It was a beautiful North Carolina spring day in 2000 at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, and Governor Jim Hunt was sprinting down the giant ruby-red stairs. I was his then-young press aide, and we were running late because he had been on the phone with President Bill Clinton.

Naively, I noted something about their discussing a state issue. Without missing a beat, the governor said of Clinton, his fellow Democrat, “I was telling him what he was doing wrong with the country and how to fix it!”

So began my real education in politics, which I was quickly learning had even more to do with human interactions than I realized.

Last week, Hunt died at 88, a historic figure in North Carolina politics who served 16 years as governor. Appointed governors from the Colonial Era served longer, but no one has yet matched Hunt’s tenure as governor from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001.

The obituaries are full of his accomplishments and his most notable defeat, a 1984 bid to unseat U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Hunt once told me his TV ads were “all wrong,” which may be true, but that was a bad year to be a Democrat, especially in the South. Ronald Reagan carried the state with almost 62 percent of the vote. Helms got 51 percent.

But I’m drawn to the dynamic between Hunt and Clinton, southern Democratic moderate governors who had to find a policy and political path forward as the South became increasingly Republican in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. They weren’t alone. Democratic southern governors like Ray Mabus in Mississippi, Richard Riley in South Carolina, Roy Barnes in Georgia, and Reubin Askew in Florida had similar dilemmas. They had a common goal, but they were all rivals in a way, too.

Clinton had real indebtedness to Hunt, nine years his senior. Hunt’s advocacy led to him serving as chair of the Democratic Governors Association. Clinton recalled “[I]t was the first significant national position of any kind I had.”

Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory aligned with Hunt’s return to the governor’s seat. Together, they used their bully pulpits in Washington and Raleigh to advance policies that could push the progressive envelope in a conservative era.

In 1997, when Clinton spoke before a joint session of the North Carolina legislature, as part of his crusade for national education standards and a testing plan, he called Hunt a “mentor and friend,” whose work was influenced by Hunt’s labors to create national teaching standards. Indeed, Hunt’s wilderness years outside elective office were spent as founding chair of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which to date has certified over 141,000 teachers with the profession’s highest credential.

Hunt never missed an opportunity to promote this cause to Clinton, even if it meant being aggressive. A White House staffer once told me that Clinton always insisted on understanding how the federally supported teaching certification program was progressing because Hunt was sure to grill him about it.

Photos of Hunt and Clinton are like a time capsule from a bygone era. For instance, there was a joint announcement of a public-private partnership to bring Internet access to the state (and a bit of a tug-of-war over who should get credit).

There were their combined efforts to pass a “global settlement agreement” between tobacco companies and the feds, which faltered, and later a “master settlement agreement” with the states that was sealed. There was their mutual understanding that education had to start before kindergarten and that it was a winning issue with voters—something New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani latched onto over 30 years after Hunt.

The Clinton-Hunt friendship is a testament to the ideals of intergovernmental relations—that federal and state leaders should cooperate. One area that’s particularly telling about how things have changed is disaster funding. The Clinton years allowed Hunt to boast about securing federal dollars for North Carolina after devastating hurricanes; one wonders how Hunt would navigate President Donald Trump’s truculent withholding of disaster relief.

Just because both men were Democrats didn’t guarantee success. Hunt served as governor during Jimmy Carter’s administration, but that relationship was fraught, with fights over college funding and tobacco, the state’s cash crop.

January will mark a quarter-century since Clinton and Hunt last held elective office. North Carolinians should remember that their bond produced outcomes that benefited the Tar Heel State. So should the rest of us. Their relationship continues to serve as a national model during these divisive times.

The post What Bill Clinton Learned from Jim Hunt and Why It Still Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump is a singular—and solitary—figure.

“I alone can fix it,” he solipstically declared in 2016, before his first presidential run. Now in his second term, he’s been a one-man tsunami, destroying decades-long global alliances, creating chaos in the global economy with his unilateral tariffs, and unleashing bitter partisanship domestically.

Like a kid locked in a toy store after midnight (or the drunken raccoon who recently trashed a Virginia liquor store), he’s gleefully demolished cherished institutions. He’s defaced the Kennedy Center by adding his name and bulldozed the East Wing for a garish ballroom. He’s trampled on the presidency’s traditional decorum with unhinged late night rants on social media. Especially appalling was Trump’s attack this week on the beloved director Rob Reiner, which led to rare bipartisan condemnation. Ever the narcissist, Trump turned Reiner’s tragic death into just desserts for Reiner’s opposition to the president’s policies.

We can blame our national habit of venerating iconoclasts, a tendency Trump exploited to leverage himself into office. We like to lionize the man who speaks out—the brave rebel who defies the establishment.

We revere the visionary genius of the solo entrepreneur and the pluck of the “self-made” billionaire. We mythologize the pioneer and the cowboy—the rugged, self-reliant men who tamed the West. It’s no coincidence that Tom Cruise’s world-saving hero in Top Gun has the call sign “Maverick.” Many of the presidents Americans most admire are the ones who challenged the conventional wisdom of the day and forged new paths for the country’s future: Lincoln, FDR, JFK.

But for every iconoclast, there’s a crank. For every visionary, a conspiracist. For every genius, a madman. After FDR, Trump. Idiosyncrasy becomes transgression, and defiance becomes insurrection.

Above and beyond the immediate and obvious wreckage of the last 11 months, Trump’s gospel of self-reliance has inflicted deeper wounds on America’s communal identity. Too many of us have been told that we don’t belong, are no longer welcome, or aren’t “American” enough. GOP policies, moreover, aim to erode the collective institutions that undergird our social fabric. In the selfish self-centeredness of Trump’s America, you’re on your own.

Take, for instance, Republicans’ current opposition to Obamacare and the extension of premium subsidies for those who buy their coverage through this program. The great achievement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to transform the outrageously expensive and opaque individual market for health insurance into a collective enterprise—a marketplace that allows individuals to pool their risk with others and reduce their individual exposure. This is how insurance is supposed to work: The more people there are in the pool, the lower the costs for everyone.

The GOP’s refusal to extend premium subsidies will send costs soaring for millions of Americans, many of whom will now choose to go uninsured. The impact on the ACA marketplaces is obvious: Fewer people buying insurance means smaller pools and higher costs. This is turn could prompt even more people to drop out, leading to what health care economists call a “death spiral” for the ACA. The result could be a return to the individual market status quo ante, when nearly 50 million Americans—or 1 in 5 of the non-elderly—were uninsured.

What meager “solutions” Trump and Republicans have offered are also geared toward individual assistance, rather than shoring up the collective infrastructure of insurance. Trump’s idea to give people cash for health care would leave people on their own to pay for their care out of pocket. GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy’s amendment to this proposal, to expand individual health savings accounts, would do the same. Few Americans on their own can afford to protect themselves from the catastrophic expenses of a serious accident or illness.

Health insurance isn’t the only arena where the GOP is pushing ideas to undermine shared societal responsibility. Republicans love school vouchers, for instance, because they’re a backdoor mechanism for gutting public education. (See a related analysis by PPI’s Rachel Canter below.) And who needs Social Security when you can have your very own “Trump Account”? (Read my early critique here.)

Future presidents can restore the Rose Garden and rebuild relationships with the allies Trump has spat upon. But the larger project of collective national identity and mutual responsibility might take generations to repair.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders ditched the Articles of Confederation because they realized that a loose structure of individual states would make the forging of a great nation impossible. They understood that America is powerful when it’s united: In common purpose, with common values, and in collective regard for the common welfare. We can’t let Trump destroy that.

The post Donald Trump’s Go-it-Alone America appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump’s comments to White House reporters last week about the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery sale should terrify every American: 

I wouldn’t want to see the same company end up with CNN … I think CNN should be sold because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent … I think any deal should—it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately. 

In separate remarks, Trump said he would be “involved” in the deal, and his loyalist attorney general, Pam Bondi, said the Justice Department’s antitrust division would oversee it. In plain sight, the president of the United States is hijacking federal power to decide who owns the media that covers him. So much for freedom of the press.  

You can thwart Trump’s attempt to control the media. Donate to the Washington Monthly and strike a blow for independent media.  

Instead of raising alarms about Trump’s dictatorial behavior, the leading suitors of Warner Bros. Discovery—Netflix and Paramount—have been currying the president’s favor. Shortly before the preliminary deal struck by Netflix, the company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, met with Trump in the Oval Office, most likely hoping to prevent any interference. But under the terms of that deal, Warner Bros. Discovery would be split, and Netflix would only take over half of the company, the half without CNN. That’s not what Trump wants. 

In response to the Netflix announcement, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover bid. Paramount was recently bought by multi-billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, who added it to their Skydance Media. Back in 2016, Larry Ellison backed then-Senator Marco Rubio in the Republican presidential primaries and Senator Tim Scott in the 2024 ones. Still, like so many CEOs, he has been ingratiating himself with Trump ever since, as detailed in the April 2025 The New York Times article “How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul.”  

When the Ellisons’ Skydance Media snapped up Paramount, it rapidly moved to make its CBS News subsidiary Trump-friendlier by tapping Bari Weiss to run it. (Trump had pressured the previous Paramount ownership under Shari Redstone to cough up $16 million and settle a flimsy lawsuit accusing CBS News’s 60 Minutes of making deceptive edits to an interview with Kamala Harris.) For good measure, the Ellisons bought a piece of the social media powerhouse TikTok.  

Now their eyes are on Warner Bros. Discovery. Unlike with the Netflix proposal, Paramount would not split the acquisition, thereby making CNN its own. The Wall Street Journal reported that “During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.” 

Yet Trump is still unhappy, because the Ellisons haven’t made CBS News a full-fledged propaganda outlet. When 60 Minutes interviewed Trump loyalist-turned-critic Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump raged on his social media page, “My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!”  

So, we have a president asserting he can decide who owns CNN and pressuring both suitors to woo him, which they seem willing to do.  

If we don’t want this craven spectacle to represent the future of American media, then we need to make sure independent media outlets continue to have the resources to operate. That’s why your donation to the Washington Monthly is so critical. 

At the Washington Monthly, we don’t seek the president’s favor, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. We exist to help you understand Washington better and to help Washington govern better. In the Trump era, we don’t obsess about every bit of Trump rage-bait. We focus on what Trump is doing and how to fix what he’s broken. 

If Trump had his way, independent media would no longer exist. He has used personal intimidation of professional journalists, favorable treatment of propagandists masquerading as journalists, litigation, threats of lost broadcast licenses, and now interference in merger approvals to bend the Fourth Estate to his will.  

With your $50 tax-deductible contribution, you’ll get a free annual subscription to the print edition of the Monthly. 

We cannot allow this president, or any president, get away with such brazen attempts at media manipulation. Please donate NOW to the Washington Monthly and help keep independent media alive. 

The post Trump Is Trying to Control the Corporate Media. Here’s How You Can Stop Him appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I recently spoke at Jesus College, Cambridge, to about 200 students, professors, and media figures about “Autocracy in America: Law and Politics in the Second Trump Administration.” The teaser for the event in a local blog was “US lawyer comes to Jesus,” which made me reassure my friends and family that the reports of my conversion were exaggerated. 

I reviewed the shocking departure from constitutional values and presidential norms of the second Donald Trump administration. In just 10 months, in a manner reminiscent of the Argentine junta of the 1970s, he has sent masked ICE agents in unmarked vans to seize presumed undocumented immigrants and deport them without due process to horrific prisons in El Salvador or to failed African states where they cannot speak the language. With a green light from the Supreme Court, many of these deportees were targeted based on skin color or their accents. He has unlawfully deployed the National Guard to U.S. cities. There are also the extrajudicial killings in international waters.  

The Brits I spoke with were most concerned about the drift toward autocracy in America, especially the targeting of political opponents, political gerrymandering, and the weakening of our constitutional system of checks and balances. Until the recent flap over the Jeffrey Epstein files release, Trump had full control over Congress, and it seems over the supermajority in the Supreme Court. Hopefully, nevermore. 

Slipping in the polls, stunned by fissures within the MAGA ranks, and set back by Democratic gains in the recent election—where Democrats won governorships by overwhelming margins and some local races by astonishing totals—Trump is pivoting like a whirling dervish. Under pressure from MAGA allies in Congress, he changed his position on releasing the Epstein files. Unless Pam Bondi succeeds in redacting some of the most embarrassing details, we may finally learn what happened in his 15-year relationship with the convicted pedophile.  

He turned to Zohran Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York City on an affordability platform. Trump must realize that it is the high cost of living across America that, more than anything else, helped him beat Kamala Harris. And it is affordability more than anything else that explains the poor performance of Republicans earlier this month and Trump’s decline. The latest poll numbers show that Trump’s approval is below water. Only 33 percent of US adults approve of how he is managing the government, down from 43 percent in March.  

So, after labeling Mamdani a “communist,” he now tries to align with Americans who voted for him a year ago and supported Mamdani earlier this month. Trump loves winners and hates losers.  

Of course, affordability is a problematic issue for Donald Trump. To hang the bell on the cat, his inflationary tariffs have caused the economy to reach a point where healthcare and basic living expenses will be beyond many Americans’ means. 

Trump has fluctuated on Ukraine, and the negotiations are constantly changing. First, he thought Zelensky wasn’t sufficiently grateful. Then, while flying to Israel on October 12, he told reporters that, “if the war is not settled, we may very well transfer Tomahawk missiles to Zelensky. But at a meeting with Zelensky in Washington on October 17, five days later, Trump rejected the request. Later, after the Pentagon approved giving Ukraine the Tomahawks, he reconsidered and said he would sell Ukraine Patriot missiles, which can deter missiles and drones targeting military sites and civilians. Ultimately, he shifted back to calling Zelensky “ungrateful,” giving him until Thanksgiving to accept a 28-point “peace plan” that benefits Putin’s aggression, or face losing further U.S. support.  

November 30 marks Winston Churchill’s birthday. The deal Trump proposed is another Munich, rewarding aggression. Would Churchill have ever said that Trump brings us “peace in our time?” 

Foreign affairs expert Richard Haass is shocked by the Trump proposal. In a special edition of his newsletter “Home and Away,” he writes: 

The plan is extremely pro-Russian and one-sided. It favors, rather than punishes, Russia for this aggressive war of choice. It also requires Ukraine to rely not on itself but on Russia and the United States for its safety. The plan never should have been proposed; it definitely should not have been put into action. One can only wonder what influenced the American envoys—Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll—when they created and promoted it. 

There is, as well, a sordid quality to it all. The United States is to receive compensation for any guarantees it provides and share in the profits generated by infrastructure projects in Ukraine funded by frozen Russian assets. It also pledges to sign an economic cooperation pact with Russia covering just about anything and everything. 

The position the President is putting Ukraine in is simply unconscionable. 

But get this last pivot. Last week, Trump said the plan was not America’s “final offer,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to distance Washington from it before insisting just hours later that the US had authored it. In a Truth Social post, Trump strangely declined to blame Russia for the Ukraine conflict, instead aiming his ire at Kiev and European allies for failing to endorse his truce proposal. 

Meanwhile, a joint Ukraine-US statement says there’s now a whole new deal in play, which it calls an “updated and revised framework document”. The Financial Times quotes one of the delegates, though—Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister Sergiy Kyslytsya—who talks of a new 19-point plan with “very little left” from the original draft. If the rewrite is sensible, it will likely be unacceptable to Putin. Security guarantees for Ukraine are what’s key here. If negotiations break down, Trump may pivot again and supply the Tomahawks, or not.

Given the English parliamentary system, many at Cambridge were surprised that Trump could survive. Britain is accustomed to frequent changes in government. Between 2016 and 2024, it had four prime ministers. When it was revealed that its Defense Secretary John Profumo had an extramarital affair with Christine Keeler, who was also the mistress of a Soviet agent, Profumo was forced out, as was the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan in the next election.  

France likewise has a chaotic form of government. It has elected five prime ministers in the past two years. And they still do not have a budget. 

One of the chapels in the newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral is dedicated to the patron saint of Paris, Saint Genevieve. Beneath a statue of Genevieve is the inscription, which we would do well to take measure, “In Saint Genevieve the spirit of strength restores law and justice when they are flouted.”  

We need a Saint Genevieve in America. We have Trump for at least three more years, assuming he chooses to leave office in 2029, as the Constitution requires.  

British lawyers I spoke with were bewildered by the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where summary orders that are said to be interim become law without explanation, opinion, or even revealing which justices voted for the final decision. 

Then, there are the pardons. The rule of law is under serious challenge in the United States. Trump has pardoned violent criminals convicted and serving out their sentences over the events of January 6 as though they were Thanksgiving turkeys. His recent pardon of Joe Lewis, the former owner of Tottenham Hotspur football club, who pleaded guilty to insider trading in the U.S. last year, is a case in point, and of great interest in the U.K. The move was the latest in a series of high-profile pardons by Trump. Last month, he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of crypto exchange Binance, who had pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. He also commuted the sentence of former Republican congressman George Santos, who was convicted of wire fraud and identity theft. He pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law and appointed him ambassador to France. 

“This president views the pardon power as a personal tool that he can use when it benefits him personally, politically, or financially, without assessing whether the use of the pardon power benefits the American public,” Elizabeth Oyer, a former senior Justice Department attorney under Trump told The Washington Post. The “traditional rules and procedures about pardons have been thrown out the window,” Oyer said. She called Trump’s use of the pardon power a “crisis.” 

But there is some cause for optimism. Looking at the signs of recent events, we see what was once unimaginable just a few months ago. Trump may be losing his hold on the Republican Party. One of the most telling signs was the announcement by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, that she is resigning her House seat rather than allowing herself to be treated by Trump like what she called “a battered wife hoping it all goes away and gets better.” 

For years, Greene was, of course, one of Trump’s most loyal and high-profile hard-right supporters, but she has recently broken with him. That included issues like health care and the government shutdown, as well as pushing for the release of Justice Department files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Because of her betrayal, Greene has become a target for Trump, who has repeatedly attacked her on social media, calling her “a traitor” and “a ranting Lunatic” who has gone “Far Left.” Early Saturday, he wrote on social media that her decision to leave Congress was based on “PLUMMETING Poll Numbers and not wanting to face a Primary Challenger with a strong Trump Endorsement.”  

As John Lewis, the great civil rights leader and Congressman, famously said, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” Trump is blinking; hope may be on its way.  

The post An American Comes to Jesus  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

MAGA is going through a rough period. The bitter breakup between President Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files is roiling the far right, forcing movement conservatives to make uncomfortable choices in the political divorce.  

Trump should, in theory, have a clear advantage. The president commands a loyal army of supporters and the authority of the Oval Office. He has used the executive branch to persecute his opponents and reward his friends. Until now, those who have opposed him in intra-Republican battles have not typically fared well. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation from Congress effective January 5, following a barrage of threats. But it is far too soon to suggest that Trump has won the battle with Greene: indeed, Greene and her allies forced Trump to backpedal on the Epstein files. The House and Senate have both voted for their release, and now the focus shifts to whether and how the Trump administration will meddle with or obstruct the release. 

It also seems more likely than not that Greene is distancing herself from Trump and his allies and waiting for him to fall before making her next move, perhaps in 2028. Indeed, it is shocking that more Republicans have not publicly broken with Trump and taken their chances on better surviving a post-Trump future. 

Never has an American president been embroiled in such a lurid scandal as the Epstein business. Trump was among the best friends of the world’s most notorious convicted pedophile. His name appears more than 1,500 times in the Epstein documents being released, including multiple stories of him ogling young women and girls at Epstein’s residence. In one email, Epstein offered to serve as an intermediary between Trump and Russian government agents. Trump allegedly wrote a salacious and suggestive birthday letter to Epstein, joking that they shared secret interests that “never age,” crudely written over the outline of a female figure that appears less than fully adult, with his signature on the figure’s lower area.  

No other politician would survive this. To be sure, Trump has a Teflon-like aura. His strange combination of shamelessness and scoundrel’s luck has allowed him to squeeze out of every impossible situation. But this? 

Remember, too, that the Epstein story didn’t come out of nowhere, nor was the obsession with it exclusive to the left. It was QAnon and far-right conspiracies about supposed child sexual abuse connections to Democrats that animated much of the Republican base. Trump promised to release the Epstein files; Attorney General Pam Bondi said they were “on her desk” and then made a big show of giving binders of Epstein documents to MAGA influencers, only for them to find they contained publicly available information. Trump’s followers have been primed for years (often by Trump himself) to demand the Epstein files. Now, Trump is flip-flopping: first cajoling members of Congress in the Situation Room to stop them from voting to release the files, then encouraging them to vote to release the files once he knew he had lost that fight, then directing Bondi to open an investigation—but only of Democrats—in a partisan abuse of power. Now it seems the “investigation” may become an excuse to withhold the files, or to release them selectively. 

Which brings us back to Greene, one of Trump’s earliest supporters. She was in the MAGA vanguard, a believer in rightwing conspiracy theories from contrails to Jewish space lasers. Whatever she may lack in critical thinking skills, she makes up for in raw savvy with a particular kind of voter central to MAGA’s rise. And she has long been demanding the release of the Epstein files. 

Is she committing political suicide, or is she again one step ahead of where the MAGA voter is going? 

Trump’s power comes from two sources: first, the presidency; and second, Republicans have a difficult time winning when he’s not on the ballot. The reason Steve Bannon is so keen on finagling a Trump third term as president is that MAGA has no credible, electable heir who can turn out the marginal and unexpected voters that Trump the showman can. 

But Trump’s approval rating has crashed to all-time lows, Democrats just routed Republicans in off-year elections, and his credibility on every issue from the economy to immigration is underwater. He cannot constitutionally appear on the ballot again despite Bannon’s fantasizing; even if he could, he would be in his 80s, older than Joe Biden was in 2024, and showing physical and mental deterioration. Greene understands that the post-Trump era is in the offing, and that even before the fight over the Epstein release, the president did nothing to support her gubernatorial, senatorial, or even presidential ambitions.  

With no chance of being his designated heir, she knows challenging Trump is risky. Still, it’s far more dangerous to shield Epstein associates, perhaps including the president, from their long-overdue consequences. The party got behind her in the lonely crusade to release the files, and a few oft-derided allies, like Representatives Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Thomas Massie, joined her. Eventually, congressional Republicans fell in line, and Trump had to feign at least joining the parade. And having joined the Democratic left in labeling Israel’s war with Hamas as “genocide” and supporting some extension of Obamacare subsidies, she’s shown a kind of ideological shapeshifting that’s positively Trumpian, perfect for today’s GOP and tomorrow’s. 

Democrats are eager for Republicans to launch a full-throated critique of the president. But Republicans, too, may be wise to join with those, like Greene, already looking ahead to a future that doesn’t revolve around Trump. 

The post The Clairvoyant Marjorie Taylor Greene  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Of the five big news stories of last week, which one will be most remembered by historians? Let’s rank them from least likely to most likely.

“Quiet, piggy”

That was a horrible thing for the President of the United States to say to a [Bloomberg] reporter. If anyone else—from a First Grader to a CEO—said something so vile, there would be consequences. Yes, presidents sometimes snap at reporters. Franklin Roosevelt once told someone to go sit in the corner with a dunce cap. But FDR was usually nice. Trump is usually mean, especially with women reporters. It was outrageous for him to threaten ABC News reporter Mary Bruce with lifting ABC’s license just for asking a question about the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was, according to the CIA, cut up with a bone saw on orders of Mohammed bin Salman, the man sitting at Trump’s side.

“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question.”

Disgusting. Bloomberg and ABC News issued statements backing their reporters, but that’s not enough. When something like this happens, reporters and their news organizations should get together and demand an apology. If Trump refuses, they should boycott the news conferences. And one of them should say something in real time, rather than just stand there silently. How about: “Why are you so rude, Mr. President?”

Trump needs the legacy media more than people realize. He doesn’t want to just be talking to Fox, Breitbart News, and Newsmax. These bigger news organizations have the leverage that they need to start using. Media is his oxygen, and if he’s denied it, he’ll fold.

Mamdani meeting

Trump is a master programmer, and he understood that flipping the script on the man he routinely called a communist would be good TV. But it was also kind of logical when you think about it. They need each other. Mayor-elect Mamdani needs Trump because he has to have money from Washington, or New York City will be thrust into chaos. And Trump needs Mamdani to latch onto the affordability agenda, which he has to start identifying with if he’s going to have any hope at all in the midterms. Besides, they both genuinely love New York. My guess is that in private, Mamdani learned the Zelensky lesson (adopted by every leader who meets with Trump) and found something to praise, perhaps the Trump family’s record on building middle-class housing.

Even so, I expect this agreement to last less time than the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact—the fascist-communist pact, to put it in the context of this strange White House meeting, which ended with Trump telling Mamdani in front of the press that it was OK to call him a fascist. (Mamdani did not give Trump permission to call him a communist.) The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by the way, broke down in less than two years, and I give Mamdani and Trump about six months before Trump finds some excuse to go after the new mayor.

In the meantime, if Mamdani can somehow convince Trump not to send ICE and troops onto the streets of New York City, maybe we can avoid the prospect of some knucklehead throwing a Molotov cocktail at someone, which would give Trump an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and plunge the nation much deeper into crisis.

Ukraine deal

Speaking of the Russians, this so-called peace plan that Steve Witkoff wrote with the Russians—there’s actually Russian language in there—is a nonstarter. It demands that Ukraine give up territory that Russia took by force and reduce the size of its army in exchange for the kind of vague security guarantee that Russia has repeatedly violated. I don’t think it will be remembered by history because it’s just the opening move in what will likely be an unsuccessful peace effort. If Trump were ever able to ram a treaty down Ukraine’s throat, you can expect that Ukrainian partisans would continue to resist. Trump is making Neville Chamberlain look like Winston Churchill.

The Epstein files

Yes, this scandal will bedevil Trump to the end of his term, but it’s important to remember that there’s not likely to be evidence of law-breaking by Trump, or by anybody else, because the FBI has had these files for a while. If somebody needed to be prosecuted, the way Ghislaine Maxwell was, that would have happened under Biden.

So what we’re likely to see is highly embarrassing material, not just about some people we may not have heard of much yet, but about Trump. That’s why he has been so desperate not to release the files, and why he and Mike Johnson will do anything they can to find loopholes in the new law and otherwise delay things. Trump always says Nixon should have burned the tapes, but destruction of evidence is much harder to do here, fortunately, without some career official (or IT guy) leaking it.

My guess is the big news will most likely involve what Michael Wolff says was called “The Pussy Committee,” which the mainstream media will have to find a euphemism for. (I wish Wolff and I had discussed it here, though we covered a lot of what he knew long before most of the press started paying much attention). “The Pussy Committee” was Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s jokey interest in pimping for Prince Andrew—finding him women so they could social climb. When the files come out, get ready for Trump to be called “President Pimp.”

“Punishable by death”

The story of this week that I think is most likely to leave a lasting impression when historians write about the Trump Era is that the President of the United States threatened members of Congress with execution for their “seditious behavior” in telling the military that they are not required to carry out unlawful orders. They aren’t. That’s the law. It’s also the right of these members to say so under the Constitution. Real sedition is what happened on January 6.

I’m a little unsure about their timing. Why now? But this was nonetheless an important thing for Senator Mark Kelly, Senator Elissa Slotkin, Representative Jason Crow, and other fine legislators (all veterans of the armed forces or the intelligence community) to get out there. It put down a marker. Conscientious members of the military now understand that if they are asked to do something illegal off the coast of Venezuela, say, or in another context, they can go to Congress for help.

The larger point is that we have never seen anything approaching this in American history. Even the worst despot does not publicly threaten his critics with death. Of course, the story will be infinitely worse if the death threats that these members of Congress are now receiving were to end in violence. But even if they don’t, Donald Trump trying to back off a bit on a rightwing radio show doesn’t cut it. He should be censured by the Senate and the House for what he said.

The post The Most Historic Trump Story of Last Week appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York, met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office today in what might have seemed like an improbable love fest. Though the 34-year-old democratic socialist and the 79-year-old Republican would seem to have nothing in common, they do share a couple of important ties. Both have called the borough of Queens home, and both were catapulted to office on the issue of affordability.  

Before the meeting, the two men traded insults, calling each other “communist” and “fascist.” Afterward, Trump said of Mamdani, “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job. I think he’s going to surprise some conservative people, actually.” Mamdani was civil, too: “It was a productive meeting based on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and the need to deliver affordability for New Yorkers,” he said. The early pundit consensus for this surprising turnabout is that Trump loves a winner. This is certainly true, but their topic of conversation also reflects the Trump administration’s recognition that rising prices have become a political burden. 

Mamdani won what’s been called “the second-hardest job in America” by relentlessly harping on the cost of living for average New Yorkers and ways to drive it down, from free buses to easing regulations on Halal food carts. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia with a similar message about taming high prices. Republicans, who swept to power in 2024 primarily out of frustration with inflation, recognize that the Democrats’ new strategy rests on a simple truth: Fairly or not, the cost of living gets blamed on whoever’s in charge. 

Or at least they should. Instead, Trump has been criticizing the Democrats’ mantra of affordability as misappropriation. “It should be our word, not theirs,” he said this week. He might have seen the Oval Office meeting as a way to reclaim the word by embracing its best-known exponent. Meanwhile, his administration is throwing out a raft of explanations for rising prices in hopes that one might work. In a live interview on Thursday at the neoclassical Andrew Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with Breitbart News, Vice President J.D. Vance cycled between denial, justification, bargaining, and blame. 

“The new buzzword, if you will, is affordability,” Breitbart’s Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle said, referencing Mamdani’s campaign. “People out there feel like the economic situation isn’t that great.” He added, “Look, we’re 10 months to the day here since [Donald Trump’s second] inauguration. But they want to see more. They want to see more action. … What’s your message to those out there who feel like they haven’t seen that yet?” 

I sat in the audience and counted eight different answers from Vance, a Yale Law graduate. 

First, it’s the congressional Democrats’ fault. The government shutdown, an act of “economic terrorism,” slowed the momentum we would see now.  

Two: “We get it, and we hear you.”  

But, three, “the Biden administration put us in such a very, very tough spot.” Vance used the familiar example of high egg prices. If it went from $2 a dozen to a high of $8 during Biden’s term, he noted, that it remains at, say, $6.50 now is still a significant problem. (Explanation four. Also, egg prices are actually back to $2 a dozen, and it was primarily avian flu that drove the increase.) “And,” he added—point five—“the thing that I’d ask for the American people is a little bit of patience.” The economy wasn’t harmed over 10 months, he said; it was four years of importing foreign workers under Biden (six) that followed a 40-year policy of offshoring American jobs (seven). And finally (eight), hope is around the corner: “It’s going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming.” 

To be fair, several of those answers fit into one refrain: a decades-long betrayal of the American worker is being reversed by Trump, who needs a little more time and forbearance to finish the job. But if you consider a previous response of Vance’s, there is even a ninth: There is no problem.  

A few hours before Vance’s interview, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a long-delayed report from September that showed 119,000 new jobs—respectable growth, and more than anticipated. “If you look below the surface, I think the numbers are actually better,” Vance said. Why? Well, the Biden numbers were worse than you thought: Wage growth was eaten up by inflation (true, though you could spin that as wages keeping pace with record inflation), and because all the jobs were going to the foreign-born, “there wasn’t any job growth at all.” (False.) In that context, September’s jobs and growth in post-inflation wages aren’t just modest improvements: they’re the first real growth in years. 

The mood in the Mellon Auditorium was defiant and jubilant: Vance took the stage to a standing ovation and received applause for his immigration remarks that echoed throughout the Beaux-Arts interior. Boyle’s questions were appropriately obsequious for an editor who, apparently, Vance once urged Jeff Bezos to hire at The Washington Post.

But outside that room, Trump’s approval ratings remain as low as they’ve been, with 76 percent of respondents holding a negative view of the economy and 61 percent disapproving of the president’s economic policies, according to a recent Fox News poll. Not so long ago, another administration was trumpeting the strength of its economy, touting statistics that didn’t square with the experience of angry voters. 

That the Trump administration’s affordability problems are self-created could be considered a strength. Joe Biden didn’t have many palatable answers for a pandemic supply shock and a grinding war in Europe. But Trump could, if he chose, reverse his tariffs—which will cost the average household $1,200 this year and $1,600 the next, according to the Tax Foundation—and direct ICE to stop arresting contractors and restaurant workers without criminal records.  

Instead, Vance and Trump are staying the course. And they’re eagerly elevating Mamdani, certain that not only their base but swing voters will recoil from his socialist label and big-government policies. Maybe so. But they’re picking a politician relentlessly focused on the cost of living as their foil, while offering shifting explanations for their own performance.  

Vance did share one tidbit on Thursday: There’s a “great” new Republican health plan coming, one that is “going to get Republican and Democrat support.” (The Trump administration has made promises like this one before.) So, voters who suffered through the shutdown and are now eyeing health care premium increases need only a modicum of patience. Like that big economic boom, lower prices are just around the corner. 

The post Affordability Wars appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump has never polled well. While in office, in the Real Clear Politics job approval averages, he has never cracked 50 percent, save for a brief period at the beginning of his second term. His average favorability rating—which, unlike job approval, is measured while out of office—never has at all. 

But in a polarized era, in elections including third-party candidates determined by the Electoral College and not the popular vote, keeping these numbers above 45 percent has been for Trump—shall we say—good enough for government work. About three weeks before his 2024 presidential victory, Trump managed to push his favorability rating above 45 percent for the first time since the spring of 2022. And Trump kept both his job approval and favorability numbers above 45 percent throughout this year. 

Until now. 

Trump’s favorables dipped below 45 percent in August and have tracked around 44 percent since then. More striking is the decline in Trump’s job approval rating since the run-up to the shutdown. Since September 21, the president’s approval rating has declined by four points, from 46.3 to 42.3 percent.  

The low 40s is where Trump was for most of his first term. During the midterm election year of 2018, Trump largely held steady at 43 percent, ticking up to 44 just before Election Day, with his favorability lower at 42 percent. Then Republicans got clobbered in House races, losing 40 seats and control of the chamber. 

Trump actually cleared 45 percent in the spring of 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But he squandered that goodwill with his response to the murder of George Floyd and his bizarre public health messages, sending his job approval down to 41 percent in July 2020, partially recovering to 44 percent through most of October before losing re-election. (Technically, in the RCP average, Trump passed the 45 percent threshold the day before the November 3 election, but that calculation appears to have been based on a relatively small number of polls sampled in very late October.) 

Of course, with a year before the midterm elections, Trump has time to regain three points or more and give the GOP a puncher’s chance to hold the House next year. And to get there, he’s hardly above gimmicky ideas—recently, he mused about $2,000 government checks sent to most Americans.  

Yet what should unnerve Republicans is that Trump’s second-term agenda is already firmly in place—including tariffs, deportations, civil servant layoffs, and the One Big Beautiful Bill—and the public is unimpressed. Only 36 percent of Americans say the country is on the “right track,” down seven points since June.  

Despite entering office on a promise of cutting prices, the most recent poll from The Economist/YouGov asked voters what their most important issue is and—surprise, surprise—the number one response is “inflation/prices.” Trump may have flinched from his most extreme tariff proposals, but tariff revenue has still more than doubled this year, and that’s a tax hike on us all.  

The next two top issues for voters are “jobs and the economy” and “health care.” The unemployment rate remains relatively low, but concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of work are widespread. And Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, didn’t help matters on CNBC yesterday when he praised the state of the labor market by claiming, “firms are finding that AI is making their workers so productive that they don’t necessarily have to hire the new kids out of college and so on.” Unlike Hassett, most people think it’s a bad thing that AI is making it harder for college graduates to enter the workforce. 

And then there’s health care, which, as I noted last week, is poised to derail the GOP’s midterms once again. Trump and the GOP hoped voters would applaud the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill. But its cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are inflicting real harm on working-class households. Granted, some of these cuts are delayed until after the midterm, but spikes in premiums are already happening. Republican policies are exacerbating the problem, and Republican politicians have no consensus plan that would undo the damage. 

Trump’s best issue in polls is immigration, but that’s only the seventh most important issue to voters. And “best” is relative. According to the RCP averages, approval of Trump’s handling of immigration is slightly underwater. Plus, we have hard evidence of immigration backfiring on Republicans among swing voters. Consider Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 291 votes in 2024. Bolts reported that the incumbent Bucks County Sheriff, Republican Fred Harran, lost re-election this month by 11 points to a Democrat who attacked his eager partnering with ICE.  

We also saw immigration play a big role in the Aurora, Colorado city council elections. Denver’s Fox News affiliate reported, “Aurora has long been led by a conservative-leaning council and has a Republican mayor, but voters in Colorado’s most diverse city, which was thrust under a national spotlight on immigration enforcement, rejected three conservative incumbent council members and elected progressives in their places … One of the [defeated] incumbents, Danielle Jurinsky, had made a name for herself aligning with President Donald Trump on immigration issues, calling attention to what they had called a takeover of the city by Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.” 

That’s what happened downballot this month when Trump’s job approval sank below 45 percent. Without a change in trajectory, expect more Republican carnage on Election Day 2026. 

The post Trump’s Poll Numbers Just Entered the Danger Zone  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Dear Reader, 

When Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps and I launched the Washington Monthly podcast last year, it was a shoestring affair—and still is. If you listen to our earliest episodes—please don’t, actually—you’ll hear uneven audio and cringe at my efforts to channel the honeyed smoothness of my audio hero, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. (Garrett, however, sounds great.)  

Our first guest and guinea pig was Washington Monthly contributor Peter Shane. The legal scholar warned listeners of President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to use “recess appointments” to install a cabinet—an act that seems only mildly transgressive in retrospect—and that the 47^th president has used aggressively.  

Join the conversation at the Washington Monthly.  

Since then, Garrett and I have spoken with the sharpest legal, political, and economic minds about Trump’s wrecking-ball presidency such as the popular YouTuber Natalie Wynn, who has dissected the allure of conspiracism; journalist Michael Grunwald, whose new book chronicles the environmental destruction caused by agriculture; and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson, who offered lessons Americans can learn from China’s dissidents.  

We know that videos and podcasts are how many Americans get their news. We want the Monthly to be among the voices you turn to for fresh thoughts, new ideas about defeating MAGA and promoting a common-sense vision for America, or thoughtful analysis that puts our chaotic world into context. We’re building a community. And that goes for our newsletters, too. 

But we need your help. This is only possible with your support. Your contributions allow us to expand the Monthly’s presence online, on your feeds, and in your headphones. We hope you’ll take a moment to support us with a tax-deductible contribution. Please do it now. For only $50, you get a complimentary year of our print edition. Next year promises to be one of the most consequential in the history of our democracy. Join us. 

All the best, 

Anne Kim 

Senior Editor 

The post A Podcast With Purpose appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The release of Jeffrey Epstein’s email archives by House Oversight Committee members has quelled the upset in Democratic circles over the shutdown climbdown and returned the focus to what President Donald Trump knew about the late financier’s crimes.  

Whether that focus can be sustained is unclear. The House will soon vote to direct the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents, thanks to a discharge petition that collected its 218th vote after four Republicans broke ranks, and Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona was allowed to take her seat after a 50-day delay imposed by Republicans.  

However, Senate prospects for an Epstein document dump are murky. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is not obligated to schedule a vote and has not promised to do so. Even if it cleared Congress, Trump would almost surely veto it. 

Democrats could try to make Trump’s Epstein stonewalling a midterm election issue, with promises to subpoena documents if they gain control of one or both chambers. After all, overwhelming majorities want the documents released. But focus on Epstein waxes with new developments in the underage sex trafficking case, then subsides as other stories dominate the news cycle.  

Trump, of course, often creates his own news cycles. He has a bottomless capacity to shock.  

But now he has an opportunity to distract by doing something helpful: alleviating the imminent spike in health insurance costs from the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies. 

Politico reports that “White House officials and Republican lawmakers are cognizant” of how health care concerns helped Democrats take the House in the 2018 midterms and “are looking to coalesce around a plan for the future of the health care system.” 

Just as before the 2018 midterms, which were disastrous for the GOP, that plan doesn’t exist, but Republicans are considering their options. Per Politico, “Options that administration officials have publicly teased in recent days include giving money directly to Americans to cover health expenses, and subsidizing out-of-pocket costs for low-income people enrolled in the ACA.” Among congressional Republicans, some “support depositing funds into Health Savings Accounts, which can be used more broadly on expenses and roll over year to year, while others would opt for Flexible Savings Accounts, which expire at the end of the year and are narrower.” NBC News reports Republicans are nowhere near an intra-party consensus on what to support. Significantly, both it and Politico note that Trump has not “ruled out” what Democrats want, a simple extension of the expiring enhanced subsidies.

When it comes to policy, an extension is the best approach to address the disparate impacts of the expiring enhanced subsidies. CNN explains that “More than 90% of [ACA’s 24 million] enrollees are receiving premium assistance, which, for roughly half of policyholders, reduces their monthly cost to $0 or near $0.” Because Democrats during the Biden administration lifted income caps for the enhanced subsidy program, expiration hits middle-income households especially hard. Moreover, the Trump administration has already made the formula for the remaining subsidy stingier. The health policy analysts at KFF estimate the combined impact of the expiring enhanced subsidies and the new subsidy formula means a 45-year-old individual with an annual income of $20,000 would pay $420 more in health insurance premiums for the commonly chosen “Silver Plan,” while a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 would pay $22,635 more, more than a quarter of their income. 

Trump can be miserly, as evidenced by the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court to deny SNAP benefits, but he’s not averse to government largesse when he thinks it serves his interests. He is generally reluctant to do whatever Democrats want him to do. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer already offered a mere one-year extension for a proposed deal to end the shutdown—enough to help Republicans take the issue off the table for the midterm elections—which Trump rejected.  

As he considers his options, Trump must contend with the Republican caucus’s self-styled deficit hawks. They proved willing to rack up more debt by supporting the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in the name of party unity. (Extending the enhanced ACA subsidies would cost about $35 billion a year over 10 years, while the One Big Beautiful Bill will cost about $330 billion a year.) But undoing cuts to the Affordable Care Act may be more than they would swallow. 

The political crosscurrents make a bipartisan health care deal unlikely. Yet Trump could still use the health care issue to distract from the Epstein emails about him knowing about “the girls” and spending hours with one. He could offer a half-baked plan that wouldn’t mitigate the price spikes but could provide political cover and help shift blame to the Democrats.  

In that scenario, the challenge for Democrats will be to keep it simple. They could argue: Democrats would entirely avert the loss of the subsidies, and Republicans would not. No complex details needed.  

Republicans would then find themselves in the unusual position of having to explain the more complex elements of their proposal, without having earned any credibility from the public as genuinely interested in making health care affordable. Quite the opposite, as the One Big Beautiful Bill was hammered for its sharp health care cuts.  

Of course, Trump could always distract with all sorts of insane executive orders, proposals, and comments. But no matter what happens with Epstein or any other Trump act, more than 20 million people will soon get socked with much higher health insurance costs that they are unlikely to forget in November. What’s really in Trump’s interest, and what would really distract from Epstein, is solving the looming insurance premium hikes. However, neither he nor his party has proven capable of crafting any significant health care policies, 16 years after declaring war on the Affordable Care Act, let alone thoughtful ones. 

The post Trump Could Deal With the Epstein Scandal by Addressing Health Care  appeared first on Washington Monthly.