Though he’s running as an independent, Osborn is so far the most promising of the progressive-backed, working-class coded candidates whom the Left hopes will take seats from Republicans in the midterm elections. Incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts is still widely perceived to be the frontrunner in the Cornhusker State, but Osborn is polling in a dead heat at 46.9%, according to Flipr, Nate Silver’s polling site, perhaps in part due to his refreshing perceived distance from the culture wars. He’s maintaining that distance — or the pretense of it — despite audio leaked this month from three separate private meetings that revealed him assuring progressives behind closed doors that he’s campaigning as a social conservative and border hawk only in order to win votes. 

I explain to Osborn that if gender identity is included as a protected category under Title IX, as was decreed by executive order by the Obama administration, though subsequently suspended by President Trump, it means biological boys in girls’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms. “I can’t see myself voting for that,” Osborn answers easily. “I don’t really understand it. I certainly don’t focus on that. I mean, as far as education concerns, that’s at the very bottom for me. We’ve got to teach civics in school. We should be teaching our kids finance.” 

Osborn is a 51-year-old Navy veteran who worked as an industrial mechanic for the Kellogg’s plant in Omaha, and became president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers Union Local 50G. He first appeared on the national political radar while leading a 77-day strike at Kellogg’s in 2021. Following that, he ran for Senate against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in 2024 — and shocked the Beltway by winning 46.5% of the vote, despite getting very little attention from the chattering class.

Of the many red-state candidates Democrats have tried to promote in the Trump era, Osborn has long stood out as the most genuine. Unlike John Fetterman and Graham Platner, he actually is an Average Joe with no pedigree to speak of. Strategists are betting that the pros of being a regular guy will outweigh the cons of his lack of polish.

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In our discussion, Osborn quickly pivots to quality rather than ideology in education. “We are definitely falling behind,” he contends. “They had a record amount of people apply to be a plumber at the Union Plumbing Local 16 in Omaha, and over half the kids that applied failed the math test. I think that’s what we should be talking about.”

This is a savvy example of the balance Osborn needs to strike: agree with the Right on the underlying policy, but downplay its importance to remain palatable to the Left. Nobody else is doing it quite like he is, because he’s actually representative of the median Nebraskan independent voter, who is paying an average of $4.33 for a gallon of gas, isn’t supportive of the Iran War, and is unconvinced by socialism but is looking for some reprieve.  

These frustrations make 2026 fundamentally different from his failed campaign in 2024, Osborn says. Blanket tariffs, an unpassed farm bill, competition from Argentinian beef imports, and the war are major frustrations now bubbling up in conservative ag communities. “I’m starting to see a significant change in rural Nebraska,” he says, “specifically anybody that’s agriculture adjacent.” 

Such voters, he believes, will be responsive to the pitch he shares with me about punching a clock for 20 years, going to work “sick and sore … because that’s what you got to do for your family” and so on. “You know you’re always an injury away from going into the red,” he says. “It’s about being able to connect with the people throughout Nebraska who have the same shared experience through work, hard work.”

Such voters, however, also have plentiful reason to mistrust him. 

Incumbent Ricketts, a multimillionaire businessman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Daddy Warbucks, has successfully branded Osborn “Democrat Dan.” A national GOP operative with knowledge of the race explains Ricketts’s strategy this way: “the main point is always to get back to ‘Dan is a Democrat,’” for two reasons. First, “it’s true,” and second, because it calls attention to him being “wishy-washy” and “untrustworthy.”

On Sept. 1, Nebraska’s The Plains Sentinel published a report based on a leaked recording that showed Osborn pushing back on demands for him to go Left on trans sports. “The state is made up of 50% Republicans, 26% Democrat, and 24% Independents. So my win numbers, mathematically, I need to get 10% to 15% of Republicans to win this race…. How am I going to do that, by fucking saying, ‘Oh, I love trans people, and they should be able to play in sports?’”

Then Politico obtained audio of Osborn telling Democrats that Donald Trump’s border wall is “a symbol of racism” and “does nothing.”

“I knew the wall — it’s a joke. It’s a symbol of racism, really, is what the wall represents. It does nothing, you know,” Osborn told a questioner. Pressed further, he added, “There’s the campaigning side to get elected, and then there’s once you get into office, what are you going to do?” 

Shortly thereafter the Omaha World-Herald got its hands on another leaked recording. This time, Osborn appeared to be denigrating Trump voters. “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska, who lives next to the fucking Trump store as you pull into town and is waving the flag, all he knows is that he’s on the winning team,” Osborn said on the tape, later adding, “[Trump’s] been so effective at taking Billy Bob and his wife Mary Jane or Mary Jo and telling them … you’re on the winning team. And that’s all they care about, because their lives probably suck so fucking bad.” Team Ricketts immediately tried to frame the recording as Osborn’s “deplorables moment.” 

The GOP operative I spoke to said the sports recording is proof Osborn is a “fake independent.” 

“It blows up this whole narrative that he’s an independent guy who’s going to vote for Nebraska in the Senate,” the source said.

Republicans have a point on this. Osborn has run twice against GOP candidates, and was recruited into politics by high-profile progressives tied to Bernie Sanders. He’s been advised by political strategist Morris Katz, known for his work with Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner. Osborn’s campaign also received contributions from Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Montana Sen. Jon Tester. 

“I’d like to thank the banks, big tobacco, foreign lobbyists, and chemical manufacturers funding Ricketts’ campaign for not donating to mine…. The only money I accept is from those who support working people and are tired of the partisanship in Washington,” Osborn says, though he admits that it’s “frustrating” to explain this heavy support from the Left to voters who want to make sure he’s really independent. 

“I would love to see certainly more funding come in from the people who lean to the Right,” he tells me. “Actually, one of my biggest individual donors is a Republican business owner in Nebraska. Both he and his wife have double-maxed to the campaign on my stance on right to repair.”

“It’s not about Republican or Democrat,” he insists. “I happen to be running against a Republican. If I was in New York and I was running against a Democrat, most of my money would probably be coming from the Right.” Osborn argues that he’d be raising gargantuan sums like State Rep. James Talarico (D-Tex.), currently the Democratic nominee for Senate in the Lone Star State, and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), currently running for reelection, if he actually were a Democrat.

This is also true. Osborn’s $5.7 million cash haul pales in comparison to fundraising by Talarico and Ossoff, according to Open Secrets data. 

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Regardless of the gotcha tapes, there is still a lot of daylight between Osborn and the Democrats. On immigration, he says that we need reform that won’t “undercut American workers.” There isn’t a Democrat in the country that would lead off that way.

“I saw it firsthand at Kellogg’s when we went out on strike. They immediately tried to replace us and we had some very strong suspicions and some evidence that a lot of these folks were undocumented workers from Texas, and that shouldn’t happen,” he emphasizes. This, of course, is not the best way to rack up donations on ActBlue — if that’s your goal. Osborn mitigates his stance by describing himself as a “humanist” who believes “we’re all human beings just trying to get through our days in some semblance of peace.” 

“It’s just about having some dang common sense and not using this as a political football,” he says.

Such is the life of a Left-leaning independent trying to prove that the political elite can be toppled by a union mechanic in a state Trump won with 60% of the vote. Osborn clearly isn’t Mamdani and he clearly isn’t MAGA. That means he’s like a lot of Americans, a record number of whom — 45% — now identify as independents. 

Most people aren’t trying to decide whether they have the politics of Pete Ricketts or the politics of the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re trying to decide who’s going to bring down gas prices and healthcare costs while maintaining a sense of normalcy in the culture wars: no open borders, no boys in girls’ sports. 

When all is said and done, Osborn sounds like a guy who’s still trying to figure that out himself.  All while navigating the choppy waters of America’s expensive and messy electoral process. The leaked recordings don’t exactly reveal that Osborn is a secret Brooklyn barista so much as that he’s dealing with economic populists who also demand fealty on cultural issues. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say where Osborn stands on those issues apart from the reality that he’s clearly not a puritan and is clearly very frustrated.

So is he a relatable character torn between the divisive forces of corruption tearing American politics apart or a progressive sleeper cell trying to seduce MAGA into giving up a vote in the upper chamber? That’s for the voters of Nebraska to decide — and Osborn, too. 

Most observers understand that Trump will never be truly beloved — not in a national way as, say, Bill Clinton once was (warts and all). America in 2026 is too polarized, and Trump is too polarizing. But history proves Trump can at least be palatable, and that’s where this second presidency is flagging. It’s why the president is taking a major risk by insisting that a “transformation” has been achieved when, on his own terms, it plainly hasn’t. Not yet, anyway. 

The president made big promises ahead of this second term: about bringing about a new “golden age.” For many voters — especially the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who twice sent him to the Oval Office — renewal is about the kitchen table and internal reconsolidation: a focus on repairing the domestic hearth and on helping an asset-poor majority buffeted by decades of economic insecurity (even as China and Wall Street went from strength to strength).

As one GOP strategist told me ahead of Tuesday’s address, “It will be a great speech if Wednesday morning headlines read: Trump delivered a State of the Economy address.” Trump partially delivered that. Yet his boasting was out of step with what voters are telling pollsters about how they feel — a jarring callback to the themes of stability and reconsolidation that were supposed to define the second term but were somehow forgotten along the way. Then, too, the speech highlighted the ways in which a hyperactive foreign policy is swallowing what was supposed to have been a domestic-focused populist movement.

Even under the best conditions in the past, Trump has at times managed to preside over a relatively strong economy — and still not achieved public support greater than about 50% approval, owing to the confluence of a fractured media environment and a fractured electorate. Yet the polling numbers right now are damning evidence he’s hemorrhaged much more public support than usual.

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Trump entered office last winter with his highest ever approval rating, 50.4%. According to the RealClearPolitics average, his job-approval average was six points above water days after he was sworn back into the White House and stayed that way until about mid-March. By contrast, Trump enjoyed only a 0.1-point bump — a blip, really — as he took the oath in 2017, which quickly dipped to six-points underwater by late February of the same year. In other words, the second time around, he really came in about as popular with the national electorate as a figure like Trump could ever be.

So what happened? Why is it that today, supermajorities of Americans disapprove of his handling of most issues? Why is it that, according to the pollster Nate Silver, the president is underwater by double digits on all immigration, the economy, inflation, and trade? 

Trump is always the same person. At no point in the last 11 years has he stopped posting crazy messages on social media, hiring weirdos, or holding wild news conferences. Yet despite these antics, there have been times when half of the public has been willing to get behind him as a norm-busting, Right-wing polemicist who is under a constant barrage from the entire political establishment. 

Put another way: it was possible for Trump to have avoided his current approval hemorrhage. The very fact that Trump entered office last year with political and cultural momentum after running a hard-core populist campaign the legacy media detested is proof of this. So is Trump’s problem an excess of populism or its absence?

Trump argued in the speech that his administration is creating a world “where government answers to the people, not the powerful” and “where the interests of hard-working American citizens are always our first and ultimate concern.” He accused Democrats of “corruption that is plundering America,” adding: “From trade to health care, from energy to immigration, everything was stolen and rigged in order to drain the wealth out of the productive, hard-working people who make our country run.” 

The speech was clearly designed to highlight populist policy priorities like banning “large Wall Street investment firms” from buying single-family homes, bringing back manufacturing jobs, protection from energy rate hikes caused by new data centers, banning congressional stock trading, closing the border, and deflating prescription drug prices. This was the Trump who won in 2024. But where was he for the past year or so?

A glance back at Trump’s Second Inaugural Address recalls just how intentional he was about promising strength and stability. He cast elites as destabilizing, making the argument that “a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.” 

That is a very particular criticism of the political class which paints it not merely as corrupt but also as chaotic. “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored.  The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” said Trump last year.

But this is not, in fact, how many voters have experienced his second presidency. Some economic metrics are moving in the right direction for him, to be sure, but voters remain unimpressed with his stewardship of the economy and trade policy. As the Supreme Court demonstrated last week, it’s the uncertainty that may be what’s harming Trump, who promised to restore stability. 

The Dow is up, the Consumer Price Index is down, and tax cuts are coming. Reuters described the January jobs report as “unexpectedly strong.” But consumer confidence is now at a 12-year low. It shot up after Trump took office, then plunged to roughly the same level. The index shows confidence has declined sharply among Independents but is down even among Republicans. People report disapproval of Trump’s work on inflation and tariffs in particular. 

Prices are still rising — in part due to tariffs — and every day brings a new apocalyptic warning from experts about an impending mass deletion of jobs at the hands of artificial intelligence. (Trump, meanwhile, is lavishing artificial intelligence oligarchs in praise and political favor and enriching himself and his family with laughably corrupt cryptocurrency schemes.)

The public’s dissatisfaction with Trump’s economic and tariff policies makes more sense against this backdrop. He made big promises. So if you’re a 26-year-old who heard the president on Lex Fridman’s podcast but don’t feel like he cares that you still can’t buy a home, your patience is wearing thin. 

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What might snap your patience altogether is Trump’s heavy focus on foreign policy, from the Iran war buildup (despite his assurances that last summer’s intervention in Israel’s 12-Day War had “obliterated” the nuclear program); to the Venezuelan regime-swap operation’ to capricious threats against Greenland and the war continuing to rage in Ukraine to, despite a promise to end it rapidly. There’s also the matter of the Epstein Files, which again featured a high-profile promise of disclosure that Trump had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making good on. 

At least some of Trump’s low marks are coming from disappointed Republicans. According to Politico, new polls have picked up this trend: “In [a] CNN survey, 82% of Republicans approved of the job he was doing, down eight points from a year ago. And the Washington Post survey found that 48% of Republicans ‘approve strongly’ of his performance, down from 63% a year ago.”

Tuesday proved Trump is not throwing in the towel on populism — at least, not rhetorically — but to a lot of ordinary people, it looks chaotic and muddled, when the president promised strength and calm. 

Trump now has only three years left in office so he’s likely more interested in long-term legacy building than day-to-day approval ratings. That means he’s also more willing to take risks with the hope they pay off down the road even if they feel shaky in the moment. His heavy emphasis on foreign reflects this. And in fairness, that in part explains the heavy focus on foreign policy — the domain in which most second-term presidents try to cement their legacy (it’s much easier to strike foreign agreements or start foreign wars than to deal with a recalcitrant Congress).

Still, populism has to deliver, and if you promise strength and stability, you can’t also remain popular if you’re seen as an unpredictable agent of chaos.

Perhaps that explains Trump’s repeated invocation of “1776” on Tuesday. He is, of course, pleased to be the president during the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But nobody looks back on 1776 as a moment of calm and stability. It’s remembered as a time of enormous difficulty and uncertainty. This indeed may be Trump’s best argument, but it won’t exactly put the country at ease. 

A haphazard Kamala Harris campaign plucked Walz straight from cable news, where he was effectively defining the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird” throughout the mid-summer of 2024. Clips of Walz — a Midwestern Dad seemingly straight from central casting — were going viral on social media during the heyday of Couchgate: baseless allegations that JD Vance had once engaged in sexual activity with a couch. Indeed, just one day after Harris named him to the ticket, Walz referenced the meme about Vance’s supposed lust for living-room furniture. 

“I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Walz smirked. “See what I did there?” (Vance was widely regarded as the winner of their debate.)

It was an early sign that the second-term governor might not have been as wholesome as depicted. As the country acquainted itself with Walz, the signs became impossible to miss. In retrospect, it’s remarkable the Harris campaign ever took a gamble on a man with Walz’s record — though unsurprising in the context of the Democrats’ Biden-era hubris. 

On paper, Walz had characteristics that made the consultant class swoon. He was a teacher, a veteran, a football coach, a gun owner, a father of two from the Upper Midwest. Like the uncle you catch up with every Thanksgiving, Walz was affable and balding and fluent in sports. 

Vibes aside, Walz had also pursued a progressive agenda in a rural state. This made him an enormously attractive pick for Harris, who was herself a perfect embodiment of the party’s rudderless direction in 2024. Democrats needed to maintain the Biden coalition by appealing to suburban voters and winning back some of the white working class that Hillary Clinton lost, while also keeping young voters and activists energized.

Walz was slightly less popular than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris’s other option for the ticket, but a 54% majority of registered voters in Minnesota approved of his job as governor. As Walz ascended to the top of the ticket, multiple outlets profiled his shift Left-ward since serving in Congress. “How Tim Walz Went From ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ to Progressive Champion,” ran a headline from National Public Radio.

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CNN enumerated the items in Walz’s progressive agenda: “codified protections for abortion access; restored voting rights for felons who’ve completed their sentences; driver’s licenses for people regardless of their legal status; a state child-tax credit; free public college for families making less than $80,000 annually; protections for gender-affirming care; and a paid family and medical leave program.” Most Democrats couldn’t pull that off with a 54% approval rating, so national Democrats saw in Walz a relatable “prairie populist” who could sell the Harris campaign’s cultural progressivism to middle America. 

Enter “Tampon Tim.” Trump World immediately neutralized Walz’s efficacy as a critic of “weirdness” by calling attention to a bill Walz signed that required public schools to provide tampons and pads “to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students.” In other words, Walz put tampons in boys’ bathrooms; Trump knew just how to brand him. 

A closer examination revealed other obvious red flags. Despite being heralded as a white-working-class whisperer, the governor did poorly outside Minnesota’s deep-blue urban centers in both his 2018 and 2022 races, losing most rural counties handily. Pundits and consultants may not fully realize how wealthy and how progressive the Minneapolis suburbs have become. A re-election landslide in Hennepin County won’t translate to support from swing voters in the Rust Belt. 

Walz’s record included a burgeoning fraud scandal of massive proportions among the state’s Somali community; 70 people had already been indicted in the Somali fraud ring by the time Harris tapped him. The record also included Walz’s memorably horrific response to the George Floyd riots of 2020 that permitted the state to burn rather than allowing police to intervene; inconsistencies in his military record; and a deeply strange affinity for China (he made a whopping 30 trips to China over the course of three decades, including on his own honeymoon). 

If anything, Harris may have caused a net drag on her campaign by adding Walz — and that wasn’t an easy thing to pull off, since few people’s votes are influenced by veep picks. As Republicans battered Harris with “Kamala is for they/them” ads, it didn’t help Democrats that “Tampon Tim” attacks only reinforced some voters’ impression of the ticket as being out of touch.

When Trump mounted the comeback of a lifetime and easily defeated Harris, Walz went back to Minneapolis with a bruised ego but also with national name recognition and clout in elite spaces. He slimmed down and dressed up. Yet by November, just one year after Walz was at the top of national politics, everything started to crumble. 

Conservative media had for years sought to draw national attention to swelling fraud allegations among Minnesota’s sizable Somali community. During the pandemic years, Somali scofflaws in Minnesota escaped scrutiny by weaponizing identity politics, fraudulently accepting millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that were supposed to be distributed to children and other vulnerable Minnesotans. As governor, Walz presided over the bureaucracy that allowed this to happen despite clear warning signs. 

Federal investigators, for example, uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services, as well as federal child-welfare and autism programs. Indicted and convicted conspirators, for example, would recruit Somali children into autism therapy services — even if a child didn’t have a diagnosis — facilitating fraudulent claims. Parents reportedly received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child, with some allegedly threatening to go to other fraud networks unless their rates were increased.

After City Journal and County Highway published exposes around Thanksgiving, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation of its own into the scandal. The headline was devastating: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch.” 

From there, the story took on a life of its own, both in mainstream media and Right-wing social media. Walz responded by taking responsibility and claiming to have cracked down on fraud while also putting up identitarian deflections: he talked about “white men” and said the Somali community was not to blame, even as some Somalis disagreed. 

The war of words between Trump and Walz heated up. As the scandal broke into mainstream spaces, Republicans saw an opportunity for high-profile immigration enforcement in a sanctuary city with clear-cut immigration problems. Trump launched “Operation Metro Surge,” dispatching thousands of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area and pledging to arrest “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens” in the area. 

The Associated Press notes that Trump “has repeatedly linked his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to fraud cases involving federal nutrition and pandemic-aid programs, many of which have involved defendants with roots in Somalia.”

The eyes of the country have been focused on Minnesota since the fraud story led to the ICE surge. While polling is hardly going in Trump’s favor, the picture emerging of Minnesota is one of a state in chaos — not unlike what unfolded in the summer of 2020 under Walz’s supervision. 

On Jan. 5, Walz shocked the political world by suddenly — and angrily — dropping his re-election bid, connecting his decision directly to the attacks he’d sustained, starting with the recent wave of fraud coverage. According to Axios, it was actually “fellow Democrats” who applied the “mounting pressure” that forced the governor’s hand. 

Just two days later, Renée Good died in her car, shot by an ICE officer on duty as part of Trump’s crackdown. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti died during an interaction with Customs and Border Patrol. Between the incidents, organized activists disrupted a Baptist worship service, drawing more criticism that Walz and his allies were inciting raucous disruptions that left ordinary Minnesotans vulnerable. 

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Walz, for his part, has practically begged anti-ICE rioters to remain peaceful — to no avail. While it’s clear the public is not cheering on Trump, anti-ICE disruptors are also causing property damage and creating a sense of general bedlam, producing viral moments on a near nightly basis in clashes with federal officers. 

After Pretti’s killing stirred up days of escalating confrontations, Trump and Walz tried to smooth tensions. Both sides claimed victory. Trump yanked Gregory Bovino, the face of the operation, out of Minneapolis. A MAGA pundit claimed that “Tim Walz and Jacob Frey bent the knee and local law enforcement is doing their job” as police made arrests shortly after Walz and Trump spoke. 

For Walz — whose fame rested on the idea that he could be the adult in the room, a normal Midwestern Democrat fed up with MAGA’s bullshit — the turn of events must sting painfully. 

Perhaps the most devastating rebuke of Walz’s career came on Monday from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After Pretti’s death, Walz lectured in a Sunday news conference: “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody is gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

The Holocaust Museum called this deeply offensive, releasing a statement the following day that read: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as anti-Semitism surges.” 

Walz, the embodiment of “Minnesota nice,” the man so relatable he could supposedly sell a progressive culture war to the white working class, was finally revealed to be reckless, divisive, and incompetent. The party’s over. The Walz balloon is now a sad piece of plastic lying on the floor. 

The New York Times defined “Dark Woke” last year as “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing.” In the Gray Lady’s telling, it “requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” Examples range from Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare to Jasmine Crockett’s alliterative insults (“Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision?”). GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to “subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite ‘when they go low, we go high’ posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again.” 

These aren’t mutually exclusive definitions. Dark Woke is a meme with amorphous contours. Sometimes, it’s merely rhetorical; other times, it offers serious strategies to challenge MAGA with a dose of its own post-liberal medicine. Either way, it’s rooted in the same demand posed by grassroots Democrats to the party establishment: throw some punches, or we’ll primary you into oblivion.

Since Good’s demise on the icy streets of Minnesota, videos of enraged anti-ICE protesters are proliferating on social media. In one clip posted by the Fox News reporter Matt Finn, an ICE agent goes up to two shiny SUVs blocking traffic, warning the women in them not to “make a bad decision.” The women, both of whom appear to be Millennials, aren’t intimidated. “I think I’m making exactly the right decision,” one says. When the officer signs off with, “Thank you, have a good day,” she replies with a grin: “I hope you have a terrible day.” In another viral clip, a gaggle of whistling women surround a reporter; one gleefully taunts him as another screams, “Nazi!” 

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Or there’s the TikTok video circulating on X, in which a blue-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired woman who describes herself as a 42-year-old single mother and “relationship anarchist” slips sexily into her Carhartt overalls while spelling out a “dating-profile request” for a man whom she can “call, right now, and say, ‘Hey, get in the passenger seat and let’s go fuck some shit up.’” 

These street soldiers aren’t the antifa types torching cars or the rioters looting stores. They are, like Good, Millennial moms in the Midwest. They’re people from normal quarters of American life who are spending time during the workday putting their bodies and vehicles on the line to protect illegal migrants, some with serious criminal records, from deportation. And they see ICE as a neo-Gestapo that calls for more than rhetorical condemnation.

The Washington Post this week wrote about the growing activist coalition: “As the Trump administration deploys thousands of federal immigration officers and agents around the nation, a loose-knit but increasingly organized network of activists is tracking their whereabouts and documenting arrests.” With whistles and messaging apps, these ICE “watchers” or “verifiers” are often trained by nonprofit groups, according to the Post article, which adds that they are “dispatched to spot arrests, record interactions, and, where possible, get contact information for family members of those arrested.”

This partly explains why Dark Woke is growing amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Tracking ICE supplies a sense of agency and community at a time when people feel powerless and atomized. It is also a clue as to why there are so many upscale white women in the ranks of the Dark Woke army. 

Last fall, the GOP pollster Alex Tarascio “asked likely voters if they agreed that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement, even if it breaks the law,” as he put it in an X post. “Overall, just 24% of Americans agreed. But among white women, 18 to 44, who identify as liberal? The number shoots up to 61%.” Half that number, only 30%, disagreed. Among all liberals, the number was nearly 20 points lower, at 42%. And among all likely voters, the number dropped to less than a quarter of the population.  

Why are white liberal women especially eager for battle? People like Good are motivated by a sincere commitment to social justice, to be sure. Good was so moved by the prospect of ICE deportations in Minneapolis that she joined a midday protest after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.

However, there is also no shortage of research in recent years showing that young women on the Left struggle more with mental health than do other cohorts. In 2024, Times columnist Thomas Edsall dug into studies on the “happiness gap,” noting “one of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the Left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.”

In 2025, a study published by Zach Goldberg at the Right-of-center Manhattan Institute found that “females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.” 

Research from the Institute for Family Studies has likewise found that “when we control for education, race, age, and income, …  liberal women ages 18 to 40 are over three times as likely to report frequent feelings of loneliness compared to their conservative peers.”  

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Renee Good, of course, was married and — at least in the tragic record of her final minutes — cheerful in demeanor. Unhappiness and lapsed agency may or may not explain her personal decision. However, it’s fair to speculate that rational disapproval of Trump is not the only explanation for why more and more young progressive women are training as “ICE watchers” and joining physical protests. Tellingly, the Institute for Family Studies found that “a large part of [the] loneliness gap comes from different rates of marriage and church attendance. … Adding controls for marriage and church attendance, ideology becomes less important, with marriage being the strongest predictor of feeling less lonely.”

Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good. 

Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity.

We were there to see the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s annual rendition of A Christmas Carol, as we would do nearly every year into the future. The Pabst is a stunning venue, the kind of place that makes you think your town is special, though as I got older, I realized just about every American city has its own version of the Pabst: a local magnate’s eponymous temple to the arts, built with spoils from the Industrial Revolution. 

This makes it the perfect home for Charles Dickens. In the mid-19th century, as A Christmas Carol debuted, Milwaukee was a grand city in the style of Chicago, infused with German culture and European elegance. The city’s prosperity, however, often did not extend to the laborers who produced the wealth. Humbug! 

Captain Frederick Pabst immigrated from small-town Germany in 1848, marrying into the Best family and eventually growing their brewing operation into the largest in the United States. By his death in 1904, he had “left his mark on the city of Milwaukee, investing in real estate projects like the Whitefish Bay Pleasure Resort and the Pabst Theater and making financial contributions to welfare, education, and arts organizations,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Indeed, when the opera house that became the Pabst Theater burned down in 1895, the captain is said to have cabled, “Rebuild at Once!” Each Christmas, Pabst and his wife supplied 100 families with baskets of groceries to get through the harsh Wisconsin winter. Ebenezer Scrooge, he was not. 

Christmastime makes the world of Dickens bearable, cozy even. And for me, a Christian, Christmas is not a holiday about trees and eggnog and piles of gifts and overspending, but about Christ, who makes our world possible — and bearable and cozy, too, if we can see his light.

Dickens was a complicated Christian: he was born in the Church of England, but later turned away, toward Unitarianism. He focused on the social good produced by Christian principles, but was a vehement critic of the church hierarchy, as well as of clerical hypocrisy and abuses. The light of true faith shines in his profound commitment to charity and the social good. 

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Metaphors of light and dark abound in his work, serving as a commentary on wealth and poverty, patronage and exploitation, individualism and community, and damnation and salvation. In A Christmas Carol, he contrasts Scrooge’s “gloomy suite of rooms” and his “neglected grave” with scenes of how the miser’s former employer, Fezziwig, ran his business. Fezziwig’s warehouse was “snug, and warm, and dry.” Scrooge’s nephew Fred, another of the book’s positive role models, throws a party in a “bright, dry, gleaming room.” (Light and dark are clearly delineated in Dickens — a deeply Christian concept; no moral relativism here.) Dickens describes many wonderful things as “bright” in the book, making obvious the motif of light and dark. His characteristically precise illustrations of both worlds have a jarring effect on readers, fostering the visceral appreciation for warmth that occurs when you step in from the cold.

One passage, as Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present approach Bob Cratchit’s residence, is perfectly Dickensian. “The sky was gloomy,” the author wrote, “and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain.”

Scrooge finds that, inexplicably, “the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong.” 

This is the source of a light so bright that even the summer sun could not compete with it. And it is the reason that Christmas Carol is Dickens’ best work — in a macro sense, his stories are really all Christmas carols. Christ is the flame that lights the West, bringing comfort to the poor and a burden to the rich. Blessed are the meek.

Scrooge, who represents darkness and the other side of the equation, has replaced this light with a “golden” idol. We see this clearly in the scene where he is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to watch his former self part ways with a girl to whom he was once betrothed, and she reproaches him for having chosen this idol instead of their love.

The younger Scrooge replies, “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

“Gently” the girl answers, “You fear the world too much.… All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

Critics might say that this detachment from the woes of the world — which are a realistic source of fear — excuses predatory capitalism. Believers who focus on the next life might be tempted to ignore the ills of this one. However, Christian apologists argue that it is precisely this kind of fear of the world that causes predation. And the fear can only be overcome by faith in Christ. The Ubermensch — the godless man who makes himself the measure of value — takes no prisoners on his way to evading material poverty, just as Scrooge stiffs Crachit. Dickens demonstrated that the great miser’s fear leads to a combination of material wealth and spiritual poverty.

Dickens’s Christian ghost stories and Victorian spiritualism were a counterargument to the other dominant philosophies of his time, those of Frederich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, each of whom proposed materialist solutions to the ills of human life. Marx decried the material horrors visited upon workers by Victorian capitalism, but saw no solution, no peace, beyond more struggle. Transcendent values — the ones that might’ve justified his concern for workers — were so much, well, humbug. Weber took a more nuanced view, believing that hard work and the system of capitalist prosperity was a religious good, but acknowledging that it came with dangers. 

“Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion,” said Weber. “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces.” Of “religious asceticism,” he wrote that “victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.” The “modern economic order,” Weber believed, “is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.” 

“Perhaps,” he added, “it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned.” 

Coal is a theme in A Christmas Carol, as well. One of its last lines invokes the ever-important coal of 19th-century England. Scrooge says: “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!” he remarks. “Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!” This greeting comes with “an earnestness that could not be mistaken.” Scrooge has been changed forever. 

Cratchit was hardly burning the last ton of fossilized coal, nor are we approaching that landmark even now, though Dickens’s carol and the spirit of mercy persist, even in the modern world. In his showing, we may gain wealth and power, but only if we do good with it. In the modern world, we may be trying to forget about his form of charity, but we haven’t entirely. As technology companies with power that rivals great nations erect sprawling data centers, moguls like Elon Musk promise “there will be universal high income” in the near future. Shame lingers, at least for now. 

Tom Holland once described “the supreme paradox of Christian history” as the existence of “a faith that became powerful by virtue of enshrining as its symbol someone utterly powerless.” The challenge for Christians in the industrial West is to find every Scrooge in our midst and make a Pabst out of him. Starting with the Scrooge inside ourselves, of course.

Dismissed for years as the “QAnon Congresswoman,” Greene leaves Washington a different woman. Drained of her bubbling “optimism,” as one source close to her put it, Greene is now divorced from her husband and divorced from her president — but faithfully married to the cause of America First.

It was, in Greene’s own telling, the algorithms that sent her spiraling into conspiracy theories in the 2010s. It was algorithms that rocketed her to prominence. It was algorithms that made her one of the GOP’s top fundraising assets. And it may have been algorithms that sent her packing, though they’ll almost certainly guide Greene to her next destination soon enough. 

This is a new form of populism, a strain that represents the online rage fueling an uneasy horseshoe alliance between the populist Left and Right. And it’s no longer confined to the internet. Greene’s arc is what happens when the everyman’s rage is stoked by social media — sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse — and then escapes the algorithm for Washington, DC. 

In her early days in DC, Greene was dogged by headlines like “Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress” and “Video surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor with baseless claim.” Sworn in about 24 hours before the Jan. 6 riot, Greene was elected amid pandemic fever, cruising to a comfortable victory, in which she won 75% of the vote. 

That put her about six points ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, situated in the state’s northwest corner between Tennessee and Alabama. Greene originally planned to run in her own, more affluent district that included some of Atlanta’s shifting  suburbs, but swapped her bid to the much less competitive 14th District, after the incumbent representative announced his retirement in 2019. 

Georgia 14, long home to the state’s carpet industry, is heavily rural and populated by voters who blame NAFTA and immigration for their economic struggles. Trump was impressed, calling her a “future Republican star” and sending the media — along with the GOP establishment — into a tizzy.  

Born in Milledgeville, a small city of 17,000 in central Georgia, Greene proudly remembers growing up around her family’s construction company. She graduated from South Forsyth High School in 1992, then the University of Georgia in 1996. Six years later, she purchased Taylor Commercial from her father.

In 2022, after 29 years together and 27 years of marriage, Greene’s husband Perry filed for divorce. Greene herself had filed 10 years earlier amid allegations of cheating, though the pair reconciled before calling it quits after she entered Congress. Several months later, Greene and newly divorced conservative media figure Brian Glenn — best known for questioning Volodymyr Zelensky’s wardrobe in the Oval Office — confirmed they were dating. They became engaged on Monday.

Like many Gen-X moms, Greene racked up an extensive Facebook history during the 2010s. Animated by the strains ObamaCare had put on her family’s successful business, the future congresswoman got hooked on Trump early. 

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But her sense of injustice and distrust also sent her in bizarre directions. She questioned whether school shootings were false flags, whether a plane really hit the Pentagon, and what was going on with the internet poster named “QAnon.” Her Wikipedia page is full of reminders of a febrile recent past, including forays into #Pizzagate and Seth Rich, among other conspiracy theories, as Greene used Facebook as a form of activism and started blogging for a website called American Truth Seekers sometime around 2017. 

In the spring of 2019, Greene shouted at Parkland survivor David Hogg in Washington, and filmed a Facebook Live video outside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office telling the lawmaker to “get rid of your diaper.” 

A little more than a year later, the mother of three, Crossfit enthusiast, and small-business owner earned her own office on Capitol Hill, not unlike AOC, the bartender-turned-congresswoman she’d been yelling at months earlier.  

Her pandemic-era campaign made good use of the backlash. “I’ve made all the right enemies,” Greene tweeted during her run. “The Fake News Media hates me. Big Tech censors me. The DC Swamp fears me. Now Soros and the Dems are trying to take me down. I’m running to Save America and Stop Socialism.”

But it was in the new year, after Jan. 6, that a newly elected Greene delivered one of the most significant speeches on the House floor in modern history. Her remarks barely budged the perception of Greene in Washington, and were quickly forgotten. But they shouldn’t have been.

As a vote loomed to strip Greene of her committee assignments, she calmly took to the floor to explain herself. “What you need to know about me is I’m a very regular American, just like the people I represent in my district,” Greene said, mouth hidden behind a face mask emblazoned with the slogan FREE SPEECH. “And like most people across the country, I never, ever considered a run for Congress or even to get involved in politics. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t a political person until I found a candidate that I really liked, and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

But, Greene continued, “when we elected President Trump, and then I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so, these things bothered me deeply, and I realized just watching CNN or Fox News, I may not find the truth.” 

“And so,” Greene remembered, it spiraled from there, “What I did is I started looking up things on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day, using Google. And I stumbled across something and this was at the end of 2017 called QAnon.” 

Greene said she walked away from QAnon and fringe conspiracy trends later in 2018, after discovering holes in the theory. She said her campaign never mentioned the word QAnon. She said she believed Parkland survivor David Hogg.

The speech was contrite and honest, a genuine explanation for how her rational distrust of institutions steered her, and many others, down unfortunate rabbit holes. That experience, if anything, is utterly representative. In her case, it represents both the good and bad: asking the questions, believing the lies, then abandoning them when the facts went in another direction. 

But Greene’s words landed like a lead balloon in DC, where there is scant tolerance for the experience of the ordinary American outside the halls of power. Greene, though, managed to lose only 11 GOP votes when Democrats orchestrated a push to take away her committee assignments amid a full court press from media and the Beltway establishment. 

One congressional insider remembers a tense private meeting ahead of the vote. “She came in and it was during this bruising time of all of her Facebook posts and previous statements being unearthed. This was space laser time,” the insider said. But while Greene was “defiant at first,” she apologized. She stood up and said she was sorry to her fellow members for having to answer for her. “Anytime you get a reporter with concerns about me, you don’t have to answer, just tell them to talk to me,” she told the meeting, striking a “super conciliatory” tone, the insider says.

This “changed the whole mood of the room.” Republicans came up to the microphone and announced they’d vote in her favor. Greene had successfully “lowered the temperature.” 

The mild air, of course, did not last long. Outside the GOP conference, Greene shouted at AOC, repeatedly sought Joe Biden’s impeachment, shouldered heavy fines for refusing to wear a mask, and spoke at — then distanced herself from — a conference held by Nick Fuentes. 

Republicans took back the House majority in 2022, restoring Greene to committee assignments. Greene supported Kevin McCarthy for speaker, and the two remained on good terms even while the Florida populist firebrand Matt Gaetz, with whom Greene once embarked on an “America First” speaking tour, engineered McCarthy’s ouster. Ironically, it was Greene’s sparring with other MAGA populists that ended her time with the hard-Right House Freedom Caucus in 2023.

Nevertheless, “she was in a good spot, she was a productive member of Congress,” the congressional insider recalls of Greene’s tenure before this fall. That same source referred to Greene as Trump’s top “guard dog” in Congress for years. She defended Trump against virtually every charge for half a decade, before and after coming to DC. Just last year, Greene called the president “sweet” and said she was “loyal and unapologetically supported him everywhere and all the time.” 

It was the second Trump administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein documents that first drove a wedge between Greene and the president. Then Trump struck Iran, further alienating Greene, whose views on foreign policy lean toward an anti-interventionist flavor of “America First.” Finally, during the government shutdown, Greene started criticizing Republicans sharply for ignoring an imminent health-care crisis: the lapsing of subsidies that would send premiums skyrocketing for low-income people. This brought with it opportunities for the congresswoman, long Trump’s staunchest defender in the House, to join CNN and The View and 60 Minutes. 

By mid-November, Trump had enough. Deeming Greene “Wacky Marjorie,” he posted on Truth Social to say he’d endorse a primary challenge in Georgia 14. Just a few days later, Greene announced her retirement from Congress. 

Two sources separately pinned the blame for Greene’s turn on House Speaker Mike Johnson. As the government shutdown lingered for weeks and weeks, becoming the longest in history, Johnson didn’t take seriously the problem of members leaving DC with heaps of time on their hands. They were idle, looking for fights and itching for media hits. And it’s certainly true that Greene’s differences with Trump escalated during this time.

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Greene could be the tip of the iceberg for Johnson, who now faces a rumored wave of retirements from a deeply frustrated and demoralized conference. What should really keep Republicans up at night is whether Greene’s darkened sentiment is representative of voters, in the same way her experience on Facebook in the first Trump term represented a real growth in conspiracism fueled by institutional failure leading up to the pandemic.

Tempting as it may be to chalk Greene’s turn up to personal eccentricities, and that’s hardly out of the question, Republicans aren’t just losing a pain in leadership’s behind — they’re losing the member with the single highest share of small-dollar donors in all of Congress. 

And that’s not just about money. It means Greene resonates with her party’s base better than almost any lawmaker. (AOC is in a distant second place on that list.)

Yet her departure seems to have prompted a sigh of relief in the House. “I doubt there was a single member sad to see her leave,” one senior House Freedom Caucus source in the lower chamber told me, describing her behavior as “super unprofessional.” Other sources remembered her early days in Congress warmly, but acknowledged she came with a flip side. “She’s genuinely a nice person, but she can lose her shit and be a mean person too,” said one.

In Greene’s case, her policy populism came in temperamental populist packaging. That is to say, she opposed the substance of her party’s policy agenda during Trump II, from the economy to foreign policy, but stylistically she also opposed the longstanding norms of politeness and collegiality with the other side. As Democrats like Jasmine Crockett are starting to flirt with this personality populism, Washington should wonder whether it’s possible to keep a lid on both flavors — the substance and the style. 

Asked about Greene’s retirement, one insider pointed out the news didn’t leak strategically to Beltway rags or break in a juicy sitdown interview before the congresswoman made her announcement. She simply posted it to social media. Ostensibly unscripted and shot on a cellphone, the video featured Greene saying, “Loyalty should be a two-way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest, because our job title is literally ‘representative.’”

“She gets the value of wearing your heart on your sleeve,” the source noted. “That’s something Trump taught the Republican Party…. When she talks, a lot of conservative women across the country say, ‘You know what? I’m a pissed-off mom who’s getting crushed by all these stupid things in Washington.’ She’s been able to speak for a lot of people.” 

This is the Epistemology of the Algorithm, a double-edged sword. It exploits our reasonable distrust of institutions, pulling us into irrational conspiracies for rational reasons, stitching together paranoia and anger, driving highs and lows. Consider the Greene who “lowered the temperature” in the private GOP conference meeting ahead of Democrats’ effort to oust her from committees. Then consider the Greene who got booted from the Freedom Caucus. 

The insider described her jokingly as “bipolar,” but in a broader sense, that description makes sense. We’re in the liminal space between life before algorithmic social media and life after it. Gen X and Millennials aren’t quite one or the other. But we can see what’s coming, and Washington is not prepared. Greene wasn’t either.

A not insignificant part of Trump’s support came from algorithmic populists like Greene, people whose political awakening began with Trump and the reaction to him. They got online. They dug deep. They saw Trump as a disruptor. This is a populism built on social media, where the incentive system rewards strong emotion. It’s black and white: trust and distrust, love and hate, in or out. 

Trump’s second-term flirtation with elite interests, from Epstein to foreign policy to Big Tech, puts him on the wrong side of that equation for algorithmic populists like Greene. She’s only a representative for a few more weeks, but she will represent a virtual district of likeminded people for years to come. 

After two years of conflict between Israel and Hamas, and nine months of Trump’s second presidency, the White House seems to be moving with alacrity. At the same time, officials seem to be trying to ensure that Trump gets credit. Rubio had also handed Trump a note instructing the President that he would need to approve a social media post, “so you can announce deal first”.

The instinct to give Trump credit is nothing new. But why the sudden haste? One reason might be the two-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre. But another key landmark looms. Today, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce the winners of its annual awards — and the world will know whether or not the Peace Prize has been awarded to the American President.

Trump has not been subtle in his pursuit of the gold medal. In January, in his second inaugural address, Trump predicted that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker”. Since then, his deputies have often referred to him as “peacemaker-in-chief”, and the White House has been on a diplomatic trolley dash. This summer, while holding a press conference with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have “stopped six wars”. “I’m averaging about a war a month,” he quipped. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, used the same line, telling the press corps on 31 July that Trump had ended conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia. “This means President Trump has brokered on average about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office,” said Leavitt. To drive the point home, she added: “It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

By the time Trump addressed the UN General Assembly in September, denouncing the globalists in the gilded hall in which they had previously laughed at him, his case had been apparently strengthened: the US had now brokered a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Seven wars down, Trump devoted a portion of his address to the prize and how little he cared about it. “Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” the President explained, “but for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who live to grow up with their mothers and fathers because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless and un-glorious wars. What I care about is not winning prizes, it’s saving lives.”

It would be forgivable to think that Trump’s words recalled Shakespeare’s line “the lady doth protest too much”. The White House’s concerted campaign is evidence enough; the Nobel prizes are supposed to be awarded for feats achieved in the 12 months prior to the award being given out. Hence the rush. But Trump’s obsession with the prize goes back much further. Before his re-election, he complained that, if he were named Obama, he “would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds”. The original Obama, Trump noted, won the Nobel Prize almost as soon as he had been elected. “He didn’t even know what the hell he got it for.”

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It is commonly held that Trump has despised Obama since the latter, then the incumbent president, humiliated the real-estate developer at a White House dinner in 2011. Obama’s easy charisma gave him bien-pensant acclaim and is likely to have smoothed his path to the Peace Prize. Within a year of reaching the White House, Obama joined Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela in the annals of Nobel peace laureates. How infuriating it must have been for Trump that his nemesis seemed to stroll so effortlessly into that pantheon.

And it is a pantheon that has enough popular attention for Trump to have been eyeing it up for decades prior to Obama’s award. Jay Nordlinger, author of Peace, They Say, a history of the Nobel Peace Prize, told me that, in Trump’s formative years, “being on the cover of Time magazine was a huge, huge deal. If you’re the cover of Time magazine, you were like a national celebrity. And Trump has always liked being on the cover of Time.” Some of the most famous past winners received their prizes in the Eighties and Nineties, when Trump was completing his ascent to the heights of new-money stardom and first suggesting that he might one day run for president. The award would satisfy Trump’s competitive instincts and his desire for acclaim. It represents a further crowning achievement for a man who has already reached the world’s most powerful office twice, and it would be the result of his dealmaking: the keystone of Trump’s self-mythologizing. And, given that the award is doled out by European liberals, a Trump victory would feel like a storming of the citadel. It would be as though his greatest enemies were made to place the crown on his head.

So how likely is his success? Fact checkers have been somewhat puzzled by Trump’s claims to have ended conflicts in Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia, though critics concede that the President has played a key role in nudging many of the relevant parties into peace agreements. Evelyn Farkas of the McCain Institute framed his victories as missions to pick low-hanging fruit. “In the cases where he can get quick results, he’s been successful,” she told FactCheck.org.

And, for what it’s worth, Trump has had support from outside the White House. Pakistan’s government nominated Trump for the prize, making him one of 338 total nominees, as did the prime minister of Cambodia. Pakistan cheered Trump’s “decisive diplomatic intervention” amidst conflict with India this year, and Cambodia’s PM hailed his “extraordinary statesmanship” in helping resolve a border dispute with Thailand. Citing the Abraham Accords, Netanyahu shared his nomination letter to the Nobel committee in June, writing, “Few leaders have achieved such tangible breakthroughs to peace in such a short time. In these times of great historic change, I can think of no one more deserving than President Trump of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

These nominations will go only so far. Tevi Troy, a presidential historian, told me he thinks Trump faces “two hurdles”. “One is that he’s an American president,” said Troy, “and the second is that he’s a Republican.”

“American presidents relatively rarely win the Nobel Peace Prize,” he added, “and a Republican hasn’t done it since Teddy Roosevelt.” Hawkish American executives did not lend themselves naturally to consideration from Scandinavian peaceniks after the Second World War. Further, Troy noted, the two significant conflicts on everyone’s mind — Israel and Hamas and Russia and Ukraine — are not yet clearly resolved. Even on their own, Nordlinger posits, the Abraham Accords would likely not be Trump’s ticket to the prize because of the ongoing “bloodletting” in the conflict.

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Nor are the signs from Norway promising. One member of the five-person Nobel committee doused Trump’s hopes in cold water with a little-noticed leak to Reuters. Trump’s “lobbying” for the award, “is likely to be counterproductive”, the reporter Gwladys Fouché wrote in late September. “The award-giving committee prefers to work independently, one of its members told Reuters, sheltering from outside pressures.”

When asked if he could come up with any other historical examples of a candidate campaigning so openly for the prize, Nordlinger said, “I’m afraid I can’t.” “No one’s ever campaigned so openly, so brazenly for the prize as Trump has,” he explained. “Nobody, not even close. And usually it is said that campaigning backfires.” Committee members, Nordlinger says, are elected by the Norwegian legislature and thus “the Nobel Committee reflects Norwegian and, more broadly, Scandinavian political culture, which is social democratic”. Judges evaluate nominees on three points: disarmament measures, efforts to hold peace congresses, and “fraternity between nations” — Nordlinger says this is the most important criterion. Trump’s aggressive address to the UN is unlikely to have been helpful.

One White House staffer told me Team Trump has privately written off the possibility of their boss being rewarded for his efforts. The sense at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is that Trump could bring about world peace and still get snubbed.

Nordlinger’s view is that Trump’s most recent comments on the matter can be thought of as “putting pressure on the refs. He’s making it so that when they don’t give it to him, he’ll say that he was robbed.”

Trump has overcome steep odds many times in his political life, has three more years in the White House, and can count on allies and supplicants to keep nominating for as long as he remains in power. “He deserves that Nobel Peace Prize, he deserves to be on Mount Rushmore, and I think in time he’ll get both,” said his son, Eric Trump. This might not be Trump’s year, then, but there remain wars to end.

As of Monday, Trump’s odds on Polymarket were a measly 3%. By Thursday, after the Gaza peace announcement, those odds had doubled — to a whopping 6%. “Will Trump get the Nobel Peace Prize?” Nordlinger asks. “Stranger things have happened, but not many.”

But it had nothing to do with the sanguine message from the formal panels: that neoliberalism is vastly underrated and that our elites should be trusted to steer the country back on track. The real revelation was that my fellow professional-class 30-somethings haven’t been budged at all by the “vibe shift.” They remain as committed as ever to pronoun declarations, land acknowledgments, identity-based breakout groups, and other hallmarks of “peak woke.” 

This puts my generation at odds with just about everyone else, from the populist Left to the tech Right to normie voters in both parties. For other cohorts, the woke pot boiled over and cooled down by circa 2022. But for educated Millennials, it stayed on simmer. 

It isn’t remotely surprising, for instance, that Democrats opened their annual summer meeting with a land acknowledgment last month. As the clip went viral on social media, party strategist James Carville begged, “Please stop this, in the name of a just, merciful God.” Democrats — who were walloped in the swing states by President Trump last year, who alienated voters by pushing the culture war too far Left, and whose brand is crashing in opinion polls — seem practically suicidal in these moments.

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When in 2024 the Trump campaign ran a swing-state ad blitz featuring the devastating line “Kamala is for they/them,” the leading Kamala Harris super PAC found that the spot “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The ad targeted a Harris pledge in 2019 to publicly fund transgender medical care for detained illegal immigrants as the woke fever was rising ahead of the 2020 Democratic primary.  It’s not unusual for primary stances to backfire in a general election, of course, but by 2024, the country’s mood had shifted dramatically. 

An Economist survey published last fall added research to the Trump campaign’s instinct that peak woke had already been reached by general-election season. “The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business,” the magazine wrote last September. “Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22, and has been declining ever since.”

The authors went on: “We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (gss), Pew, and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021.”

Why, then, would Democrats smarting from a loss with some very obvious causes still allow the party to be branded by causes that are partially responsible for tanking the brand? The reason will haunt Democrats long into the future, and it’s why the problem cropped up in the first place. Affluent Millennials, whose early adulthood was rocked by the Great Recession, got addicted to cheap virtue-signal opium as their source of meaning and purpose. Their worldviews are built on this foundation of sand, which is why “woke” isn’t quite sticking with Gen Z, and why it never dominated among older Americans. 

Trump’s rise accelerated the realignment of educated, affluent voters away from Republicans and toward Democrats. This happened just a few years after Charles Murray, in his book Coming Apart, documented how socioeconomic sorting into “superzip” bubbles was creating vast cultural divides between the rich and the poor. The more people who went to college filtered into high-earning careers, the more they settled in the same neighborhoods, the more they watched the same shows, read the same books, and ate at the same restaurants. 

The sticky cultural progressivism from Ivory Towers carried over from classrooms into board rooms and newsrooms. But that’s the thing about an ideology that insists one comply with an ever more radical set of rules: dissenters are purged to the point where it becomes impossible to assess the political climate because disagreement is dismissed as bigotry. Before you know it, Trump is back in the Oval Office.

At a panel on school choice in Aspen, Tommy Schultz of the American Federation for Children, asked audience members how many went to private school or sent their kids to private school. Most of the festivalgoers in the crowd raised their hands. This, Schultz noted, set them dramatically at odds with the rest of the country. 

Throughout the week, well-meaning, ambitious fellows broke themselves into identity-based chats, posted their pronouns, and cheered for invocations of privilege. I jumped off a shuttle having chatted with the driver about Aspen’s hollowed-out middle class to see a Pride flag on a taco truck and a woman pairing her cowboy hat with Louis Vuitton. The vibe was cowboy chic and, between the Balmain and Goyard, Birkenstocks and Broncos, started to feel like elites wearing the skin suits of the people they’d conquered. In fairness, one panelist in a trade discussion seemed almost ashamed to admit, “I’m part of the neoliberal order!”

All that is to say, it’s clearly true whatever postmodern fever gripped the culture five years ago has broken. Gen Z is diffuse, with no monoculture. Boomers are drowning in Facebook-slop-fueled anger. Affluent millennials, though, are clinging to the ideas that soothed them through the tumult of the Great Recession, the post-9/11 wars, and the fragmenting of their youth by the advent of smartphones. And the problem for Democrats, who face the prospect of infuriating their colleagues and activist class, is that it’s really hard to tell an interest group or employee you’ve indulged for years that they can’t do a land acknowledgment anymore. 

My question seemed to be answered the following day. On Truth Social, the president posted pictures likely taken from the motorcade that morning or the next, as he returned for another round of golf. Alongside images of roadside tents and trash, Trump wrote, “We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.” Sure enough, at a marathon briefing on Monday morning, Trump announced that he was placing the DC police force under federal control and deploying the National Guard to secure streets long blighted by disorder — and bloodied by the fourth highest homicide rate in the nation. 

At first, I hardly noticed the encampment. My parents dropped me off for college at Foggy Bottom 14 years ago this month, and as far as I can remember, tents have dotted that part of the city ever since. But rumours were swirling that a federal takeover of DC was imminent, so I spent the ride thinking back on the last decade.

Washington, DC, is like most other major American cities: dirty and crime-ridden in some pockets, idyllic in others. But it isn’t just another city. It’s the centre of American power and the seat of American democracy. It’s the gateway to America. Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.” The president added: “Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us. It’s a very strong reflection of our country.”

This is the deepest tragedy of the capital city. It really does reflect the country. It reflects our class dynamics, our inability to end cycles of poverty and crime, our aborted ambitions.

Trump’s critics are correct that Washington is lovely and, like many cities, much improved since a nadir in the Nineties  and early Aughts. True, Covid ravaged the city, to the point where downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction. That is no longer the case, though there are more empty storefronts than there should be; fentanyl visibly haunts the homeless community; and heinous violence still visits multiple corners of the city every week. 

The place feels better than it did amid the riots and lockdowns of 2020, but that’s a low bar. While city statistics show the population is growing again and crime is falling, the police union accuses leadership of manipulating data on the latter. “To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,” the union’s chairman said in a May news release. Allegations of data tampering are under investigation in the police force.

Perhaps most important, the school system is crumbling. A sweeping Washington Post investigation this summer found that the number of students in the public school system “who missed at least two weeks of class in a school year increased 110 percent over the past decade”; and that “more than 18,000 reports of truancy went uninvestigated in the last three full school years.” 

Just this spring, local media reported that “the number of juveniles arrested in DC has gone up each year since 2020. More than 2,000 were arrested in 2023 and 2024.” The report, from NBC Washington, continued: “Juveniles also accounted for 51.8% of all robbery arrests in 2024, according to the police department. About 60% of all carjacking arrests made to date in 2025 are juveniles,” and “nearly 200 juveniles arrested in 2024 for violent crimes had prior violent crime arrests.”

In April, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith warned: “We have seen an increase in fights in our schools and more serious criminal offences outside of our schools. And we have seen an increase in juvenile suspects involved in criminal offences district-wide.”

Just days later, the Navy Yard neighbourhood experienced the first of several violent teen takeovers that have rattled the city. “In just a matter of weeks, our neighbourhood has witnessed yet another teen crime… terrorisation — for lack of a better word — of our neighbourhood,” a commissioner recounted to residents assembled at a May community meeting. He described the event as “a planned attack on our community orchestrated by youth from across the region.”

Hillrag reported, “Hundreds of teenagers have converged on Navy Yard twice over the past month, first on April 18 and again May 17,” during which the commissioner said (and much video evidence confirmed) the kids “entered communal spaces of private residential buildings, fought in public spaces, robbed adults exiting local bars, and yelled at police officers positioned at metro stations.” 

This crisis has persisted through the summer months. As in many other cities, each week brings more horrifying anecdotes of murder and assault. Of course, apologists for the existing state of affairs remain unbending. An Associated Press report in January asserted that, overall, “experts say most cities are seeing a drop in crime levels that spiked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they say misleading campaign rhetoric in the run-up to the November elections and changes in how people interpret news about crime have led to a perception gap.” 

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In DC, at least, the police union seems to believe perceptions of a steady crime rate are more accurate than the city’s figures. Regardless, the low bar set during the apocalyptic days of the pandemic explains why Trump’s bluster is being met with scorn and mockery in the press corps. He’s obviously not right about everything. DC has been worse. Many American cities have been, too. But perhaps the most important message Trump sent on Monday isn’t about the data, it’s about refusing to tolerate what every single American knows is a vicious cycle of crime and poverty in the nation’s greatest cities. The public reaction of DC journalists will be much cooler than the public’s, inside DC and out.

To be sure, the success of Trump’s intervention isn’t guaranteed. The roots of the problem are clearly planted deep in the city’s failing schools and shattered families. Conservatives will point to dependence on government programs, and liberals will argue those programs are underfunded. But the National Guard won’t fix these underlying problems, though a posture of intolerance for crime and enforcement of the law will surely help. If the plan succeeds, hundreds of kids in DC will be spared from the trauma of being victimised by crime and also the trauma of participating in it. 

The problem is worse than it should be in this historic centre of global wealth and power. Quibbling over the data isn’t unimportant, but it risks obscuring the bigger picture. Washingtonians, and Americans, can do much better. That isn’t really up for debate.

Yeah, no. That would go over about as well as calling for 35% tariffs on Canada. The year is 2014, remember? There’s a reason Pat Buchanan didn’t get an invite to the event, and the staunchly isolationist libertarian Ron Paul was mocked as a crank during the keynote. You’d probably already be in the parking lot — or a shouting match — by the time your tablemates tucked into their slices of mediocre cheesecake.

The quips you made at the table are real quotes, however. They come directly from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s X account this summer, as the Gaza war approaches its two-year mark and “food supplies in Gaza have dwindled,” per a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Greene, one of President Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress, shattered another GOP taboo last week by describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a “genocide.”

A similar trend is afoot on the Left, meaning that Israel now faces a bipartisan pincer movement of disapproval and alienation.

Greene is far from alone on the Right. Steve Bannon, the former Trump political consigliere and one of the most popular Right-wing podcast hosts in America, recently argued, “Netanyahu’s government is out of control.” On Bannon’s show, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince accused the Israeli military of intentionally targeting a Catholic church in Gaza and declared: “The time of subsidizing the IDF as the American taxpayer must end.”

After that church was hit, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles addressed the Israelis in lament: “You’re losing me. You’re losing me, when you strike churches, the only church in Gaza, even if accidentally, but especially if not accidentally, you’re losing me.” At Turning Point USA’s summer student conference, the group hosted a debate on the subject between comedian Dave Smith and columnist Josh Hammer that exposed the movement’s divide. Smith, who’s called Ron Paul “the greatest living American hero,” was greeted with cheers from many attendees for criticisms of the Jewish state that would have fallen on deaf ears — if not hostile ears — before Oct. 7. 

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Florida’s Rep. Randy Fine — perhaps Israel’s most vociferous defender in the House of Representatives, who even earned a rebuke from the American Jewish Committee over his enthusiasm for starving Gaza — has a GOP primary challenger in Aaron Baker. “I do NOT support starving children,” Baker posted recently, adding: “I do NOT support punishing [Gazan] citizens for having the worst government in existence.” 

Tucker Carlson, another of the country’s most popular broadcasters, released an episode of his podcast on Wednesday with University of Chicago scholar John Mearsheimer, titled “The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It.” Carlson and his guests have been consistently critical of Netanyahu’s government for months. That isn’t even to address the outright anti-Semitism of other fringe voices with significant social-media followings. 

Of course, the horror in Gaza now is not an apples-to-apples comparison with the 2014 clash between Israel and Hamas. But that’s kind of the point. The war since Oct. 7 has claimed the lives of at least 18,500 children, according to a new Washington Post analysis of the Gaza Health Ministry figures. According to the Post, that means “Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during the war.” The deaths included 953 babies who never made it to their first birthday; another 943 never made it to their second; 972 never made it to their third.

The sheer scale of the misery, as Israel now controls a wide swath of Gaza and starvation mounts, challenges modern definitions of proportionality — even as Americans are horrified by the evil tactics of Hamas and continue to sympathize deeply with hostage families. Recent attacks on Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank are further incensing many in the United States.

Speaking of 2014, the Obama administration veterans at Pod Save America are issuing their own mea culpas from the Left. “Barack Obama signed a 10-year [Memorandum of Understanding] for $3.3 billion a year. So we are part of the problem here. Let’s correct it,” said co-host Tommy Vietor this week. Vietor, who served under Obama as a spokesman for the National Security Council, added, “When the war ends, we are not going back to the pre-October 7 status quo.”

Challenged on X by a critic who accused him of exacting a grudge against Netanyahu from the Obama years, Vietor replied, “Or … stay with me here … the entire world is horrified by what we’re witnessing in Gaza, which is why this conversation is happening now and not back in 2015.”

There’s little insight about the Right to be gleaned from Pod Save America. But in this case, Vietor is correct that revulsion at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is no longer limited to progressives. This nationwide movement is so sweeping that it’s dragging people on the Right away from Israel, even as some conservatives triple down on support for the war. 

What’s eroded on the Right, above all, is the stigma that used to surround criticism of Israel. Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the Gaza war since its earliest weeks. On Tuesday, the firm released stark new findings. “American approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza has fallen 10 percentage points since the prior measurement in September, and it is now at 32%, the lowest reading since Gallup first asked the question in November 2023,” read the report. “Disapproval of the military action has now reached 60%.”

To be sure, Gallup’s survey found a stunning gulf between Democrats and Independents on one side and Republicans on the other. 71% of Republicans still approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza, but that number is only 25% among Independents and 8% among Democrats. For what it’s worth, that same poll found Trump’s approval rating has declined 17 points among Independents since the start of his second term, and only 27% approve of his handling of the conflict.

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While that number means less to Republicans in red states and primary elections, in swing districts, battleground states, and nationwide races, it’s enormously significant. Independents split evenly between Trump and Kamala Harris last November, but that was itself a gain for Trump, because he erased Democrats’ nine-point advantage from the 2020 election. Back in 2022, before the war, Independents fell at 71% when it came to favorability for Israel, squarely between Republicans at 81% and Democrats at 63%.

It’s true that even in 2024, Israel ranked low among voters’ priorities when choosing between candidates, but it’s also true that Republicans counted for years on reflexive support for the Israeli government from moderates and the party faithful. Now the incentive structure has been transformed. 

And for the GOP, that fissure looks poised to get much worse. A Pew survey this spring found that “Republicans under 50 are now about as likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one (50% versus 48%). In 2022, they were much more likely to see Israel positively than negatively (63% and 35%, respectively).” That’s a shocking change, especially as younger generations begin to comprise more of the electorate. 

Bannon himself put it best when he told Politico this week, “It seems that for the under-30-year-old MAGA base, Israel has almost no support.” Bannon further believes it’s not just Young MAGA but that “Netanyahu’s attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older MAGA diehards.” It’s precisely the Israeli hard-liners’ awareness of this generational problem that impels them to act in a maximalist fashion in Gaza and beyond. Better to strike big now, the thinking goes, before the generational turnover empowers Israel-skeptics on both sides.

The problem for Jerusalem is that the harder they go, the more they intensify the sense of alienation in America, the one country whose public sentiments are downright existential for the Jewish state.

He hasn’t tweeted the word “queer” since 2023, nor “defund the police” since 2020. (Except for a 12 June post that read: “Don’t believe the MAGA billionaires funding Andrew Cuomo’s fear-driven campaign: I will not defund the police.”) But back in 2020 Mamdani insisted that “Queer liberation means defund the police.” This would have been toxic to a citywide campaign in pandemic-era NYC, but Mamdani isn’t running on it now. He’s running on one thing and one thing only: affordability. And it has captured the disenfranchised Millennials that Democrats have ignored.

Back in November when we chatted, as Democrats were reeling from Donald Trump’s culture-war comeback, Mamdani’s populist streak actually positioned him well to meet the moment. When I asked what his message was to Trump-supporting New Yorkers, Mamdani said he’d just spent the weekend in Queens and the Bronx chatting with voters about why they backed Trump or stayed home from the polls.

Trump, they told him, spoke to their “desire for a more affordable life and bringing peace back to the world.” So Mamdani said his path to victory was clear: talk about “tangible, deliverable policies” for the working class, not about “values or ideas.”

“There are far more New Yorkers who feel left out by the economic policies of Mayor Eric Adams and the Democratic leadership,” he told me, “Than identify with any one political persuasion.”

This turned out to be the key to Mamdani’s primary win. For most voters, in New York City or anywhere else, elections are always a matter of choosing between two imperfect choices. To read Andrew Cuomo’s loss as the Democratic electorate’s embrace of defund-the-police socialism is to underestimate the toxicity of the party establishment and how much voters have turned against it.

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People are viscerally angry at Cuomo. And they are right to be, they project understandable grief onto him for Covid-era nursing home deaths. They see him as a figurehead for the party that led the city ever deeper into an affordability crisis, and the party that went to comical lengths covering-up the president’s mental decline. That’s enough to motivate many voters to actually go to the polls, and enough for them to take a chance on the guy who only ever seems to talk about one thing: the cost of living.

Mamdani was the perfect foil to a terrible candidate. It’s really that simple. If Democrats are mad about voters electing a socialist, they should consider that consolidating behind Cuomo left a whole lot of New Yorkers determined to vote in a way to take the disgraced governor down at all costs. For some, it was more about affirmatively embracing Mamdani’s platform and for others it was more about rejecting Cuomo. You don’t have to be a democratic socialist to vote for one when the alternative is more Andrew Cuomo.

Consider how the conservative writer Rod Dreher likened Mamdani’s win to Trump’s, writing that New York’s Left-wing voters “lashed out against what they regard as a failed liberal establishment, electing a charismatic populist who promised a clear break with the past.” Just as voters did for Trump nine years ago. “We on the Right can shake our heads and laugh at how dumb New York liberals and progressives were to choose a candidate as politically inexperienced and radical as Mamdani,” he argued “but don’t miss that this was also a referendum on the Democratic Party itself.”

The question, then, is why voters are animated and desperate to reject the Democratic Party, so much so that some were willing to vote for the erstwhile host of Celebrity Apprentice or a millennial socialist. I think Peter Thiel might have the best answer.

Cuomo is, of course, repulsive in many ways that have nothing to do with his economic policies. His fall from gubernatorial grace was particularly humiliating and shameful. But Thiel, the techno-libertarian billionaire, articulated socialism’s pull with millennials in a 2020 email to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, among other tech heavyweights. “I would be the last person to advocate for socialism,” he wrote. “But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”

“And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact,” he added, “there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”

In Thiel’s framework, it is no surprise then that Mamdani outperformed Cuomo in boroughs with the highest concentration of young voters, who are facing extreme rising costs and unaffordable housing in New York City. Andrew Cuomo’s own campaign website observed the cost of living has “risen faster than the growth in incomes.” New York’s state comptroller reported that food costs rose by 56.2% over the last ten years, which is 10% more than the national increase. And rents in the city “grew more than seven times faster than wages last year, the largest gap in the country.”

But this is not all Cuomo’s fault. It’s the result of structures that transcend the city’s borders. Places like New York City struggle, in part, because they’re such desirable places to live, with abundant economic and cultural opportunities. It will always be a hardscrabble city for the ambitious and artists. But it needs a healthy middle class and it can have a middle class — at least if politicians hope to neutralize the appeal of populism.

Mamdani’s biggest vulnerabilities in the general election in November are the two issues that fall in the middle of the Venn diagram between culture and economics: immigration and crime. They’ll either be his salvation or his downfall. The #defundthepolice record will be hard to run from in a general election, but Mamdani has backed away from it and the city is recovering from the pandemic-era crime spike, meaning it’s not as sensitive for voters right now as it was several years ago.

Immigration could be even tougher. Like many Democrats, Mamdani is leaning into the culture war angle by aggressively opposing the Trump administration’s crackdown as a fight against “fascism.”

“We are going to protect our immigrant communities and not collaborate with ICE,” he pledged this month. The campaign will have to convince wary New Yorkers, who also connect immigration with jobs and housing, that his opposition to Trump’s crackdown won’t be a package deal with the policies that flooded hotels and shelters earlier in Eric Adams’s term.

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The likeliest case is that any time Mamdani is asked to defend his cultural record, he’ll pivot to affordability as fast as Adams jumps on business class flights to Turkey. When Mamdani says people in New York are “struggling to afford even a shred of dignity in their lives,” it resonates, and makes people more willing to take a chance on something new. His bet is that they care more about decreasing the cost of living than whatever he may or may not do in the cultural arena. If he can signal that queer liberation is a lower priority than affordable housing or universal childcare — and his opponent is a scandal-stained centrist — he can keep overperforming expectations, and win.

For Mamdani, the key to achieving that in the primary was a “relentless focus on an economic agenda,” as his communications director Andrew Epstein told me on Election Night. When I asked Epstein what the campaign’s message is now that Mamdani is running in the general election, he replied, “One thing Zohran has said throughout this whole campaign is there is not an ideological majority in New York City but there is a majority of people who feel disillusioned with the political system and alienated from the economic system and feel the strain of the cost of living prices.” The alienated and disillusioned — Thiel’s millennials — showed up full throttle for Zohran.

“I don’t think the message really changes,” said Epstein. “I think it continues to be this relentless economic agenda.”

Democratic voters are clearly not the only New Yorkers ready for change. Mamdani’s opponents, be they Bill Ackman, Curtis Sliwa, or Eric Adams, will need to make Mamdani look like a riskier bet than the painful and precarious status quo if they have any hope of preventing his win in November. Like the broader Democratic Party, Mamdani is now winning voters’ trust by focusing on kitchen table issues without fully disavowing the progressive cultural policies he prioritized before Peak Woke started receding. If he’s successful, then the party might have found its path out of the wilderness.

It just goes to show that the Biden-era policies dogging the country now were shaped by a sort of temporary insanity, where even moderate Democrats abandoned long-held beliefs to avoid charges of bigotry or associations with Trumpism.

But there’s a serious danger in attributing Joe Biden’s border chaos more to ideology than cowardice. The Biden administration leaned into immigration as a cultural signifier to rack up virtue signal points and stave off charges of bigotry. The result was a precarious new shadow society of migrants, and few good options to address it.

We know that Biden wasn’t a hardened open-borders ideologue. Nor was his vice president, Kamala Harris, at one point charged with addressing the root causes of the migrant surge (a mission that came to naught). Mainstream Democrats wanted higher levels of immigration, to be sure, but Biden and his more lucid colleagues mostly didn’t expect the border to be flooded like it was after Biden rolled back Trump-era policies like “Remain in Mexico,” under which would-be asylum seekers were required to file their cases in Mexico, rather than make the trek to the US frontier. The Bidenites believed the costs of their anti-Trump virtue signaling would be worth the benefits.

To put the numbers in perspective, net migration during Biden’s tenure exceeded 8 million people. It was the largest surge in American history, and the most rapid since 1850. That means Biden added the entire population of New York City to the United States in just four years; or two Delawares to the country every single year of his presidency. There are fewer residents in my home state of Wisconsin — which has a population of 6 million — than migrants who moved to America under Biden.

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For Democrats who counted on winning re-election in 2024, this was not the plan. The party’s genuine ideologues were surely pleased, but the Biden administration drastically reduced migration as it became clear that a continued surge would harm the party in 2024. The truth is that many key decision makers in the Biden administration legitimately didn’t understand that loosening restrictions on migration would be such a powerful magnet for people to come to America.

That, of course, reflects gross incompetence. During a 2021 reporting trip to northern Mexico, I asked a group of Haitian migrants who’d mostly come from stable lives in places like Argentina and Chile why they left those countries to sleep on the cartel-infested streets of Matamoros, waiting for a chance to cross. They said they wanted the American Dream.

I relayed that story to a prominent Left-wing politician at the time, who seemed dumbfounded. “Do they know what it’s like to be poor in the United States?” the person wondered.

Those migrants knew exactly what it would be like. WhatsApp messages from friends and relatives who came first had convinced them to fork over hefty fees to cartel smugglers, risk life and limb crossing through passages like the Darien Gap, and then live in the shadows of US society on a hope and a prayer that dubious asylum cases would turn out alright in several years. If not, they could always melt into the background of a sanctuary city.

So what does any of this have to do with cancel culture?

Peak Woke was a strange time. Presidential hopefuls swapped out “Latino” for “Latinx,” Aziz Ansari’s mild sexual exploits became national news, and feminists organized a boycott of Tampax over a joke. The consequences were, of course, more serious. From malicious government censorship to grave media blunders, a chill ultimately settled over politics and culture.

This is why, in 2019, Kamala Harris pledged to publicly fund gender transitions for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. It’s why “Scranton Joe” Biden himself supported previously radical trans policies. In Peak Woke, Democrats believed it would be politically worse for them not to back these ideas because interest groups, journalists, and activists were itching to call them bigots.

On immigration, the cynical political calculus of every Democrat running in 2020 was to be positioned as Trump’s antithesis. “Biden Pledges to Dismantle Trump’s Sweeping Immigration Changes,” read an NPR headline. “Biden Will Stop the Border Wall and Loosen Immigration Again,” blared Politico. “Immigrants have always made us stronger as a nation — our diversity has always been our greatest strength. Donald Trump doesn’t get that,” tweeted Biden in October 2019.

As the centrist candidate in the Democratic primary, Biden actively sprinted away from his prior positions on illegal immigration. He had to deal with headlines like this one from CNN: “Joe Biden Once Said a Fence Was Needed to Stop ‘Tons’ of Drugs from Mexico” and this one from Politico: “Biden Under Fire for Mass Deportations Under Obama.”

In December of 2019, Vox noted, “Biden has struggled to answer questions in several recent debates about Obama’s more controversial policies on immigration enforcement, which included record-high levels of deportations and were often criticized by activists.”

At the time, in the fevered days of the #AbolishICE movement, now making a comeback on the Left, virtually no immigration enforcement mechanism was considered humane by activists and outside groups. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” Joe Biden pledged in 2020, commenting on perhaps the most basic piece of infrastructure imaginable. This became a massive pull factor for newcomers. As a Red Cross worker in Mexico explained to me in 2020, migrants heard Biden was not as “drastic” as Trump, and they were taking their chances accordingly.

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David Leonhardt explained what happened after Biden took office in a groundbreaking retrospective for The New York Times last year. “Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office,” he wrote. “Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach.”

“After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States,” reported Leonhardt. “Some have received temporary legal status while their cases [went] through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.” According to numbers tracked by Syracuse University, the asylum backlog at the end of the Biden administration was nearly 4 million active cases, with the average wait time stretching well more than a year long.

Love Trump or hate him, a surge of 8 million migrants in four years is no easy situation to address. And as the Biden-Harris campaign ultimately discovered, voters demanded that the next president address it, Democratic or Republican. So here we are, with a massive new population of aspiring Americans, who are living in precarious conditions legally and socially, and an economy of employers and consumers ever-more tied to their cheap labor.

It should be obvious that Biden and “career prosecutor” Harris weren’t on an ideological crusade to replace the native population of the United States. But elite Democrats also wanted to win elections above all else. This is why when the vibes were anti-Trump, they did everything they could to counter him, both to avoid the minefield of Peak Woke cancel culture and to rack up virtue points. It’s also why Biden’s policies and rhetoric changed as soon as election year rolled around and the polling looked bad.

Democrats painted themselves into a corner on immigration. They feared the fringe to the detriment of the American majority—and ultimately, to their own party’s detriment. The immigration chaos Americans endure now is a direct consequence of cancel culture or Peak Woke, and the way “responsible” Democrats caved into these forces, afraid to look like they cared too much about overseeing an orderly immigration system.

When Trump assumed office on Jan. 20 and tossed the company a life raft, he did so by issuing an executive order that overrode duly enacted legislation, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court days earlier. By this Saturday, TikTok was supposed to have been sold or shut down in the United States.

Instead, Trump on Friday told his followers that a deal his administration has been hammering out “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”

He added: “We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the USA!). This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security! We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark’. We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

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ByteDance called the government’s bluff and briefly shut down ahead of Trump’s January decision, rather than sell TikTok to an American company. The firm’s unflinching obstinacy, perhaps, explains why everyone just shrugged at the first executive order and hoped for the best — and why they’re doing the same now too. Trump set investors scrambling, China hawks seething, and constitutional lawyers questioning how the move comported with the president’s stated ambition of restoring the separation of powers.

TikTok knows it has the cards. Whether ByteDance is at all interested in ultimately going through with a deal is a fair question: plenty of lucrative offers from US investors have been on the table. According to CBS News, a source said Trump was set “to sign an order initiating a 120-day period for closing the deal, allowing time to finish paperwork and secure financing”, but that “China backed out once Trump imposed the global import taxes”. Tariffs are a believable excuse, but it’s not impossible China is like Lucy with the football to Trump’s Charlie Brown.

TikTok is a major bargaining chip in a grave geopolitical struggle. Given the data users have always sent to Beijing, it’s been a bargaining chip ever since it arrived on America’s digital shores. For Trump, though, it’s not exactly his chip to bargain with: Congress already determined the American course of action. The mystery is why nobody seems to mind Trump delaying its execution — or at least, why nobody is complaining publicly.

With Trump’s 5 April deadline looming, I set out in March to query Trump-friendly conservatives on the legitimacy of his executive order. Several requests went unanswered, despite repeated efforts, while one group politely declined to comment over concerns about the sensitivity of the subject matter.

In reaching out to experts, I’d asked specifically about a summary of the executive order from Jim Geraghty of National Review. “Trump just didn’t want to enforce the law, even though it was constitutional. Nothing in the law’s text said the president could suspend it for 75 days”, Geraghty wrote. “The president and the executive branch cannot just ignore a law that was passed by the legislature and upheld by the judicial branch. It doesn’t matter if you love Trump or hate Trump, the president doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are enforced”.

Was that accurate, I wondered, and if so did it undermine Trump’s plan to champion the “unitary executive theory” in the name of checks and balances?

On the one hand, ensuring the proper scope of executive power is so important to the Right that Trump is firing commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and members of the National Labor Relations Board to restore presidential authority. On the other, he’s flagrantly ignoring Congress to improperly assert executive authority by almost any fair evaluation of the law.

It’s an important dynamic to scrutinize because Trump is — right now — claiming executive authority to override Congress on TikTok while also arguing forcefully for the “unitary executive theory” upon which the DOGE “revolution” hinges. What explains the Right’s hesitation to publicly advocate against this radical expansion of power, even as the GOP seeks to wrest presidential authority back from cabinet agencies and contain the Beijing regime?

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Shortly after Trump confirmed his decision in January, a couple of brave souls pointed out the obvious problems. “For constitutional conservatives: the law requiring the shutdown or qualified divestiture by ByteDance of TikTok, provides no statutory basis for the president to suspend enforcement. This is an illegal order. The bill uses ‘shall’ not ‘may’ in section 2(d) outlining enforcement”, posted tech writer Mike Brock.

Conservative John Hasson argued: “Per the TikTok law, Trump can only extend the window if he certifies to Congress that TikTok has ‘binding legal agreements to enable [its] execution’ of a ‘qualified divestiture’. Seeing as TikTok has no such agreement in place … Trump can’t do this”.

Flash-forward to Deadline Week and the Associated Press published a story with the headline, “Why no one is challenging Trump’s executive order that keeps TikTok running”.

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The AP noted that few members of the bipartisan coalition that passed the bill put up much of a protest over the 75-day extension, which “the law does not permit”, according to an expert quoted in the piece. As Sarah Kreps of Cornell University asked, “who’s the constituency [for challenging Trump’s extensions]? You have 170 million Americans using the app, and they’re pretty happy to see this continue to be available to them”.

And that’s probably where the mystery stops. TikTok is a substantial part of most teenagers’ daily lives, used by most people under 30, woven deeply into the fabric of popular culture, and a big chunk of the economy. If Trump can broker a deal, why rock the boat over a 75-day extension?

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TikTok critic Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins and the American Enterprise Institute told me in mid-March that “if the pause results in the sale of TikTok, in a way that meaningfully addresses the underlying security, intelligence, and propaganda, concerns, then I think the administration will have a decent argument that the pause served its purpose”.

“The problem”, he added, “is that President Trump has consistently signaled that his real goal is to strike some sort of a deal on this issue with China. Leaving aside the merits of any such bargain, the problem here is that this sends the signal that everything in the US-China relationship is transactional. The proper message would be that, if TikTok really does pose a threat to US national security, as President Trump once believed, and a bipartisan majority of senators and representatives concluded last year, then a ban or divestiture should not be negotiable. It should be a necessary step taken to protect America’s position in a high stakes competition”.

At the center of this conflict is data and, at risk of sounding dramatic, some measure of mind control. Whether you buy claims that China manipulated the TikTok algorithm to turn young Americans against Israel, there is something discomfiting about a Chinese firm retaining significant control over the US operations of an app used by millions of Americans. And the potential for surveillance and predatory data mining are bad enough without allegations of political mind control. ByteDance, of course, has repeatedly denied it’s engaged in any such activities.

But that is, of course, why a robust bipartisan coalition of American policymakers is also eager to get TikTok in the hands of entities stateside — both to wrest these powers for China and potentially use them for domestic purposes.

Trump’s motives here are not difficult to parse, and the bill in question is legitimately problematic. He’s popular on TikTok, and close to one of the company’s major investors. Conservatives have bigger fish to fry than what seems like a losing battle against the app, and most know they need to pick their public battles carefully when it comes to challenging this White House. And with the whole world seemingly allied against the president, his sensitives and loyalty tests aren’t entirely unreasonable this time around.

On this and other bold decisions from Trump, his defenders repeatedly cite the need to fight fire with fire and push back against Democrats’ perceived lawlessness, rather than fight with one hand tied behind their back. They point to Biden’s policy on student loan debt. “I promised to ease student debt for millions of folks”, Biden posted on X. “The Supreme Court blocked me, but it didn’t stop me”.

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Back in 2021, Aaron Blake criticized Biden’s COVID-era eviction moratorium policy in the Washington Post, summarizing the president’s attitude as, “It might not be legal, but even if it’s not, we’ll get some good done in the meantime”.

Both parties can play the blame game all day, arguing until they’re blue in the face about who started all of this — at least in modern US history. But that’s the point. As talking heads have spent recent weeks shouting at one another about Trump’s explicit challenges to the status quo on deportations and federal workers, his TikTok policy faded into the background. In the shadow of scrutiny, Republicans and Democrats hoping for a deal that benefits the United States may have forfeited a principle they claim to be fighting for bitterly in other theatres.

The proof is Trump’s flippant 75-day extension of his first 75-day extension. As fallout continued from his tariff bombshell — including the legitimacy of his emergency authority to implement the new rates — barely anyone batted an eye at TikTok getting another dubious bailout.

The arc of Grey’s is the arc of American television in more ways than one. From monoculture to micro-culture, from a time of shared institutional trust to one of reflexive distrust, you can see the shift from Dr. Meredith Grey’s primetime debut on a March night during George W. Bush’s second term, to the show’s post-Covid whimpers. The era of medical soaps and detective shows has given way to streaming juggernaut Taylor Sheridan’s more cynical, less gauzy renderings of American institutions.

Wikipedia’s synopsis for the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy describes it like this: “Meredith Grey wakes up after a one-night stand to start her first shift as a surgical intern. The first shift for Meredith and the new surgical interns … proves eventful and backbreaking. While working, Meredith realizes that the man from her one-night stand is Dr. Derek Shepherd, her attending physician. Derek enlists the interns’ work to solve the case of a teenage-girl baton twirler who has seizures. Meredith and Cristina realize that she has an aneurysm that was burst by a fall”.

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The plot is almost too perfect: a high-achieving woman in a major city — post 9/11 Seattle — shows up to work and finds out she slept with her new boss the night before. She solves problems with her colleagues.

Derek, of course, was played by Patrick Dempsey. Along with Pompeo and Katherine Heigl (who played Izzie Stevens), Grey’s launched stars who were inescapable throughout the aughts. Shonda Rhimes, creator and head writer of the show, started Shondaland — the name of her production company and her vast universe of TV series — thanks to the blockbuster success of Grey’s. “At her most prolific”, a writer for Time noted in 2022, “Rhimes was responsible for producing around 70 episodes of TV across up to four ABC dramas each year”. Rhimes’ career, like those of her female protagonists from Bridgerton to Scandal, is its own topic of fascination for culture writers tracking the rise and fall of #GirlBoss feminism and the crescendo of Peak Woke.

One trend is impossible to ignore: Rhimes began her career on ABC. By 2017, she’d moved to Netflix, like most younger people in her audience. When the deal was re-upped in 2021, Rhimes reportedly got somewhere between $300 to $400 million. Yet no individual show today has the power Grey’s enjoyed in 2005.

That May, the Grey’s season finale drew 22 million viewers. That’s higher than last year’s September presidential debate. It’s roughly the audience of a Sunday-night football game these days. It’s impressive for a fictional series to garner anywhere close to 10 million viewers; last week’s episode of Grey’s got 2.39 million.

Welcome to the micro-culture, where success is measured in single-digit ratings. This is good and bad news for consumers and artists. The good news is that consumers get more niche content, and artists are under less pressure to create content for literally everyone. The bad news: consumers get more niche content and artists are under less pressure to create content for literally everyone.

The contrast between Stephen Colbert and Johnny Carson illustrates the effect of this dynamic on popular culture. Colbert was the king of late-night TV during President Trump’s first term, despite being the least funny and most partisan guy in the game. Carson didn’t avoid politics, but he avoided alienating one side or the other. During Carson’s run, of course, NBC needed to maximize the appeal of his show to draw the most ad dollars it possibly could. During Colbert’s run, the way to win the rating game is to cultivate a niche base of loyal supporters — and a great way to do that is with culture-war fodder.

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Rhimes, a prominent activist for Democrats in the Trump years, is still a woman of the monoculture. “I don’t like to be preached at, and I’m not interested in preaching”, she said in 2022, when preaching was Hollywood’s top currency. Yet Rhimes resigned from the Kennedy Center board in protest of Trump’s takeover last month. She told Time she pivoted from the cutthroat White House saga of Olivia Pope and Scandal to the fantasy world of Netflix favorite Bridgerton, “when it felt like the world had caught up to the stories we were telling”.

Pope had an abortion in 2015. On Grey’s, Cristina Yang got one in 2011. Rhimes, interestingly enough, told Vulture she “let go” of a similar plot line during the series’ first season amid objections from the network. Planned Parenthood has since credited Rhimes with helping to “Flip The Script On Abortion In Television”. By 2011, though, Rhimes’s audience for Grey’s had been cut nearly in half. The abortion episode pulled in about 10 million viewers, which wasn’t nothing for ABC but wasn’t 2005 either.

The highest-rated Grey’s episodes of all-time are somewhat infamous. The first episode in a two-part special that aired after the Super Bowl in 2006 managed to pull in nearly 40 million viewers. Its self-seriousness is so amusing to revisit now that a doctor’s 2022 reaction video to the episode has more than 7 million views. Entertainment Weekly described the plot like this: “After surgically removing a bomb from a man’s torso, Meredith Grey hands it over to defuser Dylan Young — and it blows up before he even makes it out of the [operating room]”. If you can even make it through that description without laughing, congratulations on clinging to your innocence.

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Every once in a while, scenes from the special go viral on social media, evoking something like disbelief that we actually sat on the edge of our seats, snacking on Super Bowl scraps, watching Kyle Chandler (spoiler alert) get blown up by a torso bomb.

And yet. Taylor Sheridan’s universe is thriving. From Yellowstone and its many spinoffs to Tulsa King, the man is a machine — not unlike Shonda Rhimes. His shows are just as soapy.

If you had the good fortune of missing the viral scene from Sheridan’s new series Landman in which Billy Bob Thornton’s teenage daughter explains how she avoids getting pregnant when sleeping with her boyfriend (it’s a bold strategy), the drama is a reminder that Americans are still glued to soaps. Landman isn’t bad. Perhaps like the torso bomb, in the context of the full episode, the scene’s jaw-dropping levels of cringe actually flow more naturally — though Sheridan still writes women like they live perpetually in the opening scene of a pornography movie.

Sheridan’s universe, like Shonda’s, is pure soap. It’s soap for men, to be sure, but it’s soap nonetheless. And, with the exception of football, it’s the closest TV comes to monoculture now. We don’t have clean apples-to-apples metrics to compare the streaming era with what came before it, but Paramount says Landman reached around 15 million households in its first four weeks. That seems to be a record, though Sheridan’s projects routinely pull in big numbers.

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Shonda versus Sheridan is a fascinating study in contrasts. Books could be filled with analyses of how each writer treats men and women, and how those choices reflect cultural shifts. (Rhimes presaged the #GirlBoss ascent, Sheridan presaged the male backlash). Rhimes shook up the procedural drama dominated by classics like Law & Order, ER, and Baby-Boomer favorite Blue Bloods.

Where Sheridan and Shonda are both masters in the high art of television drama, what’s changed in the culture from 2005 to now is Americans’ relationship to authority: doctors, law enforcement, politicians. According to Gallup’s annual tracker, trust in the medical system is down 12 points since Grey’s premiered. The same is true of trust in the police. Trust in the presidency is down 18 points, and trust in Congress, big business, and banks is hovering near record lows.

Rhimes got dark. Grey’s got dark. But her shows were fuzzier than Sheridan’s. Their edges were blunted by optimism and redemption. Sheridan’s universe is cynical. It’s undeniably gorgeous, capturing Yellowstone like Bierstadt, electrifying new generations with a lust for the American frontier. But his institutions are dark and corrupt, and his protagonists are rough. (And not in a one-night-stand-with-Patrick-Dempsey kind of way.) Their redemption arcs take much more work, if the audience can even get there with the characters.

Maybe Sheridan’s post-Trump soap operas are what Shonda’s were post-9/11. Yellowstone is the Shondaverse for a generation with lower institutional trust, that finds its catharsis in escapism committed to depicting people as they are, not as we want them to be. There are merits in both, to be sure, but as Grey’s hits the 20-year mark in a new economy and new culture, it’s funny to think our appetites for soap operas haven’t changed, but our appetites for their heroes have.

The answer, at least as of Chavez-DeRemer’s hearing, appears to be yes. Senate Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee are poised to send her nomination to the floor of the upper chamber, where Chavez-DeRemer will likely be confirmed with some measure of bipartisan support.

This, of course, could all go sideways. Republicans are planning to ask Chavez-DeRemer some serious questions about her intentions for the department today. GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a longtime skeptic of labor unions, will decline to move Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination out of the HELP committee. That means she’ll need votes from the Left. Sources say the labor movement is itself making a powerful case to Democratic committee members like Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin: It’s Chavez-DeRemer or someone much, much worse.

How did a Republican president’s nominee to lead the Labor Department end up receiving an assist from unions? The story of Lori Chavez-DeRemer is the story of how the GOP became MAGA. Trump’s singular, personal ideology of “America First” transactional pragmatism is the operating software of the Republican Party right now. That means different things at different moments. At this moment, even while an anti-union figure like Elon Musk slashes the federal bureaucracy, the GOP is backing the same candidate for Labor as unions themselves. With opposition to Musk quickly becoming a new cultural litmus test on the Left, Democrats are thrown by the nomination too.

Thirty-six years ago this month, a 20-year-old Lori Chavez-DeRemer started working part-time at the front desk of a Planned Parenthood clinic in California. Now in her mid-fifties, Chavez-DeRemer told NBC News: “I personally do not support abortion, and if confirmed, I would not use my position as Secretary to facilitate abortion access in Labor Department programs. My job will be to implement President Trump’s agenda.”

It’s not uncommon for moderate Republicans to disagree with the party’s platform on abortion, and her long career in politics reflects a standard record for GOP politicians on the West Coast. In a 2023 interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Chavez-DeRemer mused about her time as a suburban mayor: “For the longest time, people probably didn’t even know what my party was, because I just wanted to represent the people and the concerns that they had for things that happened in front of their noses.”

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This makes Chavez-DeRemer an interesting character. Before serving a single term in Congress, she enjoyed a long career in local politics. After marrying her “high school sweetheart”, supporting him through medical school with odd jobs, and a stint on the local parks committee, in 2004 Chavez-DeRemer joined the city council of Happy Valley, a community outside Portland, Oregon. A mother of twins, she would go on to serve as mayor of Happy Valley from 2010 to 2018.

Chavez-DeRemer took a “break” from holding office until 2022, when she flipped Oregon’s 5th Congressional District red in a razor-tight race for the seat she then lost last November following another close election. But by Thanksgiving, Trump announced he would nominate Chavez-DeRemer to serve as Labor Secretary, elevating the former mayor of Happy Valley to the executive branch.

At the time, the Washington Post reported that the pick “surprised” Beltway insiders and described the nominee as a “moderate Republican who has served on bipartisan congressional caucuses and supported pro-union legislation”. So how did she end up on Trump’s list? It’s widely understood in D.C. that Teamsters president Sean O’Brien pushed for Chavez-DeRemer after agreeing to speak at the Republican National Convention last summer, a place no labor leader in recent history would have been caught dead until Trump came along. O’Brien also declined to endorse Kamala Harris, bucking a trend.

As a New Yorker story recently observed, Chavez-DeRemer “was raised in California by a Mexican American Teamster”, adding: “Her father, Richard Chavez, who worked at a Safeway milk plant in the Central Valley, reportedly leaned on his union card to help his daughter last year, when she was seeking labor endorsements in a bid for reelection.” While she lost that race, Chavez-DeRemer became the first Republican endorsed by the local Teamsters in two decades. Why? Her support for the PRO Act, a bill strongly associated with Joe Biden and the Democrats, which would make it much easier to form a union, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would guarantee the right to organize for state employees.

These are not merely bills strongly associated with Biden and the Democrats, but also bills strongly opposed by high-profile Republicans, with the very notable exception of Josh Hawley in the case of the PRO Act. That’s why, according to Politico, anti-union groups tried to prevent Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination in the first place. That she is even up for nomination, let alone confirmation, is a major victory for Trumpism in and of itself.

Theoretically, a win for Trump on this could be a victory for the Left too, though Chavez-DeRemer only has a lifetime rating of 10% on the AFL-CIO’s scorecard that seeks to rate a politicians’ friendliness to organized labor. “Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is perhaps the best-case scenario for worker advocates and labor unions, relative to the other names in the mix, such as former fast-food CEO Andy Puzder,” Politico continued. If Democrats were to block her, then a conventional anti-union Republican would almost certainly take her place.

First, though, Chavez-DeRemer needs to be voted out of committee, a normally mundane part of the confirmation process that in this case could be imperiled by GOP Sen. Rand Paul who confirmed on Tuesday that he would vote against Chavez-DeRemer. Paul’s decision comes as no surprise. “I’m the national spokesman and lead author of the right-to-work bill,” he posted on X back in January. “Her support for the PRO Act, which would not only oppose national right to work but would preempt state law on right to work — I think it’s not a good thing.” This means Trump will need Democrats to advance his nominee out of HELP to a full floor vote: Sen. John Fetterman says he’s a yes, as does Jeff Merkley. But that won’t matter if Chavez-DeRemer gets stuck in committee.

Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the PRO Act is a big sticking point for many Republicans. According to one senior GOP House source, “she is a Leftist in moderate’s clothing”, while the president of the National Right to Work Committee warned in a New York Post op-ed: “Teamsters don’t deserve a Cabinet pick — like Labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer”. The evening before today’s hearing, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board came out swinging. “Republicans are enjoying increasing support from low-income workers, but too many think unions are the key to that support,” the paper asserted. “It isn’t.”

Several weeks ago, Paul warned that Chavez-DeRemer could lose as many as 15 Republicans if she even advances out of the committee. For decades, the conservative movement’s “fusionist” agreement against communism held libertarians, social conservatives and neoconservatives together. Labor unions were distrusted, not merely as disruptors of the free market, but as potential breeding grounds for dangerous ideological infiltration. This consensus seemed to fall apart after 2016, leading many on the Right to reconsider their reflexive rejection of organized labor.

Daniel Kishi is a policy advisor at American Compass, where conservatives interested in building out a Right-of-center lane for ordinary workers try to put ideological meat on the cultural bones of MAGA (myself included). Asked about the confirmation, he told me: “President Trump has transformed the Republican Party into the party of the working class. Selecting Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as his Labor Secretary reflects his desire to deliver on the promise of this realignment”. He added: “Senate Republicans should see this as an opportunity to cement the party’s gains with working Americans and make them a permanent part of their coalition.”

Heading into the hearing, Trump allies feel good about her odds, but nobody quite knows what the math will look like. That will depend on how Chavez-DeRemer performs today.

Republicans roughly know what to expect from Chavez-DeRemer’s realignment-friendly warmth towards organized labor. Democrats, on the other hand, now face the prospect of confirming someone who seems increasingly likely to answer to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency as he pivots to Labor, leaving any potential department head responsive to the President’s mandate for sweeping reform. Musk is a bitter opponent of unions and DOGE is already making headlines over its early moves to reform the Labor Department. Greenlighting Chavez-DeRemer’s confirmation could come back to haunt Democrats should the nominee be confirmed and start rubber-stamping attacks on organized labor from DOGE, especially if they appear to benefit Musk’s businesses.

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Democratic Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey told Semafor he had a “good conversation” with Chavez-DeRemer but seemingly referenced DOGE and said: “I’m not supporting nominees as long as the lawlessness continues.” Meanwhile, Chris Murphy of Connecticut came out strong in the same article. “I’m a hard no on her,” he explained. “And it’s not a protest vote. It’s about her character and commitment to the Constitution.”

That’s a good preview of where Democrats’ questions will go, and from where the pressures on them are coming. If, however, you’re Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from swing-state Wisconsin, voting Chavez-DeRemer out of committee — and even into office — is pretty clearly an easy opportunity to look like a common-sense Democrat who calls balls and strikes. (Baldwin ran ads highlighting her bipartisan work with Trump to win a close reelection in November.) If Merkley and Fetterman are backing Chavez-DeRemer, it’s easy to imagine Sanders helping her out of committee as well.

Indeed, the aforementioned senior labor movement source believes Chavez-DeRemer’s biggest battle will be with her own party, where opposition to unions is deeply rooted in decades of practical and ideological machinations.

It’s remarkable that a Teamsters-endorsed backer of legislation despised by anti-union forces in the GOP ended up as the Labor Department nominee of a Republican president. It’s remarkable she could lose dozens of votes from Democrats, despite union backing. It’s most remarkable, however, that Chavez-DeRemer is actually poised to join Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard in Trump’s realignment cabinet.

One well-placed GOP source explained the dynamic like this. “Republicans are not thrilled about her,” they said. “But they’re going to vote for her.” Donald Trump gets what he wants from the party he remade.

And, yet, on the surface at least, D.C. is uncharacteristically calm. Some anti-abortion groups are agitating about Trump’s decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, but on the Right, nothing inside the conservative movement resembles a “freak out” at all right now.

“It’s the end of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” says one insider, reflecting on the feverish resistance movement that sprang into action after the President-elect’s 2016 win, creating an arms race for anti-Trump donor cash and media attention. While there’s some “grumbling” about Kennedy and Trump’s pro-union pick for Labor Secretary, nobody wants to “step on the vibes”, one senior activist tells me.

The threat to K Street lobbyists is more obvious, but you wouldn’t know it from the outside. The Chamber of Commerce put out a polite statement congratulating Trump on his victory — after which the incoming President immediately started filling top posts with sworn enemies of the special interests the chamber represents. One long-time lobbyist I spoke with on Monday afternoon said K Street is “scared to death and not saying anything” for fear of retribution.

“The angel of death is hovering and they just want fucking lamb’s blood on their door,” the person added. Everyone is hoping the incoming administration “has bigger fish to fry” than their particular industry.

There is no modern precedent for these nominees. Trump’s first cabinet ruffled no feathers in the Republican Party as he surrounded himself with known quantities with conventional worldviews. Remember Tom Price? Alexander Acosta? How about David Shulkin and Sonny Perdue? Most people certainly don’t, though it’s hard to imagine anyone will have forgotten about RFK Jr in 10 years’ time.

Even Trump’s more disruptive picks in 2016 were solidly on the Right, from the longtime donor and activist Betsy DeVos to Rex Tillerson, who was first recommended to Trump by Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Tillerson’s nomination even drew support from Dick Cheney.

But with a win in the popular vote and demographic winds shifting in his favour, Trump did the unthinkable this time around. This cabinet is a mix of bomb-throwers and GOP foot soldiers — slotting a fierce critic of government surveillance like Tulsi Gabbard next to John Ratcliffe, who is a staunch defender of controversial spy powers. If confirmed, Kennedy will rub elbows with Russell Vought, a longtime proponent of deregulation and cultural conservatism, and Chris Wright, a fracking executive.

Gabbard herself has said that Marco Rubio — nominated to lead the State Department — represents “the neocon, warmongering establishment of Washington, D.C.” As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard’s sphere of influence would overlap significantly with Rubio’s. While Trump’s prior disagreements with his own nominees have been hashed out — and this is good enough for the GOP base — their disagreements with one another have not. How long the collective bunch will hold the peace is anyone’s guess.

But there is one thing that knits these characters together: their loyalty to Trump. It would be foolish to assume this will necessarily prevent discord and chaos. But perhaps these aren’t obstacles to success. During his first term, Trump openly said internal conflict was “the best way to go”, as news of fights between advisers such as John Bolton and John Kelly leaked into the press.

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“It’s tough,” Trump said. “I like conflict, I like having two people with different points of view, and I certainly have that. And then I make a decision. But I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go.”

This is not the way either major party has viewed presidential cabinets in the past; they were always considered places to park supportive ideologues. Even Barack Obama, elected on the mandate of “hope and change”, shied away from nominating Kennedy to head up the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008. Described by Politico at the time as a “well-respected climate lawyer”, a Chamber of Commerce lobbyist told the outlet that “a Kennedy appointment is as liberal as you can possibly get. There is no one [candidate] based firmer in extremes.”

Trump’s Republican Party today, in contrast, is one where Russia hawks Rubio and Michael Walz will have to share the stage with Moscow-friendly Kennedy and Gabbard. Pete Hegseth, a decorated veteran, activist, and Fox News host, will oversee the gargantuan Pentagon budget if he’s confirmed as Defense Secretary. He is a bitter opponent of the department’s bureaucracy who would gladly wave a wand and clean house. He will sit alongside Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s Teamsters-friendly Labor pick who is one of the only Republicans to have co-sponsored sweeping pro-union legislation and Kennedy and Gabbard, lifelong Democrats.

It’s hard to exaggerate how unusual it is for Democrats to find their way into a Republican cabinet, accept nominations alongside GOP ideologues, and be met with such little protest by most of the conservative movement. In the case of Kennedy and Gabbard, both were invited into Trump world not despite their unorthodox politics but because of them.

Not all of Kennedy, Gabbard, Chavez-DeRemer, and Hegseth’s views are truly subversive, though, and most of Trump’s nominees are ho-hum conservative standardbearers flavoured with a dash of MAGA. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi followed Matt Gaetz as nominee to head up the Department of Justice. Former GOP Reps. Sean Duffy and Doug Collins were tapped to lead the Departments of Transportation and Veterans Affairs respectively along with a handful of other Republican loyalists. Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick will be familiar faces to Wall Street at Treasury and the Commerce Department.

But if Trump is their unifying belief, Trumpism will be defined by their clashing ideas. For outsiders, that’s an exciting prospect. For insiders, who’ve spent decades building the system and building their livelihoods around it, the prospect is deeply unsettling.

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They fear that Trump and his deputies are plotting “retribution” and “mass” layoffs across the federal workforce. Brian Stelter reported this week that some journalists are genuinely anxious “about newsrooms being raided and media owners being audited”. At a recent gala for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Stelter notes one media CEO said, “journalists are being forced to hire their own security, for themselves and their families. And publications are setting aside massive legal budgets for the challenges we know are to come. It’s chilling.”

Journalists may not need private security, but legal protection could be critical. Trump has a long history of calling for leaders to pull the broadcast licenses of outlets that, as he sees it, report egregiously false information. Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to head up the Federal Communications Commission, tweeted shortly after the announcement to say: “Broadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource — our airwaves. In turn, they are required by law to operate in the public interest. When the transition is complete, the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation.”

Trump, it is clear, has remade the GOP in his image, priming the party institutions to absorb “climate lunatics” such as RFK Jr — as one nonprofit leader told me this week — and to make peace with the politics of revenge. The transformation took eight years of pressure from the man and his voters. If anything, that level of compliance coupled with the utter demoralisation of the Democrats suggests Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp” of his enemies is more serious than ever before.

Yet if the fields and forests seem lost to liberal America — even as the cities reliably vote blue from Portland to Albuquerque — the one battleground left is what’s there in the middle. I mean the suburbs: the strip malls and drive-thrus where 43% of Americans live. They’re certainly less appealing to the media’s collective imagination than the woods of Michigan or Virginia’s mountain communities. But if they’re more Starbucks than dairy farms, the election is set to be decided here, with activists battling across gender and political affiliation to stumble over the line.

The easiest way to understand the political power of the suburbs is through demography. Consider the statistics. According to Pew, 46 million Americans live in rural countries, while 98 million live in “urban core” areas. Yet both of these pale compared to the suburbs — home to some 175 million people. To put it differently, then, the suburbs are simply a bigger slice of the electoral pie, and have the heft to make or break presidential campaigns.

Just as important, the electorate of swing states tend to be concentrated in the suburbs of big cities. There are plenty of examples here, from Raleigh (North Carolina) and Detroit (Michigan) and Atlanta (Georgia). Or else there’s my native Wisconsin. Outside Milwaukee sit the three suburban counties of Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha — together known as “WOW” — and which are home to over 600,000 Wisconsinites or roughly 10% of Wisconsin’s population. Philadelphia, for its part, has its own version of the WOW phenomenon, where its four so-called “collar” counties are among the richest and most educated in the state, and indeed boast more people than Philly and Pittsburgh combined.

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Beyond the raw population figures, the suburbs matter because of how residents vote. Unlike both their rural and urban cousins, voters in the suburban mass are split basically down the middle between the two parties. And if that makes them worth courting whatever your politics, that’s equally clear from recent electoral cycles. Traditionally, Wisconsin’s WOW counties have been Republican stalwarts. In the Trump era, though, the GOP is winning those areas with eroding margins — meaning falling numbers in the suburbs hit the Republican haul statewide. “As always, Trump’s personally still not strong in the ‘burbs themselves,” a GOP strategist in Wisconsin tells me, “but his appeal in exurban areas remains strong, and he is really gaining rural and small town votes still.” As for the Democrats, they add, the party is “holding strong” in urban areas like Milwaukee and Madison, even as they’re also gaining ground in more suburban areas.

Over in Pennsylvania, Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was partly the function of his popularity in those Philly collar counties, and indeed corrected for his underperformance in the City of Brotherly Love itself. It helped that Biden was both a native Pennsylvanian with blue collar fluency and a change candidate running against the pandemic economy. Yet if Harris is in a relatively less comfortable position — running as the sitting vice president and amid dissatisfaction over both the economy and the border — the consequences of Covid may actually help her in suburbs further south.

In North Carolina, for instance, the pandemic has led many Left-leaning voters to escape their small urban apartments and settle in the suburbs of towns like Charlotte or Greensboro, a phenomenon which may have permanently altered the electorate. As analysis by Bloomberg found, those counties that have seen the “highest population growth shifted toward Democrats between 2016 and 2020 — including many suburban counties that voted for Donald Trump in the last election”.

“Similar shifts are playing out in Arizona, Georgia and other key battlegrounds for next week’s race,” Bloomberg added. “It’s a continuation of a trend from 2020, when the suburbs decided the election.” Certainly, it’s something Parker Short has noticed too. “I have seen this shift in the suburbs firsthand”, explains the president of the Georgia Young Democrats, who grew up in Dunwoody, an affluent suburb of Atlanta named after a Confederate officer. “Since 2016, my town has gone from having all Republican local elected officials to all Democrats.”

As that reference to 2016 implies, one important factor here involves the distaste many suburbanites feel for Trump’s more vulgar tendencies. That’s especially true in Georgia: Short says that the Atlanta suburbs largely turned blue after Trump rejected the 2020 election results, and attacked local GOP officials. That’s echoed by anecdotal evidence too. “While I was in line to vote,” Short says, “an older white couple behind me confided in me that they were voting for Kamala Harris, and were lifelong Republicans.”

And if that explains why Harris has relentlessly campaigned on a platform of “democracy” — using Republican stalwarts like Liz Cheney to convince erstwhile conservatives to go blue for the good of the republic — it’s a similar story at the local level. In Stafford County on Saturday, amid Virginia’s sprawling suburbs, a three-hour line snaked around the sidewalk at one polling place. It was the last day to vote early and Democrats had dispatched the wives of Senator Tim Kaine and Eugene Vindman to work the line. That latter choice is telling: apart from being a candidate for the House of Representatives, Eugene Vindman is also the twin brother of Alexander, who became a liberal darling after testifying against Trump during his first impeachment. As Vindman’s wife told voters: “What he really stands for is service.”

Beyond an abstract commitment to the Constitution, meanwhile, Harris’s focus on Trump’s supposed threat to the rule of law matters for more pragmatic reasons too — especially when it comes to suburban America. To quote one Democratic strategist, the party really needs to “persuade ‘traditional/establishment’ Republican voters writ large, and that is really more about improving the margin with college-educated voters, many of whom are suburban women, because not only is [Harris] losing non-college-educated voters by huge margins, but she’s also not doing as well with traditionally democratic groups like young people and people of colour”.

Together with internal migration and disgust at Trump, though, there’s also a third factor that could turn the suburbs blue: gender. As Short points out, indeed, one of the most striking trends in his native Atlanta is how suburban women are moving towards the Democrats. Nor is this particularly hard to understand. Quite aside from Trump’s own dubious behaviour towards women, there’s also the question of abortion. With the Dobbs case no longer guaranteeing the abortion access nationwide, and fierce legal battles over the issue underway in states like Georgia, it’s little wonder that Short suggests it’ll “drive tens of thousands” of women to the polls — though he believes many likely voted blue already.

After Dobbs, Democrats are targeting what they see as the changing the politics of another group: suburban women married to Republicans. As Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist explains, “the big difference in this election are white women who are married to Republican dudes who might be registered Republicans but who want to vote for Kamala Harris.” This, according to Rocha, is because they want to see a woman president, are upset about Dobbs, or identify Trump with obnoxious men they’ve personally known and would never want near the nuclear codes.

Given Rocha’s experience in key states — he’s currently working in Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania, among other battlegrounds — he’s surely someone worth listening to. Or you could just turn on the TV. Less than a week before election day, a progressive group leant on Julia Roberts. In a pro-Kamala ad, the actor narrated a scene that followed white women into a voting booth. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know”, Roberts says as the women vote for Harris, return to their husbands, and assure their menfolk they “made the right choice”.

“Remember,” Roberts adds, “what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.” As Rocha explains, that last point speaks to what he calls the “silent vote” — mostly college-educated women who aren’t captured in polling, but who nonetheless plan to vote blue in private. And if Vote Common Group, the group behind the stunt, is spending $30,000 to get Julia Roberts beamed into the homes of women in swing states, the expense is a bet on Rocha’s “silent vote” to tip the scales on Tuesday. With Harris up nine points among women, Democrats are obviously tapping into something real — the question is whether they’re doing it well enough to combat Republican efforts.

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Democrats are not the only ones appealing to moderate suburban housewives. Beyond focusing on the usual bugbears around inflation and migration, Republicans are also trying to make inroads by focusing on the creep of progressive radicalism in suburban areas where parent teacher association meetings have been upended by hot button culture battles. “The trans issue has been incredibly powerful — and it’s not just from our research — it’s showing up in everyone’s data”, says Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, asked particularly about what’s working in the suburbs. “That’s why we are seeing it nonstop during the World Series and almost every college and professional football game.” This is clear enough in practice: in a battleground North Carolina district, encompassing some of Raleigh’s eastern suburbs, Republicans just put money behind an ad depicting the Democratic incumbent in drag, highlighting his support for transgenderism. Schilling, for his part, says his “gut” tells him Trump will do a bit better in suburban counties this time around. Before the midterm elections in 2022, 40% of American women said societal views on gender identity were “changing too quickly”.

Back in Stafford County, Republicans say they’re seeing a similar pattern to Schilling. When I stopped by the GOP’s tent, one middle-aged woman was posing giddily between lifesize cutouts of Trump and RFK Jr. As she watched that happy scene play out behind her, the wife of the local GOP chair told me that both Kennedy and Elon Musk were bringing a lot of people into the party, with women especially keen to vote red this time around. Like Schilling, meanwhile, she said many were particularly worried about extreme gender ideology.

Whoever ends up triumphant, at any rate, things are bound to be close. Biden won Stafford County by fewer than three thousand votes — just over 3% — in 2020. Four years earlier, Trump defeated Clinton by nearly 10 points. Not, of course, that any of this is happening in isolation. About 20 miles south of Stafford, King George County is designated rural by the Commonwealth of Virginia. There, Biden did better than Hillary Clinton, but Trump still won by more than 10 points in 2020 — and with more votes too. To put it differently, then, you don’t have to drive too far from DC’s affluent suburbs to discover country roads dotted with Trump signs. The question Republicans are wondering now is whether those signs, and their owners, will be enough if the GOP finally loses the battle for the suburbs.

Even last night, in her acceptance speech, Harris chose not to play that card. Instead she accepted “on behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks”. She talked about her life story, dipping into personal anecdotes, building to a pointed but carefully vague overview of her policy plans. And she talked in muscular fashion about her record on crime and drug cartels and predators. In her own way, she tried to be soft but firm.

The starkest statement about Harris’s gender over the week was a wordless one, on Thursday, when female delegates wore white as a nod to the suffragette movement. Their outfits dotted the audience but their silence was deafening. Even the New York Times noticed the messaging gulf on Thursday, describing Clinton-style rhetoric about historic firsts as “somewhat dated”. Clinton made gender central to her campaign message. Harris let surrogates and supporters “point out the obvious”.

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The Democrats seem to have absorbed a genuine lesson from Clinton’s loss, and it’s not that America is teeming with irredeemable misogynists. It’s just that perhaps voters don’t really care.

While a few other speakers over the week referred to Harris becoming the first female president, it was in the context of her becoming the first non-white female president — and mostly in passing. We heard personal stories about the Vice President as a loving step-mother and a wife, as a daughter and a sister. It’s not as though Harris’s womanhood is being ignored by the campaign; it’s that her womanhood is not being treated as an important pitch to voters. This is post-woke America. Pronouns don’t matter.

Polling tells an interesting story. As The Hill reported: “Since 2015, the number of Americans who say they are ready for a female president has dropped by nine points.” That same poll found only 30% of American voters say they aren’t “ready for a female president”. A clear majority, 54%, say they are.

What accounts for the shift? Since 2015, Americans supported Clinton in the popular vote and elected the first female vice president. They flocked to the Women’s March. Then came the heady days of cancel culture, and the MeToo movement ripped through the country like a tornado. But now, “majorities say that a woman president would be neither better nor worse or that the president’s gender doesn’t matter,” according to a Pew report last September.

In another survey, Pew found: “A majority of adults (64%) say that it’s not at all or not too important to them personally that the U.S. elects a woman president in their lifetime or that the president’s gender doesn’t matter.” Only 18% of people said it was extremely or very important to them that a woman is elected president in their lifetime. The country has moved on. It’s not about identity politics: they simply want to vote for good candidates.

Hillary Clinton lost for many reasons, and perhaps some small amount of sexism was enough to cost her the electoral college, but the data seems to suggest that meritocratic Americans were turned off by the suggestion Clinton’s sex should affect their vote. When the New York Times asked Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) about the tone shift, she explained: “There’s a ground that has been softened with lessons that we’ve learned from Hillary.” The Times added: “Female politicians have learned not to shy away from sharing aspects of their personal lives and struggles. Authenticity and vulnerability seem to be helping women in modern politics, not hurting them, [Pressley] said.”

Perhaps, though, authenticity and vulnerability were acceptable in 2016 as well. Perhaps Democrats spent nearly a decade in the wilderness as the culture edged closer and closer to a breaking point and learned a lesson about the American public. They want the best candidate to win, and intersectionality points don’t count.

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There was a land acknowledgement and a “gender neutral” prayer room in the United Center. Harris’s step-daughter lauded her commitment to “social justice” from the stage. But the Kamala Harris of 2020 did not show up. Democrats talked about Harris taking on criminals, not fundraising to bail them out of jail. Harris echoed this toughness last night as she boomed and projected a hard-edged attitude to foreign policy. “I will not cozy up to dictators and tyrants like Kim Jong Un who are rooting for Trump,” she declared to a roaring crowd.

It was abundantly clear in Chicago that Democratic loyalists — the same people who just over a month ago openly feared for their ticket if Harris became the presumptive nominee — are now enthused about the Veep. Rather than proving Democrats are newly relatable and not at all the kinds of politicians who create “trans refuges” or put pronouns in their social media bios, this week’s DNC proves the party is desperate for a win — desperate enough to be clever.

Harris ended her speech last night with another mention of her late mom. “My mother had another lesson she used to teach,” said the VP. “Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”

It’s working so far. When the balloons fell last night, with suffragette white blanketing the crowd and not a glass ceiling in sight, Harris had almost closed the approval gap that yawned so vastly scarcely a month ago.

Six days before last night’s speech, Republican National Convention volunteers were in the middle of receiving training when news landed of the assassination attempt and they hit their phones. The man they were preparing to nominate had been felled.

The question on everyone’s lips here in Milwaukee ever since has been: has it changed him? Last night we finally got the answer.

Every day since Sunday has been more giddy, more enthusiastic than the last. By the time final microphone tests before his speech echoed through the hallways on Thursday, people were describing it as “the best convention” they’d ever attended. “Historically, Republicans aren’t unified,” one GOP operative told me, “so it’s quite unusual to be at a convention like this.”

A sense of destiny filled the halls. Each night, the man himself walked into the main event like a UFC fighter, glaring steadily into the cameras proudly displaying his incongruously bandaged ear. He was still here. Meanwhile, MAGA rappers and influencers mingled with blue-suited Republican politicians and soccer moms, reflecting the duality of, say, J.D. Vance — an Ivy League venture capitalist who glad-hands with Marjorie Taylor Greene. And everywhere, that photograph of Trump, bloodied and punching his fist.

Delegates fizzed with the nomination of Vance for Vice President. Amber Rose posed for selfies. Sarah Sanders delivered an unexpectedly electrifying speech, and the President’s eldest granddaughter appeared on stage. Roger Stone wore his sunglasses indoors. Chants of “Joe Must Go” and “Fight, Fight, Fight”, echoed around the Fiserv Forum all week.

Trump, though, said nothing on stage. He told an interviewer that he’d torn up a “real rip roarer” of a convention speech and posted a few videos to Truth Social. During the big speeches, he would nod gravely and rarely smile.

All of it seemed only to intensify the devotion of his fans. Their bond with their leader is personal and deep; they follow him to candidates and ideas that they wouldn’t have considered without his endorsement. And now he had survived a bullet. His resilience attracted new donors and unlikely well wishers. Delegates and loyalists projected confidence. And, yet, nobody knew quite what that bullet had done to the man they were there to celebrate, the man whose name was embroidered on their denim jackets and sequin dresses.

“Trump never changes,” one source in the MAGA movement insisted breezily. “Trump. Never. Changes.”

I asked Kevin Roberts, a friend of Vance and president of the Heritage Foundation whether a new Trump might usher in a new season of unity. “Of all the things I would celebrate about President Trump, probably at the top of the list: his intuition about where we are in the country, at any point, whether that was in 2016, or 2020, or today is just off the charts. I think he has very genuinely understood that what the country wants is normal. And he really is a great messenger.”

“Detractors of his on the Left will sort of tear him down on that,” Roberts added. “But he is a great messenger.”

But what would that message be? When he finally arrived on stage, his name literally in lights, the room erupted. The production was spectacular. The cast-list impressive if idiosyncratic, with Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and Dana White all taking to the stage.

Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, before delivering a prayer, noted that encounters with death change us all. They “[call] us to reexamine our lives and reevaluate our priorities,” he intoned.

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For a while — almost exactly 10 minutes — that certainly seemed to be the case. Trump was almost unrecognisable. Not in looks, but in temperament. He spoke so gently that it was hard to make out the words as he slowly recounted the events in Butler, paying tribute to the slain Pennsylvanian man by displaying his firefighting suit on stage.

He talked of a “providential moment,” and how — in a particularly Trumpian formulation — “God was on my side.”

There was even evidence of the unifying tone we had heard about. “The discord and division in our society must be healed – and we must heal it quickly.” “There is no victory in winning for half of America.” “Whether you’ve supported me in the past or not, I hope you will support me in the future because I will bring back the American Dream.”

Perhaps this was Trump 2.0? Softly spoken, sober, pensive, conciliatory?

It wasn’t to last. As he warmed up, the riffs got longer. He impishly deviated from the script, revelling in his moment. You could see him returning to form before your very eyes. The mood of near-death conversion fell away and then disappeared. Weaponising the legal system, stealing elections, failing the country — the attack lines returned one by one. He boasted of $250 million of business that he had brought to Milwaukee by choosing it for his convention. “I am trying to buy your vote” he joked. “I’ll be honest about that.”

Having let it be known that he wasn’t going to mention Biden, he mentioned Biden. “I’m not going to use that name again,” he vowed. By the end of an hour and twenty minutes — the longest convention speech in history — the almost eerie spell hanging over the convention had been well and truly broken.

Back in Washington the Democrats are busy adding their own changes to the script, possibly including an exit strategy and a new ticket. Within the week, the sacred atmosphere of this past week in Milwaukee could be consigned to history by the drama of a new political opponent. Come the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, that party could have a new story to tell and Republicans will be left with a candidate who sounds a whole lot like the same Donald Trump.

The myth of Butler will now forever be built into Donald Trump’s story. But the halo effect may not last much longer than the bandage on his right ear. Last night he promised to turn “fight, fight, fight” into “win, win, win.” That is not yet a done deal.

Not five years later, Kennedy’s father lost his life at the hands of an assassin, just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Andy Warhol took a bullet the day before. More than half a century later, the Smithsonian describes 1968 as “the year that shattered America”.

Anti-war protests rocked campuses. Democrats planned to convene in Chicago. A man named Robert F. Kennedy was on the ballot. It may seem like we’ve been here before, but what if we never actually left?

Donald Trump and Joe Biden were both in their twenties during the year that “shattered” America. On cable news, RFK Jr shared memories of his father’s assassination only hours after yesterday’s attempt on Trump’s life. We’re at the bookend of the Baby Boom generation.

In 1967, the year before America “shattered”, Joan Didion famously opened “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” with a placid description of the national mood. “It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege,” she wrote. “It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.”

That apprehension turned out to be well-placed, and we’d be wise to consider the similarities: superficial comforts and cultural unrest. We’re not okay, regardless of the GNP.

More than half a century of high-tech liberalism, with all its idealism and material comforts, has only masked — and sometimes exacerbated — our age-old struggle against human nature. In an instant, personal grievances can become global ones, not merely confined to one community or another. A single evil person in Sandy Hook or Memphis can immediately make their insanity the whole country’s business, thrusting us into bitter debates about cities we’ll never visit with people we’ll never meet.

It’s shocking to see Biden cling to power in the face of his decline. It’s shocking to see Trump, bloodied by a bullet, walk off his sun-soaked stage with a fist in the air. It shocks us because we expect something different.

The year 1968 forged the two Baby Boomers now vying for the Oval Office, as well as the thousands donating to their candidacies and still controlling the C-Suites. On days like this it feels like the wound of that year was bandaged but never healed.