effort failed; Reince Priebus, Anthony Scaramucci, and Steve Bannon all resigned in quick succession; and Trump traded nuclear threats with North Korea and referred to “very fine people” in Charlottesville. (36.8% approval, 57.6% disapproval)

• Trump in December 2017, as the Russia investigation intensified; Trump endorsed Senate candidate Roy Moore, an alleged child sex abuser; and the unpopular tax cut bill passed. (37% approval, 57.5% disapproval)

• Trump in January 2021, in the wake of January 6th. (38.7% approval, 57.4% disapproval)

• Biden in July 2022, during the peak of the inflation spike. (37.7% approval, 56% disapproval)

• Biden in July 2024, after his disastrous debate performance but before he dropped out of the presidential race. (37.8% approval, 58.3% disapproval.)

“Very fine people.” January 6th. Biden’s debate. That is not good company for a president to be in, and it’s where Trump is right now, basically tied with Biden’s worst poll numbers and his own from his first term. (Obama never reached these low-approval or high-disapproval marks.) When things look bad for a president nowadays, this is what they look like.

In all of the moments above, the polling pattern takes the same shape: the president approaches ~37% approval and ~58% disapproval, hovers there for a few days, and then recovers. None of the most recent presidents have sunk any lower: for example, none of them have reached 60% disapproval, a line not crossed since George W. Bush as the Iraq War sputtered in 2006 and then again during the 2007-08 financial crisis.

Will Trump keep sinking, until he reaches territory (literally) uncharted in the last three presidencies?

It’s very possible. Trump’s disapproval rating has breached the 60% mark in several individual polls, including a particularly bruising CNN poll released yesterday that showed him at 36% approval, 63% disapproval.

In that same survey, 77% of Americans — including 55% of Republicans! — said that Trump’s policies have increased the cost of living in their community. 65% said that Trump’s tariffs have had a negative impact on their financial situation; 75% said the same about the war in Iran.

Overall, a remarkable 70% of the country said they disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, which a majority also named as their top issue. As seen in the chart below, which uses CNN polls dating back to 2017, the economy used to be a relative strong suit for Trump: even when he was unpopular in his first term (and even during the Covid-induced recession), his handling of the economy generally stayed above-water. For his economic disapproval not only to now outrun approval, but to the tune of 70%-30%, represents an astounding and bipartisan rejection of the president.

There is no sign that the cost of living will ease any time soon.

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Yesterday, the Labor Department released its monthly inflation report: it showed that prices rose 3.8% in April compared to a year earlier, the highest annual inflation rate since May 2023.

The increase was largely driven by energy prices, which were up 3.8% compared to last month and 17.9% compared to last year. In turn, of course, that surge was driven by the war in Iran, which has sent average gas prices above $4.50/gallon and average diesel fuel prices above $5.60/gallon, approaching a record high.

Food prices were up 2.9% annually, and they are likely to keep climbing. As the Associated Press notes, diesel fuel is what powers the trucks, trains, tractors, and ships that transport food to the United States. Higher costs throughout this supply chain can take several months to translate into higher prices on the shelves at grocery stores, which means the prices that were recorded in April — already on an incline — mostly represent increases from before the Iran war. Once the increased price of diesel due to the war starts to factor in, food prices are set to rise even more.

For the last three years, even as prices have increased, wages have grown even faster, giving Americans a measure of relief when faced with eye-popping costs. In an ominous sign for Trump, that was no longer true in April: growth in prices outstripped growth in Americans’ paychecks for the first time since 2023.

If the war goes on, and prices keep rising in response, it is easy to imagine Trump’s disapproval rating crossing the 60% threshold.

This is probably why the war hasn’t restarted (at least not yet), and instead settled into a bizarre state of ceasefire limbo. The U.S. and Iran entered into a two-week ceasefire on April 7; when it was about to expire on April 21, Trump announced that he was extending it indefinitely to allow for peace talks to continue. That was three weeks ago, which means the two-week ceasefire has now been going for five weeks, even though diplomatic negotiations don’t appear to be making much progress.

Trump rejected Tehran’s most recent proposal and said this week that the truce is on “life support,” though he hasn’t ended it yet, perhaps a sign that he doesn’t want to, and is looking for any way he can avoid reigniting a conflict that has been unpopular with Americans and hurt their pocketbooks. (In the meantime, Trump has achieved few of his wartime objectives: Iran’s nuclear program has been unharmed by the war, Tehran maintains substantial missile capabilities, and the Strait of Hormuz largely remains closed.)

Asked yesterday whether Americans’ financial situations are a factor in his wartime decisionmaking, Trump said: “Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran: they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

While that may be the responsible answer for a commander-in-chief, it could not be more tone-deaf politically. Expect to see this clip in plenty of Democratic ads this fall:

Interestingly, Trump seems to have settled on an unusual (for him) answer to his problems: Congress.

After spending several weeks ignoring a thicket of legislative headaches on the Hill, despite Republican warnings that the party would be punished if it doesn’t have more to show for its two years of united control in Washington, Trump has suddenly turned his focus back to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Trump called on lawmakers to suspend the federal gas tax on Monday morning, as a way to lower costs at the pump. He then followed that up on Monday night with a call for the House to approve the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the bipartisan housing package that passed the Senate in an 89-10 vote in March.

This is a notable change of strategy for Trump: implicitly acknowledging that the economy is struggling, by throwing his weight behind legislative packages aimed at offering Americans relief — and implicitly acknowledging that he can’t fix it alone. For most of his presidency, Trump has prioritized executive orders over legislation, trying to signal that he doesn’t need Congress to fix the country’s ills. But there is only so much a president can do to juice the economy. More than 15 months into his presidency, Trump seems to be changing tack.

It’s less clear whether congressional Republicans will heed his calls. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was one of several GOP lawmakers who didn’t seem thrilled with the idea of a gas tax holiday. Meanwhile, House Republicans appear to be pushing ahead with their own housing bill, despite Trump’s insistence that they pass the Senate version and send it to his desk. “I am not focused on the president’s Truth Socials on this,” Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) told Punchbowl News.

Other tests of Trump’s influence on Capitol Hill loom as well: Republicans are currently moving forward with a party-line package to fund immigration enforcement, which is also set to include $1 billion for White House security upgrades, including for Trump’s new ballroom. (Republicans say only about $220 million will go towards security for the ballroom itself.)

Many House and Senate Republicans have expressed concerns about the optics of funding the ballroom — and it’s not hard to see why. Already, it’s easy to imagine this new legislative package going over poorly with the American people (Trump’s poll numbers on immigration are not what they used to be: there’s a reason the White House has told Republicans to stop talking about mass deportations). Add in spending on the ballroom while the cost of living rises, and you’ve given Democrats an easy talking point with which to tag the package.

It wouldn’t be the first megabill defined in the public image by its most unpopular qualities: remember Obamacare and death panels? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) referred to the GOP as “Ballroom Republicans” at a recent press conference. I’ll be interested to see whether Trump agrees to remove the funding from the package, or whether he make the GOP walk the plank for his pet project.

In recent presidential history, Biden in the summer of 2022 seems like the best comparison point: an aging president faced with rising inflation (partially due to a war), who tried to convince Congress to suspend the gas tax and muscled through a party-line legislative package that he thought would help. Biden would go on to lose control of the House that fall.

Trump’s political situation is likely even worse, since the war in question wasn’t started by Vladimir Putin: it was his own doing, as were the tariffs that have also contributed to rising prices. That means, as tied to price increases as Biden was in the popular imagination (“Bidenflation,” anyone?), Trump will likely be associated with them even more, creating a political crisis that not even redistricting gains will be able to protect him from.

While Biden’s approval rating in 2022 bottomed out around where Trump’s is now, and then recovered slightly, if the war in Iran continues long enough, Trump’s polling floor could end up being even lower than any of his recent predecessors.

Or they’re pretending to, at least.

That esoteric question is at the heart of the 4-3 decision handed down on Friday by the Virginia Supreme Court invalidating a constitutional amendment that would have redrawn the state’s congressional map in Democrats’ favor. The decision was part of a one-two redistricting gut punch suffered by Democrats in recent weeks at the hands of judges, the other being the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a landmark ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

Before these two decisions, the conventional wisdom was that this year’s tit-for-tat battle of mid-decade redistricting had mostly come to a wash — and potentially even a Democratic advantage — with Democratic gains in California, Utah, and Virginia (as many as 10 seats) canceling out Republican gains in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri (as many as nine).

But after Callais, Republican legislators in Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina are moving forward with redistricting, potentially netting the party as many as nine additional House seats. Take away the four seats Virginia was supposed to net for Democrats, and suddenly we’re looking at potential GOP gains of 18 seats and Democratic gains of only six. Democrats are still favored to win the House — they only need to flip three seats, after all — but the road now looks tougher and their potential majority looks slimmer.

The sizable consequences the Virginia and Callais decisions will have for the midterms mean that they have unsurprisingly generated a lot of commentary, including scorching Democratic criticism. But in both cases, strikingly little of that commentary seems to be attached to actual discussions of the complex legal issues at hand.

This is even more glaring because of the extreme language many on the left have used to describe the rulings. Several Democratic lawmakers have called the Callais ruling “Jim Crow 2.0,” comparing it to the system of oppression that blocked African-Americans in the South from equal access to employment, education, housing, or the ballot box. In a YouTube headline, Scott MacFarlane — who recently left CBS News to join a major progressive news outlet — asked, “Did the Supreme Court STEAL the NEXT Election??”

On Friday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that the Virginia Supreme Court had given a “vile assist to MAGA’s plan” to “rig the elections in their favor,” while California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said that the decision was evidence that “MAGA has rigged the system.” Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder, who leads a Democratic redistricting group, referred to “Republican efforts to steal the 2026 midterm election” in his statement after the Virginia ruling.

If you are going to allege to a large audience that a court ruling is evidence of an election being rigged or stolen, then a baseline requirement would probably be not just that you disagree with the court’s reasoning, but that it is so egregiously wrong that it can only be explained as part of a plot to gain partisan advantage.

And yet, none of the Democrats making these claims seem to actually be disagreeing (or even engaging) with the courts’ legal interpretations. They are merely reacting to the topline result of which party will be helped or hurt, and using all-caps and emotive language to rile up their audiences without giving them any of the proper context. If this sounds familiar, that’s because President Donald Trump and right-wing media figures did exactly the same thing after the 2020 election, pretending that various Covid-era changes to state voting laws were akin to an election being stolen. But complicated court rulings parsing vague text, even in ways you don’t agree with, are not the same as a stolen election, just like voting changes passed to address a global pandemic (even ones you don’t agree with!) aren’t either.

It seems to me that it would have been very easy over the past week to read several commentaries on the Callais and Virginia rulings and walk away without any understanding of the legal questions that undergirded them, but still be told that you must have a passionate opinion on why they are great or terrible. The way I see it, the price of admission to having a strong opinion on the Callais and Virginia rulings (whether you are devastated or ecstatic by their consequences) — an opinion on whether they were correctly or or wrongly decided, or even so wrong that they might be part of a plot to steal an election — is having a strong opinion on what “general election” means in Virginia law and what words like “opportunity” and “participate” mean in the Voting Rights Act.

Once you’ve read up enough on those questions, then you can have an opinion on the rulings and cheer or complain all you want, but in the meantime, you might find that it’s more complicated than you initially thought.

In today’s newsletter, let’s take a close look not at the partisan consequences of either ruling, but at the legal reasoning behind them. Then, you can wade back into the political discourse world and responsibly dish out any #hottakes you’d like.

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These two rulings have very different contexts, so we’ll look at them separately. But I want to use the same tools when we’re doing so, and then — after applying the same methods — maybe you’ll agree with both, or disagree with both, or agree with one and disagree with the other. (There’s really no reason that how you interpret the phrase “general election” in Virginia law has to correlate with how you interpret the Voting Rights Act, and yet almost every professional pundit and politician seems to either agree with both rulings or disagree with both. How odd!)

In essence, we’re dealing with two cases that each revolve around one vague legal text, and two parties in each case that are offering competing interpretations of the texts that are neither obvious nor ludicrous. If the interpretations were one or the other, these cases would be easy. Anyone who tells you these cases are easy is not telling you the truth.

What do you do when lawmakers have written a vague text, and competing parties are offering not-obvious-not-ludicrous interpretations? There are two main schools of thought, each of which have long and respectable histories.

One is called textualism, and it says that a judge in this situation should look at the bare text at hand, consult a dictionary to define each word or phrase, and use that to arrive at their best interpretation of what the statute means, without introducing any extraneous documents besides the parts that have actually been enacted into law.

The other is called purposivism, and it says that a judge should look not only at the text, but also at its authors’ purpose in enacting it. This study of legislative intent, purposivists say, will help judges understand what the law is supposed to say.

Textualism is generally associated with the conservative legal movement, and purposivism with progressives, but you can decide which one makes the most sense to you. In these two cases, I would submit that the two political parties are inconsistently applying their associated legal methods: that the Democrats are using purposivist arguments on the Voting Rights Act but textualist reasoning in Virginia, while Republicans are acting as textualists on the Voting Rights Act and as purposivists in Virginia.

But, as we’ve discussed before, the political parties’ hypocrisies don’t have to be your own. Come along with me, and we’ll look at the law in both cases, and how to interpret them either by looking at text alone or with legislative purpose in mind. Freed from the politician’s need to hypocritically apply legal methods, or the pundit’s focus only on the political consequences of a decision — since we do not want judges to incorporate such thinking in their rulings — but fully equipped with the facts and context, you can play judge for yourself and decide what you think is the legal route that makes the most sense in each dispute.

It’s time for an adventure into Legal Interpretation Land. I hope you have your robes and gavels ready!

The Voting Rights Act case

We’ll start with Louisiana v. Callais, which concerns Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as codified at 52 U.S. Code § 10301:

No…standard, practice, or procedure…shall be imposed or applied by any State…in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or [membership in a language minority group].

The law then goes on to say that it has been violated if:

Based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by [the above text] in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.

In Louisiana v. Callais, Louisiana had previously been told by a court that compliance with this language required the state to set up a second majority-Black district, in response to a lawsuit by a group of Black voters alleging discrimination. But then a group of non-Black voters sued, alleging that this new map discriminated against them.

Some of the broader questions surrounding Callais were (1) whether the VRA is violated only when a state intentionally discriminates against a racial group, or also when a policy has the effect of giving a group less representation; (2) whether the language about a group being able to elect “representatives of their choice” requires states to set up districts where minority groups form a majority; (3) if so, how do we know in which situations that’s required; and (4) could that requirement then violate the 14th and 15th Amendments, which generally block the government from using race when setting election policy.

The pre-Callais interpretation of the VRA (which Democrats were fighting to preserve) was that the law prohibits policies that are intentionally discriminatory and those that have a discriminatory effect (irrespective of intent), and frequently requires majority-minority districts in response. That isn’t a crazy reading of the text, but it’s also not obvious.

The text does say that no policies should be imposed that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right” to vote, which does sound results-based. (That is, it doesn’t merely prohibit policies that are “intended to” deny the right to vote.) But ensuring that a group’s right to vote won’t be abridged doesn’t necessarily mean they have the right to be a majority in a certain number of congressional districts.

Similarly, the text says that racial groups should not have “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Constructing majority-minority districts does sound like a good way to do that. But does the text require it? It doesn’t really say what is meant by a group having the “opportunity…to elect representatives of their choice.” Does that mean they have to form 50%+1 of a district? 40%? 30%? Of how many districts?

This partially depends on who the “other members of the electorate” are that a given racial group is supposed to have the same opportunities as. Does it mean Black Louisianans, writ large, must have the same opportunities to elect “representatives of their choice” as white Louisianans, writ large? Or, since Louisiana is a Republican-controlled state and the Supreme Court has previously declined to block partisan gerrymandering, and Black Louisianans are disproportionately Democratic while white Louisianans are disproportionately Republican, is that an unfair standard? Should the comparator instead be whether Black Louisiana Democrats have the same opportunities as white Louisiana Democrats to elect a congressman (which is to say, little in both cases, but seemingly for partisan, not racial reasons)?1

As for the “how many districts” question, one natural way to ensure members of a racial group in a state have equal opportunity is to look at how many of them there are in that state and ensure there are a roughly equivalent number of districts where they’re able to elect “representatives of their choice.” One in three Louisianans are Black, for example, so you might think that Black voters should be given significant weight (a majority? 🤷‍♂️) in two out of the state’s six districts.

But that’s the one thing the law tells us it doesn’t require! Remember: “Nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.”

So, I hope you can now see that this is a bit more complicated than it is often portrayed. The Democratic reading of the VRA is by no means ridiculous, but it isn’t necessarily the most natural textualist reading to look only at what the VRA says and walk away thinking that a certain number of majority-minority districts are absolutely required to follow that vaguely written law. And you also have to reckon with another text, that of the 15th Amendment, which says that “the right…to vote shall not be…abridged on account of race.” Does that mean mapmakers can’t even take race into account when carving up districts, in which case our whole majority-minority district project might have to be thrown out?

But that’s just how a textualist might look at things. There’s also a whole world of purposivist arguments that we haven’t discussed yet!

After all, the text of the VRA didn’t just come out of thin air, without any context. In fact, the text above isn’t even from the 1965 VRA: it’s from a 1982 amendment to the law. So you would assume Congress had a pretty specific intent here; they must have been amending the law for a reason.

And they were! They were actually responding to a different Supreme Court decision, Mobile v. Bolden. In that 1980 case, a plurality of the court held that policies only violate Section 2 of the VRA if “motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” But Congress didn’t like that intent test; the 1982 amendment was their attempt at imposing an effects test. Knowing this, a purposivist would be more likely to look at potential Section 2 violations with that history in mind (even though a textualist would respond that the text itself doesn’t really spell out much of an effects standard, or certainly how it should be adjudicated, even if Congress’ intent was to move away from an intent test).

Suddenly, our mindset might start to shift. Before, we might have looked at the text and thought that a state only has a problem if it’s treating Black and white voters of the same party differently because of their race, not merely because of their partisanship. But infused with this knowledge of Congress’ intent, a purposivist would say, I don’t care why a state is treating Black voters differently. Congress wanted an effects test! As long as the effect of this map is to dilute Black voting power, we have a problem, even if race wasn’t what motivated the line-drawers.

As for how our effects-based inquiry should proceed, the text says that violations of Section 2 should be found based on a showing of the “totality of the circumstances,” which sounds pretty vague. But it actually is lifted directly from a different SCOTUS case, White v. Regester (1973). In that case, the Supreme Court talks about taking into account the “totality of the circumstances,” including the “cultural and economic realities” of a jurisdiction and its “history of racial discrimination.” Does this mean lawmakers wanted us to take such factors into account when deciding violations of the VRA? A textualist would probably say “no.” (Where in the VRA does it use those words?) A purposivist might say “yes.” (That’s the exact reasoning that was used in the court decision that lawmakers lifted their words from, which gives us a clue of how they intended the words to be interpreted!)

Purposivists would also point to a Senate committee report on the 1982 amendments, which give us more insight into legislative intent. The report stresses the difficulty of deducing racist intent, and says that courts should assess whether “the impact” of a policy would be to “minimize or cancel out the voting strength and political effectiveness of minority groups.” That might have you leaning more towards the majority-minority district side of things. But, of course, those words weren’t written into the text of what actually was signed into law.

So it depends on how much stock you put in the legislative intent, which may have been to create an effects test and majority-minority districts, even if the text doesn’t use any of those words directly.

There are plenty of other textualist/purposivist disputes embedded within the case. Two of the Supreme Court’s leading textualists, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, penned a concurrence arguing that the VRA doesn’t even apply to redistricting: it only concerns policies that might prevent someone from casting a ballot. Look at the text, and you’ll see language about “the right…to vote,” but nothing about how maps should be drawn. To which the purposivist would say, Give me a break. The Supreme Court decision Congress was responding to (Bolden) and the one they lifted language from (White) were both about redistricting. Clearly, they knew the VRA was being interpreted to regulate redistricting and it was not their intent to change that status quo!

You also might look at the fact that the suit undergirding Callais was brought by a group of non-Black voters claiming discrimination. The purposivist might not appreciate that, since the drafters of both the 15th Amendment and the VRA were clearly intending to boost Black voting power. But the textualist would point to the texts, which simply prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, whether the racial group in question is in the minority or the majority.2 Yes, the text says that “the extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered” when deciding whether the VRA has been violated. But it only says “may”; it doesn’t say that the only factor that should be considered is whether a group has historically been able to elect representatives in the state, or even that that should be considered at all.

Is your head swimming yet? Good! These questions aren’t supposed to be easy. Now let’s apply these same tools and take a trip down to Virginia.

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The Virginia case

Last month, Virginians voted on a constitutional amendment to allow Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional map in order to net as many as four new House seats. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the constitutional amendment was illegitimately approved.

Here’s what Article XII of the Virginia Constitution says about how amendments are added to the state’s Constitution:

Any amendment or amendments to this Constitution may be proposed in the Senate or House of Delegates, and if the same shall be agreed to by a majority of the members elected to each of the two houses, such proposed amendment or amendments shall be…referred to the General Assembly at its first regular session held after the next general election of members of the House of Delegates.

If at such regular session or any subsequent special session of that General Assembly the proposed amendment or amendments shall be agreed to by a majority of all the members elected to each house, then it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to submit such proposed amendment or amendments to the voters… If a majority of those voting vote in favor of any amendment, it shall become part of the Constitution on the date prescribed by the General Assembly in submitting the amendment to the voters.

Basically, this is describing a four-step process:

1. Both chambers of the Virginia legislature approve the amendment.

2. A “general election” is held.

3. The two chambers of the Virginia legislature, as newly constituted after the election, vote to approve the amendment again.

4. The amendment is sent to the state’s voters for their approval or disapproval.

It is not easy to add an amendment to the Virginia Constitution!

The key dispute here is over the meaning of the phrase “general election.” This isn’t a case of vaguely written text, per se, but rather text that probably was pretty straightforward when it was drafted (in 1971) but now is a bit more vague since election practices have changed a lot in the last five decades.

Specifically, a lot of Virginians now vote before Election Day. So, when the Virginia legislature sent the redistricting amendment to the voters on October 31, 2025 (fulfilling Step 1 in the process), it was before the Election Day (on November 4) that is supposed to be Step 2 in the process. But so many Virginians vote early that about 40% of the state had already cast their ballots by October 31! So… did the Virginia legislature act before the “general election” took place, or while it was already underway?

This is yet another textualist/purposivist dispute!

I think if most people were to read the text of the Virginia Constitution — and nothing else — they would see that something has to take place before a “general election,” and most naturally think that it has to come before “Election Day.” In this case, that was November 4. So, as long as the Virginia legislature approved their amendment before November 4, they’re in the clear.

This textualist reading is bolstered by Title 24.2 of Virginia law, which defines “general election” as “an election held in the Commonwealth on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” OK, November 4 it is!3

But time to put our purposivist hats on. Why did the framers of the Virginia Constitution put a “general election” in the middle of the two Virginia legislature votes in the first place?

The answer is pretty clear. They wanted to give Virginia voters two opportunities to express their will over the approval of a constitutional amendment. First, the legislators would vote on the amendment. Then, the voters would vote on the legislators. Then, the legislators vote again. Then, the voters vote again, this time directly on the amendment.

“The reasoning behind this is that Constitutions should not be changed lightly,” one Virginia legislator said when the 1971 Constitution was being debated. “Not only would there be an intervening House of Delegates election where you might be able to get the sentiment of the people on an amendment you had acted upon previously, but upon reflection the General Assembly might decide not to submit the amendment.”

The whole point of the intervening election is to let Virginians respond to the vote their legislators had taken on the amendment, and then express their approval or disapproval by voting on the legislators. If the voters didn’t like how their legislator came down on the amendment, this was their opportunity to elect a new legislator who might vote differently.

Now you might see the problem. 40% of Virginians had already voted in the legislative election when the legislature voted on the amendment the first time, which means 40% of the state was deprived of the opportunity they were supposed to have to vote on their legislators in response to how their legislators voted on the amendment.

Or that’s how a purposivist would look at it, at least. They would say that “general election” in this context should be read with deference to why it was included in the Constitution, which was to give the state’s voters an opportunity to vote on their legislators in between the legislature’s two amendment votes. To which a textualist would respond, Too bad! They only wrote “general election.” And “general election” means “Election Day,” which means the legislature just had to turn their work in by November 4, no matter how many Virginians had cast their ballots by then.4

As you may have noticed, our two parties have switched sides here. If you leaned more towards a purposivist reading of the Voting Rights Act, that’s perfectly fine and understandable. But did you also adopt a purposivist reading of the Virginia Constitution? And vice versa if you leaned towards textualism.

Of course, I — like the justices of the Virginia and United States Supreme Courts — am not infallible, and maybe you quibble with how I’ve framed the “most natural” textualist and purposivist readings in these cases. That’s perfectly fine. But I hope I’ve convinced you, at least, that these are complicated questions that don’t come with easy answers. And I hope I’ve helped you try to come up with an answer for yourself, instead of allowing a pundit or politician to deny you your democratic right to think deeply and freely about these questions, and to dwell in nuances, instead of pretending that everything has ONE SIMPLE ANSWER and if you don’t agree with mine YOU’RE TRYING TO STEAL AN ELECTION.

There is no more serious charge in a democracy than that an election is being stolen. My hope is that people with large platforms handle that allegation responsibly, and don’t just cast a process as illegitimate because it yielded an outcome they disagree with (or, possibly, that they just find inconvenient).

Just as Trump and his allies did after 2020, many Democratic politicians appear to be purposefully confusing their audiences by ignoring facts and context to arrive at a message that will rile up the maximum number of their voters. Take, for example, this tweet from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), currently the betting favorite to be the next Democratic nominee for president:

This makes it sound like there is one, unified MAGA-rigged system that yielded all of these outcomes. But redistricting is not done nationally5; different states have different laws, so obviously the processes will look different in different states.

In Tennessee, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas, the state legislatures draw their congressional maps. So there is no reason a popular vote would have been required. However, in Virginia, a constitutional amendment was approved in 2020 to empower a bipartisan commission in the redistricting process. That is why a new constitutional amendment was required to override that commission’s map — and, as we now know, in Virginia, approving a new constitutional amendment means allowing the people to vote.

There is nothing nefarious in the fact that some states would have needed a popular referendum to change their maps (or mapmaking process), and others wouldn’t. That isn’t a rigging, and it wasn’t anything done by MAGA: it was simply the result of 65% of Virginians voting to set up a bipartisan commission in 2020. Nor is the Virginia Supreme Court even MAGA-controlled: Virginia is one of two states where the state legislature appoints the court. One of the justices was appointed when Democrats controlled the legislature, three were appointed when Republicans controlled the legislature, and three were appointed when control of the legislature was split.

“MAGA” was also not responsible for the fact that the state Supreme Court ruling was handed down after Virginians voted on the amendment. When this lawsuit was brought before the referendum vote, it was the state’s Democratic attorney general, Jay Jones, who asked the court to hold off on their ruling, arguing that the court could not rule on the constitutionality of an amendment until after it had been considered by the voters. Instead, Jones said, the court should wait until after the vote to consider these questions of constitutionality. Democrats signaled at the time that they would respect whatever decision the court came up with after the vote, and their lawyer specifically acknowledged to the court that whether or not Virginia voters ended up approving the amendment (or by what margin) would have no bearing on the merits of the legal question that would then return before the court. Democrats always knew there was a risk it would play out this way; they were just gambling that if they could get the referendum passed, the Supreme Court would take their side.

Anyone is free to disagree with the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision — there’s nothing wrong with practicing some good old-fashioned textualism! — but suggesting that it is the stuff of a rigged election is something else entirely. It is the easiest thing in the world for politicians and media figures to say exactly the right things in order to rile up their audiences and get them angry. It is harder for them to actually be honest about what they are asking their audiences to get upset about, because that would require delving into complex conversations where the answers aren’t as simple as the partisan bottom-line.

This election season, odds are that we are going to see lots of stolen-election claims, from both sides of the aisle, which seems to be an unfortunate and ubiquitous part of our modern political discourse. The biggest secret of all, the one neither side will tell you, is that many of these legal disputes are complicated. In the months ahead, don’t let them trick you into thinking you have strong opinion on the disputes before you’ve thought through the legal questions for yourself. Don’t let yourself get riled up. Get informed instead.

Last week, as the war there neared its 60-day mark, President Trump penned a letter to lawmakers saying that congressional authorization for the conflict was unnecessary because the hostilities had been “terminated” by a ceasefire. “There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026,” he wrote.

That statement already may not have been the full truth — Iran had attacked U.S. forces at least 10 times since the start of the ceasefire — but now it is certainly no longer operative.

Yesterday, according to U.S. Central Command, Iran launched multiple missiles, drones, and small boats at three U.S. warships that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. (None of the vessels were hit.) In response, the U.S. struck multiple Iranian military facilities responsible for the attack.

So … has the war restarted?

President Trump says no. He told ABC News that the U.S. attacks were “just a love tap” and insisted that the ceasefire remains in effect. “They trifled. I call that a trifle,” he told reporters this morning while visiting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, one of several projects in Washington, D.C. he is overseeing.

Iran may see it differently. “Every time a diplomatic solution is on the table, the U.S. opts for a reckless military adventure,” the Iranian foreign minister wrote on X. (Before the exchange of fire, the two sides had reportedly been closing in on a memorandum of understanding to end the war.) One Iranian official wrote last night that the U.S. had now “crossed the point of no return, and the response will be commensurate with the crime and more.”

The back-and-forth capped off a dizzying week in the region. The three U.S. warships that were attacked had been there in the first place as part of a short-lived U.S. effort to “guide” ships through the Strait of Hormuz. That initiative, called “Project Freedom,” had been announced by Trump on Sunday and aborted by Tuesday, reportedly due to tensions with Gulf allies who worried the operation would spark attacks from Iran.

Trump paused the effort just hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio trumpeted it from the White House briefing room, a whiplash-inducing turnaround. (Add it to the list of Trump efforts that have been announced on Truth Social and quickly petered out.)

Meanwhile, Iran still is attacking our Gulf allies: the United Arab Emirates reported an Iranian missile barrage this morning. And the Strait of Hormuz remains closed: no ships have crossed the channel in the last two days, the longest stretch since March without any traffic at all.

So, Iran is attacking the U.S., the U.S. is attacking Iran, Iran is attacking U.S. allies, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed — but a ceasefire remains in effect, according to the president. Got it? Got it.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, we can move on to our main business of the day. Over the last few weeks, I’ve received a bunch of questions from readers that have taken a similar form: basically, With Iran dominating so many of the headlines, what’s going on with Issue X that seems to have completely fallen out of the news?

See for yourself:

Q: Why do issues come and go when they are not resolved? The media doesn’t seem to follow up on older news, e.g., I hardly see anything about Ukraine.

Q: Where did the Palestine-Israel conflict go?

Q: With the war in Iran capturing all the headlines, Venezuela seems to have fallen off the map - what is happening there since Maduro’s capture?

Q: What else is going on these days? It seems like action in Iran has consumed all of the administration’s resources the last month. Is ICE still working at the same level? DOJ is stalled? SAVE Act? DOGE gone? Tariffs in place or removed?

So, let’s dive in. In this week’s mailbag issue: an update on everything else that’s going on — around the world, and here at home (including a major decision on redistricting just this morning)…

Ukraine

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Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini recently made a point on a podcast that has stuck with me. “In order to have a majority coalition in this country, the coalition needs to not entirely make sense,” he said.

By way of example, he pointed to the coalition that lifted Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and 2012. Obama famously performed well among so-called “ascendant” voters: Black voters, Hispanic voters, millennials, college-educated whites. But that was not enough to win the White House. Obama only got across the finish line with the support of white working-class voters in key states. It was a marriage of demographic opposites: white and non-white, those rising the socioeconomic ladder and those falling down it. In a country as large and diverse as ours, that is what you need to win. A coalition broad enough that it doesn’t entirely make sense.

Donald Trump also won in 2024 with such a coalition. Trump appealed to neocons and isolationists. Billionaires in search of tax cuts and working-class economic populists. Immigration hawks and a sizable chunk of Hispanic voters. Republicans have spent the last 18 months laboring (largely in vain) to keep these groups together; the 2026 midterms will hinge, in part, on whether they can do so.

Another paradox within Trump’s coalition has gotten less attention, but could also be pivotal this November. The demographic group among which Trump improved the most in 2024 is also the one that has come under the fiercest attack from his own party: Muslim Americans.

According to data from the Cooperative Election Study — a major post-election survey with a sample size of more than 50,000 — Trump went from winning 9% of the Muslim vote in 2020 to 33% in 2024, a 24-point improvement that well outstrips his gains among young voters (five points), Black voters (seven points), Hispanic voters (eight points), and Jewish voters (eight points) that have attracted more attention.

The sizable Muslim population in Michigan likely helped tip the critical swing state in Trump’s favor.

Not that many Republicans seem to have noticed.

“If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) wrote on X in February. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) echoed in March.

These Islamophobic comments have stopped catching headlines, but GOP lawmakers continue to make them. “Evidence is exposing the FACT that North Texas is ground zero for the growing influence of Sharia in America,” Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) posted just yesterday, citing plans for a nearby Muslim residential community, a new Muslim college, and a local waterpark being rented out for an event to celebrate Eid.

“These people have no desire to assimilate, their intent is to dominate! … It worked in Europe, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York, now it is playing out in North Texas,” Self wrote. “The time to take a stand against their sinister plan is now!”

When asked, Republican leaders including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have declined to condemn these remarks.

Some Muslim Republicans and analysts think the GOP might be making a political error, needlessly unraveling Trump’s 2024 gains with a demographic group that might have come in handy in 2026 and 2028.

“I shook my head at how ridiculous those statements were… I read them, and I just shook my head, and I just was like, you know, what do you say to somebody like that?” New Jersey state assemblyman Al Barlas, one of only two Muslim Republican state legislators in the country, told me in an interview, referring to the recent anti-Muslim comments by GOP lawmakers.

Barlas said that he believes the comments could hurt Republicans in the 2026 midterms. “I wish they would think about what impact this has on the greater good,” he said. “In their district, it probably doesn’t matter, right? … But those comments then could be used in Georgia, where the Senate seat is a tossup and the governorship is considered a tossup, or in Michigan, where there’s an open seat for governor and for U.S. Senate. I think they have to sometimes be careful and take a step back and think, how does this impact everybody else?”

Georgia, which Trump won by 115,000 votes, has about 125,000 Muslim residents. Michigan, which Trump won by 80,000 votes, has about 240,000 Muslim residents. “Those 200,000 voters, they could change the outcome of that election,” Barlas said. “So if Congressmen Ogles and Fine truly want to help President Trump deliver on his vision for America going forward, then they’ve got to think about how their comments have the potential to hurt that from happening.”

“Because they can say whatever they want, they can tweet whatever they want to tweet, but it’s not going to help the president if the House is 433-2,” he added.

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Saher Selod, the director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), a non-partisan organization focused on polling American Muslims, agreed that the comments could hurt Republicans in Michigan and Georgia. She also added another battleground state to the list. “The campaigning in Texas…is some of the most overt anti-Muslim rhetoric I’ve seen,” Selod said. “And I remember 9/11.”

Texas Republicans placed a measure on the party’s March primary ballot asking whether the state should ban Sharia Law, the Islamic legal system. (94% of Texas Republicans voted “yes.”) The topic has also heavily featured in GOP advertising in the state in recent months. Texas is home to 313,000 Muslim residents and a contested Senate race this fall; Selod, a native Texan, said there are Muslim Republicans in the state who “would vote for Trump again” if he were running for another term but “might not vote Republican for these other elections” downballot in protest of the party’s anti-Muslim turn.

This wouldn’t be the first time that right-wing rhetoric has turned Muslim voters against Republicans. Muslim Americans were once a reliable GOP constituency; as recently as 2000, more than 70% were Republican voters, according to estimates by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“Most people would say the Muslim community would line up more with the Republicans in terms of sort of their social and family values as well as their…fiscal perspective,” Barlas, the New Jersey assemblyman, told me. “And then I think the war in Iraq changed a lot of that for a lot of Muslims.”

The Bush administration’s war in Iraq, as well as the post-9/11 surge in Islamophobia, helped fuel an almost complete turnaround in Muslim voting trends. By 2008, 94% of Muslim Americans cast ballots for Barack Obama, according to the Cooperative Election Study.

Muslim Americans make up only about 1% of the country, which makes them a difficult group to accurately poll. But several groups align with the finding that 2024 marked the largest movement of Muslims towards Republicans since the post-9/11 shift. An exit poll by CAIR found that Kamala Harris sunk in third place among Muslim voters in 2024, behind Green Party nominee Jill Stein and then Trump; a study by the ISPU found the Trump won 31% of the Muslim vote, up from 14% in 2020, numbers that roughly align with the Cooperative Election Study findings.

Barlas said that one element of the shift was the group’s existing social conservatism, similar to conservative Black and Hispanic voters who sided with Trump in 2024 after decades of voting for Democrats despite ideological differences with the party. But he and other experts agreed that the Biden administration’s war in Gaza was also a huge factor in the shift.

“It was a reluctant vote,” said John Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University who has been involved in polling Muslim Americans for decades. “It was a vote that just couldn’t bring themselves to accept what Biden was doing in Palestine.”

A year and a half later, Esposito said, Trump has hardly governed as these voters expected, ruminating about a U.S. “take over” of the Gaza Strip and partnering with Israel on a new war in Iran. When added to the recent string of comments by Republican lawmakers, these newfound Muslim Trump voters are “not people that will be voting Republican again” in 2026, Esposito said. “That vote will be lost.”

An ISPU poll last year found that approval of Trump’s job performance among Muslim Americans had slipped to 21%.

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In some ways, this is an interesting story about a specific demographic group that was once overwhelmingly Republican, then overwhelmingly Democratic, and then suddenly competitive in 2024 for the first time in decades, due to dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s policies, both foreign and domestic.

But it is also a case study in coalition management. There are always inherent tensions that come when you must stitch together a broad, diverse coalition to win the White House. Some presidents, like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, have been adept at smoothing over these tensions and keeping those coalitions intact. Biden, on the other hand, struggled at the same task.

While campaigning in 2024, Trump made a lot of promises to a lot of constituencies, seemingly throwing anything at the wall to see what would stick. Now, his bill is coming due.

Trump went to Dearborn, Michigan — the only Arab-majority city in the U.S. — and promised “peace in the Middle East.” And he went to Florida and said that the “most important day in the history of Israel” would be the day he was re-elected. The Jewish and Muslim votes both swung in his direction, simultaneously.

Since then, Trump has continued heaping praise on Israel and the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. But he has carried out very little Muslim outreach, and stood by as his allies in Congress have made comments openly targeting the very group that swung towards him the most in 2024. His decision not to tend to a demographic that is potentially winnable for the GOP could cost his party votes in key races in Michigan, Georgia, and Texas, all home to significant Muslim populations.

This is the same dynamic playing out across the board, as Trump tries to keep neocons like Lindsey Graham and isolationists like Tucker Carlson under one party tent, and also pro-life activists and pro-choice swing voters, and also CEOs who want tax cuts and Medicaid recipients who want to keep their benefits.

Coalitions that don’t make sense require careful maintenance in order to keep them together for more than one election cycle in a row. Otherwise, presidents can run the risk of contorting themselves in too many ways at once, stretching their coalitions so thin that eventually, they burst.

The more American life has become wrapped around our smartphones, the less we seem to like it.

Parents and children don’t always agree on much, but many are aligned on this. In a pair of 2024 surveys conducted by The Harris Poll, 55% of American parents said they wished social media had never been invented. 40% of Gen Z respondents said the same. Dissatisfaction was even higher with some platforms in specific: More than two-thirds of young Americans use TikTok, but almost half said if they could snap their fingers and eliminate the app, they would. (Ditto 62% of parents.) If only.

Despite this ambivalent relationship with social media, the Gen Z cohort freely admitted to giving it many of their waking hours. 81% of young Americans said they spend at least two hours a day on social media. 62% spend at least four hours a day scrolling. 20% spend upwards of eight. Among my peers in their early 20s, almost no one I know is happy with their relationship to their phone. Even fewer do much to fix it.

What do you call it when people are hooked on a product they wish that they could quit? Usually, “addiction.” The government often steps in to regulate such addictive products, but here, Congress has planted itself firmly on the sidelines. For the entirety of the 21st century, even as social media has made itself into an ubiquity, almost no bills regulating the technology — or its enormous impact on the rising generation — have graduated into law.

The exceptions are often narrow (last year’s TAKE IT Down Act, cracking down on deepfake pornography) or ignored (the TikTok ban). Even when broader efforts receive sweeping bipartisan support in one chamber of Congress, lobbyists rush in to ensure they don’t proceed past the other. In 2024, the comprehensive Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate, 91 to 3. In the House, it never got a vote.

Meanwhile, in recent weeks, juries in Los Angeles and Santa Fe have delivered landmark verdicts finding Meta and YouTube liable for harming young people. Add it to the list of issues on which Congress has been happy to sit back and let the judiciary take the lead.

At this point, Big Tech has effectively lapped Congress, with Washington still trudging to regulate social media even as Silicon Valley has moved onto the next generation of society-altering technology in artificial intelligence. On AI, some activists worry that Congress is sleepwalking into a reprise of its hands-off approach to social media — although others spy an opening.

“People don’t want to repeat, and members of Congress don’t want to repeat, the same mistakes that were made in hindsight [in the social media era], which is that a lot of people can get hurt if you don’t have any rules and regulations involved,” Stefan Turkheimer, an advocate for Big Tech regulation, told me in a recent interview.

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Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee quietly took its most significant step yet to address potential dangers posed to minors by AI, with its advancement of the bipartisan Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act. The bill, authored by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), would require AI companies to verify the ages of their users, ban them from offering “AI companion” bots for minors, and require them to remind users every 30 minutes that their chatbots are not human (and regularly disclose that users should seek professional advice on medical, legal, financial, or psychological questions).

The measure would also make it illegal to knowingly develop an AI chatbot that could solicit, encourage, or induce minors to “engage in, describe, or simulate sexually explicit conduct” or “create or transmit any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct,” or that “encourages, promotes, or coerces suicide, non-suicidal self-injury, or imminent physical or sexual violence.” Violations of these prohibitions would result in $100,000 fines.

The Judiciary panel approved the legislation in a bipartisan, 22-0 vote. “Time for the entire Senate to decide whether we fight for kids or corporations,” Hawley said after the vote.

Turkheimer is the vice president of public policy at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), which runs the National Sexual Assault Hotline. “More and more people are calling, especially kids are calling, with concerns that relate to…chatbot-type situations,” he told me, especially with regards to companion bots like those offered by Google’s Character.ai that seek to befriend their users.

“These chatbots are not customer service bots,” Turkheimer said. “They’re not merely for helping with homework… They’re actually things that are attempting to have some sort of a relationship, a friendship of some type with a child.” Many of these relationships have quickly turned dangerous: in one case, a 14-year-old died by suicide after developing a sexually explicit relationship with a Character.ai bot that encouraged him to “come home to me as soon as possible.” (The company now restricts minors from using its chatbots.)

In another case, the parents of a 16-year-old who died by suicide are suing OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT advised him on how to take his life. OpenAI has released data indicating that more than 1 million ChatGPT users show “explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent” each week.

The AI companies are “all in competition with one another, and they feel that if they put safety restrictions on their chatbot, they’re going to lose users, versus the ones that don’t,” Turkheimer said, arguing that those economic pressures mean the government should step in with measures like the GUARD Act.

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Although the bill sailed through Senate Judiciary, it is not without its critics. “I’m actually really surprised that this is the first AI regulatory framework that we’ve seen clear the committee stage and gain some momentum,” Andy Jung, a lawyer at the think tank TechFreedom, told me. “We’re starting from a really extreme place, rather than building our way up from requiring safeguards or requiring parental controls, for example.”

Jung believes the ban on minors using companion bots is written broadly enough that it could prohibit those under 18 from accessing any chatbot, effectively an age limit on Claude and ChatGPT, not just platforms like Character.ai that market themselves as producing AI friends.

The bill defines an “AI companion” as a chatbot that “provides adaptive, human-like responses to user inputs” and “is designed to encourage or facilitate the simulation of interpersonal or emotional interaction, friendship, companionship, or therapeutic communication.”

“Certainly, that definition covers all of the popular AI chatbots that we’re familiar with,” Jung said, except for those purposefully created to offer responses on specific topics, like “chatbots that are used in schools that can only respond to questions about history, for example, or that could only respond to questions about math.”

Jung argued that this would violate minors’ First Amendment right to receiving information; the age verification regime — which would apply to all users, although it would only hamper access for those under 18 — could also violate the rights of adults as well, he said.

Although he agreed with safeguards against pornographic conversations with minors, Jung said that the GUARD Act as written would prohibit minors from asking ChatGPT about their homework or the weather. “That’s more extreme than what we’ve seen proposed from many or most of the state bills and all of the federal bills that are getting attention right now,” he said. (In response, Turkheimer noted that the aforementioned OpenAI lawsuit sprung from conversations with ChatGPT that started about homework and later turned to suicide. “It’s just a question of whether or not that thing that begins with a history paper can lead to another relationship,” he said.)

Jung expressed confidence that the measure will be amended to address his concerns and make clearer the sort of companion bots it is trying to ban for minors. “If they can narrow those definitions, then I could see the bill moving forward,” Jung said, which would mark a watershed moment for Congress: after years of fits and starts, the GUARD Act could become the first major legislation protecting kids online since the 1990s.

Tech companies will undoubtedly try to fight it: according to one recent analysis, Big Tech firms pumped a combined $20 million into federal lobbying efforts in the first three months of 2026 alone. “This is one of those bills that’s very difficult to vote against. If it gets a vote on the Senate floor, it will pass. If it gets a vote on the House floor, it will pass,” Turkheimer said. “The only way it doesn’t pass is if it gets killed in the dark.”

As the age of AI looms, it is striking to watch patterns play out that are familiar from the adoption of social media: more and more users, especially young people, simultaneously relying on a product while professing to despise it. An NBC poll in March found that 57% of registered voters believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. A Gallup survey found that 51% of Americans aged 14 to 29 use AI weekly, if not more. 42% of the same cohort said that AI makes them anxious, while 31% said it makes them angry.

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The GUARD Act will be one of the first tests of whether those popular emotions will be successfully channeled into legislation, as they weren’t (or haven’t yet) for social media. Failure could take many forms: proponents of the bill worry Congress won’t act before it’s too late to protect minors from the harms posed by AI; critics believe the measure is an overcorrection, swerving from inaction to too-much-action.

“In the three years since ChatGPT came out, there hasn’t been any movement on a federal AI framework from Congress, and that has led to some pretty volatile conversations about the harms of AI and some pretty harmful use-cases and sad stories we’ve seen of users who have used AI and then self-harmed,” Jung said. “And so I think after three years, there’s a lot of pressure on Congress to do something, and they’re responding to the extreme pressure with extreme measures.”

Still, the graveyard of social media bills from recent years, many of them bipartisan (and some from the same sponsors), is a reminder that inertia can provide a pressure of its own — one that often wins out in Washington. Whether that dynamic will repeat itself in the AI era is “possibly the $300 million question,” said Turkhemer, “based on how much these companies spend on lobbying.”

But the week’s biggest news arguably came from the Supreme Court, where the justices handed down their decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a landmark ruling on redistricting and the Voting Rights Act.

There are a lot of takes flying around about the VRA decision. It’s caused what you might call a “horseshoe reaction”: on either end, you have Democrats who are mournfully saying the ruling was a sweeping one, and Republicans who are gleefully agreeing. And then you have voices in the middle on both sides, who say the ruling will have a more limited impact.

To get the real answers, I spoke to one of the sharpest minds out there following redistricting: Zachary Donnini, the Director of Data Science at VoteHub, which is a great platform for election analysis, maps, and data.

What’s so great about Zachary is he’s a mapmaker himself, someone schooled in the art of slicing and dicing congressional districts to produce different results. It’s hard to really understand the Callais decision and what it will mean without looking at the maps themselves. In our conversation, Zachary pulls up election maps he’s created, in order to give a sense of some of the extreme gerrymandering scenarios that could result from this decision.

He’ll walk us through the sorts of maps we can expect after Callais, the lingering questions left open by the ruling, and the ways each party can take advantage of the decision. Plus, he’ll also give us a look inside redistricting software, to get a sense of how these party operatives produce maps that are slanted one way or the other.

The full conversation is available for paid subscribers. I think it will be worth the watch — but if you prefer to read, I have an overview of the Callais decision for you below, plus takeaways from my conversation with Zachary about what to expect and which districts to watch in the weeks and months ahead.

Let’s dive in!

How we got here

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was signed into law in 1965 to combat racial discrimination in elections. The law includes several provisions, many of which have come before the Supreme Court in recent years.

Section 5 of the VRA required certain states and counties with a history of discrimination to preclear any changes to their voting laws with the Justice Department. The Supreme Court struck that down in 2013, in a case called Shelby County v. Holder.

Section 2 of the VRA prohibits racial discrimination in voting practices. The Supreme Court previously limited that section in a 2021 case called Brnovich v. DNC, which made it harder to bring challenges under the VRA against state election laws.

Louisiana v. Callais is about challenges under Section 2 as it regards state redistricting plans. This, too, has come to the court before, including in a 1980 case called Mobile v. Bolden. In that ruling, the Supreme Court said that election maps were illegal only if they were intentionally discriminatory. Congress pushed back against this ruling by amending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, but what they was passed was pretty vague.

The new language said that a map violated the VRA if “based on the totality of circumstances,” it can be shown that members of a racial group “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” But it also said that “nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.”

Liberals have long pointed to the first part to argue that the language requires setting up majority-minority districts where feasible, in order to ensure minority voters are able to “elect representatives of their choice.” Conservatives have long pointed to the second part, to argue that the law explicitly says it is not requiring minority voters to be granted dominance in an equal number of districts to their proportion of a state.

The Supreme Court then took this up in Thornburg v. Gingles in 1986. Their ruling produce a three-prong test, which said that in situations where a minority group is “politically cohesive” and “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district” and where a majority group “votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it…usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate,” then a majority-minority district is required under Section 2 of the VRA. That’s been the rule ever since.

The Louisiana case

Louisiana v. Callais itself has been a long-running legal saga, dating back to 2022, when Louisiana first adopted a new congressional map after the 2020 census. (Back in the old days — a few years ago — states generally only redistricted every 10 years after the census.)

The map only included one majority-Black district; a group of Black voters sued, arguing that a second area of Louisiana fit the conditions laid out in Gingles, which meant the state should have a second majority-minority district under the VRA. A federal judge agreed and ordered Louisiana to create a map with two majority-Black districts, which was used for the 2024 elections.

This time, a group of non-Black voters brought a challenge, arguing that they were discriminated against by the new map’s explicit use of race. They said this was a violation of the Reconstruction-era 14th and 15th Amendments prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race (the same amendments the VRA had been passed to effectuate). That question — whether election maps can take race into account, even to prevent discrimination against minority voters, without running afoul of the Reconstruction-era Amendments’ prohibitions against race-based voting laws — is at the center of Callais.

What the decision said

The court split 6-3, along ideological lines, with Justice Samuel Alito writing for the conservative majority. There was speculation ahead of the ruling that the court might overturn Section 2 of the VRA entirely, finding that it required states to illegally incoprorate race in contravention of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

But Alito said they weren’t going that far. Instead, the court struck down just the Louisiana map, finding that its creation of a second majority-Black district was unconstitutional. The court didn’t overturn Gingles, the reigning precedent, but it instead updated the Gingles test, ruling that majority-minority districts should only be set up where “voters engage in racial bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation” and to combat “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting.”

The ruling can only be understood in the context of Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 case where the Supreme Court said that partisan gerrymandering is a non-justiciable question — in other words, that the court does not get involved in deciding what is or isn’t a partisan gerrymander. Therefore, Alito said, for the court to get involved in a racial gerrymandering case, voters challenging a map will have to “disentangle race from politics in proving their case.” Challengers will have to prove a state is engaging in racial gerrymandering (which is illegal), not simply partisan gerrymandering (which the Supreme Court said it will not intervene against). Were Louisiana Republicans trying to slice up voters because of their race, or because of their party?

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan (writing for the court’s liberal wing) argued that this ruling would render Section 2 “all but a dead letter,” writing that as long as a state has “left behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive,” it can simply limit minority voting power by claiming to implement a partisan gerrymander.

In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas (joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch) echoed Alito, but said that he would go even further, arguing that Section 2 of the VRA doesn’t cover redistricting claims at all, because it only prohibits states from imposing a race-based “voting qualification,” “prerequisite to voting,” or “standard, practice, or procedure.” Thomas said that none of those categories describe redistricting.

What’s next

This is what I really dug into with Zachary Donnini and, friends, there’s a lot we still don’t know.

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Early last month, President Trump made a bold announcement on Truth Social.

Trump wanted the election bill known as the SAVE America Act to be passed by the Senate “immediately,” and he was prepared to amp up pressure on Congress to make it happen. “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed,” Trump threatened, a pledge that quickly made its way into headlines on NPR, NBC, Axios, and other outlets.

Seven weeks later, the SAVE America Act has not been passed. (In fact, the Senate hasn’t held a vote related to the bill in more than a month, ending a halfhearted attempt to consider the measure.) And yet, Trump has dropped his promise: since saying he would stop signing bills into law, the president has signed eight bills into law.

The most recent was on Monday, when Trump signed a measure undoing a Biden-era ban on mining in a Minnesota wilderness area. He has also signed bills awarding Medals of Honor to three veterans and posthumously promoting another, reauthorizing a program for small businesses, helping families recover art stolen in the Holocaust, and temporarily extending a key surveillance authority — all in violation of his March 8 pledge.

This has become a familiar pattern throughout the second Trump administration: The president announces a new policy initiative on Truth Social, often saying it will be “effective immediately.” News outlets send out “breaking news” alerts. Members of Congress issue statements. Furor ensues. And then … nothing happens. No executive order is signed. No new policy is put into place. Very rarely do news outlets return to their earlier stories broadcasting Trump’s initial missive and clarify that the thing he was announcing never came to pass.

According to a Wake Up To Politics analysis, since returning to office, Trump has issued 29 Truth Social posts announcing that policies would be “effective” or “starting” either immediately or on an upcoming date. Only nine of those actually happened as announced. Two-thirds of the time, when the president unveils a new initiative on social media, it does not materialize as promised.

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There are different versions of this. Sometimes Trump will announce something, and literally nothing will happen, as if the president is just posting into the void. After the Supreme Court on February 20 struck down his tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), for example, Trump announced that he would impose a new 10% global tariff using a different legal authority. Trump signed an executive order implementing the policy that very evening.

But the next day, Trump announced that “effective immediately,” he would be raising the new global tariff to 15%. This time, however, no executive order followed. On March 4, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the change would come that week. Nothing. On March 25, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Trump still planned to make the increase and that it was “in process” to take effect. (“I wouldn’t get too lost in the details on that,” Navarro said.) Still nothing. More than two months after Trump said the global tariff level would be raised to 15%, it remains at 10%.

Similarly, on April 8, Trump posted that any country “supplying Military Weapons to Iran will be immediately tariffed, on any and all goods sold to the United States of America, 50%, effective immediately.” It was not clear how Trump intended to impose such duties, since he doesn’t have much ability to tariff individual countries without IEEPA. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett even suggested that Trump might actually use IEEPA, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. But he hasn’t. Three weeks after Trump announced the 50% tariffs, they have yet to be put into effect.

I emailed the White House about these two tariff announcements — which Trump issued as fact, no caveats attached — in case I had missed any developments or they had any updates to share. “The Administration continues to work on the President’s policy initiatives to strangle the Iranian terror regime and defend American workers,” a spokesperson told me, offering no specific progress on a pair of policies Trump had promised to execute “immediately.”

Then there are policies that Trump announces that end up being much more limited than he described. On March 3, Trump announced that the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) would be offering “political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf” region. Three days later, the DFC announced a plan to offer reinsurance, not insurance, and only to certain vessels, not “ALL” of them.

On January 14, Trump announced that “EFFECTIVE FEBRUARY FIRST, NO MORE PAYMENTS WILL BE MADE BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO STATES FOR THEIR CORRUPT CRIMINAL PROTECTION CENTERS KNOWN AS SANCTUARY CITIES.” On January 22, the White House ordered a review of federal funding for 14 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C., though the memo made clear that it was a “data-gathering exercise only” and “does not involve withholding funds.”

As far as I can tell, no further steps have been taken to effectuate the payment cut-off Trump announced. “President Trump and his entire Administration have been clear that sanctuary cities put innocent Americans at risk and they cannot continue to ignore the rule of law,” the White House told me when I double-checked, again offering no specifics.

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There are also initiatives Trump has announced that have been carried out, but not on the timeline that he promised. “I am, as President of the United States, hereby terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota,” Trump wrote on November 21 last year, even though such a decision, by law, can only be made by the Secretary of Homeland Security and can’t be enacted immediately. The president had incorrectly written online that an entire group’s legal status in the country had been revoked, causing uncertainty for a whole population. Eventually, on January 14, then-Secretary Kristi Noem signed an order terminating TPS for Somalis, to take effect on March 17, almost four months after Trump’s original “effective” date. (A judge then paused the termination order. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today on the legality of two other TPS terminations.)

Last September, Trump announced that “starting October 1st, 2025,” 50% tariffs would be imposed on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities and 30% tariffs would be imposed on upholstered furniture. He then issued a proclamation issuing 25% tariffs on kitchen cabinets/bathroom vanities and upholstered furniture, stating that both would go into effect on October 14 and then rise to 50% and 30%, respectively, on January 1, 2026. The day before that deadline, on New Year’s Eve, Trump delayed the increases for another year, quietly punting tariffs that were supposed to take effect on October 1, 2025 to January 1, 2027.

At times, even when Trump has posted that “no extensions will be granted” to a certain deadline, a six-day extension to the deadline materializes, as happened with Trump’s global tariffs last summer.

Occasionally, Trump’s threats have been dropped because a deal with an adversary was struck before a deadline — although, just as often, they are dropped without any explanation, or the “deal” that was made ends up proving to be less than initially described.

On January 17, for instance, Trump said that tariffs against European countries would go into effect on February 1 in protest of the fact that the U.S. had not been given Greenland. Four days later, the threat was dropped after Trump announced that he had inked the “framework of a future deal” on Greenland. The details of the framework were never specified, and the “future deal” has not emerged or been mentioned by Trump since.

It’s important to note that I am not referring here to policies that Trump has tried to implement by executive order but was foiled by the courts, though that has happened too. This is a whole separate category of policies that haven’t even made it into an executive order: things that Trump said he would do, and then he himself failed to follow through on, or only followed through to a limited extent or after a delay.

Unlike in cases tied up in court, for instance, it is unquestionably within Trump’s power to stop signing legislation if he so chose. But even after making such a pledge, Trump has continued signing bills into law, without any acknowledgement that his highly publicized promise has fallen by the wayside.

The fact that the president announcing something does not necessarily mean that thing will happen (in fact, it usually means that thing won’t happen) is especially notable when that president is conducting a war, a time when Americans rely on the commander-in-chief for accurate information. But Trump’s narration of the war in Iran has often proven as flexible as his policy announcements.

It has now been 12 days since Trump told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything,” including removing its enriched uranium. No evidence has emerged in the intervening period to suggest that Iran has conceded to all (or any) of Trump’s demands as he claimed. Instead, negotiations continue — never mind that Trump said a month before that the war would only end in “unconditional surrender” by Iran, not by negotiated settlement. Trump wrote on Truth Social yesterday that Iran had informed him that “they want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible.” It was not clear whether the president was communicating a genuine desire by our adversary for the critical channel to be opened, or merely making things up as he went along, even though that issue is one of the most sensitive points of the negotiations, with a large impact on stock markets and oil prices.

These episodes tell us something about the president, and something about covering him.

First, Trump is truly the Ad-Lib President. Presidential policy announcements and war updates were once picked over by several layers of advisers, lawyers, and generals. Now, they are dispensed by the president over Truth Social or brief phone interviews, apparently without much thought as to whether the thing being announced will actually take place. What was once the sturdy Word of the President has become flimsy and ephemeral, tumbling out of Trump’s mouth or social media feed but not always standing the test of time. Presidential announcements about rescinding pardons or reopening Alcatraz or offering stimulus checks have come and gone, without any sign that they lead to action in the White House.

Since many of these announcements have been threats, foreign adversaries like Iran or participants in trade negotiations are surely following this trend closely. The Madman Theory only works if your opponent takes you seriously, and thinks there is a sizable chance your words will be converted into actions.

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Second, this is a lesson for news outlets covering the president. None of this means if the president announces something on Truth Social, it shouldn’t be covered. But there is a way to cover it responsibly, noting whether or not the policy is attached to a real executive order, and then whether that executive order is attached to a real statutory authority. Too often, news outlets fail to travel down that chain of reasoning. (In an age where many news consumers read only headlines, it is also important that caveats be added at the top, not just in paragraph 15.)

On January 9, for example, the White House shared a Truth Social post on X, writing: “President Donald J. Trump announces a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10% effective January 20, 2026.” But if one read the Truth Social post, they would have seen that he had actually said “effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%.” (Emphasis mine.) He was calling for a cap to be imposed, not imposing one (and confusingly adding an “effective” date regardless).

Some outlets took the White House’s word for it, however, giving Trump the headline he wanted: “Trump says he will temporarily cap credit card rates,” Politico blared. He has not done so, however, nor does he have the power to. No 10% cap on credit card interest rates has been put in place.

When journalists fail to report responsibly, you also have the tools to investigate yourself. If Trump makes an announcement on Truth Social, you can go to WhiteHouse.gov. Check under the “News” page and see if you see an executive order or proclamation that effectuates what was announced on social media. If you don’t, it may not actually be happening (and certainly not “immediately”). Even if you do see such an order, check whether it’s announcing a preliminary review or something like that, or actually carrying out Trump’s word.

The president’s social media feed is closely watched — and a key driver of clicks, headlines, and commentary — but there is no guarantee that a policy announced there will transpire in the way he says it will.

In fact, there’s a two-thirds chance it won’t.

Washington remains shaken this morning after the familiar ritual of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner took a dark turn on Saturday night, as a gunman raced through security attempting to wreak havoc.

The suspect, a 31-year-old California teacher named Cole Tomas Allen, was quickly tackled to the ground. Inside the ballroom, top officials including President Donald Trump (attending the dinner for the first time as president), Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were hustled to safety. Journalists and other top Washington power brokers cowered under tables. It was the third assassination attempt against Trump in two years.

One Secret Service agent was shot, but was saved by a bulletproof vest and has already been released from the hospital. No other injuries were reported. Allen is set to make his first appearance in court this morning.

I was not at the dinner, though I’ve attended in the past and can confirm that it’s a chaotic environment, with many pre-parties taking place at the same venue (the Washington Hilton, which is also where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981) and a minimal security presence to enter the hotel itself. On Saturday night, I was at Substack’s “New Media Party,” which was held during the dinner, at a venue right across the street from the White House (about a mile and a half from the Hilton).

Because of its proximity to the White House, the party was placed on lockdown for more than an hour, with no one allowed in or out as the Secret Service sealed off the entire area, following their protocol after an attack on the president. Our phones buzzed with updates as Trump’s motorcade whizzed past the building, returning to the White House, where he addressed reporters (still clad in black-tie attire) later that night. By the time we were allowed to leave the party, it was like walking into a ghost town; the Secret Service had shut down every street within a five-block radius of the White House, on guard against any further threats.

Here are six thoughts on the weekend’s alarming events:

#1: The Secret Service has come under close scrutiny in the aftermath of the shooting, although Trump administration officials have expressed confidence in the agency’s handling of the attack. “The system worked,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared on Sunday, noting that Allen was quickly apprehended and never made it into the ballroom where the dinner was being held.

To give you a sense of where Allen was in relation to the president: In the floor plan below, the Correspondents’ Dinner is held on the Hilton’s “Concourse Level,” in the cavernous “International Ballroom.” The magnetometers are set up in the “Terrace Level,” one floor above the dinner. That’s as far as Allen made it. Above that is the lobby and 12 floors of rooms.

Allen reportedly checked into the hotel as a guest on Friday, spending the night in a room on the 10th floor. Per CBS News, he then used an interior stairwell to evade security stationed in the lobby, while carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives in a black bag. The stairwell spit him out at the “Terrace Level,” where everyone had to go through security before going down another set of stairs into the ballroom. He tried to dash through the magnetometers, but was quickly tackled to the ground. At that point, Allen was very close to the stairs that would have taken him into the ballroom itself — though he never made it that far.

“The system worked,” then, in the sense that Allen never set foot inside the ballroom. He was stopped at the exact security checkpoint that was supposed to stop him. But should the point that stops an armed assailant be farther than it was from the president and most of the top officials in the government?

In Allen’s manifesto, first reported by the New York Post, he gloats that he was able to bring weapons into the hotel the night before the event, without any security screening whatsoever. “Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance,” Allen wrote. “I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.”

For Allen to have been stopped earlier than he was would have required a dramatically different security posture. Should the president of the United States never be able to give a speech in an active hotel, without every guest’s luggage being screened upon arrival? Should there be metal detectors and ID checks at the front door of every building he speaks at, not just — as is sometimes the case when other things are happening inside a building — outside the specific room he’s speaking in?

Clearly, in this day and age, none of these are insane expectations to have; perhaps some of them should be adopted. But it would require a complete rethinking of the types of venues a president is allowed to speak at, with the goal of the Secret Service going from securing a room to securing a building, and shutting down activities in the rest of the building while the president is there.

If our expectation is that the room the president is in should be secure, then the system worked. If our expectation is that any building the president is in should be sealed off, without any unchecked bags or unidentified people, then we would need a new system — and maybe we do, but that is a larger conversation that calls for a broader set of norms. (On the identification point, I will note that at the Substack party on Saturday night, I had to show ID while someone checked to make sure I was on the list. No such precaution is taken at the Hilton, where anyone arriving on Saturday night needed only to flash a ticket to the dinner or a pre-party to enter the building, in addition to the hotel guests like Allen already inside.)

As we consider these questions, it’s worth noting that — once again — we seem to have gotten incredibly lucky that this wasn’t worse. What if, instead of a lone teacher, a team of trained Iranian assassins had checked into the Hilton on Friday night? If all of them charged the security checkpoint at once, might one of them have been able to slip down the stairs and into the ballroom with the president? What if Allen, having made it into the building with no screening of his luggage, had brought a bomb? What if he had gone into the lobby or the security area earlier, where he wouldn’t have encountered Trump — but would have been face-to-face with some of the top-ranking members of the government, and clearly would have been able to be armed? I remember seeing a host of boldface names in the chaos of that same security line; Allen wouldn’t have needed to show any ID or ticket to get to the point where he was standing with them. It is easy to imagine an attack on a Cabinet secretary or the speaker of the House playing out.

According to the Washington Post, the Correspondents’ Dinner was not designated a “National Special Security Event,” the high-security classification given to events like the State of the Union or an inauguration where several top officials gather (nor is the dinner typically given that designation). Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect screening of every person who enters a building where the president is speaking (or, again, maybe it isn’t) — but it seems much less unreasonable for an event attended by the president and the three officials who come after him in the line of succession. Maybe events of those sort should be held in dedicated buildings, rather than active hotels where any manner of other events can be taking place.

Tourists can’t just waltz into the U.S. Capitol for the State of the Union. The Correspondents’ Dinner is thought to be a much less formal affair — but if the ballroom is similarly studded with important figures, perhaps it should have a similar security posture? Allen wrote that he noticed a “sense of arrogance” upon entering the Hilton, which does speak to the fact that whenever attacks like this occur, it seems like the relevant security officials are in place but not necessarily behaving like they actually believe the worst could happen at any moment: recall the Capitol Police officers who seemed woefully unprepared on January 6th, or the agonizing failures that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to shoot a bullet at Trump in the 2024 campaign and hit him in the ear.

Similarly, a current Secret Service official told MSNOW that the checkpoint staff “wasn’t paying close attention” when Allen arrived because the dinner had already started; indeed, they had started to take down the magnetometers (though that also meant they had simultaneously closed the doors of the ballroom itself to “harden” the security presence around the room). Other officials raised red flags about the awkward evacuation process, which seemed difficult to carry out in the packed room; videos showed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being taken out before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Vice President JD Vance being taken out before the president.

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#2: Of course, the attack is not only another bracing reminder about security, but about political rhetoric as well.

We know nothing (still) about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. But Allen’s manifesto makes it clear that he believed it necessary to harm Trump and officials in his administration because of disagreements with their policies.

“On to why I did any of this: I am a citizen of the United States of America,” he wrote. “What my representatives do reflects on me.”

In his manifesto, Allen calls Trump a “pedophile,” repeating an allegation that has marinated in left-wing media but has never once been proven.

Allen had clearly consumed information — some correct, some not — that drove him, in his words, to “experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done,” and made him believe that emotion merited not voting against politicians he disagreed with, but killing them.

It is an opportunity for figures on both sides of the political aisle — and all of us — to stop before espousing heated rhetoric and think, *I* know that this comment is intended simply to get those listening to vote against a certain politician or political party. But is it stated in such a way, and using enough existential framing, that someone with mental illness might hear it and think it describes a situation that licenses violence? If so, how can I make changes that avoids that all-too-real possibility?

We all lose when any segment of the country looks at political problems and believes violence is an answer to them. It is easy to say that. Harder is making the changes in our own rhetoric that would ensure no listener could walk away and think we are urging them towards drastic action.

#3: The fact that Trump himself is one of these figures who could take a closer look at his rhetoric does nothing — absolutely nothing — to change that broader takeaway. On Saturday night, Trump made an admirable request that “all Americans recommit with their hearts in resolving our difference peacefully.” The next day, in an interview on “60 Minutes,” Trump called journalist Norah O’Donnell “disgraceful” and said that the media are “horrible people,” the sort of rhetoric which has led to threats against journalists, just as overheated rhetoric towards Trump has led to threats against him.

We can all think harder before attacking opponents in personal terms or making unfounded allegations, rather than merely expressing our disagreements. I am also tired of seeing more examples of political violence being treated as a team sport, with either side treating this as a Democratic problem or a Republican problem, rather than as an American problem that plainly exists within both party camps.

#4: Trump also used his Saturday night remarks to repeat his call for a White House ballroom. “It’s actually a larger room and it’s much more secure,” Trump said, describing his planned ballroom. “It’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it.” On Truth Social, Trump derided the plaintiffs who have brought a “ridiculous” lawsuit attempting to stop the ballroom’s construction. This is an interesting legal debate, but largely a non sequitur.

There are plenty of good reasons, from security to aesthetics, to have a ballroom on the White House grounds. Judge Richard Leon, in halting construction, has merely ruled that these arguments must be hashed out in Congress, which he has said has the authority over such construction. Notably, even when faced with that adverse ruling, Trump has never attempted to follow its advice, and even see whether Congress might sanction the ballroom.

That might change this week, with Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) announcing plans to request unanimous consent to pass a bill approving construction of a ballroom. According to the judge’s ruling, that’s all that had to happen this whole time! Now we’ll see whether Democrats will object to the donor-funded project.

But, either way, this has little to do with the Correspondents’ Dinner, which is hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the White House. When the president attends, he does so as the guests of the reporters, not the other way around, which means there is little reason to believe that this particular dinner would be held at the White House, even if there was a place to do it. Trump has talked about his ballroom seating around 1,000 people; the Correspondents’ Dinner typically hosts more than double that number of attendees. Whether or not the White House should have a ballroom, and who should have to approve it, is a conversation worth having. But even if such a ballroom existed, Saturday night’s dinner almost certainly wouldn’t have been held in it.

#5: I will be curious whether Saturday’s attack ricochets in Congress in other ways. I have yet to see any evidence that the Department of Homeland Security shutdown — now in its 73rd day — played any role in the security posture at the Correspondents’ Dinner, but the attack may nevertheless increase pressure on Congress to approve funding for the agency, which includes the Secret Service.

The current plan is for Republicans to fund immigration enforcement agencies through the party-line reconciliation process, while both parties approve funding for the rest of DHS (including the Secret Service) through the normal process. However, some GOP lawmakers have said they won’t approve the second batch of funding until they are sure the first batch will go through. In addition, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said yesterday that the reconciliation measure should include authorization for the White House ballroom, which could further complicate attempts to pass the reconciliation bill and then fund the rest of DHS.

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#6: In the meantime, here’s one legislative proposal that should be considered: it’s time to change the presidential line of succession.

If the very worst-case scenario had played out on Saturday, President Trump and both of the first two figures in the line of succession — Vice President Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson — were all in attendance. Who is third in line? Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, who is 92 years old.

Despite its high placement in the line of succession, the position of Senate president pro tempore is traditionally given to the senator in the majority party who has served in the Senate the longest. That’s currently Grassley, who has been a Republican senator from Iowa since 1981.

By all accounts, Grassley himself is in great shape, but there is no reason that we should risk a national crisis ending in the presidency being handed to the occupant of a position frequently held by someone in their 80s or 90s. At one point, in 2001, Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) held the position at age 99 and in reportedly failing health.

Even ignoring the age issue, there are already problems with both the House speaker and Senate president pro tempore being in the line of succession. First, legally: according to the Constitution, no one can serve in two branches of government at once, which means Johnson or Grassley would have to resign from Congress to assume the presidency. But by the time they have resigned, they would no longer be in the line of succession. It would be sort of a Schrödinger’s President situation.

But, more importantly, it creates the possibility that the presidency could be handed to someone of the other party in the middle of a term. This would obviously cause confusion in terms of policy direction, and arguably subvert the voters’ will — but it also creates a nightmarish incentive structure, when the speaker of the House is from one party and the president and vice president are from another (which happens all the time). In this situation, a deranged person of the sort we have been talking about would know that if they kill the president and vice president, they could install someone of their party in the White House. Not really a possibility we want hanging in the air.

And then you add back in the age factor — if disaster had struck on Saturday night, we might have ended up with a 92-year-old president — and the imperative becomes even stronger. It might surprise you to learn that the line of succession (beyond the vice president) is written nowhere in the Constitution, so this wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment or anything like that.

The U.S. has had three Presidential Succession Acts: the first, in 1792, listed the Senate president pro tempore and then the speaker of the House (with a provision stating that they should hold office temporarily, until a special election could be held to elect a new president and vice president). The second, in 1886, took out the lawmakers and listed Cabinet departments in order of their establishment, starting with the Secretary of State. The most recent, in 1947, added back in the speaker and the Senate president pro tempore (but reversed their order) and put them before the Cabinet.

Congress could pass a bill tomorrow that would revive the 1886 line of succession, removing any legal or political headaches that come with including members of Congress — and taking away the risk we briefly had on Saturday of a nonagenarian being suddenly elevated to the presidency.

• Can Trump unilaterally withdraw from NATO?

• Does Trump care about his sinking poll numbers?

• Can members of Congress keep their pensions even if they resign in disgrace or get expelled?

Plus: Oftentimes when I solicit questions, at least a few of you write back with questions about Wake Up To Politics itself. I usually don’t pick those to be answered — but this month marked WUTP’s 15th anniversary, an exciting milestone. So I thought it would be appropriate to answer a few of those questions, and give a bit of a State of the Newsletter update.

We’re all in this together — and I know many of you have been reading for many of those 15 years — so I think it’s only fair that you be updated on how the newsletter is growing and what I have in mind for the future. So the last few questions will be about WUTP and where I see it going.

Whether you’ve been reading for one year or 15, thank you so much for being here. Let’s dive in!

Can Trump withdraw from NATO?

Q: How can Trump pull out of NATO notwithstanding the law that requires Congressional consent?

To start with the basics, NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (not “North American,” as the New York Times recently wrote), an alliance between the U.S. and 31 mostly European countries that dates back to the Cold War. It’s a mutual defense agreement, as crystallized in Article V of its founding treaty, which states that an armed attack on any NATO member state will be treated as an attack against them all. (This has been invoked once, on behalf of the U.S. after 9/11.)

Trump has never been a fan of NATO, and has long talked about withdrawing from it. As the questioner notes, lawmakers tried to head that possibility off by passing an amendment as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (signed into law by Joe Biden in December 2023) that prevents a president from leaving NATO unless authorized by a) two-thirds of the Senate, or b) simple majorities in both chambers of Congress.

That amendment, by the way, was co-authored by then-Sen. Marco Rubio.

Seems pretty simple, right? Trump’s hands are tied? Not so fast. As is often the case with constitutional law, there is actually quite a bit more gray area than you might think. The Constitution lays out how the U.S. can enter into treaties (the president negotiates them, and then the Senate has to ratify them by a two-thirds vote, which the Senate did for the NATO Treaty in 1949). But it is silent on how the country might get out of them.

As a result, the practice has varied over time. In the country’s first century, we saw all sorts of combinations: the House and Senate passing a law to exit treaties; just the Senate doing it; the president telling foreign countries he was withdrawing from a treaty, and then Congress approving it; Congress ordering the president to say he was withdrawing from a treaty, and then him doing it.

In 1898, William McKinley became the first president to unilaterally withdraw from a treaty without any congressional participation whatsoever. Over time, this became the norm. In 1979, Jimmy Carter withdrew from a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, as part of America’s normalization of relations with China. A group of lawmakers, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), sued. You needed our permission to join this treaty, these senators reasoned. That means you need our permission to get out of it.

Carter argued that he had the power to terminate a treaty without congressional approval. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

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You know the drill. Hit me with your best questions for our next mailbag edition.

Happy to talk Supreme Court, Iran, reconciliation, redistricting, congressional ethics, Cabinet shakeup, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whether we all just want to live in our own dictatorships, or anything else that’s on your mind in the world of politics, government, and media.

Here’s the link to send a question anonymously. You can also leave a comment below or click “reply” to this email — it all goes straight to me!

Send a question!

Looking forward to seeing your questions!

— Gabe

Let’s say a congressman is about to vote on a bill mandating universal background checks for guns. The congressman’s voters oppose the bill. The congressman himself does too, so this isn’t a case where his own conscience conflicts with the views of his district. In your opinion, how should the congressman vote?

Seems simple, right? Maybe not.

A trio of political scientists from Brigham Young University recently polled a representative sample of Americans on this question — and also asked for their opinion on background checks — and they emerged with a striking finding: respondents tended to think the congressman should simply vote according to whatever position the respondent already held, no matter what the legislator or their voters thought.

Professors Michael Barber, Ryan Davis, and Adam Michael Dynes asked the question several different ways, involving immigration, abortion, health care, and tax policy. They randomized whether a respondent was told the congressman’s personally agreed with his voters, or disagreed with them.

Across the different questions, they found that Americans said that a congressman should vote his conscience, including when it conflicted with the views of his district and with the respondent themselves, 52% of the time. They said that a congressman should vote with his district, including when it conflicted with his conscience and their own, 60% of the time. But the respondents were most likely to say that the congressman should vote with them: 66% of the time, a respondent’s answer of what a legislator should do aligned with their own personal opinion, even in cases when they they knew they formed a minority of one, out of step with both the lawmaker and his district.

If the congressman supported a policy but his district opposed it — and the respondent opposed it too — respondents only said that the legislator should vote for the policy 25% of the time. But the simple fact of the respondent supporting the policy got that to shoot up to 60%, even when the legislator’s district was still in opposition.

In political science, the idea that a congressman should vote in accordance with his district is known as the Delegate Model of Representation. The idea that a congressman should vote in accordance with his conscience is the Trustee Model of Representation. Barber, Davis, and Dynes proposed that a third model exists, which is actually more influential than either side of that long-accepted binary.

They called this Personal Representation — or, more darkly, Dictatorial Representation — the idea that “many citizens want representatives to prioritize their own preferences, even when both the representative and the majority of constituents disagree.”

“Unlike a preference for delegate versus trustee representation,” the trio wrote, “a preference for personal representation is directly about whether citizens accept the legitimacy of being outvoted in ordinary political life.”

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I was thinking about this political science finding yesterday when watching the Senate confirmation hearing for Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve. About 35 minutes into the hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked Warsh a question that has now become commonplace at confirmation hearings for Trump nominees.

“Mr. Warsh, did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” Warren asked.

As has also become commonplace, Warsh dodged the question. “Um, uh, we try to keep politics, if I’m confirmed, out of the Federal Reserve,” he said.

Warren prodded him; he bobbed and weaved again. “Senator, I believe that this body certified that election many years ago,” Warsh pointed out. She tried a third time; Warsh pivoted to a criticism of the Fed’s handling of monetary policy in 2020.

At this point, that simple factual question has been asked of dozens of Trump’s nominees to serve as judges, all of whom have dodged in a similar manner as Warsh. Joe Biden was certified as the winner of the 2020 election, they say. Or Joe Biden served as president. But none have been willing to say what we can glean from simple math, and what was upheld in more than 60 court cases: Joe Biden won more votes in the 2020 election than Donald Trump.

Two plus two equals four. 81 million is greater than 74 million.

Remember what the BYU professors told us, that a preference for personal representation — which many Americans seem to share — is “directly about whether citizens accept the legitimacy of being outvoted in ordinary political life.”

If you feel one way, but the majority of your neighbors feel another, do you accept that the outcome should align with the majority’s opinion, not with yours? When you think about it, this is what all of democracy is about, really.

“Democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness,” the philosopher John Dewey once said. ‘“Every other form of moral and social faith rests upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some ‘authority’ alleged to exist outside the processes of experience. Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process.”

It is a belief in process over outcomes, and a faith not that you will usually be right, or that a higher power will be, but that a majority of the population will get to the right answer a majority of the time.

If belief in this idea is the test of whether a citizenry embraces democracy, then we are failing that test, according to the BYU study, in which voters consistently prioritized their own preferences above the preferences of the majority. And is that any surprise, when faith in that democratic ideal is being modeled for us so poorly by our leaders, including those hoping to serve in apolitical positions, like judges and as Fed chairman?

The president of the United States repeatedly insists that he won an election that he lost, and his nominees routinely appear before the Congress and refuse to say otherwise, presumably out of fear of contradicting him.

There are no comparably high-profile figures denying the results of a presidential election on the Democratic side — though, notably, many Democratic voters seem to have gotten there on their own.

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In a January poll by YouGov, 67% of Republicans said that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. 51% of Democrats said that Donald Trump did not legitimately win in 2024. (There is, to be clear, equally no evidence for these two claims.) Those two numbers are not equal, but the topline takeaway is stark: majorities of both American political parties are unable to accept it when they’ve lost.

One interesting facet of this to me is that, in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, YouGov asked this question and found 35% of Democrats believed that Trump did not legitimately win, still distressingly high but noticeably lower. They asked again in June 2025, and the number crept up to 38%. By January of this year, it had reached 51%.

As Trump’s term has gone on, and as Democrats have grown unhappier with the election result, more and more have come to view it as illegitimate. Not only do Americans reject the legitimacy of an outcome they dislike, some are rejecting the legitimacy of an outcome they once accepted the more that the outcome has upset them. It is hard to think of a better illustration of Americans’ support for the democratic process being conditional on their opinion of the outcome that it yields.

Many of us, it seems, would rather live in our own personal dictatorship, where presidential elections always go our way and congressman always vote exactly how we want, than come to terms with what it means to live in a democracy, with all the hard persuasive work and frequent disappointments that entails.

2020 was not the first controversial election in our history. In fact, there have been several occasions in which presidential losers had much more serious grounds to believe that they were the rightful winner. In 1876, Republican election commissioners in several states threw out votes for Democrat Samuel Tilden, calling Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’ victory into question. In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy’s win was tainted by credible allegations of election fraud in Illinois and Texas, which might have kept Republican Richard Nixon from the White House. Finally, after the 2000 race, a post-election study found that if all disputed ballots across the state had been counted according to consistent standards, Democrat Al Gore would have won Florida, and the presidency. (The study also found that if the limited recount that Gore actually requested had continued, instead of being stopped by the Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won.)

These three men all had actually credible cases to mount that they should have been elected president. But all three stepped aside, believing that preserving the American process over the long-run was more important than securing a specific outcome in the short-term.

“I can retire to private life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office,” Tilden joked.

Here’s Nixon:

I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.

And here’s Gore:

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.

Contrast those statements of magnanimity not only with Trump’s repeated insistence that he won the 2020 election, but the refusal of his nominees, including Warsh on Tuesday, to acknowledge this reality as well. America kinda just got lucky, at three important points in history, by having the right losers. Now, the next chairman of the Federal Reserve cannot even look a U.S. senator (and the American people) in the eye and recite a simple civic fact, because the president finds it personally upsetting.

In his beautiful book “American Covenant,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin writes about a “republican ethic” that undergirds America, which counsels patience in politics: winning with humility and losing with grace. The American system contains so many obstacles preventing majorities from implementing their will, in order to push Americans who disagree to work with one another.

When we win, we are supposed to recognize that we might lose tomorrow, so we should treat the losers justly and work with them cooperatively. When we lose, we know we might win tomorrow, so we should recognize our competitor’s victories so that they will recognize ours, and use defeat as an opportunity to learn and modify our programs in the ways the electorate has asked. Levin writes:

Sustaining that framework means sometimes valuing the processes by which our system acts above the outcomes we desire. This requires a kind of commitment to the Constitution and veneration of the law that do not come naturally but can be achieved by the experience of living under a system of government we respect… This kind of formation of the citizen’s soul cannot be achieved by merely teaching civics in the abstract. But it can be achieved by a combination of rhetoric and experience, by teaching constitutionalism, and by living it.

It is a two-way street, Levin adds, which leaders must model to their citizens, and which citizens must model back. We are failing this equation in almost all directions. When parties win, they immediately try to grab maximum amounts of power, and are being cheerleaded by their voters in doing so. When parties lose, leaders on the Republican side, and voters on both sides, are denyig it.

The next generation is noticing.

More in Common, the nonprofit group whose work I cited Monday, has polled this question:

“With regards to the Constitution, how do you think President Trump should govern?”

Option 1: “He should always follow the Constitution, even if it means he sometimes can’t get things done.”

Option 2: “He should follow his plan to Make America Great Again, even if it means sometimes ignoring the Constitution.”

Older Trump voters (Gen X, Baby Boomers, and Silent Generation) say 74%-15% that Trump should follow the Constitution, even if it provides obstacles. But younger Trump voters (Millennials and Gen Z) are noticeably more divided on that question, 60%-32%, doubling the proportion of voters who say Trump should plow past the Constitution if its process inconveniences his desired outcomes.

On other side of the aisle, in the YouGov polling, 18- to- 29-year-olds are the cohort most likely to say that Trump did not legitimately win the 2024 election.

A democracy is all about admitting that you might be wrong: otherwise, you would prefer to live in an autocracy structured around your specific viewpoint, where your policy stance would always win. We acknowledge our potential wrongness by agreeing to potentially be defeated in elections, yielding power if a majority disagrees with us, and accepting roadblocks to implementing our agendas even when we win, knowing that the best outcomes will be achieved not by our viewpoint becoming law by fiat, but by a process of checks and balances that improve our policies.

When you have leaders no longer willing to embrace this ethic — or to model it in White House speeches or Senate confirmation hearings — you will end up with a citizenry that stops desiring it.

The piece was shared on social media by a number of high-profile Trump allies, including by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and the White House itself. I’m not sure they read until the end. While the topline takeaway on MAGA voters was favorable to Trump, the piece also contained warning signs for the White House, noting that opposition to the war among Trump’s strongest supporters may have been overhyped — but that didn’t mean his more loosely committed voters (frankly, a more politically important group) didn’t have concerns.

“To the degree there are drifters in Trump’s coalition, the ones to watch are probably not MAGA diehards who are Trumpier than Trump,” I wrote. “They are likely young men who experimented with Trumpism in 2024 but now, unlike most MAGA Republicans, actually are concerned with the state of the economy and have misgivings about Trump’s handling of the war and other issues.”

One problem, I told another journalist at the time, was that there wasn’t a good name for this group of Rogan-listening, isolationist-leaning, open-to-Trump-but-not-committed-to-him voters. They often got falsely lumped in with MAGA, allowing Trump allies to (accurately) point to polls showing that MAGA voters were sticking with Trump on Iran, which refuted the categorization but not the more important point: that the war was hurting the GOP’s ability to retain this key group of swing voters they had won over in 2024, whatever you want to call them.

So, let’s give them a name — and check in on how these voters are feeling about the war in Iran now.

More in Common is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that publishes research aiming to give a more nuanced look at the American electorate. Earlier this year, they released a report, “Beyond MAGA,” which argued that Trump voters are often grouped under one umbrella of red-hat-wearing, rally-going, would-vote-for-Trump-if-he-shot-someone-on-5th-Avenue voters. But 77 million Americans cast ballots for Trump in 2024. That easy caricature elides many of the important differences among these voters. Trump had built a “coalition, not a cult,” the report argued.

To correct this misperception, More in Common fielded a series of polls of Trump voters asking about their ideologies (“God saved President Trump from assassination so that he can make America great again: agree or disagree”; “The left is an existential threat to America: agree or disagree”; “How important is MAGA to your identity?”), plus questions about how they would describe Trump and whether they had attended his rallies, donated to his campaigns, put up a yard sign, or merely voted for him.

Their conclusion was that Trump’s 2024 voters fit into four types:

• 30% of Trump voters were Mainline Republicans, who More in Common described as “middle-of-the-road conservatives who play by the rules and expect others to do the same,” “do not follow politics closely,” and like that Trump “advances familiar conservative priorities: securing the border, keeping the economy strong, and preserving a sense of cultural stability.”

• 29% of Trump voters were MAGA Hardliners, who they called “the fiery core of Trump’s base. They are fiercely loyal, deeply religious, and animated by a sense that America is in an existential struggle between good and evil, with God firmly on their side.”

• 21% of Trump voters were Anti-Woke Conservatives, who are “relatively well-off, politically engaged, and deeply frustrated by the perceived takeover of schools, culture, and institutions by the progressive left.”

• And the final 20% of Trump voters were the Reluctant Right, “the most ambivalent cohort of Trump’s coalition, and the group most likely to have voted for Trump transactionally,” viewing him as “the businessman who was ‘less bad’ than the alternative. Many feel disconnected from national politics and believe politicians do not share their priorities.”

Last week, More in Common released an update to their initial report, applying the “Beyond MAGA” typology to see how each segment of the Trump coalition was feeling about the Iran war.

One takeaway: there is still no MAGA split on Iran. An extraordinary 87% of “MAGA Hardliners” support the war. More in Common found slightly lower, but still very strong, support for the war among the “Anti-Woke Conservatives” (71%).

But these factions account for only 50% of the Trump coalition, and there is a stark difference between the two halves. Only 55% of “Mainline Republicans” support the war, although their opposition to the conflict is no higher (16%) than the Anti-Woke Conservatives; the Mainline Republicans are just more ambivalent, with a higher proportion saying they’re “Unsure.”

The real danger for Trump comes from the “Reluctant Right,” of whom only 26% support the war, while 54% said they were against it. “A majority of the Reluctant Right being actively opposed to the war was shocking to me,” Stephen Hawkins, the director of research at More in Common and lead author of the “Beyond MAGA” report, told me in an interview.

The differences are equally stark on other questions, showing how broad of a spectrum Trump voters span — Trump voters do not think with one mind, and anyone making a blanket statement that “Trump voters feel X or Y” is eliding huge differences in opinion — and how much the war is risking Trump’s support with swing voters.

85% of MAGA Hardliners have “a lot” of confidence that Trump will “make the right decisions regarding the U.S. war with Iran.” Only 5% of the Reluctant Right say the same. (In fact, 54% of the Reluctant Right say they have either “not much” or “no confidence” in his war decisionmaking.) 83% of MAGA Hardliners say Trump started the war “to protect American interests.” 55% of the Reluctant Right say Trump went to war at least partially “to protect himself and his reputation.” (On top of that, 43% of the Reluctant Right — remember, these are Trump’s own voters — say he went to war to “distract attention from the Epstein Files.”)

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Perhaps most alarming for Trump, an enormous mismatch has opened up between the priorities of his voters and the priorities they perceive the president to have.

60% of Trump voters said that inflation was one of their top three priorities. But only 22% said it was one of the top three issues Trump is focusing on. 60% said Trump was prioritizing immigration, which is now only a priority for 31% of Trump voters. (To the annoyance of many presidents, voters often don’t reward presidents for their successes. Now that the border is secure, many Trump voters likely care less about the border. What have you done for me lately?)

Even more damning: 44% of Trump voters think the Iran war is a top priority for Trump. Only 11% say it is a top priority of theirs.

“For Trump voters, who are paying attention only indirectly, only sort of measuring President Trump through their day-to-day lives, I think they might be underwhelmed by economic changes,” Hawkins said, “or even feeling a little bit betrayed by the lack of attention to economics,” considering the war in Iran (something they barely prioritize) has actively increased inflation (the issue they prioritize above all others).

“His promise in the final stretch of the 2024 election was, ‘She is for they/them. He is for you,’” Hawkins noted. “And that sense of commitment to the everyday working American is what people aren’t feeling.”

Asked if they feel at least some regret about their 2024 vote, nearly all MAGA Hardliners, Anti-Woke Conservatives, and Mainline Republicans stand by their choice. Once again, the Reluctant Right stands out: about one-third of the group express regret, a number that has increased significantly since the outbreak of the war.

More in Common found a similar trend among Gen Z Trump voters, 20% of whom say they regret their vote, a markedly higher level of second-guessing than expressed by older generations.

The Gen Z numbers cut against stereotype as well. Contrary to the image in some circles of Gen Z Trump supporters as hard-right conservatives, they are actually the group least likely to code as MAGA Hardliners.

MAGA is mainly a movement made up of Trump’s own generational peers in the Silent and Baby Boomer Generations. Fully 60% of Gen Z Trump voters — more than any other generation — code as Mainline Republicans, even though that group’s ideology reads as a throwback to a previous generation of conservatives that many have judged extinct.

The generation second-most likely to be Mainline Republicans? Millennials, who complement that by being the generation with the largest proportion of Reluctant Rightists. Trump’s changes to the Republican Party might not prove as lasting as you think if MAGA adherents are in their 60s and older, while younger Trump voters, somewhat paradoxically, seem to subscribe to an earlier form of conservatism.

Only 34% of Gen Z Trump supporters back the war in Iran, the lowest number of any generation, while 53% of Gen Z Trump supporters said they agree with the statement “Israel has too much influence on American politics.” For no other generation does that sentiment breach a majority.

This lines up with other findings that Gen Z is more isolationist, and more skeptical of Israel in particular, than older generations. A Pew poll released earlier this month found that 60% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, making it a politically dangerous country to partner on a war with, as Trump has done. 57% of Republicans aged 18 to 49 expressed an unfavorable opinion of Israel in that poll, compared to just 24% of Republicans over 50. (Another More in Common poll found that 5% of young Trump voters express coldness towards Jews, higher than other generations — but hardly enough for antisemitism to explain the 53% who have developed skepticism of Israel in the aftermath of the Gaza war.)

“Younger generations have only known a period of conflict of wars [waged by] the United States that have basically been unsuccessful, or at least underwhelming in terms of their outcomes,” Hawkins said. “If you’re 20 years old in this country, you were born into the Afghanistan war, and it only ended in the last presidency. And so I think there’s just a very different geopolitical context in which the generations are thinking about America’s role in the world.”

“For those who lived in the Cold War, so Baby Boomers and to some extent Gen X, they’re remembering a period where the United States had a moral leadership role that was advancing through its foreign policy and through its military decision making. They remember Ronald Reagan. A huge number of these would be Ronald Reagan supporters or voters, as somebody who was defining a role for the United States that stood up against evil,” he continued. “And, by contrast, younger generations have only known the post-September 11th era, which has been one of disappointment and costly ongoing wars.”

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Hawkins did note that some of the negative trends could improve for Trump if the war were to wrap up soon, and gas prices declined accordingly. However, whether that is likely seems to shift by the day.

Iran announced on Friday that it had reopened the Strait of Hormuz after Israel and Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire. 24 ships crossed the strait on Saturday, more than at any point since the war began. However, after Trump said the U.S. blockade on Iran’s ports would continue, Tehran reversed itself and announced that the strait would be closed again. Only one ship crossed the strait on Sunday; Iranian gunboats fired at other tankers that tried to cross, while the U.S. Navy seized an Iranian-flagged ship that attempted to get past the American blockade.

The current ceasefire — such as it is — is set to expire on Wednesday. Vice President JD Vance is on his way to Pakistan for a second round of peace talks, although Iran has not yet publicly committed to participating.

At times, Trump seems attuned to the sort of political problems revealed by the More in Common report: this morning, he insisted in a Truth Social post that “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran”; last week, he hosted Joe Rogan (an influential voice among young Trump voters, More in Common has found) at the White House for an announcement on psychedelic drugs, attempting to keep Rogan in the tent despite the podcaster’s wartime criticisms.

This attention to swing voters rarely lasts long, however. In a post yesterday, Trump returned to threatening to “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran” if the country doesn’t quickly agree to the U.S. peace offer. A recent Washington Post analysis also found that Trump has mentioned the White House ballroom on roughly one-third of the days of 2026 so far. It’s unlikely that’s the sort of issue his voters would rather he prioritize when they say Trump is focusing too much on Iran.

Making matters worse, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday that gas prices might not return to normal until 2027, a nightmare scenario for the White House.

The word that stuck out to me most from the More in Common report was “transactional,” which is how the organization described the Reluctant Right voters.

If there’s one thing Trump should understand, it’s a transactional relationship. These voters gave Trump their support in exchange for a promise that he would lower prices; now, many of them don’t think he’s living up to his end of the bargain.

I obtained data from More in Common that isn’t in their report, on how the different segments of Trump voters plan to vote in the 2026 midterms, from their poll conducted earlier this month.

No surprise: 97% of MAGA Hardliners plan to vote Republican, no matter what Tucker or MTG might tell you. 0% say they plan to vote for a Democrat. These splits go down, ever so slightly, to 88%-0% and 82%-2% for Anti-Woke Conservatives and Mainline Republicans, respectively.

And then the numbers absolutely take a nosedive for the Reluctant Right: only 50% of these Trump 2024 swing voters say they plan to vote for a Republican in 2026. 12% say they plan to vote for a Democrat. The other 39% say either that they’re undecided, plan to vote third party, or don’t plan to vote at all.

Sarah Isgur — the editor of SCOTUSBlog, host of the “Advisory Opinions” podcast, and a fixture of the conservative legal world — thinks that’s all wrong.

In her fascinating new book “Last Branch Standing,” Isgur argues that the popular way of thinking only takes into account the court’s ideological axis. But there’s another axis that is just as influential when predicting how the justices will rule, she says: how institutionalist each justice is.

The court isn’t 6-3, according to Isgur. It’s 3-3-3, with three liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson); three institutionalist conservatives (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett); and three non-institutionalist conservatives (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch).

Last term, only 15% of the court’s decisions were ideologically divided along 6-3 lines, Isgur points out. And the other 85% aren’t simply niche disputes. Just last week, the court ruled 8-1 that a Colorado ban on conversion therapy should be considered as a potential First Amendment violation, with Jackson splitting from Kagan and Sotomayor as the lone dissenter. In 2024, the court ruled 6-3 that Republican-led states couldn’t sue the Biden administration over alleged social media censorship — but the three dissenters were Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, with the conservative majority splintering.

Jackson, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch are all less institutionalist than their ideological bedfellows. You can’t understand the court — and the divisions that frequently pop up within the typical ideological groupings — without understanding this institutionalist dimension, Isgur argues. (And presidents often don’t understand it, which is why their nominees don’t always end up as they hoped. But you can.)

Today’s newsletter, my latest “Book Club” feature, is an interview with Isgur. A preview of the interview is available for everyone; the full video is available for paid subscribers.

In the interview, Isgur and I discuss:

• Why the court is really 3-3-3 and how understanding these divides will help you predict how some of the court’s biggest cases will shake out

• How the Bushes ended up nominating the Trumpiest justices on the court (Thomas and Alito), while Trump ended up nominating three justices who have repeatedly ruled against him

• Whether Alito will retire this year and who Trump might nominate in his place

• The future of the conservative legal movement: can originalism survive populism?

• How she would reform the Supreme Court (and why she isn’t a fan of term limits)

• Which members of Congress would make the best justices

• And more!

I highly recommend “Last Branch Standing” if you’re looking to understand the Supreme Court as an institution and the nine justices as people. Isgur is very funny, in the book and our interview — and in “Last Branch Standing,” she goes justice by justice, giving you a great sense of who each of these people are: which justice is the best poker player (Kagan) and which one is low-key an animal rights activist (Alito). And that’s in addition to making some very important points about the court’s role in American life, and how it often gets covered incorrectly by the media.

“Advisory Opinions,” which Isgur hosts, and SCOTUSBlog, which she edits, are also great resources for following the court.

I know many of you are very interested in the Supreme Court and its internal dynamics (especially this week, when one justice had to apologize to another for personal comments she made about him). I think you will find this book and conversation clarifying.

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What a strange, improbable adventure we have all been on together for the last decade and change.

If you told someone in April 2015 that — outside of friends and family — one of the people they would spend the most time thinking, talking, and hearing about for the next 11 years would be the New York real estate developer Donald Trump, they surely wouldn’t have believed you.

Trump was already well-known, of course, but the idea that he would not only win the presidency (unlikely in itself) but then wedge himself into the national psyche to the degree that he has would have seemed fantastical. But here we are. For the last decade, Trump has loomed inescapably not just over American politics, but often American business, academia, culture, and sports as well.

At this point, the only thing that sounds more fanciful than telling someone c. 2015 that Trump would have such an impact on American life is telling someone now that it might not last for very long.

But come January 2029, Donald Trump will not be the president anymore. (Even he no longer pretends a third term is a possibility.) He will still hold influence within his party, of course, but at age 82 and with his popularity likely to be middling to low, his political strength can be expected to ebb.

It’s worth beginning to discuss what this handoff will look like. After (by that point) 14 years of Trump as the central figure of American politics, what will he have changed for good? What will prove to only have been Trump-specific aberrations? Today, we’ll look at two facets of Trump’s political style — personality and ideology — and probe whether he is likely to leave a lasting mark.

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Personality

There is a widespread impulse to look at Trump’s relative political success and declare the death of the political scandal.

This is understandable: after all, Trump has been impeached twice (for attempting to coerce a foreign country to investigate his political rival and for standing by while a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol in hopes of blocking the certification of his re-election loss); indicted four times (twice for those efforts to overturn a presidential election, once for hoarding classified documents, and once in relation to hush money paid to a porn star he allegedly had an affair with); and found himself ensnarled in countless other, typically-career-ending controversies (from being accused of sexual assault to profiting off his office to repeating thousands of documented falsehoods).

And yet, here he is, serving his second term as president.

But, so far, politicians who have tried to ape Trump’s abrasive personality or his response to political scandal (deny, deflect, double down) have largely failed. In competitive states, MAGA acolytes like Kari Lake and Blake Masters (Arizona) or Doug Mastriano and Dr. Oz (Pennsylvania) have gone down in flames, as have scandal-plagued candidates like Herschel Walker (Georgia) and Mark Robinson (North Carolina). Even in non-competitive states, we saw deep-red Alabama elect a Democrat in Doug Jones rather than an alleged child molester in Roy Moore in 2018.

If you need more evidence, just look at the twin resignations yesterday of Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) for, respectively, allegedly sexually assaulting multiple women, including one who says that she was drugged, and allegedly having an affair with a staffer who later killed herself.

Did it take too long for the behavior of both men to be made public and acted upon? Yes. Are there cases where politicians mired in scandal manage to hang on? Also yes: think Democrats like Ralph Northam or Jay Jones, or Republican Cory Mills right now (though Mills faces the same threat of potential expulsion that Swalwell and Gonzales did before resigning).

But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. The political graveyard is littered with recent politicians who thought the rules of scandal no longer applied and then learned otherwise: Andrew Cuomo. Eric Greitens. Bob Menendez. Duncan Hunter. Al Franken.

There is also a special class of Democrats and Republicans who were such pure creations of the Trump era: politicians, many of them scandal-plagued themselves, who tried to channel Trump’s combative energy into political success and media prowess on the left and right. So many of them (Matt Gaetz, Cori Bush, Madison Cawthorn, Jamaal Bowman, George Santos, Jasmine Crockett, MTG) have since flamed out.

Why has Trump succeeded where others have failed?

Maybe he has forged a unique connection with his party’s voters that is just hard to replicate. Maybe voters view him as a celebrity, not a politician, and therefore hold him to different standards. Maybe his scandals really have hurt him, but he’s managed to scrape by: after all, you could argue that the elections in 2016 (after eight years of Democratic rule) and 2024 (after a deeply unpopular Democratic administration) should have been larger Republican victories, and maybe they would have been with a less controversial GOP candidate.

Either way, the future does not look bright for Trump imitators, since so few of them have achieved success over the last 10 years, and certainly not in the competitive states needed to win the presidency. I have no doubt we’ll see candidates who will try out this lane in the years to come, and perhaps the strategy will work better for a celebrity-turned-politician (Stephen A. Smith? Tucker Carlson? Mark Cuban?)

But, for the most part, the rules of politics seem to be largely unchanged from where they were in 2016, with a big, Trump-shaped exception. I’m sometimes asked if I think every president will just try to name buildings after themselves now, or roll out their own cryptocurrencies. And my honest answer is “no.” Perhaps it’s naive — and, again, if it’s a celebrity like one of those above, then my answer might be different — but when I look around at the leading candidates likely to emerge in 2028, from JD Vance to Gavin Newsom, Trump’s personality, shamelessness, and in-party immunity by way of rock-solid support from a committed base really does seem completely sui generis.

There are no other major politicians for whom it would even occur to them to do something like post a photo of themselves as Jesus, much less be able to get away with it (to the extent that deleting the photo amid backlash, and polling at 40% is “getting away with it”). These parts of Trump are the ones that have, largely, worked against him: not enough to keep him out of the White House, but enough to make him persistently unpopular the whole time he’s been there. There is a reason why, even when politicians like Newsom have tried to copy the style, they’ve stopped after a while. When was the last time you heard about a Newsom-as-Trump post? Almost every other major politician today, besides the president, came up within the political system, which means they just instinctually adhere to a different set of norms. The ones who have tried departing from them have largely realized, when anyone else does it, it comes off as ineffective or inauthentic.

Trump is one of one, and at least with the potential contenders we have right now, there isn’t much reason to believe the next president will be anywhere near as brazenly self-promotional or scandal-plagued. It is a fascinating sociological phenomenon that Trump has been able to remain so powerful in politics for so long despite these controversies, but it appears to be one specific to him and him alone.

This doesn’t mean everything will snap back to “normal” the minute Trump leaves office. Politics have, in many ways, grown angrier over the last decade, and a lot less buttoned-up. Social media has become a more important mode for politicians to communicate with their followers, often in Trump’s style of less nuanced, more emotional bursts — though that presumably would have happened without Trump, and the medium that he excelled at (short-form text posts) already seems to have been made outdated by short-form video (think Zohran Mamdani).

But there is little reason to believe the Trump strategy of barreling through scandals, or doing needlessly inflammatory, self-serving things (like selling their own Bibles or reveling in the death of a political foe) will appeal to other politicians, or work out for them. That stuff is only Trump. There is truly no other politician on the scene like him, and those who have tried, have failed. It appears that the personal style of American politicians after Trump will be less changed by his 14 years of dominance than one might otherwise have thought.

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Ideology

Here is a question from a reader I recently received:

Can you assess whether groups like the DSA (which I see as an equal/opposite reaction to MAGA) will continue to rise in power/see greater numbers elected to office? Are we in a 20-30 year cycle of MAGA v. DSA w/ no middle?

The DSA is the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftist group that counts Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani as members.

Another assertion frequently heard about the Trump era is that it has ushered in an age of extremes, in which American politics will now be gripped by a contest between the far-left and the far-right, with the center squeezed into extinction.

Clearly, even if the type of personalities that succeed in American politics have more or less remained the same since 2015 (outside of Trump himself), the sort of ideas on offer have undergone a change. Trump has shifted the Overton window of acceptable policy ideas within the GOP, and that same window for the Democratic Party has shifted in response.

However, when we look at swing states, we once again see the limits of that logic, at least in terms of what it portends for national politics. Here are the top statewide elected officials in the seven states that perennially decide the presidency:

There are 15 Democrats, none of whom are DSA-aligned: the one who comes closest, ironically, is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a onetime Bernie Sanders supporter who was seen as the left-wing choice when he ran in the 2022 Senate primary but who has since fallen out with the left over Israel and moved much more to the ideological center.

The story for the six Republicans is a bit more complicated. Two of the six (term-limited Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and retiring North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis) are clearly not MAGA; in fact, they have repeatedly clashed with Trump. The other four could all be considered MAGA to some degree, but none fit the image of a pure Trump booster.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo has tried to distance himself from Trump, bashing his election denial efforts and saying in 2022 that he wouldn’t call Trump a “great” president. (“He was a sound president,” Lombardo compromised.) North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd and Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormick are both Trump allies, though — as a former congressman and a former hedge fund manager, respectively — they very much fit the mold of Republicans who would have been elected before Trump. And they’ve both split with him at times: Budd has criticized the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, while McCormick is a Russia hawk who has defended Volodymyr Zelensky against Trump’s criticism.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is the only member of the group who’s held his current position since before Trump took office, and yet he is probably the Trumpiest among them. (“Ron, is there any conspiracy you don’t believe?” Mitt Romney once asked him.) Even he, though, has raised concerns about Trump’s tariffs. Johnson’s Senate website still has language up that refers to the “self-inflicted harm from the trade war and tariffs” of Trump’s first term.

(Then again, what does it mean to be “MAGA” at this point, and who would be considered a pure distillation of it? At one point, you might have pointed to someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene; clearly, not anymore. The number of Republicans who march lockstep with Trump, so high a year ago, is dwindling, such that it’s now impossible to point to a potential Trump successor who would cleanly export his checkered ideology. A Carlson or a Vance would likely handle a situation like Iran differently; a Marco Rubio would approach the Ukraine war and NATO from a very un-Trump lens; a Ted Cruz wouldn’t impose tariffs. Republican elites have bought into some parts of Trumpism, but he hasn’t really persuaded any of them to embrace the full package, another reason to doubt the staying power of his thinking.)

But back to swing states. The reason I focus on those seven states is that the road to the presidency runs through them, so they give us an idea of the sensibilities and ideologies that can work, not just in deep-red and deep-blue districts, but on the national level. Of course, presidential elections are different than statewide elections: they attract different electorates, and because of the higher stakes, voters might feel more compelled to support their party’s nominee, even if a low-turnout primary process produces a candidate too extreme for their tastes.

So none of this should be read to rule out prominent MAGA or DSA politicians, or even presidential nominees, down the line. But the fact that you don’t see many of these types excelling in the decisive states is one reason to wonder whether our political future will be gripped by the far-right and the far-left, rather than the more mild-mannered and ideologically centrist Dave McCormicks or Elissa Slotkins of the world. Once again, Trump emerges not as a rule but an exception: really the only pure example of a politician to come out of either movement and go on to find (razor-thin) success in the states that decide control of the Senate and the White House.

Still, you cannot look at American politics today and pretend that MAGA and the DSA are not substantial forces; indeed, one controls the levers of the Republican Party (though it’s unclear what that will mean after Trump: is there a set ideology that indicates, or was it just fealty to a person who will have left the stage?) and the other came relatively close to winning two successive Democratic presidential nominations. Will the influence both achieved over their party ideologies in the Trump era continue once he’s gone?

Directionally, I do think it’s clear that these movements represent where both parties (and our country) are drifting to some degree. The historian Gary Gerstle has defined a “political order” as a “constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.” Importantly, he adds, a way of thinking has only made itself into a political order when it permeates the ideology of both political parties.

I like to think of this as a political lingua franca, or common tongue. So, for example, Gerstle says that America was defined by the New Deal order from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s. You can think of this as meaning that both parties spoke the common language of the New Deal: they might have interepreted it differently, but they were working within a shared framework of government intervention, whether it was FDR and LBJ setting up big-government programs or Eisenhower and Nixon keeping them in place and, at times, expanding them. (Which president built the interstate highways, or founded the EPA?)

Then, from roughly the 1980s until the 2020s, America was defined by a neoliberal order, Gerstle writes, in that leaders of both parties — be they Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush or Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — shared a basic faith in free markets. They obviously did not agree all the time, but they shared a common tongue and common baseline, leading to bipartisan free-trade deals like NAFTA and declarations like “the era of big government is over” (a Clinton line that just as easily could have been from Reagan).

Now, it seems likely that the new political order will be populism, the common tongue that increasingly binds together many in both parties — and is spoken most fluently by disciples of MAGA and the DSA.

If that’s the case, then this will likely be Trump’s greatest legacy, ushering the neoliberal political order out and a populist political order in. How much credit should he truly receive for that? I think it’s open for debate: after all, populist forces were already brewing here and abroad before Trump’s first term, and the feedback loop of political orders suggests that they may have seized hold even without him. (Just as the failings of laissez-faire governance gave way to the New Deal and the failings of big-government gave way to neoliberalism, the failings of free-market fealty likely would have anti-establishment energy and a desire for greater government intervention before long.)

Trump has also been a very imperfect populist: his One Big Beautiful Bill fits much more neatly in the neoliberal order; he no longer seems so interested in antitrust enforcement; his efforts to block AI regulation hardly seem in line with the populist energy of the moment.

The New Deal order began under FDR and the neoliberal order began under Reagan (not coincidentally, the recent political leaders who held center stage for almost as long as Trump). But the seeds were started to be sown under their predecessors, from Herbert Hoover’s public works programs to Jimmy Carter’s deregulation. Another academic, Stephen Skowronek, has referred to Hoover and Carter as “disjunctive” presidents for their awkward attempts to straddle two regimes.

If we are, indeed, on the cusp of a populist order, then my guess is Trump will be seen as the one who brought it into being — though he may be more accurately categorized as a president who started to sow the seeds of something new, but never fully committed to it himself, having (like Hoover and Carter) come up during the old order.

This all depends, of course, on who comes after him. If Trump is succeeded as president by JD Vance or Tucker Carlson from the right, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ro Khanna from the left, then they could end up marking the true beginning of a populist order, building on the trail Trump blazed but never completed.

On the other hand, there is a class of potential Trump successors who would make Trump seem less like a bridge to a populist order and more like a bridge to nowhere. Potential 48th presidents like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz on the right, or Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom on the left, are all figures who easily could have been presidential nominees in 2012, before Trump was on the stage. If they are elected, they might make some moves away from their party orthodoxies, but it would suggest that Trumpist populism was more of a flash in the pan, and American politics is actually about to revert to an ideological arrangement closer to the Bush- or Obama-era status quo.

There are also candidates who fit more of a middle ground, like Ron DeSantis (a largely pre-Trump figure who has nevertheless embraced the anti-woke element of Trumpism) or Chris Murphy and Jon Ossoff (who have tried to reinvent themselves as populists in the last year).

Echelon Insights, the Republican polling firm, arranges American voters into four groups based on how they answer 18 questions on social and economic policy: those who are culturally and economically conservative (“Conservatives”), culturally and economically liberal (“Liberals”), culturally liberal and fiscally conservative (“Libertarians”), and culturally conservative and fiscally liberal (“Populists”).

Conservatives and Liberals, unsurprisingly, voted near-unanimously for Trump and Harris, respectively, in 2024. The true swing voters are the Populists, 66% of whom voted for Trump in 2024 but only 56% of whom approved of his job performance as of an Echelon poll last year. (Libertarians are also politically divided, but at 5% of the country vs. Populists’ 22%, they make up a much less meaningful slice of the electorate.)

Echelon also found that the median American’s ideology is closest to the socially conservative/economically liberal Populist pairing: majorities of voters sided with the conservative view on five of the nine social policy questions they asked, and with the liberal view on eight of the nine economic policy questions.

It’s clearly a politically potent combination; one question I have for the years ahead is whether either party ever tries it out. Trump had a chance to seize this mantle, but has never been as economically liberal as his campaign rhetoric suggested. (Unlike, for example, JD Vance, who reportedly pushed for tax hikes on the rich in the Big Beautiful Bill). Most leftist Democrats, meanwhile, are far from socially conservative (although an earlier, pro-gun, anti-immigration iteration of Bernie Sanders came close).

Whether MAGA or the DSA gets there first — or, at least, whichever one moderates their economic or social policy, respectively, in a way that manages to simultaneously appeal to their party base and to independent voters — may dictate who controls the future of American politics. (And just as the New Deal and neoliberal orders contained their share of bipartisan successes, it is possible to glimpse similar cross-party efforts if populism becomes the common tongue. Look no further than the recent MTG/Khanna publicity tour, or Josh Hawley’s work with Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.)

But, at this late stage, it doesn’t seem like the politician to reach that fusion will be Trump. Is it possible to rule over American politics for this long and leave only a limited impact? Sure: Grover Cleveland, who similarly served two terms over a 12-year period, is hardly regarded as a transformational figure. Cleveland, like Trump — and unlike transformative presidents like FDR or Reagan — never managed to form a large majority behind his views. Cleveland served in a time of peak division, which ended up being broken not by one man’s extended time in office but by the realigning election of William McKinley, his successor.

Trump is fundamentally disinterested in policy, abhors bipartisanship, avoids the work of building broad-based consensus among voters or legislators, has not tried to build a bench of ideologically similar heirs (caring only if up-and-coming politicians are loyal to him personally), and often prefers to focus either on private efforts to aggrandize himself or temporary executive orders, which limits his ability to join the pantheon of transformative presidents like FDR or Reagan, for whom the opposite qualities were true, and whose policies and lasting legislative packages set the terms of debate in American politics for decades as a result. (Trump is also personally wealthy and enamored of industry and military force in ways that made him a poor fit specifically for the populist economic and foreign policies of the moment.) Even given opportunities, almost in spite of himself, to usher in major legislative compromises or realign segments of the electorate in a lasting way, Trump opted against doing so.

Especially if he is succeeded by a candidate in the populist mold — on the left or right — Trump, by dint of his dramatic rise and outsized personality, will likely receive credit for ushering in a new era. Some of it will be deserved. But does that mean the new order will revolve around his policy views, with Trump setting the boundaries of debate for the near future? In areas like immigration or “wokeness,” possibly. In areas like taxes, trade, or military intervention, probably not, since his views on these issues are either situation-dependent or unpopular within the country or his party.

Rather than initiating a broader era that goes beyond him, Trump is likely to leave office with enormous questions looming about the future of politics that he shows no interest in answering. The real work of cobbling together the electoral and legislative majorities that would cement a new political order — and define the ideological confines of what it will contain — he seems poised to leave to someone else.

Caro has also written a great little book called “Working,” which gives readers a glimpse into his process and describes how he has been able to chronicle Johnson’s life in such meticulous detail.

In the book, Caro writes about his personal motto as a historian (“Turn every page”) and how it was tested upon walking into the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library for the first time. This is the sight that greeted Caro, the same one that you’ll see if you visit the library, too:

Each of those red things? Those are boxes. The library has more than 40,000 of them, each holding hundreds of pages of documents. In total, the LBJ Library houses about 43 million pages of records. That’s a lot of pages to turn.

Caro recounts one particular mystery those boxes helped him solve. When reading through LBJ’s papers from his eleven years in the U.S. House (all 349 boxes of them), Caro noticed a shift in how Johnson communicated with other lawmakers starting around the fall of 1940. Before that, Johnson spoke (and was spoken to) like the back-bench junior congressman he was. After 1940, without any change in his formal status, Johnson was treated like a power player, despite his lack of seniority. What changed?

Caro turned every page, until eventually he found a paper trail pointing to a series of $5,000 donations (big money in those days) that Johnson had secretly funneled from Texas businessmen and personally distributed to various congressmen of his choosing. “In that single month, October 1940,” Caro writes, “Lyndon Johnson had raised from Texas, and had distributed to congressional candidates, campaign funds on a scale that dwarfed anything ever given to Democratic congressional candidates from a single, central source.” Johnson had arrived as a force to be reckoned with in Washington.

It is a revealing finding that helps explain how Johnson was able to accumulate power in 20th century Washington. It helps us understand the man, how he operated and called in chits, in ways that started in his early days in Congress and eventually lifted him to the White House. It was also completely unknown until Caro unearthed it — and would have remained hidden if not for the documents kept at LBJ’s presidential library.

For most of American history, this type of discovery would not have been possible, because there was no process in place for what would happen to a president’s records after they left office. Documents from a president’s tenure were considered the personal property of that president. Some presidents took their papers home with them. Some burned them. Sometimes their descendants sold them. Other times, they lost them.

In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first president to donate his records to the U.S. government and house them in a presidential library. In 1955, this process was formalized with the Presidential Libraries Act, though the decision to donate records was still left up to each individual president. The three presidents who came after Roosevelt followed his lead and gave up their records. Then, Richard Nixon did not. Congress passed a law in 1974, the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, declaring that Nixon’s records specifically were federal property, and he could not keep or destroy them. He had to hand them over to the public. In 1978, the Presidential Records Act (PRA) made it so that all presidents’ records would be public property going forward.

That’s how it’s been ever since. There are now more than 600 million pages of documents in America’s 13 presidential libraries; stack them up and they would be as tall as seven Mount Everests. These documents form an invaluable public record, allowing future generations to understand how decisions were made at critical points in history. A handwritten draft of JFK’s inaugural address is part of that public record; so are the Nixon tapes; so are Ronald Reagan’s diary entries.

If he gets his way, documents from President Trump’s current term might not be.

The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Justice Department is known as “the president’s law firm.” It’s their job to advise the president on the legality of various actions, which generally means finding a legal rationale for why a president can do whatever he already wants to do. The OLC’s most recent advisory opinion, published earlier this month, is titled “Constitutionality of the Presidential Records Act.”

Over the course of 52 pages, the opinion argues that the 1978 law requiring presidents to hand over their records to the public exceeded Congress’ authority and intruded on the president’s autonomy. And then comes the big reveal on the final page: “For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional,” the OLC advises, “and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”

“The OLC opinion…is an earthquake with respect to open government, having huge implications for the ability for all of us to understand what our government has been up to,” Jason R. Baron, the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which oversees the presidential library system, told me in an interview.

Under the OLC’s interpretation, Baron noted, every president since the PRA took effect in 1981 would be able to take their papers out of government custody.

“The logical implication of the OLC memo is that it effectively ‘locks the doors’ on access to records at those presidential libraries — starting with Reagan — that have been covered under the Presidential Records Act, at least until such time as former presidents weigh in with their intention to keep on deposit those records subject to any restrictions they may wish to impose,” Baron said. “Indeed, the OLC opinion could allow them to remove and even destroy records that have been in the legal custody of the National Archives for the past three decades.”

Presidential records are not transmitted to NARA until the end of a presidency. While the OLC opinion would allow former presidents to take their records back, it imagines a world where Trump wouldn’t have to hand over his second-term records at all. “Under the OLC opinion there appear to be no legal barriers, at least for unclassified White House records, in terms of what President Trump could do with them after the end of his presidency,” Baron told me. “He will be free to do anything he wants with respect to selling, managing, or even destroying many millions of records that OLC says are now his personal records.”

Trump has already begun planning (and accepting donations for) his presidential library, which he has said will be a skyscraper in Miami that will feature the Air Force One jetliner that he received from Qatar and potentially double as an active hotel. But with the OLC opinion, it is possible that it will be a library without any documents — or, perhaps, only specific documents, with Trump claiming the power to cherrypick which papers are made available to historians and which will be his to keep.

The OLC opinion will likely face several legal obstacles. The American Historical Association (AHA) and American Oversight have already filed a lawsuit attempting to preemptively stop Trump from flouting the PRA, as the OLC says he is free to do.

The AHA is an organization of historians, who say their work would be “directly injured” if access to Trump’s records are closed off. American Oversight is a non-profit watchdog group, which has several pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records from Trump’s first term. (Under the PRA, members of the public can start submitting FOIA requests for a president’s records five years after their administration ends, although the president can keep some records sealed for up to 12 years.) If the PRA is unconstitutional, the group notes, then that would have a direct impact on their pending litigation.

The OLC frames the PRA as an unconstitutional attempt by Congress to encroach on presidential power. While Congress can take ownership of the records of the various federal agencies it has created (which it did in the Federal Records Act of 1950), the OLC says, it cannot do the same for “a constitutional office—the Presidency—that Congress did not create and that Congress cannot abolish.”

“Congress cannot preserve presidential records merely for the sake of posterity,” the OLC adds, arguing that Congress does have oversight powers, but that they only extend to subpoenas of records with a specific legislative purpose.

University of Michigan-Dearborn political science professor Mitchel Sollenberger, who literally wrote the book on presidents pushing back against congressional oversight, told me in an interview that the OLC opinion makes a mistake when it frames the PRA as an abuse of Congress’ oversight powers.

“They’re taking the PRA as if Congress intends it to seek information from the president,” Sollenberger told me. “Like, that’s not what’s going on here. It’s not a subpoena. It’s not oversight. They’re not investigating. It is just a neutral, prospective law that seeks to organize [a president’s papers].”

The biggest vulnerability facing the OLC opinion is Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, a 1977 Supreme Court case which upheld the PRA’s predecessor law (which applied only to Nixon) as constitutional. In a 7-2 decision, the court reasoned that the Nixon-era law was not a separation-of-powers violation in part because it wasn’t as if Congress was taking the records for themselves; they still remain in the custody of an executive branch agency.

The OLC opinion gets around this by simply stating that Nixon v. Administrator was “wrong” in its separation-of-powers analysis. (“Historically, it has not been the role of the Office of Legal Counsel to pronounce Supreme Court precedent to be erroneous,” Baron noted. “The Department of Justice and its OLC are bound to follow the law and then interpret the law in ways that can be supported, not unilaterally overrule settled law.”) The issue will likely find its way back to the Supreme Court before long.

In the meantime, Trump’s plans remain an open question. “President Trump is committed to preserving records from his historic Administration and he will maintain a rigorous records retention program,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told me in an email.

Jackson noted that the White House email system prohibits messages from being deleted, and said that Trump would keep that system in place. “The administration is already discussing with NARA how to move forward,” she said.

However, Jackson did not commit to doing what all of Trump’s recent predecessors have done: accepted the PRA as law and followed its requirements. While she said that Trump would preserve his records, she did not say that he would make all of them publicly available, potentially leaving room for him to pick and choose what to keep open for historians.

After all, the OLC said that its opinion was put together at the request of White House Counsel David Warrington. Why would the White House ask about the constitutionality of the PRA unless Trump was considering an attempt to skate past its requirements?

Of course, Trump already tried to do so after his first term, when he was indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith for allegedly taking more than 13,000 government documents with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office (famously storing some of them in a bathroom).

Put in this light, the OLC opinion can be understood alongside Trump’s reported attempt to receive a $230 million settlement from the Justice Department, his pardons of January 6th rioters, and the dismissal of the case against Steve Bannon, among other the many other ways the president has used the DOJ to try to wipe away the criminal investigations that were carried out against him and his allies during his four years out of office.

But the OLC opinion — if upheld in court — would do more than just exact revenge for the FBI taking “my boxes,” as Trump called them, from Mar-a-Lago. (Those boxes, by the way, were returned to Trump shortly after he returned to office.) It would also deliver a significant blow to history’s understanding of the Trump presidency, shielding his White House deliberations from public view — and allowing him to hoard (or even destroy or sell) as many documents as he would like.

Baron, now a professor at the University of Maryland, noted that classified records created by the National Security Council are covered under the Presidential Records Act, due to litigation that he was involved with back in the 1990s.

“So, what happens with millions of classified records under the OLC’s opinion?” Baron asked. “OLC’s opinion appears to say they too are personal records of the current president and former presidents. This is tremendously concerning, given that there’s never been a situation where a former president owns millions of classified files.”

In total, Baron said, about 100 million White House emails are poised to be created by the end of Trump’s second administration, as well as reams of paper records, all of which would belong to Trump himself according to the OLC. It would “a tragedy for the American people,” Baron said; like Trump bringing those boxes back to Mar-a-Lago, but multiplied by several million. He better get a larger bathroom.

Attacks from Iran against its Gulf neighbors and Israel have largely stopped; the U.S. is holding its fire as well.

But both sides believe that other parts of the agreement are being violated. Iran and Pakistan, which mediated the ceasefire, say that Israel is violating the deal by continuing to attack Lebanon; the U.S. and Israel say that Lebanon was not part of the agreement. (Complicating matters, the deal was reportedly never written down. Who could have predicted disputes over what it entailed?) Israel and Lebanon are set to hold separate ceasefire negotiations next week, though Israeli attacks continue in the meantime, killing more than 300 people and wounding 1,150 others on Wednesday, according to Lebanese officials.

The U.S., meanwhile, says that Iran is failing to hold up its end of the bargain by continuing to keep the Strait of Hormuz largely closed. Only four vessels crossed through the strait on Wednesday, followed by nine on Thursday, still much fewer than the 100+ that were crossing daily before the war. Iran has reportedly said behind closed doors that it will only allow around 12 ships a day to cross the strait during the ceasefire, and it will be charging tolls. “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” President Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. In another message, he said Iran “better stop” charging tolls.

These disputes will be hanging in the air at the U.S.-Iranian peace negotiations set to take place in Pakistan on Saturday. Vice President JD Vance will lead the U.S. delegation, making these the highest-level talks between the U.S. and Iran since 1979. The talks are liable to fall apart at any moment and give way to further attacks. (Indeed, the last two rounds of U.S.-Iranian negotiations in the last year were followed by American attacks against Iran.)

All of this makes the first question in today’s Q&A newsletter especially pertinent. It’s possible that the Pakistan talks will lead to a peace deal. But if the two-week ceasefire ends without any broader agreement (or collapses prematurely), it is not at all difficult to imagine a scenario where the Iran war resumes and then continues on past the 60-day mark, which is often invoked as a legal deadline of sorts hanging over the conflict.

Today’s newsletter will start by taking a close look at the 1973 War Powers Resolution, and answering the question of whether it requires the war to wind down after 60 days if Congress has not authorized the conflict. But that’s not at all. I’ll also answer questions on:

• How the 25th Amendment works, and whether it could ever lead to Trump’s removal

• The odds of Samuel Alito retiring before the midterms

• The current state of the Maine Senate race

• And how often Congress is on recess and who gets to make that decision.

It’s a packed edition. Let’s dive in…

The 60-day clock

Q: What happens on Day 60 of Operation Epic Fury if the U.S. attacks on Iran continue despite a lack of congressional authorization?

The War Powers Resolution, which became law in 1973 over President Richard Nixon’s veto, says that whenever the U.S. military is “introduced into hostilities” without congressional authorization, the president must report it to Congress within 48 hours. President Trump did that for the Iran war on March 2; his letter is below.

After that, the resolution says, the president has 60 days to terminate the hostilities, unless Congress has granted authorization or “is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States.” For the Iran war, the 60-day mark after Trump’s initial letter will be May 1.1

But the resolution also gives the president a 30-day extension window, so the real deadline we’re looking at is May 31. What happens then?

Read more

Tomorrow’s newsletter will be a question-and-answer column. I’ll bring the answers. But I need your questions!

Here’s the link to send in any questions you have about American politics, government, history, media, and more.

Send in a question!

In case you need some inspiration, here are some of my recent newsletters:

I’m happy to take questions on any of those topics, but I’m also equally happy to travel far afield of them if you have a burning curiosity elsewhere. (And yes, feel free to hit me with your best William Henry Harrison questions as well.)

You can also submit a question by leaving a comment below or by emailing me at gabe@wakeuptopolitics.com.

I’m excited to hear what’s on your mind and see where I can help you navigate the ever-confusing American political space.

Send in a question!

Talk to you tomorrow,

Gabe