Starting on Monday, May 4th, Tusk becomes The Smotus Report.1 I think you’re going to find it useful and I hope you’ll tell people about it.

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I’ve been running Tusk for a bit more than three years now. It started as a way to publicize some of my research on the Republican 2024 presidential nomination contest, which formed the basis of my forthcoming book, The Elephants in the Room. Of course I wrote about some other things, as well, but with the book now coming out in June, I’m pivoting to a new newsletter with a broader look at American politics.

The Smotus Report will address many of the topics I like to talk about, including parties, elections, polling, the presidency, state politics, science fiction, food, and more, but always seeking to describe things in terms of the health of American democracy.

If you already subscribe, there’s nothing you need to do differently — your subscription will automatically transfer to The Smotus Report. However, more of the content here will be paywalled. Each week, I’ll be providing a public posting at the beginning of the week and then another one later in the week for paying subscribers, as well as a fair number of live video interviews. Paying subscribers will also have access to the archives and posted videos, and will be invited to submit questions for my occasional Ask Me Anything sessions. I hope you’ll find this worthy of your support.

Thanks for reading Tusk up until now. And watch for The Smotus Report, starting Monday!

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I was at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago when I learned that there was a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner. So I had plenty of people around to help me process the unfolding (and confusing) set of events. Political violence was a subject of a good deal of discussion at the conference already, and this only added to intensity of the conversations. But there are a few points that tend to get lost when something like this happens. I’ll try this in a Q&A format. You know, with myself.

Did Trump arrange for this assassination attempt to build support for himself or give himself more authority to crack down on liberal groups?

No.

How do you know?

The best way to know that Trump didn’t engineer this is because he didn’t immediately brag that he engineered this. He has no ability to keep secrets. Also, Occam’s Razor — the simplest explanation is that someone got angry at him and chose violence as an outlet, and it’s astonishingly easy to buy weapons in this country.

But you have to admit, the shooting attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 probably got him elected, right?

Let’s look at national polls around the time of that shooting, which occurred on July 14, 2024. The shooting certainly changed the way the contest was being discussed, but there’s no evidence that it helped him electorally.

But he probably arranged this as some sort of Reichstag fire to empower him to go after people he doesn’t like.

He doesn’t need a Reichstag fire! He deployed federal agents into Minneapolis just because he hates Somali immigrants and Tim Walz. Those agents terrorized the city for months and shot a nurse in the back and a mom in the face. He has bullied networks into firing popular late night hosts. He’s gotten universities to close departments and fire people he doesn’t like. He did all these things despite being unpopular and despite, in most cases, not having any clear legal authority to do them. He’s not trying to pull off some high-wire deadly secret conspiracy to enable him to do anti-democratic things; he’s already doing them.

Okay, so if this is really about someone trying to take out the President, it doesn’t seem like the best thought-out plan.

Most aren’t! We have a stereotype of political assassins as these tactically brilliant masters of weaponry with sophisticated political agendas, helpfully generated by dozens of political thriller films. They’re not. Anyone’s who’s thought for more than a few seconds about assassination attempts realizes that they almost invariably result in the assailant being immediately captured or killed and the leader’s agenda either remaining in place or growing even more popular. The ones who actually try something are the ones who haven’t thought this through, or they have and are okay with dying.

That being said, this shooter wrote a manifesto / suicide note of sorts that is shockingly coherent and well-written. (I’m not linking to it.) That’s extremely unusual, to my understanding.

Why does Trump keep getting targeted?

Trump tried to answer this question last night:

I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people — the people who do the most, take a look at Abraham Lincoln. The people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after. They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much.

Yeah no. Would-be assassins went after Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, not high on the list of impactful presidents. One killed James Garfield just a few months into his job. Ronald Reagan was certainly on his way to having a big impact, but that wasn’t clear when he was shot ten weeks into his term.

I don’t claim to be an expert of criminal psychology by a long shot, but if Trump is the fixation of an unusual number of unhinged homicidal people, it likely has something to do with him being a household name for nearly half a century, and for the outsized coverage of him even relative to other US presidents. A Shorenstein study of media coverage early in Trump’s first term found that he was the subject of 41% of all news stories — roughly three times the average for previous presidents. And he works very hard to make himself the center of political conversation.

Thanks for chatting.

Always a delight.

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How should the Democratic Party be positioning itself for 2028? Partisans (especially Democrats) try to learn from past election losses to figure out what mistakes to avoid in the future. But Democrats still aren’t sure why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in 2024, making it hard to prepare for 2028.

I’ll be presenting a paper at the Midwest Political Science Association this week on some research I’ve been doing about these election narratives. (I wrote a bit about an earlier version of this research here.) Just to give a quick summary — I surveyed hundreds of Democratic county party chairs shortly after the 2024 election, asking them why they thought Harris had lost. I gave them several reasons Harris may have lost and asked them which they thought was the most accurate:

• Economic conditions, including inflation

• The candidates’ personal traits, including race and sex

• The unpopularity of the Biden administration

• The candidates’ and parties’ stances on key issues

• The amount of money raised and spent by the campaigns

• The speeches of the candidates

I then sent out a followup survey in July of 2025 asking them the same questions. I wanted to know several things:

1. Was there one clear narrative that outweighed all the others?

2. Did these party chairs tend to converge on a common narrative as time passed?

The figure below shows the percent of chairs naming that narrative as the most accurate explanation for the election’s outcome. We can see a few interesting lessons here:

First, economic conditions were the most popular explanation. This itself is notable, suggesting that chairs didn’t necessarily blame Harris for the outcome and saw the overall political environment as a difficult if not impossible one for any Democratic candidate. Candidate traits, however (including Harris’ race and sex) came in second.

Second, notice how the differences between the answers flatten over time. That is, chairs didn’t converge on one explanation as time passed; they actually became less convinced that the economy was the right answer and more confused about just what happened. This is not the typical pattern — people usually converge on one story over time.

I was also interested in knowing what these different narratives led these party chairs to want their party to do in the future. That is, what was the relationship between what they thought happened in 2024 and what they wanted for 2028? So I asked the chairs what they most wanted their party to do in the future, giving them several options:

• More forcefully justify the work that the party has done

• More aggressively attack Republicans

• Encourage more competitive primary elections

• Moderate on cultural or economic issues

• Nominate a white man for president

The figure below is called a Sankey plot. It shows us how answers on the narrative question in November 2024 lead to answers on the party direction question in July 2025.

A few lessons on this. The first is that better justifying the work the party has already done is the most popular direction these chairs want to see the party go. A second lesson, however, is that there’s no real consistent relationship between what they thought happened in 2024 and what they want the party to do in the future. People who thought economic conditions were the problem split wildly across different recommendations for the party. (And, in fairness, blaming economic conditions really means that the party itself doesn’t need to do much to win in the future — just be running in a more favorable environment.)

Those who said the candidate’s traits were the problem also split across a range of solutions. Those folks were more likely than others to suggest that the party nominate white men in the future, but that wasn’t a terribly popular answer.

One could criticize the Democrats for not having an idea of what happened in the past or a vision for the future. But I think it’s perfectly fair to be confused about 2024. The Democrats did better than any other majority party in a democracy did that year. They were also running against a convicted criminal whom everyone saw try to stage a coup. Did Harris perform about as well as a Democrat could have that year? Maybe! Could she have done some campaign stuff better? Maybe! Was she too far left or too far right? Was she too sympathetic to Israel or not enough? Would a different vice presidential candidate helped or hurt? There are no provable answers to these questions, and we mostly answer them with our pre-existing opinions.

Additionally, it doesn’t surprise me much that the party has no clear plan for the future. The Democratic Party has been relatively leaderless since 2024. I don’t mean that as an insult, but when you don’t have a sitting president or an obvious heir, and when the most visible leaders are the House and Senate minority leaders who most people couldn’t pull out of a lineup and are (appropriately!) far more focused on legislative work than the 2028 election, it’s just going to be a time of confusion. This will likely end as the midterms approach and as presidential candidates start to emerge.

But for now, Democrats are spending some time in the wilderness. And they could probably use the exercise.

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The Luddites were a protest movement of textile workers in 19^th century England, organizing to slow or stop the development of automated industrial machinery that they saw as reducing quality and threatening to put them out of work. Some Luddites organized raids to smash factory machines. In modern times, the term “Luddite” has softened to mean a grumpy older person who would rather write a check than use Venmo. Attitudinally, I place myself somewhere between these definitions when it comes to AI.

Mind you, I’ve generally been a tech enthusiast, and have often embraced new innovations at work and in the home. Not so much these days. I am strongly opposed to AI for even casual purposes, and while there’s a good deal of public discomfort about it, I’m somewhat surprised there’s not more anger.

I’ll note that I’m neither a programmer nor a business expert. But here are my top two concerns about recent AI developments.

Education

It’s been clear for a while that AI is having a deletirous effect on higher education. My colleagues and I have been facing this in the classroom for the past few years, and frankly it’s only gotten worse. That is, it has gotten increasingly easy for students to have ChatGPT draft a paper or compile a bibliography or write code without the professor detecting it. Students know this. Even good students who sincerely want to learn can feel the pressure to lean on an AI in a week when they have three midterms and the flu, especially when they know other students in the class can do the same.

Professors in my field have come up with an array of adaptations to limit students’ use of AI in coursework. We’re assigning more in-class tests and oral exams and fewer take-home essays. We’ve experimented with having students construct research papers in the classroom. These innovations can work, although they do eat up instruction time. But in the end, we’re working harder than ever to teach while tech companies, and even our own universities, try to undermine that, all in the name of a very expensive fad that has not been shown to improve student learning and is likely harming their critical thinking skills

I know some schools — particularly business programs — feel obliged to incorporate AI in the classroom because they want to teach students the tools that are so prevalent in today’s business world. But ultimately, this sort of teaching reduces the intellectual demands on students while training them in a technology that will either be outdated by the time they graduate or will have eliminated the job they planned to apply for.

The Business Model

One of the few bright spots in the U.S. economy in recent years has been investment in AI. Even when manufacturing is slowing, trade is hobbled by tariffs, fuel prices are high, and the labor market is shaky, businesses still invest hundreds of billions of dollars into AI innovations. And each business does this because they’re convinced all the other businesses are doing it. This potentially leads in one of two directions:

1) There’s a massive crash in this huge sector of the economy when businesses figure out that the technology can’t produce the kind of revenues that would justify their investments.

2) Businesses do benefit from the AI investment because it allows them to lay off workers, leading to widespread unemployment.

Plus there are costs that go beyond disruption of the labor force. AI is putting massive demands on our energy grids. Just as the planet was getting serious about renewable energy and electric vehicles, we’re now massively increasing our energy consumption and heating the planet further. AI is also highly dependent on copyrighted material for its language and image models. (Disclosure: I am likely getting a modest settlement from Anthropic because it used my first book to help build its Claude AI model without getting permission from me or my publisher.)

Meanwhile, most Americans are vaguely distrustful of all these innovations, so the tech companies offer us pleasant baubles like funny AI-generated videos to make us more comfortable with the tech. Look, I’m not much of a Marxist or conspiracy theorist, but good lord this plot is obvious. There are huge efforts afoot to radically disrupt society without any obvious way they will improve our lives, while the industry tries to amuse us.

There’s a reason science fiction franchises like “Dune” and “Foundation,” set millennia in the future, have in their expository backgrounds sharp limitations or even violent rebellions against AI — you can’t really tell stories about humans if the tech gets too far.

Look, obviously there are some good modest use cases for AI. Rapid pattern recognition can be helpful in many fields and can far exceed human abilities, including medicine, the social sciences, and more. I know it can do the boring parts of coding and translating very efficiently.

But to the extent I can, I won’t use it, and I discourage its use. Obviously it’s hard to be absolutist about this. AI searches are now integrated into many web browsers, it’s built into many phones, it’s hard to call a business without getting some kind of AI screening, etc. But to the extent we have control, I believe we should be avoiding it.

And that includes cute videos, doctored photos, reanimated presidents, and more. AI-generated images should be thought of like ivory carvings — fascinating, even beautiful at times, but morally repugnant.

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Donald Trump sent J.D. Vance on two suicide missions last week: Go to Budapest to save Viktor Orbán, and go to Islamabad to secure an unconditional surrender from Iran in a war Vance didn’t support. Both ended in failure. But they give us an idea of the murky waters Vance must navigate to secure the presidential nomination in 2028.

Despite everything that has happened within the Republican Party over the past decade, it still is, by my read, a party. In other words, to become its next presidential nominee, one needs to appeal to many of its factions and demonstrate that they are good enough on the issues they care about warrant their support. As Vance’s past week shows, however, that is no walk in the park.

It’s not completely clear why Trump wanted Vance to go speak at an Orbán campaign rally (a massive violation of democratic norms and values) or to lead peace negotiations with Iran (while the actual Secretary of State attended a UFC match with the President). It’s possible Trump wants to tank Vance’s candidacy; Trump does get tired of even his biggest champions after a while. It’s also possible Trump sincerely believed that Vance could succeed in these goals. Also, as Kamala Harris might remind us, Donald Trump isn’t the first President to give his Vice President the shit jobs.

Yet all this could complicate Vance’s pursuit of the 2028 presidential nomination. By pretty broad consensus, Vance is the front-runner for that position. Some of that is simply the result of name recognition, of course, and also some because, at least up until recently, Trump has seemed very fond of Vance and likely to back him.

But Vance is no Trump. And by that I mean that the laws of party politics still apply to Vance. Trump, for a variety of reasons (his celebrity independent from politics, his influence over primary electorates, his ability to direct or threaten political violence, and more), has been able to largely determine what the Republican Party thinks and does. Not on every issue, of course, but Trump has taken a party that strongly distrusted Russia, opposed tariffs, and was wary of armed government agents patrolling American neighborhoods and gotten it to accept the opposite views. Vance does not have this ability. Which means that Vance has to navigate the nomination politics of the Republican Party as it is rather than as he wishes it to be.

There are some excellent scholars and journalists who have been trying to map out the ideological divisions within the MAGA movement and modern U.S. conservatism. Laura Field, for example, sees three closely defined camps: The Claremont Institute, postliberals / Catholic integralists (which include Vance), and the national conservatives (NatCons).

I’ll admit I have a hard time focusing on these various camps, in part because their lines are quite hazy and shifting, and in part because I view Trump as poisonous to ideology. He just says… things (He’s going to end Iranian civilization, the Pope is weak on crime, Haitian immigrants are eating pets, etc.) and his supporters try and force them into a box labeled conservatism or MAGA, but it’s a lot of work and not always all that convincing. In some ways, that’s a harder environment to navigate than a factional one, since factional borders are at least knowable.

My impression remains that if Trump is not making some attempt at a third term (I’ll have more to say about that in a future post) and if he still has a clear preference for Vance, Vance will have a pretty easy shot at the 2028 nomination. (Here are my thoughts on his prospects as a general election candidate.)

But that second “if” is no small thing. Trump is highly persuadable by the right people, as we’ve seen, and there are obviously people in Trump’s circles who don’t particularly like Vance and want to be President themselves.

I tend to think people on the left underestimate Vance’s strengths as a politician. At just 41, he’s a heartbeat from the presidency and the frontrunner for the GOP’s next nomination. Five years ago he’d never even run for office. Additionally, Vice Presidents are almost always underestimated.

But his playbook going forward is not yet written.

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As a kid, I was enthusiastically and unreservedly in favor of a manned space program. Our destiny lay in the stars, I figured. Get people out there. We need Star Trek here and now.

As I got older, I became rather disenchanted with the idea. Humans are expensive, fragile, and inefficient as space cargo. We could flood the solar system with 100 robotic probes for the price of any single manned mission and get back just as useful data. Besides, it turns out space travel is dangerous.

When it came to the recent Artemis II mission, my cynical side didn’t really see the point. Flying around the Moon and back is literally something we did before I was born, and I once owned a Members Only jacket. Apollo 8 circled the Moon ten times and returned to Earth safely the same month that “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” was released. What was the point of repeating a feat that far braver people once did with tin foil and slide rules?

Yet I’ve surprised myself with how moving I’ve found the Artemis II mission to be. The photos have been stunning. The crew has been professional and engaging. There have been modest but important milestones — the farthest humans have travelled from Earth; the first woman, person of color, and non-American to leave low-Earth orbit; innovations in communication, and more.

One thing that really stood out is that this is really NASA at its finest. Not that this is the most important mission they ever pulled off, but they did this in a competent way that celebrated the achievements and kept the crew and the science at the forefront of the project. This wasn’t some billionaire throwing celebrities or cars into orbit as a vanity project — this was a collective effort to send experts in to do a job and come home safely. We don’t see that sort of thing much these days. I’m guessing few people would describe many government agencies as inspiring, but this one counts for me.

We’re living through a profoundly anti-science era, in which pathbreaking, lifesaving discoveries like mRNA vaccines are routinely downplayed or even vilified. As I’ve noted previously, this era is something like that of the Red Scare in the 1940s and 50s, in which “egghead” professors were portrayed as out of touch or even hostile to regular Americans. One of the things that helped break that spell was Sputnik — the Soviet communications satellite that demonstrated that the United States was falling behind in crucial scientific research and applications. Its launch triggered a new appreciation for American science and goaded the federal government into supporting research universities and labs. I’m not saying that Artemis is the equivalent of Sputnik, but it potentially reminds people that there’s some value to scientific endeavors and the human faces attached to them.

Despite my love for the show “For All Mankind,” I’m far from convinced that there’s any real value to putting colonies on the Moon or Mars that would justify the capital investment and the massive health risks to the astronauts. But sending scientific good will ambassadors on a trip into space once in a while? Bring it.

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President Trump’s executive order to create a national database of voters and restrict mail-in voting is very likely both unconstitutional and unenforceable. But it wouldn’t be the only time the federal government has gotten involved in elections, even though that’s outside their sphere. Are such efforts inherently wrong? How should we be thinking about them?

As the New York Times describes it, Trump’s new executive order:

directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a “state citizenship list” based on data from citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security records and other federal databases.

The order directs federal officials to send the list to state election officials, and orders the attorney general to prioritize prosecution of election officials who provide federal ballots to ineligible voters. It also directs the U.S. Postal Service not to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual not included on the “state citizenship list.”

As most media and scholarly experts on the subject have noted, the President has no real authority over the conduct of elections. Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution says,

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Now Trump and his team have hinged a lot on that last clause. And indeed the federal government has once in a rare while gotten directly involved with the administration of state and local elections. But it has done so under an explicit set of circumstances.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example, was one such effort, with Congress asserting its powers to make sure that Black citizens, mainly in southern states, had the same access to the polls that white citizens had. That was no small thing; under Jim Crow, it was sometimes overtly discriminatory laws that kept Black people from voting, and sometimes facially neutral laws administered in overtly racist ways. For example, a local voting administrator might give a basic political knowledge test to all potential voters, but the questions given to Black voters would either be absurdly hard or literally impossible to answer. In that case, Congress considered it necessary for the federal government to intervene to make sure that state and local authorities were administering elections fairly, even though the Constitution says that it is those state and local authorities who have the primary power.

In this and other cases, the federal government stepped in for the overall purpose of making the United States more of a multiracial democracy. It sought to expand the franchise and end racial disparities in voting.

What Trump is seeking to do today is the opposite. He is trying to make it harder for people to vote. And naturally, if you’re putting Homeland Security in charge of generating the list of “approved” voters, there will be heightened scrutiny on voters who are poorer, are non-white, or don’t speak English. Oh, to be sure, many who are improperly left off the list would be able to produce proper documentation and would ultimately be allowed to vote, but the cost is higher to them than it would be to other voters.

As he has in other cases, Trump is using the architecture and the precedent of the Civil Rights Movement to undermine its goals. He seeks to move the country away from the goal of a multiracial democracy.

Of course, his rationale is that this is necessary to prevent voter fraud. But I don’t need to remind you that voter fraud is functionally nonexistent in this country, while voter suppression is quite real.

In this and other matters, we should note that it’s not just that what Trump is doing —inserting the federal government into election administration — is inherently wrong. That action can be right sometimes. The question is the values that motivate it. Whether an action moves the country toward or away from multiracial democracy is a good indicator of how we should feel about it.

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I’m just returning from a very lovely week in Italy. I managed to catch enough of US news to remind me of the bonkers and disturbing era my country is living through. One message that really got through to me was the way our First Amendment protections of free speech have been perverted over the past year.

The most visceral reminder of that for me was that I initially had some minor difficulty getting back to the US through passport control. The issue turned out to be a benign and technological one and didn’t majorly derail my return, but at least for a hot few minutes I was worried I might have to hand over my phone to the authorities so they might review my social media posts for any evidence of sentiments hostile to the regime. And yes, that sounds paranoid, but I’m not exactly making that up.

But more generally, we’re living through an era in which speech that criticizes the current president is being notably curtailed. This has come in a variety of forms, including pressure on media companies to alter content produced by late night hosts or even fire them, the takeover of major media platforms like the Washington Post and CBS by figures loyal to Trump, a government crackdown on groups that advocate “anti-American” or “anti-Christian” views, and far far more.

This campaign has extended to speech on university campuses, as well. The Trump administration has put pressure on a number of universities by threatening their federal research support, organizing pressure to fire administrators, and initiating Department of Justice investigations that allege civil rights violations. Very often, the offending act is that a professor said something that irritated a conservative student, or the university didn’t crack down hard enough on those advocating for the rights of Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza war. That is, the Trump administration is using its considerable leverage to abridge speech on campus.

Now, just because the administration is trying to abridge these freedoms doesn’t mean it can legally or constitutionally do that. Indeed, the Constitution is pretty plain that most of these actions are not permissible. But until enough courts have ruled in favor of the First Amendment, the administration can mess with a lot of media organizations and individuals and ruin a lot of lives, careers, and ideas.

But of course this is just one aspect of the problem. At the same time citizens’ speech rights are being curtailed, we’re seeing the First Amendment be used to enhance the powers of government officials.

The recent changes in Tina Peters’ case in Colorado is a perfect example of this. Peters, the former Clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 for her attempts to breach voter data in order to demonstrate the presence of (nonexistent) fraud as part of Donald Trump’s 2020 “stop the steal” effort. Trump has been advocating for Colorado’s governor to free Peters, who is the last person still serving time for his illegal attempts to overturn the election.

Last week, the state’s Court of Appeals threw out Peters’ nine-year sentence and demanded that she be re-sentenced. Their claim was that the judge in her case inappropriately considered her statements about election fraud when determining her sentence, and that she had a First Amendment right to express her views about elections. She hasn’t been freed and may well still receive a harsh sentence, but the court believed that her advocacy of election conspiracy theories shouldn’t be a part of that decision.

Look, I’m no constitutional lawyer by a long shot. But claiming that a county clerk — the person in charge of administering elections at the local level — has a right to spread lies about an election to undermine faith in American democracy at a time when the right of regular citizens to organize protest is being curtailed strikes me as perverse. The Constitution quite transparently, in both text and spirit, protects the rights of citizens against their government, not the rights of government officials against citizens.

Anyway, it’s great to be back!

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The above was a hell of a statement from Republican Sen. Mike Lee and former Rep. Mark Meadows. They’re saying that they can only win this year’s midterm elections if they change the rules about elections. Now, given that they won control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate under essentially identical rules in 2024, I’d say the problem for them does not lie in the rules per se.

Obviously this is rhetoric designed to win some support for the beleaguered “SAVE America” Act, or to at least look like they’re putting up a fight for this issue that is so important to President Trump. But it’s important to understand just what this legislation is trying to do. There can be legitimate differences across party lines about just how easy or difficult it should be to vote. But SAVE is a very transparent attempt to use neutral-sounding reform language to substantially benefit just one party.

The campaign for this particular bill stems from Trump’s obsession with the idea that voter fraud is rampant in the United States and that this was to blame for his loss in 2020. (All scholarly studies on the topic show that actual voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in American elections and that he lost in 2020 fairly and squarely.) He often focuses on mail-in ballots as a vector for fraud (even though he uses this method of voting himself). Unsurprisingly, such baseless claims of voter fraud are usually highly correlated with racial animus and with the idea that the wrong sort of people are voting.

So what would the SAVE America Act do? Well, it would require voters to produce both photo ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot. What effect would this have?

More than half of states have some kind of photo ID requirement for voting and have had so for some time, so we should be able to get some sense of its effect. Yet studying this is more complicated than it sounds. To many, a photo ID requirement sounds perfectly normal, but it does not have the same effect across the population. The most common form of photo ID is a drivers license; not all of us have those, and those who don’t tend to be poorer and are more likely to be people of color. Yes, one can obtain some sort of photo ID, but that just adds a tax to the voting, one that is borne disproportionately by poorer people. Now, the tricky part for studying this is that people know voting is important, so very often they’ll pay the tax (get an ID) for the chance to vote. But that makes it harder to discern an effect. That is, people are adapting, but some have to do more adaptation than others.

One set of researchers — Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson — used validated survey results across roughly a decade of elections to discern the effects of ID requirements in the strictest states. They found a substantial impact of such laws, reducing turnout all around but more so for minority communities and Democrats. As they suggest, it’s important to view such laws in the broader historical contest of voter fraud claims:

The effects of voter ID laws that we see here are in some ways similar to the impact of measures like poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and at-large elections that were used by the white majority decades and centuries ago to help deny blacks many basic rights. Both sets of measures—new and old—were instituted by advocates who claimed they would help to ensure the integrity and legitimacy of democracy. Both sets of measures also serve to distort democracy and reduce the influence of racial minorities.

Okay, that’s photo ID. What if we add proof of citizenship to the list of voting requirements? This would massively increase this disparity. This would require many people to have a US passport (only about half of Americans have one) or a birth certificate on hand to cast a ballot. The law would also ban most forms of voting by mail, which is current practice in several states, including Colorado.

To be clear, the SAVE Act is highly unorthodox and almost certainly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution reads, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” This has been generally interpreted as leaving election laws to states and localities, although in some extraordinary situations — such as defending Black citizens’ right to vote in the Civil Rights era — the federal government has stepped in. Should this become law, it would very likely be the subject of many immediate lawsuits and would be tied up in courts for some time.

More immediately, though, its passage seems unlikely. Although it recently passed the House, Democrats are filibustering the bill, and there do not exist 60 senators who would vote for cloture to break the filibuster. Trump has urged the Senate to end the filibuster, but Senator Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) is refusing. Republicans are speaking extensively on this bill this week regardless and using it as an opportunity to complain about election security. Trump has suggested that he will not sign any other bills until this act is passed.

Mike Lee and Mark Meadows, quoted at the beginning of this piece, are not wrong — this law would substantially change their party’s fortunes this fall, and could take what looks like a 20-40 seat loss in the House and make it plausible for them to hold the chamber. But it would do for one simple reason: making it costlier for Democrats to vote.

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Just within a recent 24-hour stretch, the following occurred:

• The Trump administration announced it was deploying ICE agents to airports across the country

• A commercial aircraft landing at LaGuardia collided with a firetruck, killing the pilots and injuring dozens

• The President announced he was going to destroy civilian energy plants in Iran and then changed his mind and announced he was in productive peace talks with Iran, which was apparently news to Iran

• The Trump administration announced it would pay a French energy company $1 billion to not build wind farms on the east coast

• The President toured Graceland

In another administration, you might see one or two of these, probably spaced out across several months. How do you get all these things happening in one day? I’d like to suggest it’s the product of several trends occurring for years that are all combining in a particularly toxic way today to produce a government that is allergic to competence. These trends involve the rise of conservative populism, the growth of conservative media, and a set of personality traits particular to Donald Trump. I’ll address these each in turn.

Conservative Populism

I’ve written on this topic previously, and it plays a big role in my forthcoming book. But the main story is that there’s been a growing faction within the Republican coalition arguably since Pat Buchanan’s 1992 run for the presidency (although one could certainly trace it back to Barry Goldwater or earlier) that is now in control of that party. The main tenets of conservative populism are that there is a shadowy elite (the Deep State, journalists, top university professors, Hollywood, etc.) that controls our society, that elite is working against the virtuous “people,” and anyone who is aligned with the elite should be removed from power. That is, anyone or thing considered part of the “establishment” is inherently untrustworthy and dangerous.

Now, within the Republican Party, the old “establishment” included figures like the Bush family, the Cheneys, John McCain, Mitt Romney, etc. Regardless of whether one agreed with their efforts in office, they generally valued competence, and they generally hired people with credentials and experience. Of course, someone like Donald Trump could come along and ask [in spirit, if not verbatim], “If all that competence and experience brought you the Iraq War, what good is it?” And to some extent, that’s a fair point. Well-trained people can still make catastrophic errors. But presumably, they make fewer of them.

But what you end up with today is an administration peopled by those without relevant credentials or training. The head of the FBI was a podcaster before this job. The Secretary of Defense was a news personality. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was, and still is, a raving anti-vax conspiracy theorist and snake oil salesman who eats road kill. And of course the President’s main job before this one was being a celebrity.

Trump did have some competent people in his first administration, and those people largely conducted themselves by trying to blunt or thwart his worst impulses. He made it his mission to hire no such people this time around.

Conservative News Media

From its beginnings in the mid-1990s, Fox News was a different sort of news network than its rivals at CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. Fox drew its news personalities less from the world of journalism and more from entertainment and talk radio. It sought to feel different, to shock and entertain its audience. It also defined itself as telling the stories the other networks didn’t want you to know. It was revealing hidden truth.

Fox, along with conservative talk radio pioneers like Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, and G. Gordon Liddy, meshed well with the growing populist wing within the Republican Party. They were telling the stories the establishment didn’t want to talk about and getting to The Truth.

But even more importantly, Fox News became a proving ground for Republican candidates for office. Candidates who got interviewed there a lot and were willing to say the sorts of provocative things that got attention there tended to do better in primary elections, and slowly such candidates took over the party. Indeed, as Jonathan Bernstein has noted, doing well on Fox News became one of the key tasks for advancement in the Republican Party. Then-Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s (R-North Carolina) 2021 statement “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation” wasn’t a confession, it was a boast.

Obviously getting attention for oneself has always been important in politics across the ideological spectrum, but in modern conservative media that took on a particular flavor. To get attention, you needed to promote conspiratorial ideas, or say dramatic insults, or claim the Democratic president wasn’t eligible to serve in that office, or argue that Democratic health plans involved “death panels,” or make up lies about immigrants, and more. This attention, far more than any (maligned) expertise, was the key to moving into leadership positions in the party.

The Peculiar case of Donald Trump

I may be undercounting, but to me, there are four features about Trump’s approach to politics and life that distinguish him from other presidents and most other elected officials. One is his credulity. That is, if he likes someone, he will almost automatically believe whatever they tell him. He’ll accept Vladimir Putin’s claims that hey we don’t really know who started the war between Russia and Ukraine and maybe it was Ukraine’s fault. He’ll believe whatever he just saw on Fox. He may have even come up with the ICE-in-airports idea from a caller on a talk radio show. All this makes him highly manipulable, which, according to much reporting, is a big part of the reason Netanyahu was able to get him to join in an attack on Iran.

The second key feature about him is his incredibly short attention span. I can’t really do better here than this summary of last Friday’s White House press gaggle from the Gold and Geopolitics Substack:

At 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.

The third feature is his obsession with symbols at the expense of substance. This is arguably a product both of populism (which values strong stances over expertise) and conservative media (which elevates tough, bombastic rhetoric). He doesn’t want results; he wants to look like he’s getting results. That’s why he describes his favorite appointees as being “straight from central casting.” He’s desperate to appear tough and resolute.

He wants to end the Iranian nuclear program? He drops bombs and sends in Marines, which is doing very little to achieve that policy goal but looks tough. He’s even had a video campaign to drive this point home. He wants to reduce immigration? No, he wants to look tough on immigrants. That’s what ICE is for. They’re the unconstrained anonymous warriors he’s always desired, loyal to him above all else and determined to deliver videos of them harassing, arresting, or even torturing migrants. So they’re who he sends in to fix problems like… airport delays.

(Aside: We’ve had a lot of airport problems in recent years, including a severe shortage of air traffic controllers and decaying infrastructure, and we’ve had two major crashes since this administration took office. Whether this administration is culpable for those crashes is open to debate, but I’m confident they didn’t happen because of a lack of masked agents with tactical gear.)

A fourth feature would be Trump’s overt bigotry, which is historically a part of populism and plays at least some role in Trump’s rhetoric and governing decisions. Now, he is hardly the only bigot to serve in the White House, but he’s certainly the most overt and proud of it in a very long time.

Adding it up

Okay, so what do you get when you combine a populist conservative governing party serving a bombastic, conspiratorial media and a chaotic, manipulable, symbol-obsessed man with no attention span running the country? [Gestures all around]

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I’ve talked a bit in the past about the extent to which there’s a “Tea Party of the Left” occurring in 2026, with lots of mainstream Democratic incumbents finding themselves under fire and facing tough progressive challengers. This week’s Illinois primaries were a mixed bag on this front. Yet Colorado’s own set of primary challenges suggests that, well, there’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear. Now we have some new evidence, with three-decade Democratic incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette facing a strong challenge from her left and losing a contest this past weekend.

Colorado has developed a quirky system of party nominations over the decades. Party contests, from the state legislature on up to the presidency, are settled by primaries, as they are in most other states. But candidates can take several paths to qualify for the primary ballot. One common path is the caucus/assembly process. There’s a caucus night (usually in early March) where registered party members meet in their precincts to do a straw vote for their favorite candidates and to pick from among themselves who should be the delegates at the county assembly a few weeks later. Then at the county assembly people pick delegates to congressional district-level assembly, and then to a state assembly for statewide candidates. The candidates that get at least 30% of the vote at the final assembly automatically qualify for the primary ballot, and the candidate with the highest number of votes appears first on the ballot. It’s a lot of time and effort for a relatively small (though not insignificant) prize.

The other path is for candidates to opt out of the caucus-assembly process and just get signatures on petitions to qualify for the primary ballot.

Now, from the description above, you can guess who participates in the caucus-assembly process. It’s the most hardcore partisans in the state. It’s people who care enough to show up at multiple successive meetings that eat up large chunks of time, sometimes traveling substantial distances to get there. It’s reasonable to think that these participants are much further toward the ideological poles than the average primary voter, no less the average state resident.

You can also probably guess the sorts of candidates who do well in these contests. It’s not necessarily the wealthiest or best known candidates, but rather the ones with an enthusiastic following that will show up at events. And turnout at these contests is typically not high; a candidate with a few hundred die-hard fans can sometimes swing a county assembly.

Your average primary voter, by contrast, will probably not spend more than a few minutes thinking about their vote choice, if that. They’ll be heavily influenced by name recognition, endorsements from major figures in their party, advertising, etc. So, given the differences between who shows up for this train of events and who will actually vote in the June primary, you can get wildly different results. Indeed, my own impression is that nothing ensures failure in the primary like success in the caucus.

Okay, all that exposition done, here’s what happened recently: Rep. Diana DeGette lost in this past weekend’s Denver County Democratic Assembly. Democratic Socialist attorney Melat Kiros (who wasn’t yet alive when DeGette first got elected) got 63% of the vote to DeGette’s 35%. So Kiros is sending about twice as many delegates to the 1st Congressional District assembly than DeGette is. The likely outcome is that both will qualify for the ballot but Kiros’ name will appear first.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time DeGette will have lost in the caucus-assembly process in the fifteen elections in which she has run for this House seat.

DeGette hasn’t done anything particularly egregious in office — she’s not associated with any major scandals and has generally been considered a reliable Democratic vote, slightly to the left of the median Democrat in the House. But Denver progressives still see a target. For one thing, a district that Kamala Harris won with 77 percent of the vote in 2024 could surely be sending someone further to the left to Congress. For another, there is a lot of anger toward the Democratic Party’s leadership across the country, especially from Democrats. Anyone seen as part of the party’s establishment is seen as vulnerable.

This is part of the same story with two high-profile Colorado incumbents — Sen. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Michael Bennet (now running for governor) — deciding to go the petition route to the primary ballot instead of casting their lots with the progressive activist community.

How much trouble is DeGette in? Well, fundraising at the beginning of the year showed DeGette with roughly half a million dollars on hand, with Kiros having just over a tenth of that. That doesn’t mean Kiros can’t do well — sometimes it doesn’t take all that much money to take down an incumbent who has lost favor in their party. Just ask Eric Cantor. And it’s possible Kiros will be able to leverage this moment of media attention to get more support, donations, endorsements, etc.

My guess is that DeGette will still win the June primary comfortably, as she always does. But even this current setback is a very bright signal flare for other incumbents this year.

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I recently participated in a symposium of the Denver-based Institute for Science & Policy, during which I had a “fireside chat” with Tony Mills of the American Enterprise Institute. Mills has written extensively on the politicization of science, and the two of us had a very enjoyable hour-long conversation on the topic. You can watch it below.

The main questions we dealt with are why there is such a vast partisan gap in trust of science, and to what extent this is a unique moment. Mills helpfully brings a good deal of data to the discussion, as he did in this useful piece at Issues in Science & Technology.

Note this graph, drawing on a range of survey data to demonstrate partisan attitudes toward science since 1970s. As it demonstrates, there’s been a very sharp partisan divergence in confidence in science during the Trump Era, starting prior to the Covid pandemic. At least in part, we can attribute this to a rise in populist anti-science rhetoric embraced by Trump, his appointees, and those in his media orbit.

But as the graph also shows, the partisan divide has existed in the past, and it’s not always in the same direction. The largest divergence in party views toward science prior to 2016 was in the 1970s, when liberals equated scientific achievement with the military-industrial complex and thus trusted it less.

That era of scientific mistrust is often overlooked. Indeed, as Mills notes, the Moon landings (1969-72), which today are considered one of the last great moments of national unity, were experienced nothing like that at the time. There was sharp debate back then over whether the Apollo missions were worth the vast expenditures when the country had so much else to deal with.

It’s outside the dataset, and we don’t have the partisanship lens for it, but the 1950s was another deeply anti-science decade, with critics of intellectuals and college professors alleging their ties to communism and their lack of commitment to basic American moral beliefs. This was the subject of Richard Hofstadter’s 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in which he quotes religious leaders like Billy Graham:

[In place of the Bible] we substituted reason, rationalism, mind culture, science worship, the working power of government, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, materialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellectuals. Thousands of these “intellectuals” have publicly stated that morality is relative—that there is no norm or absolute standard.…

This fervor was heavily whipped up by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), although it’s clear that not all his fellow Republicans were on board with his red-baiting.

What ended that era? The simple answer is the 1957 launch of Sputnik. Americans became afraid that they were losing to Soviet scientists, and suddenly university researchers and government projects were awash with funding.

In our conversation, I asked Mills about the possibility of us having a Sputnik moment again that would rally the American public in favor of science today. Mills argued that the COVID-19 pandemic was essentially a Sputnik moment — a terrifying threat to all Americans that required scientific advances to address. But thanks in part to political polarization and the populist and conspiratorial leanings of Donald Trump, we got the opposite of a unifying moment. Many Americans turned against science, despite science actually stepping up in that moment.

As we discussed in the chat, it’s not clear what scientists could or should be doing in this moment to increase faith in their work. As Mills notes, one of the chief complaints against scientists and professors is that they’ve become too political; scholars becoming even more political might not help them achieve their goals. This (mainly Republican-driven) anti-science era will end, of course, but it’s not clear what event will bring that about.

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I participated in Colorado State University’s Democracy Summit this week, as part of a panel on Colorado’s political landscape. The moderator — CSU’s Matthew Hitt — opened the panel with this question: “What stands out to you as the most important indicator of the health of democracy in Colorado right now?” The answer seemed pretty easy to me: It’s whether Tina Peters is still in prison.

For those of you unfamiliar with her, Tina Peters was the Clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, during the 2020 election cycle. She chose to participate in Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” efforts by allowing conspiracy theorists illegal access to election data in an attempt to “prove” election fraud. She was removed from office by Colorado’s Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, and was then convicted on seven charges, including four felonies. In 2024 she began serving a nine-year prison sentence. She is, to my knowledge, the only person still incarcerated for participating in Trump’s efforts to overturn a presidential election.

Trump has made no secret of his interest in seeing Peters freed. He claimed to have pardoned her last year, but of course that meant nothing because she was convicted by state courts. He has publicly demanded that Colorado free Peters, threatening “harsh measures” against the state if that doesn’t happen. The White House’s efforts to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) near Boulder, the ICE raids in Denver, the relocation of the US Space Force from Colorado to Alabama, and more, are at least partially tied to Trump’s efforts to free one of his co-conspirators.

Of course, the only person who can pardon Peters or commute her sentence is Colorado’s Democratic Governor, Jared Polis. Polis has recently been making some noises about commuting Peters’ sentence, suggesting it may have been too harsh a penalty to impose on an elderly first-time offender. This has received pushback from every Democrat in the statehouse, as well as the two Democrats running to replace the termed-out Polis this year. (See this Brian Beutler piece for further steps Democrats could be taking.) Polis has now said he won’t make a decision on this until the Court of Appeals makes a recommendation.

Why is Polis doing all this? That’s hard to say. In his two terms as governor and decade in the U.S. House before that, he has generally been considered a reliable Democratic vote, but occasionally demonstrated a more libertarian, pro-business streak common among tech leaders. This streak has become more pronounced over the past year, especially in Polis’ apparent affinity for Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign. It’s possible Trump has simply convinced him that something was wrong with Peters’ conviction.1

It’s also possible that Polis is signaling sympathy for Peters instrumentally to buy Trump’s favor and mollify some of his anger toward Colorado. And who knows, that could actually work, but it would be catastrophic for democracy. It would signal the death of the rule of law, at least in areas where Trump is concerned. It would also demonstrate that, despite the complex system of U.S. government that divides power among different branches and different levels — a system designed to limit government abuse of power — ultimately everyone answers to Trump. This is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime, not a representative democracy.

I don’t mean to make one person — whether that’s Jared Polis or Tina Peters — the arbiter of whether democracy is alive or dead in the Centennial State. But the Peters decision is an important barometer of democratic health. And if Trump can degrade democracy in a solidly blue state with Democratic trifecta control and one of the best election systems and highest turnout rates in the country, he can do it anywhere.

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There’s been a lot of pontificating about what this fall’s midterm elections will look like, and the general consensus is that it will be a tough one for Republicans. But judging from the history of midterm elections, can we be any more precise?

Economic forecast models of midterm election are typically not as reliable or accurate as forecasts of presidential elections. But they can give us an idea of what to expect. More importantly, they give us a baseline against which to measure the actual performance of the President’s party.

We know, for example, that the President’s party almost always loses House seats in midterm elections. (See the chart above.) Since World War II, there have only been two midterm elections where the President’s party has gained seats — 1998 and 2002 — when the incumbent presidents were unusually popular and had approval ratings of 65 or higher. (Bill Clinton was buoyed by a strong economy and a pushback against Republicans for the impeachment campaign, and George W. Bush by a residual 9/11 rally effect.)

As I like to do in a midterm year, I’ve put together a simple model forecasting the number of seats the President’s party wins, using three variables to predict it:

• Economic growth. (Specifically, the growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year.)

• The President’s average approval rating at Labor Day.

• The number of House seats the President’s party currently has. (A larger majority is theoretically more vulnerable to a high number of seat losses.)

Just to give an idea of what the relationship between the economy and the vote looks like, note the figure below. Each data point is a midterm election since 1950, labeled by the year and the president at the time.

A few things to note here. First is that the more the economy is growing the fewer seats the President’s party loses. No surprise there.

Second is that 2022 is a huge outlier. (Honestly it screws up the regressions quite a bit. That red line is a lot steeper without 2022.) At least from this particular economic measure (which was heavily influenced by rising inflation), Americans lost a lot of purchasing power in 2022 — more than in any other year in this study. Yet Democrats under Joe Biden lost fewer than 10 seats. That is often attributed to Donald Trump’s outsized influence in the 2022 midterms, recruiting and endorsing many candidates, pushing them to echo his words about election fraud, and making the elections about himself as much as he could. We could also see this as a pushback against the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Anyway, the most recent numbers lead to this equation:

Seat gains = -49.9 + 5.3*econ growth + 1.2*prez approval - 0.2*House seats held by prez party

So what’s the forecast for this year? I’m putting presidential approval at 39 (that’s what it is now), and the president’s party has 218 seats. And for the economy… well, we don’t actually know the growth in real disposable income yet, since the time period ends at the end of this month, and the numbers won’t be reported for several weeks after that. Income growth has been pretty anemic for the past few quarters, although several forecasts expect it to pick up in early 2026. So here’s a range:

Now, given that the Republicans’ current majority is by just a few seats, any of these forecasts is more than sufficient to put Democrats in charge of the House.

How reliable is this forecast? Who knows? We have a lot of other factors in play this year, including several mid-decade redistrictings, the likelihood that Trump will again play a large (and probably negative) role in Republican candidate selections, the possibility that Trump’s popularity will drop a good deal as this war continues, Trump’s own efforts to reduce voter turnout in Democratic-leaning areas, and more.

We’ll see what comes. It seems fair to say that Republicans are due for a significant rout, which is is in part why the president is so desperate to impose his own new rules on elections (which he can’t do). Also, if Republicans manage to come away losing only 10-15 seats and the majority, they still will have overcome massive historical trends to do that.

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It would be easy to read too much into the results of just one Senate primary. So let’s get started.

State Rep. James Talarico has likely won the Senate Democratic primary in Texas, edging out Rep. Jasmine Crockett by a handful of points. For many observers, this is evidence of a more moderate Democratic candidate withstanding a challenge from a populist progressive to his left, and perhaps evidence that fears/hopes of a “Tea Party of the left” may be overhyped in 2026.

But as often happens when you look closely at a race, it’s not quite so simple as that, for a number of reasons.

First, as Nate Cohn noted, the candidates’ ideological positions don’t exactly line up as left vs. center. Crockett’s voting patterns are more closely aligned with the House’s Democratic leadership than with the progressive extremes, and a number of progressive groups and leaders weren’t backing her. Talarico’s stances aren’t that different from hers, and he’s definitely to her left on the issue of Israel and Gaza, obviously a hot-button topic in Democratic politics.

Also, the divide among Democrats right now isn’t exactly center vs. left, but is more about tone and approach to politics. Crockett is something of a bomb-thrower. She’s willing to throw some elbows against Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, and make some off-the-cuff attacks she later recants or revises. Talarico has a much milder style, and speaks more often about winning over moderates and Republicans with a “politics of love.”

There’s also the important fact that neither of them is the incumbent in this race. Insurgencies are generally directed against sitting officeholders, and while both hold district offices, they are running statewide among a population that doesn’t know them that well or hold them responsible for the conditions of the country.

But it’s interesting that the primary has been cast in this insurgency vs. establishment framework at all. In many ways, this contest has been fought on the classic Democratic battleground of electability. And as with most arguments over electability, you don’t have to scratch very hard to find beliefs about race and gender at the core.

Talarico is a white man studying theology; he very loudly professes a deep faith in a version of Christianity we don’t often hear in U.S. politics, one that focuses on Christ’s admonitions to care for the poor and immigrants rather than on rolling back abortion and gay rights. His is a campaign focused on winning over centrist voters, particularly Christians, who might otherwise vote Republican. Stated more cynically, he is a liberal’s idea of what a conservative wants to hear.

Crockett, meanwhile, is a Black woman with a provocative public speaking style. Her campaign seems less focused on winning over moderates and more focused on activating communities of color who might otherwise not vote at all.

Who was the more electable candidate? Who knows? But one thing often lost in such arguments is that the received wisdom about electability is woefully out of date. I refer you to that wonderful recent article by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach pointing out that moderates don’t really do better in general elections than leftists do, although that was true years ago. Tacking to the center doesn’t guarantee a higher voter share, especially when voters are more interested, as G. Elliott Morris notes, in strength than in moderation.

We’ll get to see how Talarico’s message holds up against a Republican in a year where Republicans are deeply unpopular but in a state where Democrats almost never win statewide. But we’ll have to wait until the end of May to find out which Republican he’s running against: an incumbent who’s got iffy cred among the Trump crowd or a challenger who is deeply scandal-tainted. And electability concerns may not mean any more on the Republican side than they do on the Democratic one.

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The George W. Bush administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It spent more than a year amassing evidence and intelligence reports (some of it misleading and some a good deal worse than misleading), building coalitions with allies, obtaining authorizations and permissions from Congress and the United Nations, and attempting to persuade the American people that attacking Iraq was in the nation’s best interests and was part of an overall war on terror. The actual invasion that began in March of 2023 was politically divisive but not at all surprising, and Bush had a good deal of bipartisan political cover to support his efforts.

This past Saturday, Donald Trump launched an air war on Iran and then at 2AM released an eight-minute video filmed at his Florida home.

These two approaches to warfare are obviously incredibly different from each other. (And see Julia Azari’s excellent piece on key distinctions between these two campaigns.) But it’s worth getting into why one is actually better than the other.

One certainly shouldn’t romanticize the Bush administration’s approach. At the time, Bush’s efforts were contrasted, unfavorably, from those of his father’s administration building support for Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91. That earlier effort resulted in a vast 42-nation coalition and a broad (thought importantly limited) mandate to free Kuwait from Iraqi control. The 2003 war, however, consisted of a smaller “Coalition of the Willing,” and it was clear the junior Bush didn’t exactly have the world’s consent for a multi-year occupation of Iraq.

Beyond that, as was somewhat clear at the time and became clearer in the following years, the Bush case against Saddam Hussein was built on a lot of misleading and even false evidence. Bush and others warned about Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” (which could not be found) and repeatedly raised the possibility that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons (which they weren’t). The facts that the war dragged on for many more years, resulted in the deaths of thousands of US soldiers and the wounding of many thousands more, and was basically built on lies and exaggerations did substantial damage to US politics and, I would argue, to the reputation of leaders in the Republican Party.

Trump definitely did not do any of that. He’s cited an array of reasons for the attack after starting it, including a claim that Iran was about to attack the US and its allies (which the Pentagon and other Republicans aren’t even buying) or that Iran was building nuclear weapons (something belied by Trump’s own State of the Union Address a few days earlier). He even suggested this was payback for Iran seizing American hostages in 1979. He called for the Iranian people to use this opportunity to overthrow their government. But overall, there really wasn’t much of an attempt to sell this attack or build support for it before launching it. (On Monday morning, two days into the campaign, Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth sought to narrow the goals somewhat to military objectives but didn’t provide a whole lot more clarity.)

So is it better for a president to build a shaky rationale for a war or to build no rationale at all and just do wars because he can do them?

David French had a useful piece this weekend in the New York Times making a good case for building the support coalition first. For one thing, as he notes, having to sell the case for war to members of Congress, even of one’s own party, provides something of a reality check:

To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.

This seems particularly important for an administration that’s so given to going with the President’s gut impulses as policy. Another good reason to try to sell a war proposal broadly is that it’s important for the people actually fighting the war to know they’ve got a consensus behind them. As French points out, Bush probably could have just ordered an attack on Iraq in 2003, but he wanted Congress and the UN Security Council to back him:

Regardless of any person’s feelings about Operation Iraqi Freedom… when our troops went into combat, they knew they were supported by a majority of the American people. They knew politicians on both sides of the aisle had voted to send them into battle.

The choice I’ve presented above isn’t great. And generally, I would hope that any president would only commit the nation to war when it’s absolutely necessary and would do so only with the specific authorization of Congress and with the support of the American people, and would use verifiable information when building that support. But just launching a war just because one can and continuing until the next shiny object comes along is not consistent with the behavior of a democratic republic, and even looks paltry compared to most empires.

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Ronald Reagan had two guests to his State of the Union Addresses during his first term. One was Army Sergeant Stephen Trujillo, who risked his life during the Grenada invasion to bring medical aid to wounded fellow soldiers. Another was Lenny Skutnik, who dove into the icy Potomac River to save passengers of the commercial airliner that had just crashed into the 14th Street Bridge. Reagan highlighted these people at the end of his 1982 and 1984 addresses to highlight a spirit of American volunteerism and selflessness. Those were the only guests he had at those two addresses, and he was the first president to do this sort of thing.

This week, Donald Trump had, by my count, 12 acknowledged guests at his State of the Union Address. These included a World War II veteran, the widow of a conservative activist, the parents of a slain National Guard member, a little girl badly injured in a car accident caused by an undocumented immigrant, a woman receiving IVF treatment, and the U.S. Men’s Hockey Team, among others. Twelve was actually a fairly small number of guests for Trump.

The figure below shows the number of guests presidents have had in person during their State of the Union Addresses since 1981. The data through 2024 come from UCSB’s American Presidency Project. I assembled the most recent two years from news coverage. (I am counting the hockey team as one guest, rather than counting each team member.)

From this figure, it’s pretty clear that Donald Trump is a significant outlier. He averages about 14 guests per speech; other presidents averaged about 4.

But he’s not just an outlier in the number of guests; he also utilizes them very differently. Other presidents have typically used their guests to illustrate policies they champion or to inspire Americans to heroism. The guests bring the President’s speech to life.

With Trump, it’s almost the reverse. The guests aren’t really there to help sell the speech; the guests are the speech. He puts a few words in to introduce them and tell their stories, but he mainly wants to show the range of people he’s been able to assemble. Yes, to some extent, he’s using them to highlight beliefs he has — military heroes are good, trans people are bad, fertility is good, etc. But his addresses have come to feel more like a 1970s TV variety show, with a cavalcade of special guest stars who go together about as well as Cher and David Bowie. They’re there to produce an array of emotional responses in his audience, from inspiration to anger to pity.

This ties into a point that Julia Azari made on our very long and late live coverage Tuesday night: unlike other presidents, Trump isn’t really going before Congress to ask them for anything. He doesn’t have much of a congressional agenda, and mostly uses the address to talk about all the things he’s doing without them, and also to shame Democrats.

In some sense, none of this should be a surprise. Trump is, at his core, an entertainer. And it was Reagan, another entertainer, who first brought in the idea of spotlighted guests at the State of the Union. This can be seen as a part of a long progression of making the event more public-facing since Woodrow Wilson proposed transforming the constitutional requirement of reporting on the country from a written statement to an in-person speech.

And while these speeches are not quite the mass draw they once were, Trump has been a bit more successful than other modern presidents in drawing an audience. The question is, to what end? To tell Congress what he wants of them? He’s just not doing much of that. To rally public opinion to his side? The SOTU has never been a great vehicle for that, and Trump isn’t particularly skilled at that task. Or is it just to rally his base in what increasingly looks like a campaign rally in front of a stodgier than usual audience? His speech gives them some images they can use — Democrats sitting down at the wrong time, him looking proud and defiant, a hero being decorated, etc. — but its shelf life can be measured in hours. Which was all variety shows were.

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Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.

Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.

-Apocalypse Now (1979)

On Saturday night, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was dispatching one of the U.S. Navy’s hospital ships to Greenland. This was apparently not in response to any request from Greenland or Denmark or any demonstrated medical need. But I happened to see this story right after finishing Ezra Klein’s interview with Atlantic journalists Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, and it fits so neatly into the discussion about power in this White House.

The White House has evolved over time, especially since World War II, to have a fairly rigid organizational structure with pretty clear lines of responsibility. Obviously different presidents have approached this differently, and some prefer a less rigid organization. President Eisenhower, building off his military experience, established the first formal Chief of Staff position in 1953, and the holder of that office traditionally holds a great deal of power in managing the President’s time and determining who gets to talk to him and who doesn’t.1 Presidential time has generally been considered a precious resource, and the White House office typically wants to limit it to moments where the President’s input is vitally needed.

Trump, of course, is famously resistant to being managed. His first term was rife with stories of him refusing to let go of some issues despite strong pushback from his top aides, and some of them would even disappear papers from his desk to keep him from acting on bad ideas. It’s not been clear to me what current Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ actual role is, but this was one of the interesting things in the Klein podcast. Scherer somewhat surprisingly described her as an actual Chief:

She was there with him during his time in the wilderness after Jan. 6, because she was able to build the campaign that ended up winning and because she has figured out her relationship with Trump — in a way that I don’t think anyone else who has ever worked with him has at that level — she is able to go to him and say: I don’t think that’s a good idea. And she is able to put people in front of him who say: I don’t think that’s a good idea.

I don’t think it’s a situation where he is not getting pushback. Now that doesn’t mean he always listens to her.

But overall, while Scherer and Parker were fairly diplomatic about it, they largely described this White House as a chaotic environment in which presidential time really isn’t managed at all. In their description, a typical Trump workday includes:

• Calling and taking calls from friends, reporters, politicians and others for hours throughout the day, sometimes just picking up the phone not even knowing who is calling

• Giving very lengthy interviews on TV and radio

• Watching hours of Fox News

• Posting extensively on his social media account

He is famously uninterested in intelligence and policy briefings, or, for that matter, Congress.

Trump, that is, seems to have more free time than almost any employed person I know. The workday in this White House seems to be that the President wanders around looking for something to get angry about, and then suddenly announces a solution to that problem by fiat without consulting with anyone familiar with the politics or policy.

The hospital ship is a great example of this. It sounds like Trump got wind (presumably via Gov. Landry) of a crew member on a U.S. submarine off Greenland needing urgent medical attention. The crew member was taken off the submarine and sent to a hospital in Nuuk. Trump quickly decided that there was in fact a substantial medical crisis in Greenland and that the U.S. would demonstrate its goodwill and importance to the island nation by sending a hospital ship there. Leaders of both Greenland and Denmark declined the help, saying it was unneeded and also that they, unlike the United States, have a good health care system where everyone is guaranteed care. It also turns out that neither of the U.S. Navy’s hospital ships are capable of sailing right now. But no matter.

I will confess to being somewhat annoyed at the work by Parker and especially Scherer in the Klein interview to portray this as just another way for a White House to function. (Scherer also said at one point that the President “does not prioritize being accurate.”) I sympathize to some extent — a White House reporter who regularly describes the President as a liar and the White House as a chaotic mess, even if those things are true, will not be granted many interviews or much access. But I believe these euphemisms do readers a real disservice.

But another notable takeaway is just how much influence this President seems to have amidst such disorganization. Like many other political scientists, I have been teaching for decades about how the presidency is a fairly weak office, requiring relationships and negotiations with Congress, deft management of an often recalcitrant bureaucracy, and good standing with the American public to accomplish much of anything. Trump has turned that on its head, drastically changing immigration policy, tariffs, policing, foreign relations, and more just by issuing executive orders or, more often, informal edicts.

The caveat there is that this governing style is not very effective in the long run. The Supreme Court has overturned most of his tariffs. The public has massively pushed back on immigration enforcement, compelling a retreat. Longstanding U.S. allies are looking for other partners.

But in the short run, one president with a bee in his bonnet and little care for how it looks publicly can do a hell of a lot of damage.

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