The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

Broadcast networks passed on carrying Joe Biden‘s speech in Philadelphia, as the president cast MAGA Republicans as a threat to democracy.
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A central theme of Biden’s speech was Republicans refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, something that drove Trump’s supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6th. Trump this week demanded that he be reinstated as president.

“Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election — either they win, or they were cheated,” Biden said. “Either they win, or they were cheated, and that’s where the MAGA Republicans are today.”
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Broadcast networks have traditionally been more reluctant to pre-empt primetime for political rallies or partisan addresses, save for major events like political conventions and election night.

Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.

As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Lisec explained to Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs that the reason they called the book “Unhumans” “is because it’s a verb, to unhuman someone…. To ‘unhuman’ someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty and property.” The authors insisted that “communists” were trying to “unhuman” those they consider good Americans, and that “we can’t tolerate an ideology like that” and so must do it to them first.

Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors tie together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present and claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who said, “Wherever I am, there will be no communism,” is a hero.

Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted in 2024, the right wing has often championed Franco, but “it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.”

The embrace of authoritarianism in Unhumans reflects the modern version of an ideology shaped after World War II by those determined to get rid of the modern state. Although the great majority of both Republicans and Democrats embraced such a government, right-wing reactionaries insisted it was a slippery slope to socialism. Defending business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure investment, and civil rights cost tax dollars and so, they said, redistributed wealth.

Over the years, reactionaries insisted that Americans who believed in such a system were un-American takers sucking dry the country’s makers. Increasingly, they demonized Black Americans or people of color and women as lazy and looking for government handouts, breaking laws with impunity, corrupting the country with their godless ways, and winning elections only by cheating.

And yet voters continued to elect lawmakers who supported the modern government. This infuriated the far right, but even establishment Republicans recognized that voters liked Social Security and cancer research, clean air and reproductive rights. While they turned out voters by railing against the “Liberals” who supported regulations and the welfare state, they made sure not to cut into those programs deeply enough to cause a backlash.

Trump has unmasked that facade. He has put the far right in power, where they are destroying the modern American state. Right-wing officials have undermined the world trade system that underpins American prosperity, empowered economic monopolists by slashing regulations and public lands, decimated reproductive rights and healthcare, cut social safety programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, slashed medical and scientific research, and dismantled the post–World War II rules-based international order that has maintained global stability for seventy-five years.

But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic throughline of left-wing revolutionaries.

Trump’s speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation “doing really well” was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by “leftists” both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed to present evidence that beginning with the 2020 election cycle, China “carried out what was believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history.” He referred to “China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” and called this an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” In fact, as Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of PolitiFact report, documents the White House itself posted show that such information is publicly available for purchase, and such purchases are common.

Trump also said documents showed that “members of the deep state” worked “to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.” But, in fact, the intelligence community told Trump about foreign interference in 2021, and Biden released its report when he took office. The report said China did not make an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Actually, one of the documents Trump released yesterday shows that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election to defeat Biden. Its operatives worked “with US officials and other prominent persons” to “spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US elections.” Trump has denied Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tied American journalists to this alleged plot, claiming the Chinese government was paying journalists to write negatively about him. He then attacked the media for being “part of a plot…to continue this [election] fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.” He called for the government to revoke their broadcast licenses.

“The findings are stunning,” Trump said, and indeed if they were true, we should expect dramatic diplomatic rifts and lawsuits. But does Trump actually believe any of this? The White House today said plans for a lavish state visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C., in two months have not changed.

Trump’s warning of a communist threat against U.S. elections was a setup for his insistence that future elections could be rigged and that the country must do as he says to stop that danger.

He said he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security “to notify every state about noncitizens on their rolls and direct them to be deemed ineligible.” And he demanded Congress pass the SAVE America voter suppression act, saying “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected in any other way.”

“These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned,” he said, and he told Americans to call lawmakers to demand they pass the SAVE America act.

Today Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanded states run voter rolls through a federal digital tool designed to identify noncitizens who are ineligible for certain government programs. Federal judges have blocked federal demands for those rolls sixteen times and prohibited the use of the federal tool, noting it was not designed to scan citizens’ information and often flags recently naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Blocked by the courts, Mullin threatened state officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t comply with Trump’s demands.

Yesterday Secretary of State Rubio expounded on the administration’s opposition to “Radical Left terrorism.” A meeting at the State Department was billed as an examination of the “transnational” nature of far-left terrorism, but Shannon K. Kingston of ABC News noted that Rubio and other officials from the Trump administration spoke primarily about what they call “antifa” and conditions in the United States, including the assassination attempts against Trump.

Kingston noted that a 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that left-wing political violence in the U.S. “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

Nonetheless, the White House said, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

There is a point to all this. Bannon argued in Tuesday’s War Room podcast that the idea of “communists” threatening to take over the United States through corrupt elections is “a predicate for immediate action.” That immediate action, he said, would be for Trump to declare “a national security emergency executive order…that took all of SAVE America plus plus plus plus.” And then, we can be sure, the Republicans will win the 2026 elections and, as Trump keeps saying, all the elections for the next 100 years. They would do so by default as the administration purged so-called communists from public life.

The parallels between Unhumans and the administration’s current rhetoric showed yesterday in Miller’s speech at the State Department. Bannon’s introduction to Unhumans begins with an epigram that reads: “Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

Miller told the State Department attendees: “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person, not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that?... You look at two photographs, and you see, you know, a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why did the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

In response to Trump’s address last night, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Cisco Aguilar of Nevada, released a statement saying: “That was some bullsh*t.”

The ICE agent who killed Johan Guerrero called his ex-wife Wednesday with a request: lie for me. She gave his name to the press instead.

His name is David Brouillette, 37, of Manchester, Maine. Four days after the shooting, the federal government still refuses to identify him, a courtesy no local officer in Maine gets. So Ashley Brouillette did the government's job for it.

She told the Portland Press Herald her ex-husband called her Wednesday, admitted the shooting, insisted it was justified, and struck her as "unusually calm." Then came the asks. Cover for his character. Don't talk about the abuse in their marriage.

Her answer, on the record: "I told him that I was not going to lie for him."
Then she talked. She described abuse during and after their marriage, including, she told reporters, an incident where he threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child. Her mother confirmed the account.

A second ex-wife, unnamed because she fears retaliation, filed multiple requests for protection orders alleging he stalked and harassed her and physically and verbally abused his daughter. People close to him told NPR he was prone to violence and held racist beliefs.

And here is the part that moves this from one man's record to a national scandal: the system was warned. Ashley says she reported her concerns about his stability to his military superiors years ago. Relatives told the Associated Press he "never should have been given access to a badge and gun."

Look at what the file already showed. Less than a year as a state corrections officer. Removed from a volunteer fire department, twice, for shouting and refusing a supervisor's orders.

And this year, according to The Atlantic and his own family, he became a new ICE recruit, hired amid Trump's frantic quota-driven expansion. ICE's defense: the officer has "nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience."

A decade of experience. A volunteer fire department couldn't keep him.
ICE also says naming its officers endangers them, because they're out arresting terrorists and murderers. Johan Guerrero was a 25-year-old delivery driver whom the Homeland Security secretary himself admitted was not the man they were looking for. ICE now claims otherwise. The government's story is still changing.

Guerrero was shot four times behind the wheel outside his family's apartment. On Thursday his wife, Martha Karolina Rojas Alvarez, spoke publicly for the first time, through a translator and through tears: "He did everything to see me happy." Their little girl is named Dulce. He fulfilled her every wish, her mother said.

No charges have been filed. The investigations are open. Senator Ed Markey showed up unannounced at the Scarborough ICE office Friday demanding answers.

And remember how all of it surfaced. The government hid his name. He called the one person who knew his history and asked for her silence.

She said no.

Do you have any ideas of your own?

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Do Democrats want to win this year’s midterm elections? Or would they prefer to indulge in self-involved arguments over the relative merits of capitalism and socialism that are irrelevant to the choices they’ll face if they win power?

It’s hardly surprising that Republicans, including President Trump, have seized upon the victory of democratic socialists in a few high-profile primaries to cast their partisan adversaries as a bunch of reds. But Democrats have no business allowing themselves to be baited into a debate that is both useless and misleading.

It’s not easy being a big-tent party that must unite the center and the left if it’s to create a durable majority. Democrats will make their task far harder if they pretend that the choice before them is captured by two abstract words. Coalition building is hard. Cold War-style, “the reds are coming” politics won’t do it. Neither will “leftier than thou” entreaties.

Their problem is aggravated because Republicans took down their own once reasonably roomy tent.

The G.O.P. used to include a significant contingent of moderates and even a hardy band of liberals. Now the party is best characterized by Ronald Reagan’s 1981 quip that, in his administration, “the right hand doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.” That wisecrack has become even more apt as the party of Lincoln has shed all its progressives and most of its middle-of-the-roaders.

As a result, what had once been moderate Republican bastions, particularly in the suburbs, are now typically represented by Democrats, many of whom tilt toward the center — figures such as Representatives Jim Himes in Fairfield County, Connecticut; Tom Suozzi, from Long Island; and Mary Gay Scanlon in southeastern Pennsylvania. The party can’t win a congressional majority without prevailing in such places, with such candidates.

At the same time, the party overall has drifted leftward in reaction to the discrediting of unbridled capitalism by the financial crash of 2008 and the steady rise in inequality since 1980. The high cost of living in big cities and precarious employment prospects have pushed many younger voters in a progressive direction.
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Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign captured this mood and sent a wave of young energy into the Democratic Socialists of America. The arrival of the new-generation left was heralded by the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then 28 years old, in a 2018 New York City congressional primary.

The D.S.A. had fewer than 10,000 members before Mr. Sanders ran. It grew to 45,000 by 2018 and then doubled its membership over the next four years. Between 2013 and 2017, the median age of its membership dropped from 68 to 33.

The triumph of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral election last year and recent primary victories by D.S.A.-backed congressional candidates in New York and Colorado unleashed a wave of elation on the Democratic left and cries of alarm among some of the party’s moderates. Mr. Suozzi organized a statement signed by 10 Democratic House members asserting, “We are capitalist, not socialist.”

What’s wrong with Democrats arguing about the relative merits of capitalism and socialism?

Such polemics clearly distract from their need to stay focused on economic discontent and Mr. Trump’s corrupt abuses of power, but there is a larger problem. The capitalist-versus-socialist debate obscures broad agreement among Democrats on all sorts of things. Suozzi Democrats and A.O.C. Democrats alike want more progressive taxation; universal access to affordable health insurance, child care and housing; enhanced worker rights; climate action; and civil rights and voting rights.

The two sides still have a lot to argue about over the forms these initiatives should take — for example, how to enforce antimonopoly laws, what tax fairness should look like and whether to establish a single-payer health care system or build on Obamacare. But these are hardly world-historical questions of the sort implied by a grand battle between capitalism and socialism.

Within the party, moreover, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist or a pure socialist. Each camp uses the qualifier “democratic” to describe their respective brands, pointing to a shared acceptance of limits on both state power and the power exercised by wealthy corporate interests.

None of this should mean dismissing the left insurgency, which reflects frustrations that span the party’s philosophical barricades. Virtually all Democrats this year are running as populist critics of a system in which the share of the gross domestic product going to wages has declined from 64 percent in 2001 to 53.8 percent in 2025. We shouldn’t be shocked that more attention is being paid to struggles between labor and capital.

There’s a particular challenge with the word “socialism,” because most contemporary politicians who use it, here and abroad, are advocating greater social justice, not the wholesale dismantling of market capitalism.

You don’t have to believe me on this. “The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” Bernie Sanders declared in 2015. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”

At the time, I could not resist observing: “Honestly, Bernie, you’re really a social democrat.” (In fact, the politician who has moved aggressively to take government ownership shares in private companies — at times, it should be said, with Mr. Sanders’s support — is Mr. Trump.) Most self-described democratic socialists are social democrats — think Norway and Denmark — who seek to balance state and market, public provision and private ownership, the creation of wealth and its just distribution.

Socialists in capitalist democracies regularly seek formulations that square these circles. One of the more creative ones was offered recently by the British Labour Party’s Andy Burnham, who is set to become his country’s prime minister. Mr. Burnham champions “business-friendly socialism.”

An oxymoron? No, argues the British economics writer Will Hutton. “Rather than an intellectual pantomime horse,” Mr. Hutton wrote recently, “it is a concept with a long pedigree trying to capture the necessary complementarity of the private and public sectors.”

In any event, it’s absurd to claim that socialists are about to take over the Democratic Party. Despite the D.S.A.’s victories, a careful study by the Cook Political Report’s Erin Covey found that in 22 primaries in the Republican-held House seats Democrats hope to flip, 14 were won by centrist or center-left candidates, while the other eight nominees are largely seen as viable by party leaders. Ms. Covey noted that establishment picks are likely to prevail in the vast majority of the remaining 15 target-seat primaries.

When November’s choices are set, the overwhelming majority of Democratic candidates will not call themselves socialists. The debate that will matter to voters won’t be over idealized economic systems but about which party is more likely to deliver relief and opportunity to those who feel left out. Shame on Democrats if they lose this argument because they allow feuds over abstractions to substitute for the shared work that social and economic reconstruction will require.

On Friday an Iranian attack on a U.S. base in Jordan killed two soldiers and left one missing. Another service member died Friday in northern Iraq. This brings the number of military personnel killed in the Iran War to 17 since Trump launched strikes against the country on February 28. The Pentagon’s casualty-reporting site says 427 U.S. service members have been wounded.

On Saturday, Greg Jaffe, Julian E. Barnes, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that multiple officials told them that the attack in Jordan was the fourth in five days and that the strikes had wounded dozens of military personnel and damaged several helicopters. The journalists’ sources told them that the strikes proved Iranian forces still have plenty of missiles and are becoming more skilled at getting around U.S. air defense systems.

The sources told the journalists that the first attack hit a base, injuring as many as five service members; the second hit a different base, damaging U.S. Blackhawk helicopters; and a third hit the same base where the soldiers would later be killed. In that first attack, about 20 military personnel were injured.

Retired Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula, who helped to plan the air war in the 1991 Gulf War, explained that bases in Jordan give the U.S. broader reach across Syria, Iraq, and beyond. Friday’s attack was “an attack on the U.S. regional coalition and an attempt to make the political cost of hosting American forces greater than the security benefit.”

Those sources who spoke to the New York Times reporters spoke on condition of anonymity. The Pentagon declined to comment.

Eric Schmitt of the New York Times noted that lack of information from the Pentagon today when he reported that in the week before the weekend’s deaths, three Iranian strikes injured military personnel and damaged several helicopters yet the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not disclose the strikes, the casualties, or the damage to the American people, citing the need to keep information about operations secure.

Schmitt noted that neither the White House nor the Pentagon has outlined a military strategy since Trump announced that the memorandum of understanding that extended a ceasefire—the one he signed on June 17—was no longer in force. In the nine days since then, both sides have increased strikes.

Schmitt noted the Pentagon has not held a major briefing on the war since early May. Since then, the administration has not disclosed the depletion of crucial and expensive weapons through the Iran strikes, or how Iran has both retained and rebuilt its own missiles. In June, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported that Hegseth’s claim that “almost 90%” of service members injured had sustained only minor injuries gives a misleading picture of the extent of those injuries. A spokesperson for the Army explained that the Army classifies a soldier as “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” only if they are at risk of dying from their wounds within 72 hours.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell responded to Schmitt’s story by posting on social media that “[t]he Department of War rejects these baseless and malicious accusations of hiding injury numbers as outright lies from partisan hacks at the New York Times who are desperate to smear America’s military and its leadership. Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action.” He continued: “This is the most transparent Department of War in history.”

And yet, the administration did not consult Congress about launching the war, as the Constitution requires, and has blown through the 60-day time limit for the use of the U.S. military to counter an “imminent threat” without getting congressional approval.

Damian Paletta of the Wall Street Journal today also asked questions about how the Iranians, who Trump said had very few missiles left back in June, are developing faster and more maneuverable missiles. Paletta noted that whether Iran is getting help from Russia, or any other country, remains an “enormous question” that puts “much more pressure on the White House to potentially confront Russia.”

When asked about the deaths of the three service members, Trump said “We feel very badly, but you know those great people, those great patriots were out there fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They’ve lost everything almost, militarily. They’ve got very little left…. We control the strait. They don’t control anything. So we’ll see what happens when we hit ’em very hard again tonight.”

Over the last several days, the U.S. has struck Iranian bridges and energy infrastructure. According to Iran’s Health Ministry, the recent U.S. attacks have killed at least 38 people and wounded more than 400.

Today the Houthis in Yemen, who are backed by Iran, announced they are imposing a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, threatening the passage of oil through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. If the strait is closed, the global oil supply will take another 7% hit.

The American Automobile Association said today that the average price for a gallon of gasoline is just over $4, up about $0.13 from last week. Before the conflict, the price averaged $2.98 a gallon. Economist Paul Krugman noted today that the “wholesale price of refined products (assuming 2/3 gasoline, 1/3 distillates) is most of the way back to its peak. Since this is what matters for inflation and demand, no relief in sight before the midterms.”

Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported today that crude oil supplies in the U.S. are the lowest they’ve been in 45 years.

The expansion of the Iran War’s scope, duration, and casualties did not keep Trump away from the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina on Sunday. After Spain won over Argentina with a score of 1–0, Trump joined FIFA President Gianni Infantino on the field—apparently unconcerned about the dangers that he says require the construction of a fortified ballroom—to present medals to the Spanish players.

The crowd resoundingly booed Trump, who then stood on stage with the celebrating players until Infantino jogged across the stage to lead him away. The Guardian captioned a picture by Javier Garcia taken of Infantino and Trump standing aside from the players: “Gianni Infantino carefully explains to Donald Trump that he is not part of the Spanish national team.”

Trump appears to be becoming less and less relevant to actual governance. Last Thursday, Alex Gangitano, Megan Messerly, and Myah Ward of Politico reported that Republicans were “scared sh*tless” about what Trump might say in his prime time address, but it is perhaps more of a sign of the current political reality of Trump’s falling popularity that CNN, ABC and NBC, chose not to run the speech live.

Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted that despite Trump’s promise that his speech would deliver “really, really big news,” the Fox News Channel largely ignored the event. Executives might not have wanted to get entangled in the election denialism that cost them close to $800 million after pushing claims of election fraud after the 2020 presidential election.

Fox hosts turned instead to culture war issues, railing against “DEI” and perceived abuse of WNBA Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who is white, by Black players.

In line with that focus, the administration is renewing its visible and aggressive immigration policies. For months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not released data about arrests, but immigration enforcement scholar Austin Kocher noted that new records show arrests in early July hit 1,474 a day, a record high for the Trump administration.

In the past months, ICE has recruited thousands of new agents. As Maanvi Singh and Fabiola Cineas of The Guardian note, many of these new agents did not have the requisite qualifications and were not properly vetted.

Agents from ICE shot and killed two immigrants within a week earlier this month: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, in Houston, Texas, on July 7 and Joan (or Johan) Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13. Neither man was the target of the operation in which he was killed.

In Maine, Ashley Brouillette identified her ex-husband, David Brouillette, as the officer who shot Guerrero four times. She found out he was involved in the shooting when he called her to ask her not to tell reporters about his abuse during their marriage. Both she and another ex-wife had restraining orders against Brouillette.

Ashley Brouillette told reporters that when her ex-husband told her at the end of last year that he had been hired as an ICE agent, “I honestly thought that he was being delusional and I didn’t believe it.”

As an Army combat veteran and former security agent, Brouillette would likely not have undergone in-person training to become an ICE agent, Christian Harsa of News Center Maine reported. A spokesperson for ICE, Lauren Bis, told Vanessa Romo and Alina Hartounian of NPR that Brouillette had “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training.”

Today, Senator Angus King (I-ME) and 38 Democratic senators sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanding “immediate, thorough, independent, and transparent investigations” of the shooting deaths of Araujo and Guerrero.

As Isabelle Oss of the Portland Press Herald reported, the letter noted that both former DHS secretary Kristi Noem and White House immigration advisor Tom Homan committed to making sure that agents are fitted with body cameras. And yet, agents involved in the recent shootings were not equipped with cameras, confirming “that neither of these commitments were honored.”

The senators noted that the acting director of ICE, David Venturella, promised Congress that all field agents would be equipped with cameras by the end of July. “We view this timeline not as a projection, but as a firm, binding commitment to which we will hold the Department accountable,” the senators wrote.

They also demanded that ICE agents wear labels clearly identifying themselves as ICE agents.

The senators asked Mullin to identify specifically how he intended to investigate the shootings, explain the vetting process for new recruits including whether it considers records of domestic abuse before hiring, identify updates or reviews being made to ICE traffic stop policies, and explain what oversight, reporting measures, or public safety measures the agency is implementing.

As if to demonstrate that he is still in charge, Trump this afternoon announced new tariffs on certain products from Canada. The 50% tariffs would further upend the economy if they take effect in 30 days as scheduled.

Trump has been complaining about the smoke from Canadian wildfires hurting U.S. air quality, and has threatened to impose further tariffs on Canadian produce because “the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air.” Canadians including Ontario premier Doug Ford noted that they sent firefighters, rather than threats, when conditions were reversed.

...and can close the Strait of Hormuz for the forseeable future.

The front page of yesterday’s New York Times featured some of the 440,000 Americans from Arizona alone who have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the deepest cuts to SNAP in its history, expanded work rules, and shifted costs to the states even as cuts to federal grant programs have forced Arizona to lay off a third of its caseworkers.

Those Arizona residents include Dee McDonald, a 65-year-old cancer survivor who weighs 69 pounds and skips meals to feed her three teenaged grandsons.

SNAP falls under the Department of Agriculture, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins celebrates the cuts, claiming the program is rife with fraud. Like other Republicans, she cites error rates. But error rates usually reflect mistakes in classification numbers by caseworkers, not fraudulent use of services.

Today Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters the federal government is withholding more than a billion dollars in Medicaid funding from California and Minnesota, saying they want to see proof that payments there aren’t fraudulent. Sarah Kliff of the New York Times notes that the administration was already withholding money from those two Democratic states. It has withheld $1.3 billion from California since May and $243 million from Minnesota since February. Now Kennedy says it will withhold more than $867 million from California and more than $200 million from Minnesota.

In the Denver Post today, Executive Director of the Association of National Park Rangers Bill Wade wrote that during his years as the son of a park ranger, and then as a park ranger himself, “I learned that these extraordinary parks belong to every American and that the people entrusted to care for them carry a sacred responsibility to protect our country’s breathtaking natural resources and key elements of our nation’s history.”

“But never—not once in decades—have I witnessed such systematic degradation, disrespect and dismantling of the National Park Service as I see today under the thumb of the President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum,” Wade continued. Budgets go up and down and policies change as administrations turn over, but “what is happening now is an assault on the people, the mission and the values that have made the National Park Service one of America’s most valued institutions.”

The Trump administration has slashed staff, starved the service of funds, and imposed a political narrative on historical interpretation. “Recovery from these losses is likely to take years, if not decades,” Wade wrote.

At the same time that the federal government is cutting programs that benefit the public, it is also privatizing systems that the government has been managing. Yesterday Justin Doubleday of the Federal News Network reported that Des Moines International Airport and Tampa International Airport have opted into the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) new privatization model for airport screening.

Congress created the TSA after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Before then, individual airlines contracted with private security firms to screen passengers and baggage, but the 9/11 attacks showed that this private system had dangerous vulnerabilities. Now the Trump administration is resurrecting that system.

While administration officials are slashing government programs that protect ordinary Americans, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine appeared on Capitol Hill today before the Senate Appropriations Committee to explain why the Pentagon is urgently in need of an injection of $67 billion to tide it over until the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The Pentagon has sunk billions into the war in Iran. Hegseth told senators the war had cost $37.5 billion, but independent analysts estimate the true number is significantly higher.

Two congressional aides told Noah Robertson, Riley Beggin, and Jarrell Dillard of the Washington Post that both the Navy and the Air Force will run out of money provided for ongoing military operations in 2026 at the end of this month. The Pentagon is already moving money around to bridge the gap, diverting money budgeted for equipment and maintenance and limiting or canceling military exercises and training.

Yesterday Rose L. Thayer of Stars and Stripes reported on one such diversion: The Army is reducing the legal resources available to soldiers being evaluated for disability “as review boards determine whether they are fit to serve or should receive medical retirement benefits.” In the past, the Office of Soldiers’ Counsel has provided those services, but dramatic cuts have left personnel available only for an initial evaluation, rather than throughout the three-stage process. After the initial evaluation, soldiers must either represent themselves or hire private attorneys.

At today’s hearing, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) grilled Hegseth. “Mr. Secretary, early in the conflict, day three, you said one of those core objectives was to, quote, destroy the missile threat, and as you restated it on day five to, quote, obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones. Those were clearly and repeatedly stated core objectives of the campaign, which four months ago you declared had been completed victoriously with every single objective achieved. Were those objectives achieved four months ago?”

Hegseth answered: “No one ever stated that every single missile was gone. Ultimately, combat ineffective means they’re not able to dig them out of their UGFs [underground facilities] and shoot at us.”

Ossoff: “Had the missile threat been defeated four months ago?”

Hegseth continued over Ossoff: “It doesn’t mean they don’t have underground facilities where they put missiles in them and hold onto them because they’re the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. So we never expected they would stop having capabilities to shoot. The question is, at scale, against an opponent like the United States of America, which went toe to toe with them in Iran, couldn’t….”

Ossoff continued: “You stated on March 8th, day nine of the war, on 60 Minutes, you assured the American people of Iranian surrender. Does that remain your prediction?”

Hegseth: “Ultimately, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon to threaten the United States of America. That has been the objective, and it remains so.”

Ossoff: “So, just to review, you will not answer whether your statement made on the fourteenth day of the war that Iran’s military had been, quote, destroyed and made combat ineffective was a truthful statement to the American people, as you sit here and ask for tens of billions more for the conflict.”

The second Trump administration is forcing the American people to define how they think the United States government should spend their tax dollars.

Today Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) introduced a proposal to expand Medicaid to all American children from birth to age 26. Kim noted that about 4.4 million children in the U.S. don’t have health insurance and 23 million are underinsured. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will make things worse.

Joseph Choi of The Hill reported that Democratic senators Alex Padilla of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois are co-sponsoring the bill. The legislation proposing “MediKids” has been endorsed by a range of organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Every child should have health care,” Kim said in a video. “Every child should have the ability to go to a doctor when they’re sick. Every child deserves to be healthy.” MediKids “would automatically enroll every child in health care coverage at birth. Because the system we have right now isn’t working. Because healthy kids make healthy adults, and that makes for a healthier, stronger future for our country. Because, as a parent, you deserve to be able to provide care for your kids without worrying about going into debt, emptying your savings, or straining the family budget. And because…we all have a responsibility to care for each other.”

Kim said Democrats need to bring new ideas forward while also opposing the Trump administration’s destruction. He told reporters: “I know that there’s overwhelming support from the American people for ideas like this, and there’s a hunger for ideas right now.”

“The Republican Party’s new favorite talking point is calling Democrats communists,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) said yesterday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“Really? Communists? Did we accidentally step into a time machine?”

“I get it,” he said. “They don’t want to talk about the real issues, the bread and butter issues. They don’t want to talk about affordability. I guess my question is, is Joe McCarthy back from the dead? Because it sounds like that’s who wrote all the garbage coming from Republicans, about communism. These guys, they dust off the same, tired, old talking points, every time they’re backed into a corner. Every time a new poll comes out saying that your economic agenda sucks, what they do is they change the subject. They try to divert attention. It is pathetic.

“But fine. They…want to play that game, let’s play that game. Let’s talk about the Republican Party. A party that worships one man above the Constitution in a cult of personality. A party that demonizes immigrants and says they poison the blood of our country. A party that calls the free press the enemy of the people and sics the Justice Department on journalists who they don’t like. A party that says their political opponents are internal enemies and calls them, quote, the enemy within. A party that is okay with invading our allies, including other democracies, a party that punishes their political opponents, that has deployed troops on our own streets, that wants to use the American military on the American people. A party that believes any unhinged lie, fantasy, and conspiracy theory as long as it comes from one man. A party that tries to lock up members of Congress for exercising their free speech rights. And a party that has tried to violently overthrow the results of a free and fair election in the United States of America. A party that, in fact, pardoned everyone who invaded this building on January 6, 2021, and tried to throw out the votes of millions of Americans because the president couldn’t accept that he lost.

“How dare that party lecture anyone? How dare they talk about communism when their own party has totally lost touch, not just with the founding ideals of this country, but lost touch with reality itself. So if we’re gonna start assigning political labels based on conduct, then let’s call things by their proper names. The Republican Party has become the party of fascism, full stop. You know, they have become a party of far right fascists who are hell-bent on destroying our country and our way of life. And every single time they call us communists, it is nothing more than a projection of their own… radicalization.

“They don’t want to talk about that, and they definitely don’t want to talk about their higher grocery prices, or skyrocketing gas prices, or higher inflation, or the cost of health care, or their new, endless, illegal war. It has now cost over $100 billion. So instead, they scream and they yell because they have nothing else left to offer.”

“Democrats are patriots who love this country enough to fight for it. We are fighting to make it easier for people to afford groceries. We’re fighting to try to make it easier for people to afford rent, prescription drugs, and health care. And we will not be lectured by a fascist Republican party that offers the American people nothing but lies, fear, endless culture wars, and tax breaks for billionaires.”

The political ideology called fascism grew out of World War I, when former socialist Benito Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

This theory drove the Axis powers during World War II, and in 1945, the United States War Department explained to U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II what fascism was. The government focused less on the ideology of fascism than on its practical outcome.

Fascism, the pamphlet Army Talks explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

After the war, scholars like Eric Hoffer studied the societal conditions necessary for fascism to take hold. In his 1951 The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer noted that demagogues needed a disaffected population whose members felt they had lost the power they previously held, that they had been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people were willing to follow a leader who promised to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader had to give them someone to hate. Who that was didn’t really matter: the group simply had to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters were suffering.

More recently, scholars are adding to our understanding of fascism by describing it as a form of political behavior. “It is,” Robert O. Paxton says in his 2005 The Anatomy of Fascism, “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

McGovern’s condemnation of today’s Republicans fits these descriptions even without the parallels noted by Carrie Kaufman in her You’re Overthinking It with Carrie Kaufman between leading Republican officials and Nazi leaders. On July 19, Kaufman showed how recent speeches by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller at last Thursday’s State Department about “Left-wing terrorism” echoed Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Heinrich Himmler’s 1942 pamphlet Der Untermensch, or “The Subhuman.”

But McGovern left a key element of fascism out of his speech yesterday: the alignment between the government and favored businesses. Fascism subordinates business activity to the needs of the government. In exchange for supporting them, government officials award massive government contracts and subsidies to favored businesses, and protect them from regulation.

Earlier this year, the administration established a new “Economic Defense Unit” (EDU) at the Pentagon, charged with investing public money in defense industries. Ana Swanson of the New York Times reported in March that the Pentagon was recruiting Wall Street investment bankers to the team to spend up to $200 billion in government investment over the next three years. That access, recruiters told prospective employees, would give them “access to fund-raising channels that include royal families and foreign sovereign contacts” in case they ever wanted to raise money for their own investment firms.

And the U.S. government under Trump has taken ownership shares of private companies it considers important to national security, like Intel, for example, and U.S. Steel. In November of 2025, Swanson reported in the New York Times that the administration had already committed more than $10 billion in taxpayer funds to favored businesses. The lack of transparency in this interference in the private sector raised concerns about favoritism, corruption, and the distortion of the market.

Last night, Michael R. Gordon and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Trump has approved a landmark 30-year deal to provide Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program. The deal gives U.S. companies a monopoly on developing a nuclear infrastructure for the Arab country, but it does not include monitoring and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure nuclear fuel isn’t enriched for a nuclear weapon.

The idea of building nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia was central to Trump’s 2016 bid for office. Members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn, hatched a plan for a joint U.S.-Russian project to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. In June 2016 they formed a company called IP3 International, short for International Peace, Power and Prosperity.

In Trump’s first term, White House ethics officials and members of the National Security Council warned that selling nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia could violate the Atomic Energy Act. Members of the administration continued to work on the project, nonetheless.

This week’s deal is worth billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. firms that work in nuclear technology, particularly Westinghouse, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017 when its nuclear technology took longer to build and was more expensive than the company estimated. In June, the Department of Energy announced it was investing $17.5 billion in loans to Westinghouse and local utility and energy companies to build 10 large-scale commercial nuclear reactors across the U.S.

The deal is “a big win for the U.S. commercially and geopolitically, enriching American firms and tying Saudi Arabia closer to the U.S.,” Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a research organization in Washington, D.C., told Vivian Nereim of the New York Times. It is also a win for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who has vowed that he will build a nuclear weapon if Iran does, making the deal a blow to nuclear nonproliferation.

Fascism has always been a vehicle for frustration with a system that was failing the people. But it has never been a solution for fixing that system.

I actually had a positive story for you today. Then some news broke. So today I want to talk about the latest development in the Trump administration’s war on women, girls, and families. Because you don’t get to claim you’re “pro-family” if your policies are consistently anti-women and anti-girls.

A New Direction for Sex Education

A new story from Stateline Media, part of the States Newsroom Network, reports on a major shift in how the Trump administration plans to spend federal money on teen pregnancy education. Reporter Kelsey Moseley-Morris, who covers reproductive rights, writes:

“The Trump administration has a new plan for teenagers who are learning about pregnancy. Beginning this summer, the administration will steer millions of dollars toward organizations that focus on anatomy, fertility tracking, hormonal production, and ‘reproductive goals counseling.’”

Notice that this isn’t just targeting women. It’s targeting girls—minors, teenagers.

And when I hear phrases like “fertility tracking” for middle school and high school students, or “reproductive goals counseling,” I have questions. These are young people whose bodies are changing, who are especially vulnerable to coercion, rape, and sexual assault. Those realities are almost entirely absent from the conversation.

To understand how we got here, we have to recognize that this agenda didn’t appear overnight. What we’re seeing now has been part of the Christian Right’s political project for decades. Its efforts to influence public schools, public education, and public funding are nothing new.

This Fight Didn’t Start in 2026

I graduated from a suburban public high school in Minnesota in 2003, so I’m talking about the late 1990s and early 2000s. During those years, my school district was consumed by battles over sex education. At the same time, the country was immersed in the rhetoric of the Moral Majority and conservative Christianity. We were in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a relationship that was often framed as salacious or consensual at the time, rather than as one involving profound power imbalances and elements of abuse.

Meanwhile, the gay rights movement was becoming more visible. At my high school, a student group called SAGE (Straights and Gays for Equality) formed.
It sounds innocuous now. It didn’t sound innocuous to the self-described Christians in my community, many of whom I sympathized with at the time. There was a major campaign by parents and students to eliminate the group entirely.

Around that same time, I received a boxed set of the Left Behind books. Many people remember those novels. They were enormously influential in the late 1990s and early 2000s, depicting the Rapture and the end of the world. For millions of American teenagers, they shaped an understanding of Christianity rooted in fear—a period marked by Y2K anxiety and, soon after, the trauma of September 11.

That was the cultural backdrop for the battle over sex education.

The “Compromise”

Eventually, my public school reached what was presented as a compromise.
Students had two options. The first was abstinence-only education. That meant no instruction about contraception, no discussion of birth control, and not even the famous classroom demonstration involving a condom and a banana. The second option was called abstinence-based education.

The language was slightly different, but the emphasis remained the same: abstinence first. This was presented as a concession to a large, organized movement of conservative Christian parents who opposed comprehensive sex education and resisted teaching girls about reproductive options.

I share this story because none of this is new.

The groundwork for limiting girls’ options, restricting reproductive freedom, and increasing the likelihood of teen pregnancy has been laid for decades. This wasn’t a spontaneous movement. It was organized. It was well-funded. And it was patient. What’s different now, in 2026, is that the money is even bigger. Deregulation has allowed more wealth to flow into these efforts. Tech money has joined the movement. And Christian nationalists now occupy positions of power throughout the Trump administration. Russell Vought, one of the principal architects of Project 2025, is one example. We also have Supreme Court justices whose decisions have fundamentally reshaped reproductive rights.

If you think of reproductive freedom as a line of dominoes, one of the first major ones to fall was Roe v. Wade. And now we’re watching the next dominoes fall.

The Good News They Don’t Like

What happened in the intervening years?

Despite these efforts that were happening in suburban public schools and elsewhere, we actually saw a huge decrease in teen pregnancy. There was a broader cultural message, carried even by shows like MTV’s 16 and Pregnant, that early pregnancy is a significant predictor of future poverty and diminished educational opportunities. This hits young women hardest. But it also affects teen fathers, and it affects the children of teen parents. Access to birth control improves outcomes for mothers, fathers, and children alike.

There was also a major public health campaign around preventing sexually transmitted infections and diseases. Much of that education grew out of the AIDS epidemic, and it emphasized the importance of preventing STIs through education and access to contraception. The results were striking. In 2025, U.S. teen birth rates hit a historic low, falling to 11.7 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19, according to provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That represents an 81 percent drop since the peak in 1991.

During exactly the same period I’ve been talking about, there was another movement taking place, a movement to expand opportunities for girls and women through education and access to reproductive health care. Researchers point to several factors behind the decline: increased contraception use, decreased sexual activity among teens, and better access to reproductive health care. Interestingly, some of the messaging around delaying sexual activity worked, but it worked alongside access to contraception, not instead of it. By almost every public health measure, this should be good news.

Unless, of course, your political project depends on something else.

Why Would This Be Bad News?

If we look at this purely from an electoral perspective, and these movements have always been laser-focused on political power, there’s an obvious problem.
Women overwhelmingly support candidates and policies that protect reproductive freedom. That’s not speculation. We’ve seen it repeatedly in elections.

A few weeks ago, I listened again to the audiobook of Tia Levings’ A Well-Trained Wife. Levings tells the story of living what many people today would call the “trad wife” ideal: an abusive marriage, repeated pregnancies, poverty, and a church culture that encouraged women to have as many children as possible as quickly as possible. She writes about the 2000 presidential election. She actually liked some of Al Gore’s policies. But she was overwhelmed by her own physical health, by caring for children, by poverty, and by an abusive husband.

At the time, her husband belonged to a church under the influence of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who has argued that married women should not vote independently. Levings recalls her husband telling her that maybe she could vote—but only if she voted for Pat Buchanan. This is what early and repeated pregnancies can do. They can leave women physically exhausted, economically dependent, politically isolated, and with fewer opportunities to participate fully in civic life.

The consequences don’t stop with women. They affect men. And they affect children.

The Assumptions Built Into Abstinence

If your broader goal is to reduce women’s independence and autonomy, one of the most effective ways to do it is to increase teen pregnancy and decrease access to contraception. And one of the most effective ways to do that is through education. The sex education I received emphasized abstinence above everything else. But abstinence-only education rests on a profound assumption: That sexual activity is always a choice.

We know that isn’t true. For countless girls and women—and sometimes for men—rape is a reality. Sexual assault is a reality. Marital rape is a reality. Sexual activity is not always a choice.

That reality is almost entirely absent from the educational model these organizations continue to promote. And that omission matters. Because when policy assumes that every pregnancy results from freely chosen sexual activity, it erases the experiences of victims of rape, coercion, abuse, and exploitation.

The Real-World Consequences

I’ll mention one horrific story that has emerged over the past few weeks, out of rural southeastern Ohio. Authorities entered the home of the Siders family and found two older adults, their adult son, his wife Elizabeth Siders, and 16 children living in horrific conditions. The children were confined to one room. They were surrounded by trash and filth. Some reportedly had developmental delays. So far, all indications are that Elizabeth Siders gave birth to all 16 of those children. Authorities also believe she began having children at age 13.

It’s an awful story.But it’s also a reminder that policies have consequences. The policies being advanced by the Trump administration don’t just affect abstract debates about education or contraception. They affect real women, real families, and real children. If your goal is to increase teen pregnancy, reduce access to birth control, and encourage women to have more pregnancies earlier in life, these are the kinds of human consequences we have to be willing to confront. The burden doesn’t fall only on young women. It falls on the children born into circumstances where poverty, neglect, abuse, and isolation become much more likely.

The New Campaign Against Birth Control

Another tactic being used by organizations now receiving increased federal funding is to rebrand hormonal birth control as something called “ovarian suppression.” It’s a phrase designed to sound frightening. The most common form of birth control used by women works by suppressing ovulation. That’s what birth control pills do. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when many conservative Christians were debating the morality of contraception, one of the common arguments was that birth control pills couldn’t technically be considered abortion because they simply prevented ovulation. Fertilization never occurred. That explanation wasn’t enough then, and it isn’t enough now. This is why I think it’s important not to get lost in the weeds with anti-abortion activists.

If you satisfy one objection, another one appears. Because the goal isn’t simply to prevent abortion. If it were, we’d see equal concern for children after they’re born. We’d see concern for women living in poverty. We’d see concern for girls who become pregnant after rape or sexual assault. Instead, what we continue to see is an effort to reduce women’s choices. Birth control pills aren’t used only to prevent pregnancy. Millions of women use hormonal contraception to treat painful menstrual cycles, endometriosis, PCOS, heavy bleeding, debilitating cramps, and other hormone-related medical conditions.

Notice what’s missing from this new campaign against so-called “ovarian suppression.” Women’s health. Women’s pain. Women’s quality of life. Those realities disappear from the conversation.

From Women to “Womb-Men”

That may help explain why some Christian nationalists don’t even like using the word women. Instead, some have adopted the term “womb-men.” It’s a revealing way of talking about women. The identity comes second. The womb comes first. Again, all of this rests on a worldview that largely ignores the realities of rape, sexual assault, coercion, and abuse. It imagines pregnancy as something freely chosen in every circumstance. But that simply isn’t the world women and girls actually live in.

From Pop Culture to Politics

I’ll close with one more example from pop culture. There’s a reality show on Bravo called The Valley. It follows the lives of people in their 30s who first became known on Vanderpump Rules. Instead of just partying, they’re now getting married, raising children, and navigating adulthood. One couple on the show is particularly relevant to this conversation. Danny and Nia Booko are adherents of the kind of Christian nationalist movement that’s gaining influence within the Trump administration. Nia, a former Miss USA runner-up and Miss Universe runner-up, is married to Danny, the son of Michigan megachurch pastor Paul Booko, who led Riverside Church. That church has faced allegations involving the sexual assault, harassment, and stalking of a teenage girl by a former church volunteer.

Today, Danny and Nia attend Mosaic Church in Hollywood, described in a 2012 Hollywood Reporter article as “where the A-list prays.” They are also the parents of what Danny proudly calls “four under four.” Every season of the show, Nia has either been pregnant, breastfeeding, or both.

Her views on sexual assault have also resurfaced recently through an interview she gave during the Miss USA pageant. Asked about the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, she said she understood colleges being “embarrassed” and not wanting those statistics to become public. She also suggested that women should learn martial arts, noting that she herself is a black belt. Notice what that response does. It places the responsibility on women to prevent sexual assault rather than on men not to commit it. That became especially relevant this season, when Danny admitted grabbing the butt of fellow cast member Jasmine, a Black lesbian woman. The contact was unwanted. It made Jasmine uncomfortable. It made others uncomfortable. One cast member even said, technically, yes, this constituted sexual assault.

But as the season unfolded, the conversation shifted. Instead of focusing on Danny’s behavior, much of the attention turned toward criticizing the cast member who called it sexual assault in the first place. That, too, says something about the culture we’re living in.

Who Is Actually Pro-Family?

From pop culture to politics to public education, we’re living in an environment where women and girls are increasingly under attack. There are countless excuses made for men’s misconduct, sexual assault, and abuse. At the same time, the Trump administration is cutting funding for organizations that have spent generations supporting children and families. Children’s Aid in New York City, a 170-year-old organization, lost its federal funding overnight at the end of June. It’s one of 53 grantees told their funding had been terminated. That money is instead being redirected toward crisis pregnancy centers and organizations that promote fear about contraception and reproductive health care.

We’re funding a movement that keeps women and girls overwhelmed, isolated, and poor. We’re funding a movement that increases the likelihood that children will grow up in homes where abuse and neglect can flourish. We’re funding a movement that makes it harder—not easier—for families to provide stability, education, and opportunity for their children.

It is already hard enough to raise children today. Housing is expensive. Child care is expensive. Education is expensive. The answer isn’t encouraging families to have more children than they can realistically support.

And notice another contrast. Much of this new grant funding includes an emphasis on testosterone and hormone therapy for men. The focus is on male well-being. For women, meanwhile, the conversation becomes one about fertility, reproduction, and being “womb-men.” Women become commodities. Our primary value becomes our reproductive capacity. The language may be one of empowerment—know your body, work with your body, use natural methods—but the outcome is the same. Girls growing up today may face pregnancies they are not prepared for. They may develop pregnancy-related health complications that become more dangerous because appropriate medical treatment is restricted. They may become sixteen and pregnant, the very reality our culture spent decades trying to prevent. And once again, it is children who bear so much of the cost.

So when I hear this administration describe itself as “pro-family,” I have to ask: Pro which families? Because the policies tell a different story. They tell a story of reducing women’s autonomy, limiting girls’ opportunities, and making it harder for families to thrive. That’s not pro-family. That’s something else entirely.

have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what
the government should do for its people. In early March 1953, soon after Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, giving the president a chance to reset the rising militarization of the United States. In mid-April, in a speech to newspaper editors that he insisted on delivering although he was suffering acutely from inflammatory bowel disease, Eisenhower warned of diverting the nation’s tax dollars to war at the expense of the people.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Eisenhower’s speech has been on my mind as the Trump administration slashes Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, foreign aid, scientific and medical research, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and yet is demanding more money for the Defense Department, bled out by Trump’s foreign adventures in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.

Because Trump’s war on Iran has run through the already-expanded budget Congress provided, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capital Hill Tuesday asking Congress for an additional $67 billion to get the Defense Department through the end of September. But Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) picked up on the possibility that the administration was trying to use the supplemental funding request as a backdoor way to get around the constitutional and legal requirement for Congress to approve military action in Iran.

Emine Yücel explained in Talking Points Memo that Murkowski referred to the 1999 opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President Bill Clinton that “the supplemental appropriation itself—passed without any authorizing language—satisfied the War Powers Resolution requirement.” Murkowski asked if Trump was intending to invoke the same reasoning, claiming that congressional funding for the war would, by itself, “substitute for explicit congressional authorization.”

Hegseth said he would “defer to our legal department” on that issue.

If you’re having trouble figuring out the funding for the Iran War and funding for the military in general, you’re in good company. The administration has obfuscated that funding so thoroughly, as Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), who is the top ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee and a member of its defense subcommittee, told Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo, that the administration hasn’t even told Congress where the money is going.

“We had Hegseth in front of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and he couldn’t give us an accounting and wouldn’t give us an accounting. They still haven’t given us an accounting,” Morelle told Walker. “It’s unfathomable.”

Morelle explained to Walker that the administration is turning to three separate buckets for war funding: standard congressional appropriations; budget reconciliation measures that don’t have to go through appropriations committees , can’t be filibustered ,and so can pass with simple majorities; and supplemental requests. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” Morelle said.

“The whole thing is alarming because, look…there’s finite resources. And the United States government needs to make decisions about where we’re gonna place our priorities, where we’re gonna invest our money,” Morelle explained. “If everything were just defense, we could argue about that number and that number alone, but every time you make a decision about increasing defense and security spending by $600 billion, which is a 60% increase virtually over last year, it means something else isn’t getting funded or alternatively, you’re borrowing more money.”

While Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, Gordon Lubold, Mosheh Gains, and Courtney Kube of NBC News reported on July 14 that the internal Pentagon estimate of the cost is about $100 billion. Walker notes that when economists at Moody’s added higher gas prices to the cost of the war, they estimated that it has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.

Yesterday Steve Rattner of MS NOW reported that “under Trump, the debt held by the federal government has surpassed 100% of GDP. By 2030, it’ll shoot past its all-time record from WWII.” Also yesterday, Megan Messerly of Politico reported that just over a third of MAGA voters think the Iran war has been worth the economic cost, down from about half of them in May.

A person close to the White House told Messerly that White House officials are “at a maximum level of frustration right now, and I was told by very senior people that the president is now fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point. We’ve got more dead Americans and a politically impossible situation.”

Although attacking civilian infrastructure for political purposes is a war crime, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appear to be threatening it. “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” Trump posted on social media yesterday morning.

Today Rubio said Iranian policy is “an eye for an eye” and added: “The president’s policy is a head for an eye. I mean, honestly, that’s what it’s going to be. I mean, they will pay a very heavy price for the things they do.”

The price of oil surged by 7% to more than $100 a barrel for Brent crude today after Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed to have attacked two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea. This raises concerns about the potential closure of the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, through which about 12% to 15% of the world’s maritime trade passes every year.

The average price of gasoline in the United States rose to $4.09 a gallon today.

After twelve days of escalating strikes between the U.S. and Iran, the strikes against ships in the Red Sea are a new development in the war. This morning, Trump warned on social media that the U.S. would consider the Houthis’ “interference with commerce and trade, by shooting at ships,” as the responsibility of Iran. In response, he said, “major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran.”

Yesterday Shelby Holliday, Lara Seligman, and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. has been surging troops, weaponry, and medics to the Middle East. These new forces add to the tens of thousands of troops already there. The U.S. Navy also has 17 ships in the region, including two aircraft-carrier strike groups, with eleven destroyers and a Marine Corps expeditionary unit. Retired general Joseph Votel, former commander of Central Command and of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the reporters the surge doesn’t necessarily mean the launch of new operations. They are designed to give the president and the Secretary of Defense options.

Barak Ravid of Axios, who often has inside information from the White House, reported today that Trump is “close to making a decision” about a “massive attack” on Iran. Ravid reported that Trump says the Iranians “want to negotiate” but “haven’t received enough pain yet.”

Today the House of Representatives passed a concurrent resolution to end the war in Iran by a vote of 214 to 208. Four Republicans—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Tom Barrett of Michigan—joined the Democrats.

A concurrent resolution expresses the sentiments of Congress. It is not a law and does not require a signature from the president.

Concurrent resolutions are often used for congressional business like setting the time of adjournment. House members have turned to them to oppose the Iran War because concurrent resolutions are “privileged” in the House, which means they can bypass standard scheduling requirements.

Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), a former paratrooper and Army Ranger who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Armed Services Committee, told his colleagues that while Iran poses a threat to the U.S., so do North Korea and Russia, and there has been no move automatically to go to war with them.

The impulse to resort to war as the only answer to threats led to “twenty-plus years”of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, “trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives lost for wars that ended poorly,” Crow said. “Americans are done with an endless cycle of conflict in the Middle East. When I was in Afghanistan, our adversaries, the enemies that we fought, would often say, ‘Americans have all the clocks, but we have all the time.’ They simply want to wait us out, knowing that we’ll just spend more money, have more combat deployments, and will just continue to do it, year after year, until we wear out.”

Crow said he could not answer his “constituents who are losing homes, losing their farms, losing their health care, who can’t answer the simple question: How is this making me safer? How is this improving my life?”

Later in the day, the Senate took up a measure backed by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to force the president to end the U.S. hostilities with Iran. That measure was different from the concurrent resolution in the House. It was a “joint resolution,” which is a law and which does go to the president for a signature. A joint resolution is usually used for something urgent and straightforward, like a declaration of war.

Senators have turned to joint resolutions to oppose the Iran War because joint resolutions are privileged in the Senate, although generally not in the House.

The Senate declined to advance Van Hollen’s S.J. Res. 180 [or Senate Joint Resolution 180] by a vote of 47 to 49. Four Republican senators did not vote.