Last week, on July 16 and 17, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA) held its third annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference in Washington, D.C. This year’s theme, the Reconstruction Agenda, took stock of the damage done to America’s core institutions as the nation marks its 250th anniversary and asked how we might rebuild confidence in the rule of law, the courts, and the other structures that liberal democracy depends on. Tickets sold out weeks in advance, and everyone from featured panelists to first-time attendees left the conference more resolved to keep fighting for liberal democracy.

One measure of how badly LibCon is needed: we’ve gotten request after request to keep the conversations going. So we’ll soon be launching a Discord channel where you can join in and keep the discussion alive. Stay tuned.

LibCon2026 was a great success—but don’t take our word for it. Here’s a sampling of the reactions we’ve received.

Alex Abdo, litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said:

The conversations at LibCon gave me hope in our ability to work together to mend our democracy. For a day and a half, we focused not on what divides this country, but on a shared commitment to self-government that should unite it.

, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of the Renovator newsletter, wrote:

Loved the chance to learn from people who have fought authoritarianism elsewhere. Loved to see how the community ready to defend liberalism is growing bigger and more confident.

, staff writer at The Atlantic and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gulag: A History, said:

There’s nothing more important than seeing, in real life, the people you read and follow online. This conference makes so many meetings like that possible.

Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, said:

LibCon is always one of my favorite events of the year, and 2026 was no exception. There’s something vital about being in a space where other people are asking the same questions that you are, and hoping to find the same kind of answers. An irreplaceable new fixture of the calendar.

Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, liberal streamer and commentator, said:

I enjoyed the conference a ton! It’s always awesome to gather a bunch of like-minded people together who are solidly liberal without constantly having to caveat statements for more radical elements to find acceptable. It was also awesome to have a bunch of people in the same area focused on how to fight the current administration, without just blindly accepting the large, populist front that America is confronting right now.

, vice chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative and host of the podcast Older/Wiser, said:

“Liberalism for the 21st Century” drew from some of the best minds in the world to address how to preserve liberal democracy here and abroad. But what was particularly refreshing was that it introduced new, young voices who will lead the next generation, including human rights activist Nathan Law who fled Hong Kong when China targeted him for his role in leading protests there. Participants and presenters stretched the philosophical and political spectrum, but their common point of agreement is that liberal democracy is at risk in the United States under Trump and around the world.

Kristie De Peña, president of America’s Competitive Edge, told us:

What stood out to me was how rare it’s become to sit on a panel with people I don’t agree with on everything and still walk away with a genuinely constructive conversation. That’s exactly why conferences like this matter: liberal democracy is only as strong as its ability to hold together people who arrive at it from different directions.

, senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, wrote:

For many decades now liberal democracy has been taken for granted, and so it has become stagnant, inarticulate, and vulnerable. Today it is under siege all around the world. The “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference brings together a burgeoning group of people, from all over, who recognize these problems and are fighting for liberal reconstruction and renewal, for big-tent coalition building, and for a better, free and equal future for all. I’m so grateful for the work Shikha and her collaborators are doing. 2026 was the best LibCon yet.

, co-founder and managing director of Protect Democracy, said:

The conference reinforced how deeply broken our political system is, and how much work we have to do in order to build a truly representative democracy. That will require developing fundamentally new and different institutions—and getting comfortable moving away from old norms and assumptions. We’re not going to return to the democracy of 2016 or 1996, so we need to get creative about how to achieve the more perfect democracy we want to see by 2036 or 2046.

Erica Frantz, associate professor at Michigan State University, said:

Despite the divisiveness of today’s times, events like LibCon offer an important reminder that liberalism is an ideal that we can all get behind. It could not have come at a more critical moment.

Robert Guest, deputy editor of The Economist, offered:

Liberal democracy is under siege. The way to save it is to persuade people that it is worth saving. That’s why liberals of all stripes need conferences like LibCon. By stress-testing our arguments, we can prepare for the struggle of our lifetimes. Also, the canapés were great.

Aziz Huq, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, said:

At a time when knee-jerk skepticism about vital ideals of free speech and toleration, LibCon worked as a place to reaffirm, celebrate, and advance the things that make it possible for our diverse American communities to live together.

, editor-at-large at The Bulwark and host of the Conversations with Bill Kristol podcast, wrote:

I’ve gone to a lot of conferences. But from its intellectual quality to its spirit of liberty, this was one of the best.

Jacob T. Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, wrote:

LibCon gets better and better at bringing together people in the broad pro-freedom coalition across differences: different generations, different particular ideologies, different strategic visions, and different professional approaches to politics, movements, and ideas. This year saw the most-ever younger grassroots activists as well as the most-ever leaders in freedom movements from around the world. It offered an important moment for thinking together about possibilities for a better future.

Jan-Werner Müller, Class of 1943 University Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author of What Is Populism?, said:

No liberalism without respect for pluralism. It’s essential to have an event during which, against the backdrop of a common purpose, one can sincerely and with due seriousness explore disagreements and conflicting views about a post-Trump America.

, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, said:

At a moment when our liberal traditions and constitutional system face extraordinary challenges, it’s more important than ever that people with differing political perspectives engage seriously on how to restore checks and balances, strengthen the rule of law, and renew our constitutional institutions. This conversation reflected the liberal tradition at its best: a commitment to reasoned debate amid profound political disagreement and a shared determination to preserve the constitutional order that makes democratic self-government possible.

, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote:

One of the most important messages a conference like this can send is: You are not alone. Not alone in wanting to cooperate across old ideological lines. Not alone in looking for fresh inspiration, talent, and ammunition in the battle for liberal principle. Not alone in wanting to glimpse what might come afterward if we win.

Devin Pendas, professor of history at Boston College, said:

This was my first time attending LibCon but it will not be my last. It brought together a remarkable group of speakers to analyze and discuss where we are as a nation, how we got here, and how we might do better moving forward. It was political without being partisan, thoughtful without being dogmatic, and provocative without provoking offense.

, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, said:

It was great to hear so many encouraging stories about the vision and energy behind the American fight, as well as the connection to so many global challenges.

, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and contributing writer for The Atlantic, wrote:

The range and quality of the presentations and conversations at LibCon 2026 were exceptional. Presenters came from Hong Kong and Poland and many places in between; public intellectuals shared platforms with activists and strategists; younger people, including Gen Z, showed up in force. The side conversations and networking were just as rich. Best of all, for me, was the reminder that liberalism is still generating energy, innovation, and inspiration.

, policy director at the American Immigration Council, said:

It was a pleasure to be surrounded by so many people who understand the importance of grounding policy in our shared vision of an America that respects its foundational values and ensures that due process matters.

Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Cruelty Is the Point, wrote:

I was struck by the broad ideological coalition of people at LibCon who fall under the anti-authoritarian banner. As grim as the times may be, there is something hopeful about so many people who disagree substantively on so much nevertheless coming together to reassert the importance of principles like democratic self-determination, due process, equality under the law, and free speech.

Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, said:

Very rarely do I get a chance to be in a room not just with academics but public intellectuals, those involved in the non-profit world, politicians, and journalists and this conference was unique in bringing together these different constituencies for a common purpose. What stood out to me was how many different thought leaders and activists are committed to upholding our democracy and the rule of law at a fraught time in the American republic’s history. I left the conference far more hopeful than I came to it, and I am grateful to The UnPopulist and ISMA for facilitating this important conversation.

Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law, wrote:

LibCon 2026 was an incredible collection of interesting and accomplished people. Anyone who appreciates the pillars of liberalism—free speech, due process, pluralism—and is inspired by the story of America’s founding should come next year, even if they’re not sure what role they would play in a movement to protect and restore our Constitution. LibCon and The UnPopulist are important elements of the mission before liberals today: creating an attractive, hopeful, and exciting political identity around the principles that animated the creation of our nation. Luckily, for tens or hundreds of years, this political identity wasn’t necessary, because these principles were so widely shared they went without saying. But now they’re under attack—or in dispute—and it’s time for people to reclaim the label.

, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said:

LibCon is a great forum to discuss the nation’s most challenging problems. It brings together an ideologically diverse group of friends of liberal democracy with a genuine desire to understand the issues and find common ground.

, writer at The Bulwark, wrote:

As always, I’ve been incredibly impressed by the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives offered by LibCon. A wide range of people with different and sometimes conflicting ideas, all united by their passion to preserve liberal society at a time when its survival often seems to hang in the balance. It’s a great place to encounter thought-provoking ideas—and talk to other people who share that passion!

That enthusiasm wasn’t confined to the prominent guests or the people on stage. Our younger attendees found a conference that matched their energy.

Kevin told us that he loved the atmosphere and that he grew “both intellectually and professionally” from the event.

Cameron was “blown away at the size of our coalition in support of liberal democracy,” reassured to see that liberal thought “is alive and well in America.”

Shea called it “a wonderful reassurance that liberalism is being championed, studied, and protected by so many people.”

Rafi said he relished the chance to talk to “multiple types of people we may have never gotten to speak” with otherwise.

Art was struck by how the conversations on authoritarianism resonated with volunteers “who come from different cultural backgrounds.”

Whick praised an event whose energy and “real defenders of liberal values” made clear the void left by the Trump administration wouldn’t be filled by “equally pernicious actors”—adding, simply, “I cannot wait for next year.”

And for at least one first-time attendee, the panels were only half of it—the real draw was “talking to people between the panels and at my table,” disagreeing at times but discovering, as this attendee put it, “the beauty of liberalism.”

This echoed the sentiments from some of the recaps already out. Kevin D. Williamson’s beautifully written dispatch for … well, The Dispatch, ended on a hopeful note: “Here I am—and here we are—looking for alternatives and allies. And this, I am more confident, is the beginning of something rather than the end of something.” Daniel Drezner’s recap was a touch more skeptical about whether a reconstruction agenda exists that can “get the blood pumping in the public sphere,” but he too found reason for hope on the ground: ordinary Americans, he wrote, have turned out to be “a little more democratic and liberal than elites feared.”

This was only a sampling of the reactions we received. The common thread? LibCon2026 did exactly what it set out to do: bring together the world’s leading liberal thinkers, journalists, advocates, and everyday citizens to chart a course forward for liberal democracy at a moment when it needs defending more than ever.

And we had a blast doing it!

Stay tuned for more content from LibCon2026.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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The Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism’s (ISMA) “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference—or LibCon2026 for short—was a smash success across the board. We’ll post some of the feedback we received soon, but the sold-out event was packed, the energy was electric, the panels substantive and lively, and the coalition we’ve spent three years assembling showed up in force.

In 2024, we set out to build something that didn’t exist yet: a movement of liberals—classical, progressive, disaffected conservatives, and everything in between—agreeing on one thing even amid their differences: that the defining fault line of this era isn’t left versus right but liberal versus illiberal, and that right-wing populist authoritarianism is the problem of our age.

The conference opened with a powerful montage from —using the soaring rhetoric of leaders past articulating a vision of America that is free, just, equal, welcoming, pluralistic, and rejects hatred and bigotry in all its forms. You’ll want to watch this:

The video was followed by ISMA President ’s inspiring opening address, arguing that America needed to save liberal democracy not just for its sake but also for the world’s. An America that turns its back on its own values would be catastrophic for other backsliding democracies. As Dalmia put it:

America, the world’s most successful liberal democracy, provided the yardstick to judge other polities—not because it was the global hegemon, but because it was a global example. It didn’t need nation-building abroad to spread liberal democracy. It just needed to be itself.

In 2024, she called on liberals to set aside their policy quarrels and unite around the values they share. Last year, she asked for moral clarity rather than moral purity, invoking Frederick Douglass’s clear-eyed embrace of an imperfect Lincoln as the model for a coalition that has to trust people it doesn’t always agree with. This year, with the country’s institutions in tatters, she went a step further: authoritarians can destroy institutions, she noted, but they can’t build them—so liberals have to take up that job while the wreckage is still fresh enough to see clearly. That’s this year’s theme, the Reconstruction Agenda, in a nutshell.

The conference opened with two agenda-setting panels: one on the state of authoritarian consolidation in America, moderated by Erica Frantz and featuring Jan-Werner Müller, Adam Serwer, and , and another on building a global liberal coalition, moderated by Robert Guest and featuring , , and . Attendees then gathered for the dinner keynote. First, Jen Baca, a former Miss District of Columbia, kicked things off with a glorious rendition of “America the Beautiful.” This was followed by a compelling personal address by Nathan Law, a bona fide liberal hero who spearheaded a protest movement insisting that Hong Kong deserved to govern itself—and was forced by Chinese authorities to give up his home and life there as a result. He remains in exile in the U.K. to this day. He received a standing ovation.

The after-dinner live taping of a joint Zooming In/liberalism.org podcast closed out the night, with Institute for Humane Studies’ facilitating a wide-ranging discussion between Jamelle Bouie and David French, both columnists at The New York Times, and Harvard’s . Many of America’s institutions trashed in the last two years need to be reconstructed. But there are others that need to be dismantled for America to make good on its founding promise to deliver justice, liberty, and equality for everyone. That is what the trio took up.

The next day was filled with high moments. “Checking the Imperial Presidency,” moderated by Protect Democracy’s , found more consensus than division. , , and largely agreed on a specific slate of reforms—narrowing the Insurrection Act and the Vacancies Act, reining in the pardon power, time-limiting emergency powers—that would make it harder for any president to govern by decree. When the question of court packing came up, the panel was unified against it—although it didn’t quite grapple with ’s recent proposal in The UnPopulist for a one-time packing by a Democratic president to inject some ideological balance to the court, but then also to tie that packing to a constitutional amendment that would restore the original number of justices, establish fixed terms for them, and allow each president to appoint merely two per term. “Congress and the Courts,” moderated by The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic, picked up a related thread, with conservative panelists of the Society for the Rule of Law and former acting U.S. Attorney General Stuart Gerson broadly aligned with the more center-left Aziz Huq of the University of Chicago Law School on the need for reform, but differing on just how flawed the current Supreme Court really is.

The Gen Z panel was one of the liveliest of the conference. The Bulwark’s moderated a spirited conversation with popular streamer Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, , and . Among other things, they discussed whether liberals need to adopt the same combative discourse tactics as their MAGA opponents in order to compete in the new, alternative media landscape.

The afternoon breakouts—on immigration, free speech, economic policy, and federalism—were just as substantive, with figures from across the political spectrum like , Kevin Williamson, , , , , and . They aired, rather than brushed under the rug, their disagreements—while searching for common ground. Nobel laureate Simon Johnson spoke on how to make prosperity more equally shared. After the breakout sessions, a panel on “Past Liberal Crises and Lessons” brought together historians and political theorists—Manisha Sinha, , Devin Pendas, and former Polish Minister of Justice Adam Bodnar—to discuss the challenges that efforts to rebuild institutions face after institutional collapse. It was a useful corrective to any temptation toward despair: reconstruction has happened before, and the panel was full of hard-won lessons from our own post-Civil War Reconstruction, the one in Germany after World War II, and Poland’s more recent example. Friday’s closing keynote pairing, and Danielle Allen, then tackled the deceptively hard question “What Is Freedom?” Klein noted that freedom can’t mean simply more choice of consumer goods. It means individuals asserting their agency to regain control over their own time in an attention economy that puts immense pressure on them to surrender it to internet algorithms.

We were overwhelmed by the positive feedback from attendees and speakers, and the recaps already published reveal just how powerfully expansive this coalition really is. —a left-of-center liberal academic—called the conference urgent and credited it with real, specific consensus; Kevin Williamson, a right-of-center commentator at The Dispatch, who spoke on the breakout panel about federalism, noted in a post yesterday that it was remarkable that people who agree on almost nothing else spent a day and a half arguing on the same side. Different vantage points, same verdict.

That’s the whole point of LibCon, and why it’s the only event of its kind: it’s a nexus for liberals of every stripe, united against the erosion of liberal democratic norms. LibCon’s disagreements feel different from the ones everywhere else because they happen inside a coalition, not across a chasm.

, the Bulwark stalwart and ISMA board member, closed us out. He noted that Trump’s authoritarianism was worse than he imagined it would be—but the resistance to it was also stronger than he had imagined it would be, especially from ordinary Americans. Elites, who have so easily bent the knee, are a different story. He closed by reaching back to something that James Carville wrote in 2020, namely, that a country willing to set aside its oldest quarrels and fight together could still go “from its darkest hour to its finest hour”—as it did in the Revolution, the Civil War, the defeat of fascism, Seneca Falls, Stonewall, and Selma. Kristol offered not false comfort, but common cause.

See you next year!

The entire conference will be up on our YouTube account very soon—subscribe so you don’t miss a panel—and we’ll publish everything on our homepage too.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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The following are Shikha Dalmia’s opening remarks today at the “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, which has been convened by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. The conference runs July 16–17, 2026. You can also read her opening addresses for LibCon2024 and LibCon2025.

Happy 250th, everyone. I don’t think I am being a technological pessimist in claiming that none of us here today are likely to be around to celebrate our personal 250th. But it is great to be here, in the capital—to celebrate this milestone of this extraordinary nation.

I am Shikha Dalmia, president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and editor of The UnPopulist, a great substack devoted to defending a market-based liberal democracy that you should all subscribe to if you don’t already. Welcome to ISMA’s third annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, or LibCon2026 for hashtag purposes. Thank you all for coming. LibCon has grown every year since its launch, but we are especially moved—and humbled—by your response this year. We sold out weeks in advance despite adding capacity and had to turn away a long waiting list. Next year, don’t wait to sign up!

It is truly gratifying to see so many people from so far and wide. We have guests from Canada, England, continental Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Hong Kong, other parts of the world and all over the country. We have here citizens—both heritage and naturalized—and noncitizens. We have conservatives, progressives, libertarians, and classical liberals. And bridging the rapidly growing cultural divide of the moment, we have brought together: vegetarians, pescatarians, paleos, vegans, keto fanatics, and pasta apologists. We have very good data on this divide given the dietary stipulations on your registration forms.

Our aim with LibCon was to replace the old left-right divide with a new liberal-illiberal divide and to build a global intellectual liberal movement without the illiberal extremes on both the right and the left. We wanted this movement to be powered not just by furrowed-brow intellectuals and pundits but people from all walks of life. We wanted diversity in all its resplendence—religious, national, ethnic, cultural, economic. We wanted all ages and all sexualities. Basically, anyone willing to set aside their policy quarrels and party allegiances and focus on the emergent threat of populist authoritarianism is our comrade. If you look around, you’ll see we are succeeding.

We are not here to endorse any party or candidate. We do not take positions in any electoral battle. We are here for one thing and one thing only: defend and advance the broad institutions and values of liberal democracy. In this endeavor, we are very grateful for the support of a host of diverse organizations: Hewlett has been ISMA’s mainstay; Packard has been particularly generous; Stand Together Trust has been with us since our inception; and Protect Democracy—especially our planning partner Justin Florence—has been invaluable. We’re thrilled to welcome MacArthur Foundation as a major sponsor this year, and deeply grateful for the Institute for Humane Studies’ liberalism.org’s support along with that of Kettering Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Johns Hopkins’ Agora Institute.

In the previous two years, LibCon’s gaze has been global—we’ve tracked the rising threat of populist authoritarianism in its many forms, examined how demagogues rally dark passions and capture institutions once in power, and we’ve responded to the postliberal ideologies providing them intellectual fuel. Many of their ideologists, incidentally, wouldn’t have had the luxury to sit around complaining about the boredom and meaninglessness of bourgeois life had it not been for the unprecedented peace and prosperity—and intellectual freedom—that liberalism provided.

This year, however, we will focus inward—at America—and forward—toward reconstructing its badly maimed liberal democracy and making it more resistant to future authoritarian assaults. This isn’t a solipsistic exercise: if we lose liberal democracy in the country where it was conceived and birthed, we’ll have little hope of saving it elsewhere—at least not for many generations. And not without things going terribly dark in ways predictable and unpredictable in the interim.

What happens in America doesn’t stay in America—it reverberates around the world. American liberal democracy has never been perfect, but it was the best the world had. As the University of Hong Kong’s Alejandro Reyes noted last year, “For decades, U.S. democratic ideals—however flawed or inconsistently practiced—served as a global reference point. America’s constitutional architecture, civic pluralism, and free press, though deeply imperfect, represented a kind of aspirational horizon.”

This aspirational horizon for others consisted of features Americans took utterly for granted. Until a few years ago:

• The loser of an election accepts the results. He shows up at the Capitol steps for the peaceful transfer of power—the closest thing this country has to a sacred political ritual—rather than inciting insurrection or spending years beating the drum of a “stolen election.”

• The law protects everyone equally, regardless of political affiliation or closeness to power—never weaponized against opponents or critics.

• The rule of law holds everyone accountable—even the most powerful person on the planet, imposing real consequences for corruption and abuse of office.

• The press functions freely and fearlessly, without being hounded by presidential defamation suits or DOJ subpoenas.

• Expertise and tenure determine who keeps their post—not fealty to the strongman in power.

• Individuals are granted due process—the core principle that keeps state terror at bay. No one is kidnapped by masked men, disappeared, detained, or deported to a foreign gulag without so much as a hearing. Armed state agents don’t kill first and make up fake stories later, something that has happened twice just in the past week.

Pulling out of international alliances or neutering the Voice of America has not done as much damage to liberal democracy abroad as America giving up on its own principles at home. America grew richer and more peaceful as it vanquished slavery and segregation—because it unlocked the potential of those stuck in an unfree and unfair system. We still need to do more to confront the legacies of the past. But the undeniable progress we have made has shown the world that oppression and exploitation are not the way to riches.

America’s rambunctious democracy has also been a beacon for holding corrupt rulers accountable. This hotel’s very name is synonymous with the idea that even the most powerful man on the planet isn’t above the law. Indeed, the Watergate scandal was a watershed moment against public corruption not in America alone but everywhere, inspiring journalists the world over.

Here’s a fun story: I was hired as a cub reporter at a national newspaper in New Delhi, India, right after college, in the heyday of the so-called non-aligned movement, when every serious person was a socialist and being pro-America was seriously uncool. I recall a conversation with a young colleague, both of us fretting about the sorry state of the Indian press. At one point, he channeled his inner Herbert Marcuse and said: “You know, there is no truly free press in the world—in the Soviet Union, government controls the media; in America, profit-seeking corporations do.” “So who are your journalistic heroes?” I asked. Without hesitation: “Woodward and Bernstein.” He couldn’t name a single Soviet journalist he admired; he went on to build a famous career as a commentator on a major, private cable channel that subsequently became the object of a hostile takeover by the prime minister’s rich lackeys.

Billionaires buying independent, private networks and replacing them with regime propagandists is a script that is now becoming familiar in America as well.

But before all this happened, America, the world’s most successful liberal democracy, provided the yardstick to judge other polities—not because it was the global hegemon, but because it was a global example. It didn’t need nation-building abroad to spread liberal democracy. It just needed to be itself.

If America could deliver enviable living standards while striving for social justice and equal dignity, Russian and Chinese autocrats had to explain why they needed to resort to brutal repression. America’s very existence forced them to justify themselves.

None of this depended on America being perfect. In fact, watching America face its defects was in many ways a more powerful example. Our civil rights struggle, our campaign against police brutality, our constant striving for a more perfect union—these have inspired democracy activists, human rights advocates, and anti-corruption crusaders everywhere.

America’s retreat from its liberal principles and practices has been profoundly demoralizing for all of them. When America brutally cracks down on anti-ICE protesters, reformers everywhere are put on the moral defensive, mocked as naïve idealists by their fellow citizens—and branded as anti-nationals by their government.

This is the exact opposite of what many of us thought would happen when the democratic world entered in 2005 what Larry Diamond called a democratic recession. We assumed that this recession would be short-lived. So long as America stood firm, like Atlas, the sheer force of its example would pull the world out of its authoritarian morass. Few of us expected that America itself was one golden escalator away from slipping into that morass, and that too at breakneck speed—a story our first panel will take up.

Still, although we are surprised, our Founders would not have been. They understood the American experiment wouldn’t be undone by external enemies, but internal populist demagogues, the great bane of democracies. The Framers used the word “demagogue” 21 times in the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

Alexander Hamilton was especially worried about them. He wrote to President Washington in 1792:

When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents … despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty … it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion [so] that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

Does that description remind you of anyone?

America’s constitution has no exceptional immunity to populist authoritarianism. What it has are exceptional antibodies to fight that infection—generated from the hard-won Revolutionary War, the bloody Civil War, the peaceful civil rights struggle, and the post-Nixon reforms. Those chapters built up America’s inner resources and resilience.

Here is why I’m optimistic authoritarianism will ultimately fail in America, even as it has been rapidly normalized in backsliding democracies like India, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, and, until recently, Hungary.

• America Has a Native and Authentic Vocabulary Against Tyranny: Unlike the old world, where the state is a benign, paternal presence, here it has never been trusted as a friend, only tolerated as a necessary evil. Frank Fukuyama might say that sentiment goes too far. But that founding mistrust gave us an elaborate rights-based vocabulary that’s coming in handy now: the No Kings protests were swimming in placards quoting the Declaration of Independence, demanding respect for due process, invoking the First Amendment.

• America Has an Opposition That is Flailing, But Not Failing: A demagogue poses an impossible prisoner’s dilemma for the opposition: play by the rules while he flouts them, and you lose; abandon the rules yourself, and you become just like him, losing your moral credibility. Either way, the demagogue wins. That dilemma, compounded by the usual disagreements over strategy, fractures and discredits an opposition. America’s opposition party, lord knows, has made its share mistakes and missteps—but isn’t finished, a spent force, like, say, India’s Congress Party. It’s flailing, but still in the game, standing. The flailing isn’t unusual; the standing is.

• America Has Deep Pockets That Citizens Dig Into: America is not just a wealthy country—it is a generous one. In other backsliding democracies, activists often depend on foreign funding, which authoritarians can sever with a single stroke of a pen—as Hungary, India, and Georgia have all done. America’s robust civil society, a fruit of its republican spirit that so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, doesn’t have that same level of dependency and vulnerability. Homegrown, independent, private philanthropy—from foundations to small donors—has quietly built an entire ecosystem, worth billions of dollars every year to defend democracy, that is much harder to choke off.

• America Has Citizens Who Protect Neighbors, Not Look Away: Americans don’t just contribute their treasure to stop authoritarianism, they risk their lives. Protests exist in every backsliding democracy, but they’re populated by the persecuted groups directly affected and their advocates, not average citizens. But ordinary Americans rise in the immortal spirit of Harriet Tubman and her Underground Railroad. Renee Good and Alex Pretti paid with their lives for standing up for their immigrant neighbors. Also strikingly, during last year’s ICE crackdown in Illinois and Chicago, neighbors formed circles of protection around vulnerable immigrants. In open defiance of the government, they ran errands, delivered groceries, built rapid-alert systems to warn of ICE sightings.

That’s the true American exceptionalism.

But even if American liberal democracy survives this bout of authoritarianism—and I’m cautiously optimistic it will—we must ensure both for its sake and the world’s that we don’t face another one for at least another 250 years. You can’t “keep a republic” if you have to remain in a constant state of mobilization. And to avoid that, we cannot go back to the old status quo. Our checks and balances had eroded over time. Congressional power had weakened and the presidency was already reaching imperial levels, making it easier for a demagogue to swoop in. But simply repairing these branches will not be enough. We need to build a new foundation and more pillars—in short, a Reconstruction.

Authoritarians can destroy institutions; they can’t build them. Liberals must take up that job while the wreckage is still fresh enough to see clearly. Delay will put us down the same suicidal path that spelled the end of previous civilizations.

So, over the next two days, we will look at what it takes to reconstruct an executive branch that upholds the law over loyalty to a strongman, a Congress that governs rather than rubberstamps, and a court that refrains from handing abusive executives get-out-of-jail free cards.

We will confront the core issues driving our culture war that has poisoned our politics for a generation, seeking on free speech and immigration answers compatible with a liberal framework. And we will discuss how to keep Gen Z in the liberal column while reckoning honestly with the challenges that lie ahead: a party that condemns the abuses of executive power right now, when it’s out of office, but resorts to the same tactics when it controls the Oval Office—and an ousted party that will cry “weaponization” the moment it faces accountability.

The good news is that the American public seems to be waking up to the urgent need for reforms. ISMA’s second national survey of populist sentiment in America, conducted in late June, found not only that Trump’s hardcore populist supporters had declined by about a third, but that a likely reason was that they disapproved of his extra-constitutional exercise of his executive power. We’ll release the results next week, so stay tuned.

This Reconstruction, like the first one, will not be self-executing. It will have its challenges—but for the sake of this country and the world, we have no choice but to begin.

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Hear ye and rejoice! The 2026 edition of ISMA's flagship annual conference, “Liberalism for the 21st Century,” or LibCon for short, kicks off tomorrow—and we could not be more excited for the days ahead. The response has been overwhelming: we first had to expand capacity to meet demand; then, we had to close registration altogether and open a waitlist; soon after, we had to shut down the waitlist! Here's what we've got in store.

As she does every year, ISMA President and The UnPopulist editor-in-chief will kick things off with an opening address to set the stage for the rest of the conference. If you missed her remarks from 2024 and 2025, please give them a read.

Dalmia’s diagnosis perfectly sets up the conference’s first panel: “Authoritarian Consolidation in America: The State of the Union.” On this panel, Princeton’s Jan-Werner Müller—the scholar who literally wrote the book on populism—will be alongside The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, Stanford’s legendary (and LibCon legend) Francis Fukuyama, and Michigan State’s Erica Frantz, who will moderate the panel. Their charge: an unflinching look at how far the damage has gone before anyone talks about fixing it.

From there, the aperture widens and the global picture comes into view—which has been an ISMA/The UnPopulist focus from the beginning. “Building a Global Liberal Coalition” brings together a truly fantastic lineup: The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, The Economist’s Robert Guest (the panel’s moderator), exiled Nicaraguan democracy leader Félix Maradiaga, and former Canadian statesman Bob Rae—four people working four different fronts of the same fight, asking how liberals scattered across very different countries actually coordinate instead of just cheering each other on from a distance.

Thursday closes on a truly high note: a dinner keynote from Nathan Law, the Hong Kong student leader who spearheaded the Umbrella Movement, was stripped of his citizenship, and now lives in exile with a bounty on his head. His topic is persuading a divided society—and it is hard to think of a more relevant theme.

Friday will pick up right where Thursday left off. “Checking the Imperial Presidency,” the second day’s first panel, will bring together The New York Times’ David French, NYU Law’s Bob Bauer, the Brennan Center’s Liza Goitein, and Protect Democracy’s Justin Florence, who will moderate the panel, to tackle the era’s biggest structural question: how do you rebuild guardrails around executive power without just handing the next occupant a tamer version of the same weapon? The panel immediately following it is “Congress and Courts: Checks, Not Rubberstamps”—which brings in Aziz Huq, co-author of How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic (the panel’s moderator), the Society for the Rule of Law’s Gregg Nunziata, and former acting U.S. Attorney General Stuart Gerson, asking what it actually takes to get two branches that have spent years deferring to a third to start doing their jobs again.

Midday brings what promises to be an electrifying panel: “Gen Z: Keeping it Liberal,” moderated by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell, who has probably spent more hours in focus groups with American voters than anyone else in politics, and featuring panelists Rachel Janfaza, founder of The Up and Up, a research and media firm built around understanding Gen Z; Gabe Fleisher, who’s been writing his own political newsletter since he was nine years old and now reaches tens of thousands of readers; and Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, whose online debates have built one of the largest youth-facing political followings on the internet. Why has the liberal coalition struggled to reach the generation it most needs, and what would it actually take to close that gap?

As if that weren’t enough, Friday afternoon runs four breakouts concurrently, so pick carefully! “A Rational and Humane Immigration System” brings together The Watch’s Radley Balko, who’s spent two decades investigating prosecutorial and police misconduct; the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick; former Reagan administration official turned Renew Democracy Initiative vice chair Linda Chavez (moderator); and Kristie De Peña, who leads America’s Competitive Edge’s push for high-skilled immigration reform. “Defending Free Speech, Fighting Hate Speech” features Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, Brookings’ Jonathan Rauch (moderating this breakout panel), The Bulwark’s Cathy Young, and the Knight Institute’s Alex Abdo, who argued the case that struck down the NSA’s bulk call-records program.

“Delivering Equitable Prosperity,” the third breakout, focuses on economics, and brings together Scott Lincicome, Stan Veuger (moderator), Sonja Trauss, and 2024 Nobel laureate Simon Johnson, honored for his work on how institutions shape prosperity. They’ll take up the economic grievances fueling populism in the first place. And last but not least, “Federalism as a Bulwark” brings together Kathrina Wolfkot, managing editor of the Brennan Center’s State Court Report; Kevin Williamson, who broke with National Review after 15 years to help build The Dispatch; moderator Walter Olson, the Cato scholar and frequent contributor to The UnPopulist; and Jessica Bulman-Pozen, the Columbia law professor whose scholarship helped define how modern federalism actually works, making the case for the states and institutions positioned to check runaway federal power.

After the breakout panels, it’s back to the main stage. “Past Liberal Crises and Lessons: Overcoming Hurdles to Reconstruction” brings Poland’s former minister of justice Adam Bodnar together with Devin Pendas, a historian of the postwar Nazi war crimes trials; Jacob T. Levy, the moderator of this panel and McGill political theorist; and Manisha Sinha, whose recent book traces the rise and fall of the first Reconstruction. The panel takes up the left’s temptation to simply redirect the expanded executive power authoritarians normalized, and the right’s reflexive cry of “weaponization” against any effort to restore accountability.

Then it’s on to the closing fireside chat—theme: “What Is Freedom?”—between The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and Harvard’s Danielle Allen: the author of Why We’re Polarized and co-author of Abundance sitting down with one of the country’s foremost political theorists of democratic renewal—and author of The Renovator on Substack.

And before we call it a day, our friend and ISMA board member William Kristol takes 15 minutes to send us off—so we can get to the work of reconstruction ourselves.

That’s a seriously formidable lineup, and a perfect blueprint for our main conference theme: the Reconstruction Agenda. Getting classical liberals, erstwhile Republicans, center-left democracy hawks, abundance-minded economists, and social-justice liberals into the same room to build a movement against emerging illiberal threats is a genuinely special thing. We share a conviction that liberal democracy is worth defending and, now, worth rebuilding.

Authoritarian movements are skilled at tearing down institutions and considerably less skilled at replacing them with anything durable. The people gathering this week are the ones who will have to do that harder, slower work—writing the actual blueprints for a more accountable presidency, a judiciary that commands public trust, a Congress willing to reclaim its own authority, and an economy that gives ordinary people a reason to believe in the system defending them.

None of that gets settled in a day and a half. But the arguments made this week, and the alliances that hold up under real disagreement, will shape how seriously that rebuilding effort is taken well after the conference ends.

If you’re in the room this week, feel free to share your thoughts live and tag us using #LibCon2026—we want to hear from you as it happens.

See you in D.C.

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The most consequential thing that the war between the United States and Iran revealed has nothing to do with missiles or centrifuges. The war has shown just how much of the world’s economy now turns on the unchecked decisions of individual men: an American president who could start the war without asking Congress, and a Tehran regime that could respond by putting a fifth of the world’s oil beyond anyone’s reach.

The rest of the world got no say in any of it. On June 14, the United States and Iran reached a framework agreement to end their war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, though the ceasefire has since broken down in an on-again off-again cycle of retaliations. (Right now, it is off!)

The largest oil and gas supply disruption in history is far from over, but its strongest legacy might well end the dominance of fossil fuels. Unlike the climate argument, which requires policymakers to minimize the economic costs of transitioning and therefore slows the process of adaptation, the Iran shock’s immediate economic costs for three-and-a-half months might change the oil and gas markets forever.

The 1973 oil embargo resulted in the interstate highway speed limit and research that eventually led to the lithium-ion battery. The aftereffects of this shock will likely be even stronger, shaped by three things the 1973 crisis lacked: actors that are ready to move, market forces already pulling in the right direction, and material conditions conducive to change. What people, businesses, and policymakers seek is protection from the disruption of oil and gas supply shocks, and they are harnessing market forces and technological progress to build the energy security architecture the world has never had.

A Waterway One Man Can Close

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s major point of leverage in response to joint U.S.-Israeli attacks, cut off more than four times as much oil supply as the 1973 crisis did. At its peak, it stopped up to 20 million barrels a day from reaching global markets. The narrow strait between Iran and Oman is the only available major waterway for the major oil producers in the Gulf—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait—to export their oil.

This is a physical chokepoint and not, as in Ukraine, a sanctions-driven disruption. It is also a reminder of how much leverage a single unaccountable and authoritarian government can exert over the democratic world’s energy supply without consulting any legislature, court, or its own people. Nor was the attack on the nation any more accountable than the response: U.S. strikes that triggered the closure were ordered without a congressional vote—lawmakers tried on nine occasions to force one under the War Powers Resolution and lost every time.

Only about 3.5 million barrels can be rerouted through oil pipelines, leaving a gap of over 16 million barrels. As a result, oil prices surged as high as 55%, and gas prices at the pump increased 50%. In response, the 32-nation International Energy Agency (IEA) released over 426 million barrels from its strategic reserves across two tranches.

With traffic now disrupted again in spite of the on-again off-again memorandum of understanding (MOU) to reopening the strait till a final treaty is made, the developed economies face the equally consequential task of restocking those reserves, a process that will require approximately one million barrels per day of surplus supply for the next three years. As IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol put it, “[The] $110 trillion global economy can be taken hostage by a couple of hundred men with guns across a 50-kilometer stretch of strait—it doesn’t make sense at all.”

The ceasefire announced on April 8 raised hopes of relief, heightened by the June 17 MOU. But the situation remains deeply unstable. The two sides have exchanged fire repeatedly, and right now Iran has again announced a blockade of the strait and the United States a counter-blockade. Even the sanctions relief has proven fragile: Treasury’s 60-day waiver for Iranian oil exports was revoked within weeks, after Iranian attacks on shipping, and replaced with a wind-down order barring new purchases. The ceasefire has kept collapsing since then, with more strikes and more closures, and Trump declared the truce “over” at a NATO summit on July 8. As of this writing, the United States is reinstating its naval blockade, effective this afternoon, after Iran fired missiles at two UAE tankers early Tuesday, killing one crew member and wounding eight others. Hormuz crossings fell to just 22 ships last week, an 85% drop from pre-war levels.

All of this is a vivid illustration of energy analyst Rory Johnston’s warning, “There is no normal going forward.” Reopening the strait is a months-long process, not a switch to be flipped. The roughly 200 tankers stranded in the Gulf hold 160 million barrels of stockpiled oil, not fresh supply.

Who Pays, and Who Profits

Asia is the region most severely affected. Japan gets 90% of its crude oil from the Middle East—South Korea, 70%. China, less exposed at 40%, is the wild card—its response will matter more than any other country’s.

Europe faces soaring liquid natural gas (LNG) prices and inflation. The United States, as a net oil exporter, is relatively insulated—the 30% increase in gas prices is painful but not existential. This asymmetry means that the countries with the most urgent incentive to act are Asian democracies and European allies—not, perversely, the country that started the war. Iran itself, along with other Gulf oil producers, has profited from the price spike its aggression triggered—a reminder that oil wealth insulates authoritarian and illiberal regimes from the kind of accountability that constrains everyone else, a dynamic political scientists call the resource curse.

But that doesn’t mean that other countries won’t look for ways to avoid becoming collateral damage.

Pakistan had already grown its clean electricity share from roughly 26% in 2018 to over 55% currently through rapid wind, solar, and hydro expansion, and has been measurably more insulated from the Iran shock than its neighbors who made no comparable investment. India, with heavy dependence on Middle Eastern crude, faces a harder version of the same calculation: higher energy prices are feeding inflation, weakening the rupee, and threatening growth, while its neighbor Pakistan’s transition presents an uncomfortable lesson in the cost of delay.

The picture is more complex in Africa and Latin America, where the shock divides along the fault line between exporters and importers. African oil producers like Nigeria are experiencing a revenue windfall, while energy-importing nations like Kenya and Egypt face fuel shortages, and Gulf-dependent fertilizer supply chains are straining further still. For the world’s poorest economies, this supply shock is a food security crisis more than an energy crisis.

The Ukraine Lesson: Why Shocks Get Squandered

The 2022 Russia-Ukraine shock was supposed to be Europe’s wake-up call—proof that one autocrat’s gas valve could hold a continent hostage—but the crisis was not an inflection point in Europe’s energy transition.

The shock was primarily a gas crisis. That made it less menacing than an oil crisis. Natural gas also functions as a bridge fuel rather than an obstacle to the transition: it burns roughly half the carbon of coal, and it can ramp up or down quickly to cover for intermittent solar and wind. Political pressure defaulted to short-term relief, such as LNG terminals and coal restarts, rather than long-term investment. The window of urgency closed before investment decisions were locked in, and no coordinating institution stepped up to turn the crisis into a broader strategy. The 2026 shock is already showing a different pattern.

Unlike Pakistan’s transition, which was already underway before this war began, this shock is generating its own record. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, called the crisis “a great opportunity” to accelerate the country’s transition. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency built around faster renewable and EV rollout. Germany suspended fuel taxes at a cost of 1.6 billion euros, while other governments rolled out subsidies for household solar, batteries, and heat pumps aimed at cutting reliance on the grid mid-crisis. And April 2026 was Europe’s strongest month for EV sales on record.

One important question is whether the Iran shock is producing a coal comeback of the kind that partly characterized Europe’s response to the 2022 Ukraine crisis. The evidence suggests not. Coal prices have surged. In response, several Asian countries including Japan have delayed coal plant retirements and increased utilization as emergency fuel-switching measures. But, according to analysis from Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate and energy outlet, these actions will likely result in only “a small rise at most” in global coal generation. The IEA’s investment data tells the story: Of the $3.4 trillion in global energy investment in 2026, $2.2 trillion is going to clean energy, grids, and electrification. A second gas shock in less than five years is ultimately strengthening the case for renewables, not coal.

After the 1973 oil crisis, President Nixon launched Project Independence, with the goal of achieving energy independence by 1980. That effort, however, failed to reduce oil consumption, and reliance on foreign suppliers actually increased from 36% in 1974 to 50% in 1979. The United States did not become a net oil and gas exporter until 2019. When independence finally arrived, it came not from a plan out of Washington but from a price-driven shale boom no bureaucrat ordered up.

The Market Has Already Decided

Even before the Iran shock, market forces were driving the energy transition without waiting for anyone’s permission. Globally, renewables accounted for 85.6% of all new power capacity added in 2025. According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review, fossil fuel’s share of global electricity generation peaked in 2007 and has been falling ever since. In 2025, for the first time in history, renewables overtook coal in global electricity generation—with renewables contributing more than a third of global electricity and coal falling below a third.

The United States is not an outlier in this, either—it’s actually slightly ahead of the global pace. In 2025, 88% of all new domestic generating capacity was renewable despite Trump signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolling back clean energy incentives in July. In 2026, that figure is still projected to reach 93%, a new record. In March 2026, for the first time ever, the United States generated more electricity from renewables than from natural gas—the single most significant milestone in the American energy transition to date.

Texas, governed by Republicans who have been openly hostile to clean energy policy, now accounts for 40% of all planned U.S. utility-scale solar additions and 53% of all planned battery storage capacity for 2026. This did not happen because of mandates or subsidies, but simply because renewables are cheaper and more profitable.

There is a lesson in that for the larger fight: the liberal answer to authoritarian energy leverage is not a grand plan but millions of dispersed decisions responding to honest prices.

The growth in renewables is driven not just by falling solar prices but by falling battery prices. Battery prices for stationary storage fell 45% in 2025 alone to $70 per kilowatt-hour, 93% lower than in 2010.

Why the 2026 Iran Shock Is Different From the 2022 Ukraine Shock

Over 90% of new renewable projects are now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives.

The geography of the pain has also shifted. The 2022 shock fell on a Europe ill-suited to rapid transition; the hardest-hit countries in 2026—South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, India—are in many cases better positioned for rapid solar deployment. Governments from India to Chile have tied new renewable pledges and EV tax cuts directly to the crisis.

China’s position is more complex than either its boosters or critics suggest. Coal-heavy, renewables-rich, and holding roughly four months of oil imports in reserve, it is less exposed than its neighbors—and the crisis will boost demand for its dominant clean energy exports.

China’s response turned out to be the most consequential single factor in the entire crisis—and the one least anticipated. According to Johnston, China cut its seaborne crude imports from 11.5 million barrels per day before the war to just six million barrels per day by June. We still do not know exactly how Beijing did this. Johnston offers three possibilities: economic self-interest, regional altruism to spare Asia and Europe a wider calamity, or a quiet arrangement with the Trump administration trading energy stability for geopolitical concessions in Asia. That we are left guessing is itself the point: the world’s second-largest economy moved global energy markets by fiat, and no one outside Beijing knows why.

The IEA’s own director has signaled that this time will be different. Speaking at the Atlantic Council on April 13, Birol said he expects “a major response to this crisis” across multiple energy technologies, including an accelerated return of nuclear power.

Every major energy shock has produced a policy and technological response proportional to the pain. The 2022 Ukraine shock was a mostly squandered opportunity, but the 2026 Iran shock struck in parts of the world already in the midst of a transition—the alternative is cheaper, deployment timelines have compressed, and countries bearing the most pain are precisely the ones best positioned to act.

That oil prices have cooled from their highest peaks, only to spike again within days of a new flare-up, does not diminish the lesson. The vulnerability is real, the damage is done, and the next shock is now more likely, not less. Every barrel the world no longer needs is one less hostage to any single man’s or regime’s temper. And the conditions for transformation are better than they have ever been. The rest is a matter of will.

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Andy Craig: Welcome to the Reconstruction Agenda. I’m Andy Craig. From the Constitutional Convention onward, Americans have grappled with what to do about political parties. The men who wrote the Constitution distrusted parties, but also created and worked within them. And we’ve been swinging back and forth between those two poles ever since.

Over the years, some efforts have aimed to suppress parties or to shrink their role by weakening them. Others have tried to do the opposite, to harness parties or to improve how they function in a democracy. And that argument has never really been settled. And it’s very much alive today at a moment when American democracy feels like it’s teetering on the edge and the two major parties are locked in what feels like an unpopularity contest. Something that often feels like a race to the bottom.

So to help me make sense of all this, I’m joined by political scientist , one of America’s top experts on this topic. Lee’s a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, and the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America.

Lee, thanks for joining me.

Lee Drutman: Hey, great to be with you, Andy.

Craig: So let’s start at the beginning. As I was mentioning, the Founders are kind of the great paradox here. They love to talk about how much they feared parties, they thought parties weren’t virtuous. Madison warned about mischiefs of faction. Washington’s farewell address is all about condemning the spirit of party, as he called it. And the Constitution mostly proceeds as if parties simply wouldn’t exist.

That was kind of what we might call the candidate-centric or anti-party impulse in American politics. That the idea is you just get good, virtuous people into office and they’ll be independent of political parties and do the right thing. But that didn’t last. So the Electoral College originally had its system where electors cast two votes for president and the runner-up became vice president.

And that broke down as soon as there were organized national tickets. So they had to go back and rewrite it with the 12th Amendment. And I think that’s interesting because it’s kind of the first concession in our laws to the reality of political parties, albeit implicitly. Those same men turned around and built, really, the first mass organized parties, the ancestors of today’s Democrats and Republicans.

So how have we grappled with having these kind of two contradictory impulses from the beginning: on the one hand, hating and wanting to weaken parties, and on the other hand, strengthening them so they work better?

Drutman: I mean, it’s the difference between theory and practice, right? In theory, we should all be independent scholars sitting there in Montpelier with our library of books and great classics—but in practice we need to get shit done. And ain’t nobody got time to sit in the library and read everything unless you happen to be James Madison in 1786.

I mean, the practice of politics is you got to organize majorities, you’ve got to build coalitions, you’ve got to win elections. And to do that, you need to organize. And parties are the institutions of organization that have made mass democracy possible. So sure, in theory, we should all be virtuous. But even when they’re writing the theory … Madison’s famous Federalist Number 10 says, “Look, there are factions sown into the nature of mankind. And, as air is to fire, so is liberty to faction. And let’s not stamp out liberty. Let’s allow liberty.” Washington’s first inaugural address talks about the fire of liberty, right? This is fundamental to the idea of this early form of American republican democracy that there’s going to be disagreement. And it thinks about faction initially with the elected representatives as sort of the enlightened leaders who will balance the factions within their own minds, but really the factions organize as ways to build majorities in Congress and then to organize elections. There’s really no going back from there because that’s just how modern representative democracy, at the scale that it operates, has to work. Anything else would be chaos.

Craig: So we can’t all just get along.

Drutman: Shut up. I mean, sure, we can get along. We can all get along as long as we agree to disagree.

Craig: So, kind of rolling through on the history … we had our early political parties. There were the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists and the Whigs and all that. But throughout the 19th century, the party system was a lot more fluid than what we know today. Parties rose and fell and sometimes vanished. You had the Anti-Masonic Party, the Free Soilers, the Know Nothings, the Populists, the Whigs.

Sometimes two different parties might even nominate the same candidate. And the anti-slavery parties most famously eventually fused and merged their way into becoming the Republican Party. A lot of that openness rested on something that people today probably aren’t familiar with and don’t think about, but there were no government-printed ballots.

It was a do-it-yourself system where you could use whatever scrap of paper you wanted. And so the parties printed their own ballots listing whoever their candidates were, and you would use that party ticket ballot to vote. That’s where we get the term “party ticket” from. So getting on the ballot wasn’t really a legal question at all.

But then around the turn of the 20th century, we started to get what was called the Australian ballot, which is what we know today, where the government prints a single uniform standard ballot everyone uses. And this was for good reasons to protect against fraud. It protected the right to a secret ballot. But that meant states could also start regulating parties and nominations and ballot access in a way that they couldn’t before.

And one of the things that came out of that was this wave of anti-fusion laws saying candidates can only be backed by one party at a time. What effect did that have?

Drutman: That and the whole Progressive [era] sweep of reforms made it much harder for minor parties to participate in our politics because we have this system of single-winner districts, which is the sort of background hum of all of our political history that makes third parties less viable. And the way that the minor parties came and went for much of U.S. history was they fused with the major parties through this system of ballot fusion, which again was common when parties printed their own tickets. Different parties could print the endorsement, and print ballots for the same candidate. But, as you say, once the state started regulating ballot access, then they said, “well, this is a Republican state” or “this is a Democratic state and we don’t want these minor parties potentially messing with our elections. So we’re going to make it harder for them.”

They also raised the threshold for who could get on the ballots. And they also—and I think we’ll come to this in a second—opened up primary elections in a way that allowed dissenters to fight within the parties as opposed to challenge them from outside the parties.

So, yeah, when we think of the idea that the U.S. is naturally a two-party system, that is a modern confabulation.

Craig: That’s the other big item from this era: primary elections. In the United States we kind of take this for granted, but it’s a really weird thing.

Drutman: Super weird.

Craig: In most other democracies, the parties can pick their candidates however they want. But we had this system that came in where the government’s going to run it like an election, where they are administered the same way they do regular elections. This was sold as kind of a way to break the corruption of the smoke-filled room and party bosses handing out nominations to make it more lowercase-d democratic.

But was that, in a way, an anti-party reform that kind of ended up backfiring? And how does that get us to where we have this harder two-party system? Which is kind of a contradiction that’s hard to get your head around, that the parties are institutionally weak, but also you can only have two of them.

Drutman: Yeah, so the idea in the Progressive era was a lot of reformers said, “look, we have these two parties and they’re private entities, but they’re serving a public role.” And, as you say, they were pretty corrupt. Like, they were! The reformers were right about the criticism. And the thought was, “well, if we could just open up these nominations to The People, it will make better judgments than the party bosses, and the politicians will be more responsive to the people instead of the party bosses.” So that was the idea.

What it functionally did was it made the parties a little bit more porous because party leaders would play gatekeeper roles in the past. Are you a good party man—it was always men at the time—or are you not? Are you going to be loyal to the team or are you not?

Now voters say, “well, anybody can run.” So you don’t have to be loyal to the team. You can be an independent, you can be a maverick, whatever, as long as you have enough support. That was the idea. Practically, it opened up some competition initially, but mostly it was just incumbents getting reelected, but with maybe a little bit more independence from the party bosses. But they were their own brands.

Eventually the party bosses, figured out how to control the nominations and the competition went down, but it did discourage new party formation, because why, if you’re an aspiring dissenter, form a new party when you can contest for the Democratic or the Republican nomination? So I think overall it weakened parties.

It took away the most essential role that parties throughout the world play, which is kind of gatekeeper candidate quality. And in the U.S., we just leave it up to the voters who … how do they know the quality of the candidates based on the advertisements and the media exposure? Which is how Donald Trump becomes president, but a century later.

Craig: Exactly, and lots of other examples we can think of where we have these populist insurgents that people might like or dislike, depending on who the candidate is, but there is no gatekeeper. People often talk about it and it’s kind of frustrating, as if the Democrats need to do this or the Republicans should run that person. But if you’re the chair of a state party or on the national committee or whatever, you don’t have any real control over that.

Drutman: Nope. And I think a lot of the state party people in the Republican Party were not enthusiastic about Donald Trump. Certainly not in 2016 and not even so much in 2024, but they don’t have control.

Craig: So that brings us up to today, what you’ve called “the two-party doom loop.” Before we get to how to fix it, I want to zero-in on that. Because the two-party system does have its defenders. There are people who say it’s good, it encourages moderation, it encourages stability, there have been academic defenses of it.

So why should we want a more multi-party system?

Drutman: All right. So let’s give the argument for the two-party system first. In the idealized theory of the two-party system, you have two parties competing for control of the government. They both have to be broad coalitions, they have to win over the middle in order to win elections.

And the voters in that theory are sort of outside the party system, kind of judging independently as they’re reading all of the economic reports and all the policy papers and trying to figure out which is the better party. And that’s such a fanciful theory. But the weird thing about that theory is it doesn’t actually fit the United States. It imagines that we are the U.K., which is actually … one party can totally control the government by winning the election. Because the U.K. has a parliamentary system where it’s basically unicameral. There is an upper house, but it doesn’t really have any power. So in that system, maybe a party gets total control, gets to implement its agenda, the voters get to evaluate it. But even there it’s not clear.

But our system is, the House and the Senate and the presidency and the Supreme Court and all these different branches of government checking and balancing each other. So the reality of American politics is that a lot of the time we have—I mean, we always have coalition government because all politics is coalitional politics—but a lot of times we have divided government, which is really coalition government.

And to the extent that you could argue that the U.S. political system was pretty stable and functional for much of the 20th century, it was because we didn’t really have a two-party system. We had a two-party system in name, but we had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.

Politics was much more rooted in state and local differences. Politics was much less nationalized. So what we had was: two broad coalitions that contained lots of overlap and lots of different coalitional possibilities. And that made our government relatively functional and stable and our parties moderate because they both contained multitudes across multiple dimensions. And so what people called the U.S. two-party system was really just a multi-dimensional multi-party system within two broad coalitions.

That is not what we have today. It’s been a steady erosion of that multi-party system within a two-party system to … we’ve lost the liberal Republicans from New England and the coastal states. We’ve lost the conservative and moderate Democrats from the plains and the south and the interior. What we have now is two parties that are genuinely distinct and non-overlapping, fighting for narrow majorities in a zero-sum doom loop logic of competition. And that is just ruinous to our whole idea of shared legitimacy. It doesn’t work with our political institutions, and it doesn’t work with our basic human psychology, which evolved on the savannah when it was “are you in our group or are you not in our group?” And I need to know. And we have a sort of natural tendency towards brotherhood within and war without, when we feel that we’re in a threatening environment, which our politics makes us feel.

Craig: And that gets to one of the things that I think has really changed in that modern era of, people call it polarization, of the parties becoming homogeneous like that. Which is the norms of non-domination erode. These norms are essential for having not just democracy, but liberal democracy. This sense that everyone gets their turn, you don’t always win, the other guy can win and saying that’s legitimate and there’s always next time.

But when it becomes this existential kind of trench warfare battle of 49% versus 49% fighting for that to eke out the win, it can drive authoritarian impulses. And I think that’s a lot of what we’ve been seeing in recent years where, once you get in power, you’ve got to use it for all it’s worth.

Drutman: Yeah. This is something that you see authoritarians drive towards. They try to make politics more divided and more divisive because that allows them to consolidate support. This is something that Donald Trump is constantly doing. He’s constantly picking fights to consolidate his support. He’s constantly driving further, demonizing and attacking Democrats and daring Republicans to defend him. Because once they defend him, they are on his side. Jan. 6 is kind of a masterclass in that. He brought Republicans who said, “maybe this is too far.” He brought them to his side by saying, “well you don’t want to give the Democrats a win.”

A lot of academic studies show people are much more willing to countenance democratic violations when they feel that the stakes of elections are higher. It’s the gerrymandering wars, which is Democrats saying, '“well, if Texas did it, then California should do it.”

So everything becomes justifiable if you think the other side is dangerous, because winning becomes more important than following the democratic norms. And democracy, in some ways, is this really wild thing where at regular intervals we divide ourselves and argue over who should rule. And we are stoking division by having elections. It’s just that the alternative—no elections, no accountability, no choice—is worse. But in order to keep it going, we have to stoke that fire of division. It’s just when it becomes so binary, so zero-sum, so existential, it’s hard to let that fire burn out after the election.

Craig: There have been a lot of ideas out there about how to fix this.

And particularly, in the last couple of decades or so, there have been electoral reform ideas on the table and adopted in some states. But a lot of these seem to come from more of that anti-party impulse—that what we need is to just get good people who will stand more independent of the political parties.

From that you get things like nonpartisan jungle primaries where all candidates run in the same primary—regardless of which party they’re in. This is the top-two system in California that they’ve been having recent controversies over, that was brought in about 15 years ago. Also ranked choice voting is something people might have heard of. That gets used some in primaries, but also some in general elections in states like Maine and Alaska. But none of these seem to produce a more multi-party system. We’ve seen them in practice now for a decent amount of time. And whatever other benefits they might have, elections are still effectively just Republicans versus Democrats.

So why haven’t these ideas done what I think a lot of people wanted them to do, which is to open up more competition for independents and third parties and break down the two-party stranglehold?

Drutman: That’s right. Well, if you look at the top-two system, which is the idea that we’re just going to narrow it down to two candidates, that’s usually going to be the Democrat and the Republican, right? Or maybe sometimes two Democrats in a very Democratic district, or two Republicans. So the challenge with minor parties is how do they build enough support to get meaningful representation?

Historically, there are two ways that has happened. Actually, there are multiple ways, but there are two main ways. One in the U.S. is your history of fusion voting, which is the idea that you can have parties that endorse the same candidate, even if there are different parties, that allows minor parties to play a constructive, productive role by having a ballot line. That is the case in New York state where there is a vibrant Working Families Party and a Conservative Party.

The more common way, and this is what happens in most democracies, is you have a system of proportional representation, with larger districts, and parties get vote shares based on how well they do within the district, and then those vote shares translate into seat shares in the electorate. So a party that wins 40% of the votes in a district will get 40% of the seats. In a five-member district that would be two seats, for example.

It is true that in the U.K. and Canada, which are first-past-the-post systems, there are multiple parties, so the idea that it’s the single-member district entirely—there are other quirks about the U.S. ballot access restrictions, the nationalization of our politics, the electoral college, which also tend towards two dominant parties. But if you want to make minor parties and expand the number of parties in the U.S., it’s really two options, ballot fusion and, most powerfully, it’s proportional representation.

Craig: One thing about that is … so, you mentioned a couple of times the idea of single-member districts, and that’s not the whole thing, but that is certainly part of it, that we have winner-take-all elections when you’re only electing one member of Congress. Obviously there’s only one president or governor or mayor, that’s inherently kind of one guy wins, one guy loses. And if you’re in the minority, if you get 48% of the vote and the other guy gets 52%, then you get nothing. That’s Duverger’s law. That’s the famous incentive that brings us to it. But like you mentioned there are other countries that do have that, like the U.K. and Canada, but they’ll still have the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party.

Drutman: Right. It’s still two dominant parties. Although the upcoming U.K. election is about to test that.

Craig: It’s one of those things that when it goes, it goes. And it tends to be kind of a landslide. You saw the same thing in France when Macron came in and kind of demolished the two historic major parties that they’d had there.

I want to dig in a little bit more on proportional representation. This is something that, like you say, most other democracies use some form of. Where, if a party gets 40% of the vote, it gets 40% of the seats, and that makes it possible for smaller parties to come in and compete, rather than trying to challenge within an existing party to take it over or to hijack it.

How does that work within the American system? Because one thing I often find is … you mentioned the parliamentary system that the U.K. has and how that’s different, and I think a lot of people confuse those two things. Obviously in the U.S. we have a presidential system where the executive is elected separately from Congress, and the same at the state level. How would using PR and having a more multi-party legislature or Congress work when you still have this kind of one-winner race for control of the executive branch?

Drutman: Right. So, this is an important point that’s worth pausing on for a second. Parliamentary versus presidential systems—that’s one choice of a governing system, and first-past-the-post single-member districts versus proportional representation is a separate choice. You can have different combinations of those two. The choice that we have, presidential plus single-member district, is the rarest combination in the world. There’s only a few other countries that do it. Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and us are the only countries with …

Craig: … Sounds like we’re in good company there.

Drutman: It’s a small but niche choice. There are a lot of presidential democracies around the world, and they tend to be more in South America and Central America, some in Eastern Europe, former Soviet regions, and they all have proportional legislatures. And what does that mean in practice? It means that you have a president who’s elected to be president, and then you elect a proportional legislature.

Now, often what practically happens is that you see pre-electoral coalitions form behind different presidential candidates. And so there’s sort of a sense of what kind of government you are likely to get. Coalitions then form in the legislature and work with the president. It’s coalition government. But again, we have coalition government in the United States. We just don’t think of it that way because our two major parties are actually coalitions.

And often we have divided government, which is effectively coalition government, though it doesn’t work very well because the parties are at odds these days. Although in an earlier era, from roughly, 1968 to 1992, that was pretty much entirely how our government worked. It was actually a very productive period.

So we’ve had experience with functional coalition government. We just don’t think of it that way because we’re America and we do things differently. But it’s the same fundamental thing, which is: it’s politics, right? You’ve got to build a majority, and sometimes the president is going to be able to build a majority in the legislature, sometimes not. But the difference is that … actually, Brazil is a useful contrast here.

In Brazil, you had Bolsonaro who tried to do his own Jan. 6 and he is in prison. And one of the reasons why he is in prison and Donald Trump is back in the White House is because he was leading a coalition of parties and the other parties in his coalition said, “my electoral fate is not tied to this person, so I don’t need to defend them.” Whereas, in the U.S., you had all these Republicans who were either going to be Republicans or they were going to be out of office. And Donald Trump was a Republican. They realized, “if I want to have a career in politics, I need to defend this guy.” There was nowhere else for them to go. Anybody who opposed Donald Trump was quickly pushed out of the Republican Party—Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger being the most prominent examples. There were others.

Now, if there were a different party on the right, center-right party, a different conservative party, that wasn’t tied to Donald Trump’s Republican Party, I think you would have seen a lot more folks defecting and calling Jan. 6 out for what it was. But what were they going to do? Become Democrats?

Craig: Right. And we’ve seen that continuing. With Bill Cassidy just losing his primary and getting pretty brutally crushed, actually, after he voted to convict Trump. Even though they’re six years later now at this point.

Drutman: Yeah. That’s right.

Craig: So kind of on the nuts and bolts, when we’re talking about bringing in PR and fusion … also, like you had mentioned, fusion has never entirely gone away. It’s still there in New York and a few other states. Procedurally, how do we get there? Is this a matter of just passing a law? Do we have to amend the Constitution? Is there legislation out there or potential legislation that would move us this way? And how would that look? Particularly, I’m thinking of for Congress.

To be clear, we’re not talking about going to a single nationwide district, where you just vote for one party and then it’s doled out based on that, nationwide. You would still have your members of Congress apportioned to your state by population, like we’re used to, and you would still have districts where you might have three or four or five members, and it would be within that. How do those kinds of design decisions affect how many parties you end up with? Because some people might have in mind, if they’ve heard of how it used to be in Italy, or what you see today in Israel, where you get like 20 parties in the legislature and it feels chaotic, and forming a majority coalition is very difficult. But that’s not quite what we’re talking about when we’re talking about these smaller numbers.

Drutman: Right, right. So, a couple of things here. First, on the constitutional possibilities, I think a pretty plain reading of Article One, Section Four of the U.S. Constitution, the elections clause, says that Congress has power to decide on the rules of its own elections, which is a power that Congress has used repeatedly throughout the history of the United States. It’s the reason that we have a mandate currently for single-member districts. We have single-member districts that are required under Article One, Section Four powers, through the controlling statute which is the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act. So it’s totally constitutional, but as you say, one thing that the Constitution does say is that the states will each have their own delegation.

So the idea that we’re just going to have one national PR election like Israel or the Netherlands is not going to happen. Those are extreme PR systems, and there are lots of different design choices that one needs to think about in designing a PR system. But district magnitude is probably the most important, which is basically that the larger the district magnitude, which is the number of representatives who are elected out of one district, the more parties you can imagine having. If you think about it, if there’s only one seat, only one party can win. So you’re going to have two parties probably competing. But as the number of seats goes up, the threshold to win a seat goes down. So if it’s a three-member district, in theory, you could have three parties each with one seat. If it’s a five-member district, you can in theory have five parties, each with a seat. And generally, to the extent that there’s lots of variation in lots of countries around the world, people who look closely at this say you get pretty good proportionality with between four to eight members. And then after that, you just wind up getting too much fragmentation, the ballot becomes too long, too confusing.

So there is kind of a sweet spot between four to eight member districts, and that would sort of depend on different states, how many seats they currently have. But yeah, this idea of proportional representation … it’s actually an American invention. People don’t realize that the first formula for proportional representation in the history of democracy is for the U.S. House of Representatives, only it’s allocating seats by state population, not seats within a state by party vote. If you read back the discussions of the constitutional convention, people are talking about proportional representation. But they mean that the states should get seats allocated in proportion to population. First formula is Thomas Jefferson’s formula, which later a Belgian named D’Hondt would claim as the D’Hondt method, but it’s really Jefferson’s method. Although personally I think the Daniel Webster method is a better method. There’s also an Adams method. There were different formulas.

Craig: These are different ways to basically do the math problem of taking your percentages and getting the whole numbers that you need out of it, because there’s different ways to do that.

Drutman: Right, yeah. Because the likelihood that in a five-member district all going to get everything as multiples of 20% is pretty unlikely. So you have to figure out what to do with the unequal fractions and there are various formulas for that.

Craig: So I want to bring it home to the immediate context, which a lot of people are thinking about these past couple of months, which is, one, the gerrymandering war that Trump kicked off mid-decade and that has seen the retaliation or attempted retaliation in California and Virginia from the Democrats. But then also the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais, which really upset the apple cart. For a long time since the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and it’s a complicated history of how it’s been interpreted and applied and such, but basically we’ve had what were called VRA districts. Which was you have a concentration of, particularly Black voters in the South, and so you have to draw a district where they’re not getting packed and cracked and gerrymandered out of having representation. But the Supreme Court has, in its infinite wisdom, decided no, this is unconstitutional now. And admittedly, it is a little bit awkward because we generally don’t want the government to be drawing lines or treating people differently based on race, even though in this instance it was intended as a remedial thing for past discrimination.

So now it’s not just people like us who want a multi-party system in the abstract. There’s a real incentive from within the major parties. Because Democrats are seeing their longtime colleagues losing their districts. Everybody is seeing the tit-for-tat race to the bottom on gerrymandering. We talk about proportional representation by party, but it has this effect for racial and ethnic and religious minorities, or whatever the case may be. If you’re Alabama and you’ve got six seats and a third of your population is Black people who mostly vote for Democrats, and the rest is majorities of the white people who vote for Republicans, you can have that result where you get that proportional outcome and everybody has their seat at the table, without having to go in and draw lines on that basis on the map.

And so there’s been a lot of renewed interest just this year in moving towards more of a PR system. Have you been seeing that too?

Drutman: Absolutely. Yeah, I think the Callais decision was a real earthquake moment. The idea that you can do fair districting at this point is just a bunch of broken glass on the pavement of history. I think everybody’s looking at this gerrymandering, murder-suicide pact that both parties are putting on American democracy and thinking, what are we going to do about it? And Democrats say, “well, of course we shouldn’t back down,” or Republicans say, “of course we shouldn’t back down”—but at some point you need a peace treaty.

The single-member district is the murder weapon and you’ve got to take away the murder weapon. And the way you do that is by enacting a proportional representation mandate that makes gerrymandering impossible and allows genuine competition. Right now, we have what, like 15 toss-up districts in this upcoming House election? Like, what is this? Like Soviet-style democracy, you get one person, it’s just—da. Sorry, my Russian accent is terrible. But in Soviet Russia, politician choose you.

Craig: Ha. And that’s not something that’s a complaint coming solely from the left. Obviously, Callais has kind of fired things up for the Democrats, but you do see on the right among Republicans pointing to states like Massachusetts and saying, “well, what about that? There are nine seats there and Republicans are a third of the vote, but Democrats get all nine seats. Why isn’t that more fair?”

I think a lot of people kind of intuit their way towards proportional representation as their idea of what fairness means. I think a lot of people think this is kind of how it already works.

Drutman: Right. And that’s why people are so upset. Shouldn’t you get seats in proportion to your vote share? That is a basic human intuition of what fairness is. Fairness is proportionality, right? We have elections that are completely disproportionate. And it’s always been inherent in the system of single-winner elections. It just wasn’t so disgusting and blatant until now. In part because the parties were more overlapping and there were more competitive districts and the stakes were not as high and voting was less predictable. But now that we’re in this era in which politics is so nationalized, voting is so predictable, the geographic split of the two parties is so wide and the coalitions are so distinct, it’s revealed what was always inadequate as a technology of representation to be grossly and disgustingly and terribly and brokenly inadequate.

Craig: And one thing I think we need to be clear about is that even if you kind of have a two-party system where the vast majority of people are voting Republican or Democrat, it does make gerrymandering impossible because you can’t just pack and crack voters, which is how gerrymandering works. Because you’re just moving people over to another district and then they’ll elect another seat there.

Drutman: Right.

Craig: So it’s the only way that really breaks the tyranny of the map. We hear talk about banning gerrymandering, and there’s some states that have tried to do it. But when you dig into the details, it’s really hard. What do you mean by that? Do you mean we prioritize having a proportional outcome by party? Do you prioritize geographic compactness? Do you have communities of interest and minority representation? And all of these different tests kind of predictably skew one way or the other on the outcome. And so it’s really hard to find any sense of agreement on that.

Drutman: Right, yeah. And then it just creates more opportunity for endless litigation about … you can have redistricting commissions, but there are a bunch of trade-offs in how you draw the maps. And was it truly independent? In a world in which almost all the seats are solid for one party or the other—it is a 49 to 49% world with 2% of seats up for grabs, you bet both sides are going to litigate the living shit out of every decision. And then who’s deciding, right? It’s just endless back and forth with expert witnesses slinging complex algorithms at each other and judges being like, “I don’t know, I’m a Republican, so l like the Republican map,” or, “I’m a Democrat, so I like the Democratic map.”

Craig: So circling back to the original framing of pro-party versus anti-party reforms, a lot of people do still have this notion and they think it’s very American that “I want to vote for the individual, not the party. I don’t want to have to just pick a party. I want to be able to vote split-ticket if I want. I want to be able to kind of vote for this guy or that guy.” And so on the design—this is getting a little bit into the weeds of the nerdy design options of PR system …

Drutman: … Right, well, if you’ve made it this far you’re here for the nerdy design questions.

Craig: Exactly. So I do want to touch on that. So let’s say we adopted this system we’re talking about and you’re a voter and you go into the polling place and you have your ballot for, let’s say, a midterm congressional election—we’re doing U.S. House seats—what would that actually look like? And how would you fill out that ballot and vote?

Drutman: Well, if you did what I think we should do, which is what most proportional countries do, you would have an open-list system where you go in and there’s different parties, and then they put forward lists of multiple candidates, and you can either just mark the party because you are just a partisan voter, or, if you want to vote for the person, you vote for the person on the party list and then their vote contributes to the total party vote and the top-performing candidates within that party list are the representatives. I think that’s the simplest way to do it. I think it’s the most intuitive way to do it. You still get to vote for the candidate. It’s sort of like combining the primary and the general election in a way, but with potentially multiple candidates from each party going forward. Seems like a pretty simple and logical way to do things. A lot of countries do this and voters in those countries are not confused.

Craig: People manage to figure it out. A lot of these electoral reforms you kind of run into [the objection]: “will people be able to understand it?” But I think sometimes we can dip into being a little bit too patronizing about that.

Drutman: Yeah, people figure it out. But I don’t want to [completely dismiss that]. I do think that some voting systems are more complex than others and there is a cognitive tax. I think asking people to rank multiple candidates, it does require a little bit more. And I think a lot of people just are like, “I just want to find my one person and I just want to vote for that person.” Honestly, I just voted in the D.C. primary election, the first ranked-choice election. I researched a bunch of candidates the other day. I don’t know, there’s maybe one candidate in each race that I could be okay with voting for, who I think has a chance of winning. So I’m just going to vote for one candidate in each race and that was just easier. There’s a bunch of candidates that have no chance of winning. I guess I could research a bunch of them, but what’s the point?

Craig: D.C. is a good example of—but this is the reality for most people in most of the country—that the primary is the only election that matters. Because, obviously the Republicans are not, with their 5% or whatever it is in D.C., going to win anything.

Drutman: Yeah. I wish we had proportional representation for the D.C. Council.

Craig: And more generally that’s something that we talk about for Congress, but it’s applicable for city councils, it’s something you can use for state legislatures. Historically, a lot of these big reform ideas have bubbled up in the states and the localities and then only then do they become federal reforms.

Drutman: Yeah, well, maybe that’s how things will happen this time.

Craig: Lee, thank you, this was a great conversation.

You can find more of Lee’s work in his newsletter, Undercurrent Events, and on Politics in Question, the podcast he co-hosts. He’s also the co-founder of Fix Our House, which is the campaign for proportional representation. And for the full argument on all this, I highly recommend his book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.

So that’s it for this episode of The Reconstruction Agenda brought to you by The UnPopulist. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

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Dear Readers:

We’ve got a fantastic roundup of clips for you this week. First, video correspondent reports on the FBI’s recent raid on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group whose entire job is registering voters. More than 100 federal agents descended on five Ohio cities in a single day, in some cases without warrants, to chase down fraud allegations that Ohio’s own track record shows are almost never substantiated.

Next up is a clip from senior editor ’s recent conversation with Boston University law professor on the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling—and the gap between what everyone expected and what the court delivered. (Their full conversation, which is full of really valuable insights and expertise, is here).

In our third clip, editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia powerfully conveys, drawing on her experience as an immigrant in this country, what being an American means to her.

But wait, there’s more! We also have a bonus clip from an upcoming episode of The Reconstruction Agenda that you won’t want to miss. That’s right—tomorrow, Craig’s conversation with political scientist drops. We give you a teaser of this excellent convo below.

For more videos from The UnPopulist, go here: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.

1) Trump’s FBI Raids an Ohio Voter-Registration Group

More than 100 federal agents showed up at the homes and offices of Ohio Organizing Collaborative staff and volunteers—a group whose only job is helping people register to vote. Some agents came without warrants; by one board member’s account, they even followed staffers’ kids to school.

They had a pretext, of course—but that’s all it was. The office had filed 1,200 fraud referrals from Ohio’s secretary of state for allegedly registering noncitizens to vote, which seems serious. But the state’s own track record tells a different story: a previous batch of 621 referrals over a decade produced just nine indictments.

In our roundup’s first video, Ayres connects the dots to explain why this is part of Trump’s broader vote-suppression agenda.

2) The Birthright Citizenship Ruling Should Never Have Been Close

Oral arguments in the birthright-citizenship case left experts expecting a lopsided ruling, somewhere between 7-2 and 9-0. Birthright citizenship is, after all, straightforwardly constitutional. Instead, it came down 5-4—prompting Shugerman, an esteemed law professor, to ask what the justices were listening to, if not the arguments everyone else heard.

The 5-4 framing is also a bit misleading, he notes, since Justice Kavanaugh didn’t actually dissent—he agreed the executive order was invalid, just by a different route, which makes his opinion a concurrence by any first-year law student’s standard. That he insisted on calling it a dissent anyway, Shugerman argues, tells you exactly who he’s performing for: not the court, but the anti-birthright-citizenship wing of MAGA.

3) What America’s 250th Means to an Immigrant

In our third clip, Dalmia notes that by Vice President JD Vance’s own framing, a “heritage American” descended from Revolutionary War soldiers would outrank a naturalized citizen like her. But she argues that an outsider’s vantage point reveals American virtues easy to miss if you’ve never known anything else.

Her larger point cuts against a common assumption: America isn’t great because it draws the best people from around the world, but because its freedom from tyranny and hierarchy draws the best out of people, native-born and immigrant alike. (It also drew the best out of Dalmia’s photography skills—the backdrop is no Zoom filter; it’s a photo she herself took!)

One Last Thing … A Sneak Peek

We promised you a bonus, so here it is! The following clip is actually a preview of our upcoming episode tomorrow in which Craig sits down with the brilliant political scientist Lee Drutman to talk about why our politics increasingly feels like existential trench warfare—and what that’s doing to American democracy.

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The release of “Project 2029” in May was surely the first of many efforts to identify “big ideas for America’s future.” The response flagged the challenge of the moment, with complaints that its proposals weren’t exciting and amounted to “establishment-friendly technocratic reform.” (In an anti-incumbent era, “establishment-friendly” is a bomb to blow something up.) The hurdle for what comes next, as recently suggested, is that any alternative “cannot just build back; they can’t even just build back better. They have to build something different.”

Klein may be right, but calls for different, bold, and new only address part of the challenge without clear principles to restore trust in democratic institutions that protect the rights of all citizens. It is easy instead to wonder whether the Trump administration’s disruptive approach might be used for good. In a recent podcast, asked Klein what he thought a “good DOGE” could do. The answer should be “nothing” because DOGE was illegal and didn’t understand or care about how government works. The question, however, illustrates the need to think through the deeper challenge of liberalism after illiberalism, and Americans should learn from the experiences of those facing similar challenges in places like Poland, Brazil, and Hungary.

DOGE Wasn’t Daring—It Was Unconstitutional

The lure of a good DOGE isn’t unique to the podcast. It’s a tension in many policy circles, op-ed pages, and roundtables seeking to identify next steps for America. Klein observed that, on the one hand, DOGE was clearly destructive, but that, “on the other hand, it was proof that you could do a lot more to the state than people thought you could, that the rules or regulations were not nearly as binding as people thought.”

The observation echoes an occasional reluctant admiration for the Trump administration’s determination to get things done, including many long-standing planks of past Republican Party platforms that had seemed stymied: shut down the Department of Education, fold the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department and slash foreign assistance, get NATO allies to increase defense spending. Thomas Frank illustrates the lure of the approach if not the ends, writing, “Like an anti-LBJ, Trump reminds the world every day what presidential power can do—the institutions it can wreck—when it is administered resolutely and with a little bit of daring.”

The creation of DOGE and the destruction it led to, however, was not just the result of Trump’s “daring.” It wasn’t proof that the rules are not as binding as people thought. DOGE did what it did largely by breaking the law, and Congress let it.

There is no mystery why this happened. Rather than assert its Article I power of the purse, Congress let DOGE and the Trump administration fire people and cancel programs it had passed into law. House Speaker Mike Johnson agreed that President Trump can assert prerogatives over spending and programs because, he said, there is a “presupposition in America that the commander in chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.”

Meanwhile, the courts have shown that they are not designed to stop the “move fast and break stuff” spirit that defines DOGE. While it may be possible to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center, many things will be hard if not impossible to reverse. Even if the courts were to rule that eliminating USAID was illegal without congressional approval, there’s little chance to bring it back now. There isn’t even a debate about whether this was unconstitutional. OMB Director Russ Vought told Congress in his confirmation hearings that he did not accept Congress’ authority over the power of the purse, having famously written in 2022 that he believes we are “living in a post-constitutional moment in our country.”

Big Ideas and the Reluctance to Challenge the Status Quo

Reimagining power will be at the heart of any big-ideas agenda: the power to get things done, long blocked by bureaucratic procedure and shrinking ambition. For years veteran policymakers have observed that government is like an enormous ocean liner that can only change course gradually, that change in the short term is only possible at the margins, in part because of zealous congressional earmarks and legislative guidance issued in the name of protecting taxpayer dollars. (I remember a USAID Administrator, when asked what he would do differently, ruefully commenting that his budget was already earmarked 110%.)

The instinct to restore the status quo ante will be strong, especially among those who watched decades of their work dismantled and now argue for restoring it. Klein acknowledges, “One thing DOGE very naturally did was create a rallying around the institutions of government among liberals — they’re trying to gut the N.I.H. and the National Science Foundation and U.S.A.I.D. and all these things, and we need to defend them.” But liberals have to treat institutions, he argues, “as much more liquid and malleable and have to take reports of their failure much more seriously than we do.”

Not long ago, Biden was being trumpeted as the next FDR (or LBJ) who knew how to pass big, complicated legislation. Yet the insight of the “abundance” analysis is that passing legislation isn’t enough: years after the Inflation Reduction Act passed, there was still little rural broadband and no national network of electric charging stations. When the Trump administration came into office, it reversed many of these policies in a move that previous wisdom said couldn’t be done because they had been codified in legislation. It happened not because there was more flexibility than policymakers realized, but because Congress refused to act as the check the Constitution intended.

The abundance approach calls for a return to first principles, to what we believe government should do, and to be willing to criticize the status quo where it prevents progress. In the case of the National Institutes of Health, Thompson argues failures have been created by “decades of cover-your-ass rules that force scientists to essentially become bureaucrats. … Let’s find a way to allow scientists to be scientists by reducing that burden.” Reinvigorating institutions sounds inspiring, but the peril surfaces when Thompson concludes, “that’s an approach that I would like to see a ‘good DOGE’ lean into in 2029.” But the problem is not that DOGE was put to bad ends. It is that DOGE is fundamentally illiberal. It normalizes illiberal power instead of rebuilding the case that government can deliver.

Instead, the next president should lead a national initiative to articulate a new compact of checks and balances with Congress, one that binds the executive branch through greater transparency and accountability in return for greater flexibility to innovate.

This doesn’t come without risks. Many caution that, if you open the floodgates, you may not like what you unleash in an era of political polarization. You might get an emboldened Project 2025, rather than a new national consensus. Democrats might vow to reject Vought’s vision of the unitary executive when in power, but it’s not hard to imagine Republican lawmakers rediscovering their belief in Congress’ oversight with a Democratic president.

Liberalism after Illiberalism

The hurdle for any “Project 2029” is not only ambition but what some have called the “challenges, dilemmas, and paradoxes of liberalism after illiberalism.” Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley observe:

A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps that are difficult to counteract in the short term without resorting to the same methods that established them in the first place. Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook.

In Poland, the centrist coalition that defeated the authoritarian-leaning Law and Justice Party in 2023 confronted the fact that, even after winning elections, its defeated opponents were still in place, and determined to defend themselves. Faced with a legal system still populated by justices from the past government and vetoes blocking reform by the president allied with them, the new Polish government struggled to govern, ultimately judged to deliver on only 12 of the 100 policies it had promised for its first 100 days. In 2025, the coalition’s candidate for president lost an election to a candidate backed by the Law and Justice Party, setting the stage for continued gridlock over democratic reform.

Friends in Poland warn that if you do not move fast to dismantle the old regime while your political capital is greatest, its holdovers will undermine you. Yet Bill and Stanley suggest that “governments seeking to deal with the consequences of democratic backsliding face demands and incentives to act effectively, legally, and quickly, but realizing two of these goals often means excluding the third.” When the coalition floated bending the rules to overcome resistance, the predictable both-sides verdict followed: it was no better than the authoritarians it replaced.

Others are trying to learn from this. In Brazil, the Supreme Court took two years to convict former president Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to lead a coup after losing elections in 2022, proceeding despite international pressure from the Trump administration. In Hungary, Péter Magyar, who led the parliamentary defeat of Viktor Orbán, called for the president aligned with Orbán’s party to also step down, threatening to amend the country’s constitution to remove him using legal tools. Magyar, with an overwhelming parliamentary majority his Polish neighbors lack, recently suggested, “This process will take about a month, we are trying to adopt the necessary legislation as quickly as possible, and yes, there will be talk of removing all puppets.”

In the end, “good DOGE” isn’t just a poor choice of metaphor. It illustrates how difficult it can be to maintain clarity that rebuilding bolder, better, and differently must be accomplished through a renewal of democratic principles that govern the rights of all citizens. The experience of liberalism after illiberalism in other parts of the world reminds us of windows of opportunity but also that moving fast must happen through democratic institutions, not around them. Otherwise, it may not last.

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“Of course he found a way.”

That’s a phrase we tend to say before marveling at whatever amazing play one of soccer’s global superstars just pulled off in the FIFA World Cup—as in, “His team was down. But of course Messi found a way.” On this occasion, however, the referent is the president of the United States, and the phrase isn’t the typical prelude to some superlative. Yet it’s the phrase that came to my mind after watching Trump strong-arm FIFA into letting a U.S. player suit up despite a red card that should have kept him off the field.

The phrase reflects the depressing inevitability of Trump treating his authority as boundless—unchecked by the Constitution, institutional norms, or even, in this case, the rules of the world’s most popular game. He was always going to find a way to put his stamp on this World Cup—the only question was how much damage it would do.

On Monday night in Seattle, Belgium dismantled the United States 4-1 in their Round of 16 matchup—the worst 90 minutes the U.S. played all tournament, and a stunning collapse from the team that had swashbuckled through Paraguay, dispatched Australia, battled Turkey to the wire, and outclassed Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first knockout round to get here. So what happened?

What happened is the president of the United States turned a red card into an international incident. The U.S. lost because it played poorly and Belgium played superbly—that’s not in dispute. But one contributing factor that led to that outcome was surely the brouhaha over Trump’s meddling in FIFA’s enforcement of World Cup rules.

Of course Trump found a way to abuse his powers—and the fallout might have put as much fire in the belly of the Belgian team as it dampened the spirit of the American one.

The U.S.’s exit means all three World Cup co-hosts, including Mexico and Canada, are now out of the tournament. But only one of those exits was in the wake of a pressure campaign that put U.S. soccer officials on the defensive; elicited widespread condemnation from commentators, public officials, and the game’s own governing bodies; and made an alleged unfair advantage on behalf of the U.S. the most talked-about topic in the run-up to the game.

Everyone should have seen this coming. Trump has spent his presidency treating World Cup access as just another lever of power: travel bans that shut out fans from Haiti and Iran, a Somali referee turned away at the airport, Senegalese supporters locked out of their own team’s matches, an Iranian squad barred from spending the night in the country hosting them, a floated-then-reversed plan to post ICE agents at stadiums, even a preposterous suggestion that Italy—which hadn’t qualified—replace Iran in the tournament. Trump was always going to put his stamp on—actually, his fist through—this tournament, harming the nation’s and team’s reputation.

How It Happened

Trump decided that U.S. striker Folarin Balogun’s suspension for a red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina was unfair and should be lifted. So far, no problem. Virtually every supporter of the U.S. felt the same. Earlier in the tournament, Leo Messi—Argentina’s star and the game’s greatest player—made a nearly identical challenge and he did not receive so much as a yellow card, let alone a red card that leaves the player suspended for the next match as well.

But FIFA doesn’t overturn suspensions during the tournament. Although the call on the field was harsh, and the U.S. had every reason to feel aggrieved, there are procedures and rules by which the call was made. The competition enlists a referee on the field, and then a three-person video assistant referee panel during the game that meticulously watches in case major decisions on the field need rectifying. Once that process results in a red card, there’s no undoing it afterward—not during the World Cup anyway. The process is widely considered to be flawed and error-ridden—but here’s the thing, it applies equally to everyone. But not to the U.S., Trump decided.

On July 5, ahead of the U.S.’s biggest match of the tournament, the world learned that Balogun, the team’s top goal-scorer in this competition, would be eligible to play after all.

Basically, Trump treated FIFA the way he treats any independent institute: as something to be bent to his will until he gets the outcome he wants. He called FIFA President Gianni Infantino directly. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also started working the phones. Within days, FIFA’s disciplinary committee did something it hadn’t done in more than 60 years of World Cup play: it suspended a red-card ban mid-tournament so Balogun could play. Trump made his reasoning explicit: if the U.S. lost with Balogun sidelined, he told reporters, “We’ll say it was—I say it was rigged, just like the election was rigged in 2020.” He was laying the groundwork for a stolen-game narrative before a ball had even been kicked.

Whether Balogun should have received a red card is open to debate. What is not is whether a government, or its politicians—in this case, a host nation—should be the ones making that call. They should not be—and I can’t think of any of Trump’s predecessors who would have shown such flagrant disregard for the game’s rules. Trump’s pressure campaign worked, and that is to FIFA’s shame. But the fact that it worked is not all down to FIFA. The organization is spineless, and has a long history of corruption scandals. But it also understands power, and more importantly, it knows what power can do when it is in the hands of someone who can wield it arbitrarily.

FIFA’s Capitulation

Consider how Trump talks about his leverage over FIFA, then consider how FIFA has behaved toward him. Infantino’s public line has been that FIFA’s disciplinary bodies are independent and “operate autonomously.” But when a supposedly independent body breaks with over a half century of precedent, it doesn’t do so because the evidence was compelling. Off the top of my head, I can rattle off a dozen instances of past red card suspensions during the World Cup that were more unjust, and whose subsequent appeals went absolutely nowhere. But everyone knows Trump is willing to go very far—beyond any constraints or rules—to get what he wants.

Infantino invented a “Peace Prize” for Trump back in December, right as Trump was publicly stewing over missing out on the Nobel—a gift to a man with the power, as host nation, to make FIFA’s life difficult if he didn’t get what he wanted. This week, when the Balogun controversy broke, Infantino told reporters that fielding a call from Trump was unremarkable, the same as calls he takes from “heads of state, government officials, football stakeholders, and business executives.” Yet when Trump called, FIFA bent the knee.

Outside the United States, reaction was close to unanimous. UEFA—European soccer’s governing body, and one of the sport’s most powerful institutions—said FIFA had crossed a “red line,” calling the reversal “unprecedented, incomprehensible, and unjustifiable.” The European Union’s sports chief said decisions like this “belong to sporting bodies, not politicians.” Even Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s own disgraced former president, called it what it was: “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies. Football must never become a playground for political power.” Mark Pieth, the Swiss attorney who once led FIFA’s own internal governance-reform effort, was blunter still, calling it “blatant abuse of power” and saying it showed how Trump and FIFA’s current president “are playing the power game at the expense of football and fans.”

Belgium didn’t need extra motivation, but Trump gave them some anyway—after sealing the win, their players broke into his signature two-fisted dance, both on the field and in the locker room. Of course Trump found a way. It just didn’t work out the way he wanted it to.

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We launched Executive Watch early in Trump’s second term, and it has been meticulously documenting this White House’s illicit actions ever since. Below is our biweekly selection of new entries. Bookmark this page, which contains a chronological scroll of the abuses. And also this post, which sorts and lists them under our 5 “P” categories:

• Personal Grift

• Political Corruption

• Presidential Retribution

• Power Consolidation

• Policy Illegality

After reading the following entries, tell us: Which of these abuses is the most troubling, and why?

July 6, 2026

Trump Strong-Arms FIFA to Overturn a Red Card Suspension Against an American Player in the World Cup
Category: Political Corruption

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a bad call fixed. By most accounts, the red card handed to U.S. striker Folarin Balogun during a challenge in the team’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina—a red card means expulsion from the game and a suspension for the next one—was harsh. And fans, pundits, and even elected officials venting about it is perfectly fine and totally commonplace. That’s not what happened here. What happened is that Trump treated FIFA the way he treats any institution that’s supposed to operate independently of him: as something to be leaned on rather than persuaded, using the machinery of his office to get a result he wanted.

After the red card, Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino directly. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, seated next to Infantino at the match, started working the phones almost immediately, and what reportedly followed were days of coordinated strategizing between the White House’s FIFA task force and U.S. Soccer’s legal team over how to build a case for reversal. The U.S. government reportedly supplied “additional evidence” that FIFA’s disciplinary committee then cited in lifting the suspension ahead of tonight’s Round of 16 match against Belgium—the first time since 1962 that a World Cup red card hasn’t resulted in a suspension.

Remember: when Trump has power, he thinks he can do anything with it. As and León Krauze discussed on Zooming In before the tournament even began, that instinct has shadowed this World Cup from the start—visa policy, game locations, and, in April, a proposal to hand Italy a spot in the tournament it hadn’t earned. Italy failed to qualify, but Trump’s special envoy, Paolo Zampolli, floated giving them a berth anyway, pitching the idea to Trump and Infantino as a fix for Iran’s participation in a U.S.-hosted tournament in the middle of a war; reporting at the time tied it to patching up Trump’s own rift with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

CNBC reports:

President Donald Trump on Monday defended making a phone call to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, which led to the soccer association overturning a one-game World Cup suspension of U.S. Men’s National Team striker Folarin Balogun.

“I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” Trump said, referring to a referee issuing Balogun a red card in his team’s victory last week over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I didn’t know what the hell a red card was,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office of the White House.

Two other lines from that same appearance round out the picture. Trump called the referee who awarded the red card “a little bit suspect if you check his past”—the same reflex he’s turned on judges who rule against him, baselessly questioning their motives or backgrounds rather than the substance of a ruling. And on what would have happened had the suspension stood, he said the game “would have a big mark on it, if we lost or if we won”—a framing that treats any result reached without his intervention as inherently suspect, regardless of the outcome.

FIFA could have said no. It didn’t. But that’s a story about FIFA’s spine, not the executive’s use of power, and it’s the latter that’s the point here.

July 4, 2026

Trump Puts His Signature on the $100 Bill, Breaking 165 Years of Precedent
Category: Political Corruption

Trump’s name and face already adorn national park passes, U.S. passports, and federal buildings around Washington. This week he added the nation’s currency to that list: the $100 bill now carries his signature alongside the Treasury secretary’s, breaking with a 165-year-old tradition of pairing the treasurer’s signature with the secretary’s.

CNN reports:

President Donald Trump posted a new image Friday of a $100 bill bearing his signature, months after the Treasury Department announced that, for the first time, a sitting president’s signature would be featured on US paper currency.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Saturday touted the president’s economic achievements and said it is “only appropriate” that currency bearing Trump’s signature be issued in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday. “There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S. dollar bills bearing his signature, and it is only appropriate that this historic currency be issued at the Semiquincentennial,” Bessent posted on X.

The image Trump posted shows the president’s signature above Bessent’s. Previously, the $100 bill featured the signatures of the Treasury secretary and the treasurer of the United States, but not the sitting president. …

Trump has made it a passion project to get his name and likeness on an array of US documents and landmarks. His administration also has put his image, name or both on a commemorative US passport, national parks passes, banners on various agency buildings in DC, cultural institutions like the US Institute of Peace and special investment accounts for babies. Florida also renamed Palm Beach International Airport after him. …

Some in Congress have wanted to go a step further and put Trump’s likeness on currency, introducing a bill to get his portrait on a $250 anniversary bill. That outcome is far less likely, given it would need the support of Democratic senators in Congress.

This isn’t, fundamentally, about currency design. It’s about self-aggrandizement. It is driven by the same instinct that has already seen him attach his name or likeness on passports, park passes, and federal buildings. As our own wrote in April, Julius Caesar putting his own image on coinage was seen as an outrage, associated with assuming the title of dictator for life. Polling conducted when the change was first announced found nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapproved of Trump putting his signature on the bills. Of course, he did it anyway. No vote, no bill, no debate, no authorization from Congress. Treasury just changed the signature, and that was that.

July 3, 2026

Trump Pardons a Major Republican Donor Along With Nine Clean Air Act Violators
Category: Political Corruption

Donald Trump, the pardoner-in-chief who has abused this presidential power incessantly since returning to office, just handed out a fresh batch of pardons. Nine were extended to individuals who installed or sold devices that disabled diesel trucks’ pollution controls, letting them spew illegal levels of exhaust fumes, and one to a major Republican donor who pleaded guilty alongside Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist whose bribery scandal became synonymous with Washington corruption in the 2000s, in a nearly $150 million fraud scheme.

The New York Times reports:

The president … pardoned Adam Kidan, a major donor to Republicans, including Mr. Trump. He had served about two and a half years in prison for his role in a fraud scheme involving the disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The Clean Air Act pardons benefited people who had sold or installed devices for diesel trucks that defeated their emissions controls, making them far more polluting. It was the latest move by the Trump administration to undermine laws intended to fight climate change and curb air pollutants that harm human health. …

By 2020, the most recent numbers available, the E.P.A. estimated that the emissions controls had been removed from more than 550,000 diesel pickup trucks over the prior decade, or roughly 15 percent of all diesel trucks originally certified with those controls. The effect, the agency found, was the equivalent of adding more than nine million diesel pickups to American roads, spewing harmful nitrogen oxides at levels up to 300 times the legal limits. …

Mr. Kidan had pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy and fraud charges involving his purchase of a casino boat fleet with Mr. Abramoff, who became a poster child for Washington corruption in the pre-Trump era. Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Kidan were each sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay a total of $21.7 million in restitution related to the $147.5 million purchase of a cruise ship line in 2000. Mr. Kidan served less than half of that prison sentence and became an executive in the staffing industry. He has donated millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and groups over the years, including more than $270,000 to Mr. Trump’s political committees in 2024, according to campaign finance records. It is not clear whether he paid the full amount of the restitution.

A pardon doesn’t just erase a conviction. It can erase restitution, too—and it’s not clear how much of the $21.7 million Kidan and Abramoff were ordered to repay he ever actually paid. What we do know is that being a major donor to this president definitely didn’t hurt. And that’s just not how pardons are supposed to work.

July 1, 2026

DHS Is Tracking Down and Threatening Americans Who Criticize ICE
Category: Power Consolidation

Criticize ICE and you may get a visit from Homeland Security—anytime, anywhere. Federal agents have started showing up at the homes and even hotel rooms of ordinary Americans who criticized the agency online or by email, warning them that they may be under criminal investigation for constitutionally protected speech.

NPR reports:

David Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter last week when he noticed his doorbell camera back home had captured some unusual footage. In recordings from hours earlier, he could see what looked like two law enforcement officers in blue jackets waiting on his front porch in Rochester, N.Y. …

The agents asked Hilary Streever to tell her husband to call them back and left a form for him to sign. It said “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” and described federal laws that make it a crime to threaten federal officials. Later, the Streevers would learn the same agents presented the same form to a Syracuse poll worker earlier that day, and accused her of threatening an ICE officer on her Instagram account. …

Just a couple hours after Streever landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Thursday evening, a third Homeland Security Investigations special agent tracked him to the airport hotel he was staying at that night. The agent left a business card with the front desk, raising questions about whether Streever is under surveillance.

“This is clearly out of line,” said , an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which advocates for free speech, about the investigation into Streever. The First Amendment protects the rights of Americans to voice their concerns to their government, Steinbaugh said. “The government doesn’t have to listen to those, but it doesn’t get to dispatch federal agents to your door and stalk you across the state of New York,” he added.

Nobody was charged with a crime. Nobody made an actual threat. What connects these episodes is a government agency deploying the machinery of federal surveillance against its critics—ordinary individuals, at that, rather than public commentators or political officials—and counting on fears of a knock at the door to ensure future silence.

July 1, 2026

ICE Arrested 10,000 People in Five Days After the White House Demanded Bigger Numbers
Category: Policy Illegality

After federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens during an unprecedented immigration crackdown in Minneapolis this past January, ICE quietly dialed back its splashy street operations. That restraint didn’t last. Internal documents show the White House pushed the agency to hit a new daily arrest target, and ICE more than doubled its pace in a matter of days—even sweeping up a nun on her way to Mass along with immigrants who had no criminal record and were seemingly following the rules.

The New York Times reports:

Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates. Agency leaders in recent days ordered top ICE officials to focus more of their officers’ efforts on picking up immigrants they want to deport. … ICE officers have arrested people at check-ins with immigration authorities, during traffic stops and on the street. ...

ICE officials were told that the White House wanted an increase in arrests, according to three officials with knowledge of the conversations. One of the officials said that it was unclear how long the pace could continue, but that ICE officials had been told that 2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement. ...

In South Texas, Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun, was arrested on her way to church on Sunday morning, according to Sister Norma Pimentel, her colleague. Sister Letty is a local nurse who also helps at a parish in the region. Sister Norma called local leaders after learning of the arrest, and congressional officials soon got involved and pushed for her release. On Sunday, she was let go from ICE custody, and Sister Norma was there to greet her. Sister Norma said that Sister Letty was distraught upon her release. “It took her awhile to be able to talk — she was crying,” she said.

None of the people named in the Times’s piece—a nun, a nurse, a father with a court date already scheduled for 2027, a man driving to a soccer game—were accused of violence or anything coming anywhere near the public-safety threats normally invoked to justify immediate enforcement. Their underlying immigration statuses may differ in ways that matter legally, but none of that actually impacted who got swept up. And, of course, that’s precisely what a quota facilitates; it pulls in anyone who can help hit the target—who they actually are is an afterthought.

Except, as we’ve come to understand, “afterthought” may be too generous to apply to this administration. Senior White House aides have spoken openly about reversing immigration-driven demographic change. Stephen Miller, the right’s point person on purges, could not be more forthright about his desires for mass-scale deportation of immigrants. That’s why, for this movement, a policy that rewards volume over judgment isn’t an unintended side effect. It’s actually the mechanism that lets agents pursue a nativist vision of the country while justifying it through quota fulfillment.

July 1, 2026

Trump’s Qatari-Gifted Jet Just Flew Its First Mission as Air Force One
Category: Personal Grift

Back in 2025, Donald Trump created controversy by accepting a gifted jet—a “gift” that may have cost American taxpayers up to a billion dollars to ready—from Qatar. This week, he put it into service for the first time: flying it to North Dakota for the dedication of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, with the jet slated to lead a Fourth of July flyover days later.

MS NOW explains:

The jet is meant to serve as a “bridge,” easing the strain on aging aircraft until two purpose-built planes enter service in 2028, the administration official and the Air Force spokesperson said. Trump has said that once he leaves office, the jet will be donated to his presidential library. …

Just weeks before the president announced the gift, the Trump Organization announced a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar in “collaboration” with a Saudi company and a firm owned by the Qatari government. ...

“The president time and time again makes clear that he is willing to [accept] and actively seeking gifts from foreign governments where the American people have significant national security interests, and Qatar is perhaps the most glaring and tangible example of that,” [said] Donald Sherman, president of the government ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

It’s hard to keep track of Trump’s various scandals, controversies, and self-dealing (although we at the Executive Watch desk do our best to help with this!). He has so utterly flooded the zone with improprieties that episodes like this one barely register. Indeed, a sequence like this—Qatar’s $400 million jet “gift” arriving weeks after the Trump Organization signed its own deal with Qatari-linked money—might have been a crisis moment for a past administration. For this one, it’s par for the course.

The Constitution, for what it’s worth, specifically provides that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

June 30, 2026

Trump’s White House Ballroom Vanity Project Was Built on a Secret $500 Million No-Bid Contract
Category: Personal Grift

Trump has insisted, repeatedly and publicly, that his East Wing ballroom project wouldn’t cost taxpayers a single cent. It turns out that the White House quietly steered the half-billion-dollar construction deal to a favored contractor through an office specifically exempt from the competitive-bidding rules that normally protect taxpayers from getting overcharged.

What’s more, Trump personally haggled over line items!

The Washington Post has the scoop, but it’s paywalled. This Daily Beast write-up relies on the Post’s reporting:

Officials steered the $500 million agreement with Clark Construction through the Executive Residence, an arm of the Executive Office of the President that ordinarily buys furniture and art, covers entertainment, and handles repairs at the mansion. … That office sits outside federal rules that require agencies to seek competing offers and to lay out spending publicly. Structuring the deal this way allowed Trump to dodge scrutiny of the arrangement and avoid exposing it to competition.

Trump, 80, got personally involved in the haggling, records show. On March 4—days after launching his war with Iran—he talked down what a Clark subsidiary would charge for concrete, trimming $2.3 million from an opening figure above $47 million. ...

A White House official told the Post the deal ran through the Executive Residence because that office “will be the primary support of the facility,” adding the Executive Office of the President “consistently executes contracts following the law.” ... Joshua Fisher, who directs the White House Office of Administration, said that bids were skipped because disclosing the project’s needs would “compromise national security,” echoing the president’s repeated efforts to cast the rebuild as a defense concern.

“I would certainly expect them to compete a project of this size and complexity,” [said] Anthony Costa, a former General Services Administration official who handled federal real estate work across four administrations.

Skipping competitive bidding is how governments overpay for things. That’s precisely why the rule exists. Doing it in secret, through an office designed to be exempt from scrutiny, for a vanity project the president promised the public they wouldn’t have to pay for themselves, has all the hallmarks of Trump’s particular blend of self-aggrandizement and self-dealing.

June 30, 2026

Trump Personally Made Over a Billion Dollars on Crypto Last Year, All While Promoting and Deregulating It
Category: Personal Grift

Both as candidate and as president, Donald Trump has clearly identified crypto bros as potentially powerful sources of both political quid pro quo and personal enrichment. A new federal filing reveals that he has earned more than a billion dollars, split between World Liberty Financial and his Trump meme coin, at the same time as he is touting crypto and deregulating the market.

The Guardian reports:

Donald Trump has raked in more than $1bn from his crypto businesses since returning to the White House, according to financial disclosures, making him substantially richer and ringing alarm bells over a conflict of interest...

While many of the president’s crypto ventures were startups when he took the oath of office, their revenue has now eclipsed much of his vast property portfolio. This rise has been fuelled by billionaire investors and Trump’s move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.

In his second term, the president and his family have invested heavily in digital money and crypto businesses, with Trump announcing at the start of last year that he wanted the US to be the “crypto capital of the world.”

Trump has significantly loosened regulation and enforcement over the very industry from which he personally profits—the kind of overlap that would raise questions in any administration. Part of his actions in this area can be explained as his political interests in making a play for a wealthy constituency. But it’s also clear that he and his family have found ways to personally profit from policies he himself controls. As we previously observed at The UnPopulist, this is a way to let money flow directly to the politician’s coffers, without the pretense of a campaign donation.

June 29, 2026

Two Weeks Before ICE Sought a $220 Million Taser Contract, Trump Bought Around $5 Million in Taser Stock
Category: Personal Grift

On Feb. 10, Trump bought stock in Axon Enterprise, the company that dominates the market for the weapon his own immigration enforcers are about to buy by the tens of thousands. Add it to the pile of Trump family investments that just so happen to line up with his own administration’s policy decisions.

CNBC reports:

President Donald Trump bought as much as $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise — maker of Tasers, body cameras and policing software — two weeks before Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought a five-year, $220 million contract that experts told CNBC appeared tailored to the company’s weapons. On Feb. 10, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of Axon stock, according to federal disclosures he filed in May. On Feb. 24, ICE posted a notice seeking roughly 17,800 new Tasers, along with unlimited cartridges and training. ...

“The concern is that [Trump] bought into a company whose business could grow if his own administration expands immigration enforcement,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president of communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said. Deborah Fleischaker, a former acting chief of staff at ICE during the Biden administration and now a senior advisor at UnidosUS, said the timing “raises red flags,” while cautioning it is impossible from public records to determine whether anything improper occurred.

“It is not smart to buy stock in a company that was impacted by the decisions you would be making at the agency,” Fleischaker said.

The White House insists Trump’s assets sit in a trust run by his children and that there are “no conflicts of interest.” Except the president reportedly filed the disclosure himself, on a stock he apparently chose himself, two weeks before his own agency wrote a contract that reads like a shopping list for that company’s products.

June 29, 2026

Trump Toady Pete Hegseth Is Quietly Continuing to Refashion the ’Department of War’ in His Boss’s Image
Category: Power Consolidation

Last year, Pete Hegseth removed every member of the Defense Policy Board. Now he’s reconstituting it with 15 new appointees, and—unsurprisingly—it’s full of ideologues, lackeys, and Trump’s rich pals.

The Hill explains:

The Defense Policy Board is an advisory committee that provides advice and recommendations to the defense secretary, the deputy defense secretary and the Pentagon policy chief on regional defense policies, strategic planning, policy implications of U.S. force structure and modernizations and others. ...

Hegseth announced that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen will serve on the board. He is the general partner at Andressen Horowitz, a firm whose investments include OpenAI, SpaceX, Skydio, Hadrian and Anduril — all companies that have contracts with the Pentagon.

Other members of the board include Blake Masters, a former Senate GOP candidate; and Michael Anton, former director of policy planning at the State Department.

It’s never a good sign for a democracy—particularly one with a strong history of good civilian-military relations—when political leadership starts replacing experienced professionals with incompetent ideological loyalists (like Anton, of “Flight 93 Election” infamy, and Masters, who was such a weak candidate that Trump himself reportedly told him he’d lose a primary to Kari Lake) and self-interested heterodox billionaires like Andreessen.

June 29, 2026

Massachusetts and Rhode Island Provide Financial Aid and In-State Tuition to Help Immigrant Students—Now Trump Is Suing Them Over It
Category: Policy Illegality

The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policy extends far beyond his attempts to ramp up deportations and his (now-failed) attempt to end birthright citizenship. It also seeks to deny immigrants access to opportunity, resources, and basic equal treatment. Now Trump is combining attacks on several of his favorite targets: immigrants, higher education, and blue states.

Courthouse News reports:

The Justice Department claims in two lawsuits filed Monday that Massachusetts and Rhode Island are violating federal law by offering in-state tuition and scholarships to students who live in the state but entered the country illegally. “The Department of Justice is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise that illegal aliens will not receive taxpayer benefits or preferential treatment over America’s own citizens,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a DOJ statement. “As our nation marks 250 years of freedom, we will continue to challenge state laws that place aliens over citizens in clear defiance of Congress’s commands.” ...

Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston charges state residents less than $16,000 a year for tuition but students from other states pay $44,700. Rhode Island College charges state residents about $5,000 a year but out-of-state residents pay almost $14,000. ... Some 21 states have passed such tuition equity laws, and at least 14 states allow such students to receive state financial aid.

One of the Trump administration’s favorite lies is that immigrants are undeserving of help and unable to succeed in the United States. It isn’t true, of course, but their policies are designed to make it true by denying immigrants access and opportunity.

June 27, 2026

Trump’s Board of Peace Is Trying to Grant Itself Legal Immunity and the Power to Steal Palestinian Land
Category: Power Consolidation

Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has a modest ask before it gets to work in Gaza: total legal immunity for itself and its agents, plus the power to seize property, with almost no oversight attached. A draft resolution shows the group—which currently enjoys the blessing of the United Nations—wants to answer to no one but itself.

The Guardian reports:

The four-page resolution, labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” extends broad protections to every member of the Board of Peace and its administrative affiliate, the office of the high representative (OHR), as well as to the Palestinian technocrats, international military forces and nonresident contractors lined up to perform work in Gaza. It defines legal processes from which they would have immunity as “any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in the courts or other entities in Gaza.” ...

Six lawyers specialising in US contracting law and international armed conflict reviewed the draft resolution for the Guardian. If the resolution goes into force, they said, it is unclear how Board of Peace officials, soldiers and contractors would be held accountable if there are shootings or accidents that affect Gaza residents, or even how the group might resolve routine disputes over business or land use there. ...

The final section of the Board of Peace’s draft resolution, entitled “Premises of the Board of Peace, OHR, and ISF,” says that the group “shall be provided, free of charge, public premises and facilities needed for the accomplishment of the missions in Gaza.” Legal experts said that this singular phrase could open the door to illegal confiscation of Palestinian property.

Lest we forget, the Board of Peace’s composition and actions are, by design, almost entirely within the control of Donald Trump—personally, not just in his current capacity as POTUS—until and unless he decides to give it up. Now he wants to give the people he controls legal immunity. Surely only for good reasons!

June 26, 2026

Trump Is Snatching Money From America’s National Parks to Pay for His White House Vanity Projects
Category: Political Corruption

Donald Trump has made a lot of promises about his D.C.-area construction projects—about their quality, about how much they’ll cost, and about who’s paying for them. Most of those promises have turned out to be false, so it’s no surprise that American taxpayers are indeed footing the bill for Trump’s personal vanity. New reporting reveals where some of that money is coming from: America’s national parks.

The Atlantic has the story:

In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from national parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. ...

Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”

Cuts to the Park Service are far from the most headline-grabbing thing Trump is doing, but they’re a perfect encapsulation of the second Trump term: raiding accounts meant to serve the public to bankroll the president’s own pet projects.

June 26, 2026

Trump Is Pitifully Lying About Crowd Size Again, This Time About His ‘Great American State Fair’
Category: Political Corruption

Donald Trump has always been obsessed with the size of his crowds, and his attempts to turn America’s 250th birthday into a celebration of himself and his vision of the country are proving no exception. But as the lame-duck incumbent rather than the provocative challenger, he’s struggling to draw the enthusiastic crowds he once did. And he absolutely hates to have that fact pointed out.

MS NOW reports:

[Trump] delivered a campaign-style speech and made much of the gathering a celebration of himself, not the country.

In case that weren’t quite enough, turnout for the event was — how do I put this gently — underwhelming.

An NBC News report noted, “Roughly half of those in Wednesday’s crowd of more than 1,000 wore Trump’s slogans or likeness on their clothes. For them, America’s 250th birthday was secondary to an opportunity to see the president.” The Washington Post ran a related report that noted, in reference to attendees, “The crowd thinly covered an area about the length of the National Museum of American History, smaller than some summer outdoor movie screenings.” ...

Five hours later, either trying to convince the public or himself, he published a follow-up item, which read in part, “Last night’s Rally was packed — 45,000 people.“ An NBC News report described the president’s claim as “false,“ adding that the actual total was “nowhere near 45,000 people.”

The fact that Trump appears to have lied about a crowd size is pitiful but predictable. He has, after all, been doing this since literally the first day of his first term.

Pitiful, indeed.

June 23, 2026

Instead of Draining the Swamp, Trump Turned the Reflecting Pool Into One
Category: Personal Grift

Trump’s attempt to remodel the Reflecting Pool—cleaning it and painting the bottom blue—has instead turned into a massive mess. All this after one company that had previously worked on the Reflecting Pool turned the project down as unfeasible. Trump awarded it instead via no-bid contracts, including one for a water filtration system to one of his donors. Trump’s response was of course as measured as you’d expect, flinging unhinged and unsupported allegations of vandalism.

The New York Times explains:

President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with “knives” in the “dark of night.”

But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the “American flag blue” coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.

Even as the documents show workers were attempting to address deteriorating conditions, Trump administration officials were insisting publicly that the pool was pristine. ...

On Saturday, Mr. Trump acknowledged the pool would have to be at least partially drained for more work. On Tuesday, the president said on social media that six people had been arrested, and seven others had been cited, for slashing the pool’s sealant with a “sharp knife or razors.”

“It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night,” he wrote.

Mr. Trump also told reporters on Monday, without offering evidence, that vandals had poured fertilizer into the pool to feed the algae.

Neither the Interior Department nor the White House would provide charging documents, citations or the names of anyone arrested.

Somehow a perfect metaphor for Donald Trump, both the man and the president.

June 23, 2026

Trump Threatens to Sue ABC News for Reporting Honestly on His Reflecting Pool Fiasco
Category: Presidential Retribution

Fresh off blaming vandals for the algae and peeling paint plaguing his Reflecting Pool renovation, Donald Trump turned his fire on the press for covering it. He accused ABC News of “false reporting” for failing to credit past administrations’ spending on the pool, and vowed to sue.

CNBC reports:

U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to sue broadcaster ABC for its reporting on the cost of repairing damage sustained by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington D.C. Trump said the network had not reported costs incurred by previous administrations in maintaining the landmark.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that ABC “failed to report that their close ’friends,’ Dumocrats Obama and Biden, spent over 100 Million Dollars on the Reflecting Pool, and it never worked.” ...

“We are preparing lawsuits against ABC for false reporting. I like their money, which will be given to the U.S. Treasury,” Trump added, also referencing $16 million that ABC paid to settle a defamation case he filed in 2024.

The latest action against ABC comes as the company faces two investigations from the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr.President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with “knives” in the “dark of night.”

But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the “American flag blue” coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.

Even as the documents show workers were attempting to address deteriorating conditions, Trump administration officials were insisting publicly that the pool was pristine. ...

On Saturday, Mr. Trump acknowledged the pool would have to be at least partially drained for more work. On Tuesday, the president said on social media that six people had been arrested, and seven others had been cited, for slashing the pool’s sealant with a “sharp knife or razors.”

“It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night,” he wrote.

Mr. Trump also told reporters on Monday, without offering evidence, that vandals had poured fertilizer into the pool to feed the algae.

Neither the Interior Department nor the White House would provide charging documents, citations or the names of anyone arrested.

Threatening to sue a network for accurately reporting an embarrassing story isn’t a policy dispute; it’s an attempt to make honest coverage of his administration more expensive than it’s worth. ABC joins the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and The New York Times on the list of outlets Trump has sued or threatened to sue in just the past year.

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There’s nothing wrong with wanting a bad call fixed. By most accounts, the red card handed to U.S. striker Folarin Balogun during a challenge in the team’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina—a red card means expulsion from the game and a suspension for the next one—was harsh. And fans, pundits, and even elected officials venting about it is perfectly fine and totally commonplace. That’s not what happened here. What happened is that Trump treated FIFA the way he treats any institution that’s supposed to operate independently of him: as something to be leaned on rather than persuaded, using the machinery of his office to get a result he wanted.

After the red card, Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino directly. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, seated next to Infantino at the match, started working the phones almost immediately, and what reportedly followed were days of coordinated strategizing between the White House’s FIFA task force and U.S. Soccer’s legal team over how to build a case for reversal. The U.S. government reportedly supplied “additional evidence” that FIFA’s disciplinary committee then cited in lifting the suspension ahead of tonight’s Round of 16 match against Belgium—the first time since 1962 that a World Cup red card hasn’t resulted in a suspension.

Remember: when Trump has power, he thinks he can do anything with it. As and León Krauze discussed on Zooming In before the tournament even began, that instinct has shadowed this World Cup from the start—visa policy, game locations, and, in April, a proposal to hand Italy a spot in the tournament it hadn’t earned. Italy failed to qualify, but Trump’s special envoy, Paolo Zampolli, floated giving them a berth anyway, pitching the idea to Trump and Infantino as a fix for Iran’s participation in a U.S.-hosted tournament in the middle of a war; reporting at the time tied it to patching up Trump’s own rift with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

CNBC reports:

President Donald Trump on Monday defended making a phone call to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, which led to the soccer association overturning a one-game World Cup suspension of U.S. Men’s National Team striker Folarin Balogun.

“I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” Trump said, referring to a referee issuing Balogun a red card in his team’s victory last week over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I didn’t know what the hell a red card was,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office of the White House.

Two other lines from that same appearance round out the picture. Trump called the referee who awarded the red card “a little bit suspect if you check his past”—the same reflex he’s turned on judges who rule against him, baselessly questioning their motives or backgrounds rather than the substance of a ruling. And on what would have happened had the suspension stood, he said the game “would have a big mark on it, if we lost or if we won”—a framing that treats any result reached without his intervention as inherently suspect, regardless of the outcome.

FIFA could have said no. It didn’t. But that’s a story about FIFA’s spine, not the executive’s use of power, and it’s the latter that’s the point here.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Trump’s name and face already adorn national park passes, U.S. passports, and federal buildings around Washington. This week he added the nation’s currency to that list: the $100 bill now carries his signature alongside the Treasury secretary’s, breaking with a 165-year-old tradition of pairing the treasurer’s signature with the secretary’s.

CNN reports:

President Donald Trump posted a new image Friday of a $100 bill bearing his signature, months after the Treasury Department announced that, for the first time, a sitting president’s signature would be featured on US paper currency.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Saturday touted the president’s economic achievements and said it is “only appropriate” that currency bearing Trump’s signature be issued in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday. “There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S. dollar bills bearing his signature, and it is only appropriate that this historic currency be issued at the Semiquincentennial,” Bessent posted on X.

The image Trump posted shows the president’s signature above Bessent’s. Previously, the $100 bill featured the signatures of the Treasury secretary and the treasurer of the United States, but not the sitting president. …

Trump has made it a passion project to get his name and likeness on an array of US documents and landmarks. His administration also has put his image, name or both on a commemorative US passport, national parks passes, banners on various agency buildings in DC, cultural institutions like the US Institute of Peace and special investment accounts for babies. Florida also renamed Palm Beach International Airport after him. …

Some in Congress have wanted to go a step further and put Trump’s likeness on currency, introducing a bill to get his portrait on a $250 anniversary bill. That outcome is far less likely, given it would need the support of Democratic senators in Congress.

This isn’t, fundamentally, about currency design. It’s about self-aggrandizement. It is driven by the same instinct that has already seen him attach his name or likeness on passports, park passes, and federal buildings. As our own wrote in April, Julius Caesar putting his own image on coinage was seen as an outrage, associated with assuming the title of dictator for life. Polling conducted when the change was first announced found nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapproved of Trump putting his signature on the bills. Of course, he did it anyway. No vote, no bill, no debate, no authorization from Congress. Treasury just changed the signature, and that was that.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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We are lucky to be alive today to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the greatest republic in human history. Barring some scientific leaps in human longevity, none of us on the planet right now are going to be around for America’s 500th. The more important question, however, is: Will America as we know it still be around? Human history shows civilizations rise and fall. All we can do right now is increase America’s odds. That will require a massive course correction from the trajectory it is currently on. At The UnPopulist, we are dedicated to that task.

But today, in our video below, the two naturalized Americans on staff reflect on why we love and admire our adopted country as we understand it—and the native born on why he is worried, but still, ultimately, hopeful.

We hope you enjoy.

Happy 250th, America! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 From all of us at The UnPopulist!

Shikha Dalmia
Editor in Chief

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Donald Trump, the pardoner-in-chief who has abused this presidential power incessantly since returning to office, just handed out a fresh batch of pardons. Nine were extended to individuals who installed or sold devices that disabled diesel trucks’ pollution controls, letting them spew illegal levels of exhaust fumes, and one to a major Republican donor who pleaded guilty alongside Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist whose bribery scandal became synonymous with Washington corruption in the 2000s, in a nearly $150 million fraud scheme.

The New York Times reports:

The president … pardoned Adam Kidan, a major donor to Republicans, including Mr. Trump. He had served about two and a half years in prison for his role in a fraud scheme involving the disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The Clean Air Act pardons benefited people who had sold or installed devices for diesel trucks that defeated their emissions controls, making them far more polluting. It was the latest move by the Trump administration to undermine laws intended to fight climate change and curb air pollutants that harm human health. …

By 2020, the most recent numbers available, the E.P.A. estimated that the emissions controls had been removed from more than 550,000 diesel pickup trucks over the prior decade, or roughly 15 percent of all diesel trucks originally certified with those controls. The effect, the agency found, was the equivalent of adding more than nine million diesel pickups to American roads, spewing harmful nitrogen oxides at levels up to 300 times the legal limits. …

Mr. Kidan had pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy and fraud charges involving his purchase of a casino boat fleet with Mr. Abramoff, who became a poster child for Washington corruption in the pre-Trump era. Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Kidan were each sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay a total of $21.7 million in restitution related to the $147.5 million purchase of a cruise ship line in 2000. Mr. Kidan served less than half of that prison sentence and became an executive in the staffing industry. He has donated millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and groups over the years, including more than $270,000 to Mr. Trump’s political committees in 2024, according to campaign finance records. It is not clear whether he paid the full amount of the restitution.

A pardon doesn’t just erase a conviction. It can erase restitution, too—and it’s not clear how much of the $21.7 million Kidan and Abramoff were ordered to repay he ever actually paid. What we do know is that being a major donor to this president definitely didn’t hurt. And that’s just not how pardons are supposed to work.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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We all know the famous opening lines. All men created equal. Unalienable rights. Consent of the governed. But these are just the first half of a sentence, albeit a run-on sentence. The conclusion of that sentence is just as important, and far less familiar.

When a government becomes destructive of those ends, the Declaration proclaims, the people may alter or abolish it, “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

That clause is easy to miss, sitting where it does. Ahead of it are the lines we read aloud every Fourth of July. Behind it comes the indictment of George III: the subversion of fundamental rights, the standing armies kept among us in peacetime, the military set above the civil power, the judges made dependent on his will alone, et cetera. We have had grim reason to quote that list of late, under a president who seems to treat it like a to-do list, with uncanny precision sometimes.

The creed and the charges both get their due. The instruction between them does not, but it should. It is the most practical part of the document, declared to simultaneously be a “right” and a “duty.” The Declaration is not content to justify tearing a bad government down. It assigns a second and harder task: to build a better one, deliberately, on chosen principles and in a considered form. Overthrowing the old is the easy part, building something new is the real difficulty.

This is the part revolutions usually get wrong. France went from storming the Bastille to crowning Napoleon within a generation. Russia traded the czars for totalitarianism. England overthrew the Stuarts, then restored them, then overthrew them again. Hatred of a despot can unite a people, but deciding what to erect in his place divides them. And that decision, not the toppling, is what tells you whether the whole thing was worth it.

The Founders did not make that mistake, though they made plenty of others. Independence was declared in a single afternoon in 1776. Building a lasting government to replace British rule took 13 more years, half of them after the war had ended. The new system was not up and running until 1789, when a president was inaugurated and the First Congress met under the newly ratified Constitution.

The interval was no triumphal procession. It was a slog of state constitutions drafted and discarded, of riots and tumults, of the Articles of Confederation failing in slow motion. The Constitutional Convention’s draft was useless until it had been carried back into the states and argued through, ratified against serious and able opposition. The work was the arguing. It was a fight over what principles a government should rest on and how to arrange its powers.

Nor did they get it all right. They built a presidency several of them feared. In Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph called it the “foetus of monarchy,” and Charles Pinckney warned it would become a monarchy “of the worst kind, to wit an elective one.” They were overruled, in part because George Washington sat in the room and everyone assumed the office was being cut to his measure.

Their mechanism for selecting a president did not survive its second contact with a contested election. The Constitution was initially so lacking in protections for individual rights that, to secure its ratification, what became the first 10 amendments had to be promised. And of course, they also wrote protections for slavery into the same charter that opened with a paean to the “blessings of liberty.” The idea that women, too, were created equal did not even enter into the equation.

The Founders were not oracles. They were capable people solving hard problems under pressure, and they made immense leaps in our understanding of government and political philosophy. But some of their answers were wrong. Treating their work as revisable, as the perpetual task of a self-governing people to make and remake our institutions, honors their creation more than treating it as holy writ.

Their most dramatic failure took a civil war to correct. In the aftermath, the leading figures of Reconstruction would not simply restore the Union as it had been. They rebuilt it instead, with three amendments and a host of new laws that rewrote the relationship of citizen, state, and nation. Their work has been aptly termed a second founding, with its own principles and its own reorganized powers. It came because the first arrangement had produced a catastrophe, and simply returning to the status quo ante was insufficient.

Now the same task falls to us.

The deeper trouble we face is not the aging man in the White House. Demagogues and populists, would-be tyrants and their amoral enablers, will always exist. The Framers knew this, and tried their best to channel competing interests into a system of checks and balances. But nothing is perfect, and the guardrails eventually failed. The old order has shown it can be captured by a president who treats his oath as a rote formality, not a solemn promise. The systems carefully designed to prevent any concentration of lawless, arbitrary power started creaking from the weaknesses and imperfections in their foundations.

When the danger passes, as one-man cults of personality eventually do, the reflex will be to exhale and put the old machinery back. That would be a mistake. Removing the man does not repair what produced him. To rebuild the system unchanged is to choose the arrangement that had major vulnerabilities.

On this quarter-millennium anniversary, the Declaration presents us with the same questions its authors grappled with in the years that followed 1776. What principles? That public power is held in trust, not as personal property. That no office sits above the law. That legitimacy flows from the broad consent of the governed, not from a faction clever enough to game the system. That government must be truly representative of the people, in all their diversity of beliefs and interests.

Why did the old order fail? Here we have to be honest about what broke. The presidency, swollen past the point any oath can restrain. The limitations that turned out to be mere customs, easily discarded. An electoral system which pitted us into “the alternate domination of one faction over another,” as Washington put it in his farewell warning.

And what better arrangement? Here is the difficult task of both finding the right answers and building consensus. An executive that can be checked in fact—and not only on paper. Real accountability to the rule of law. The three branches of government put into their proper places, where nobody holds unchecked power. Elections that convey the will of the people in all its nuances and contradictions, neither empowering nor suppressing any particular factions with unrepresentative results. A system that encourages the give and take of coalitions and compromise, rather than perpetually entrenching a broken and unpopular two-party binary. Finding the forms most likely, in the Declaration’s words, to secure the ends the whole thing exists for: our future safety and happiness.

There will be, as there should be, much debate over the details. This is healthy and necessary. There will be no philosopher king decreeing the new system from on high. It’s up to us, and all the messy, frustrating democratic process that entails. But the essential goal is one we have in common, and the worst thing we could do is walk away from the task, surrendering to a nihilistic sense of futility.

None of this will be easy to get right, and working out the answers is itself part of the job, not a box to check beforehand. But the ideas are not lacking. Reformers across the spectrum have spent years proposing and contesting fixes like these. We are working to document and hash them out here, our own modest contribution to the Reconstruction Agenda, as are many others. The problem was never a shortage of proposals. It is the slow, contentious work of arguing them out and agreeing on enough to act.

That is where the real danger lies. Not in another strongman immediately seizing the wreckage, but in the opposite. A victorious coalition splinters the moment the pressure is off, turns to infighting and the settling of scores, and lets the chance slip by. That is exactly how the old machinery slides back into place: not because anyone chooses it, but because reversion is the path of least resistance when no one can agree on anything better. Structural reform is hardest to agree on once the emergency has passed, when everyone is exhausted and eager to get back to normalcy. That fractious aftermath is where high-minded ideals about building a new order for the ages usually go to die.

The Founders did their building in the thick of exactly that kind of squabbling, and so did the Reconstruction Congress. Both forged enough consensus, through all the rancor, to build something better than what fell. We will get the same narrow opening before long, and likely only briefly. The goal has been on the page for 250 years, in the oft-forgotten half-sentence we rarely finish. On this, the most auspicious and bittersweet of anniversaries, we would do well to remember the full measure of our national mission statement.

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The Supreme Court’s much anticipated birthright citizenship ruling Trump v. Barbara came down this week, and by a hair—with five votes—the court managed to avoid upturning the very first sentence of the 14th Amendment and subjecting potentially millions of Americans to involuntary expatriation. That sentence reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The entire fight is over five of those words: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” But avoid upturning it they did, and—however narrowly—the most important part of the legacy of Reconstruction still stands. Trump’s executive order, issued on the first day of his second term, decreed that children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants—or to parents present only temporarily—are not citizens. Five justices have now rejected that policy as unconstitutional.

I had predicted a 7-2 case, as had many others after oral arguments. I’m particularly surprised and disappointed by Justices Kavanaugh and (especially) Gorsuch, but five votes will at least stave off the immediate crisis. The Roberts Court’s near-total disregard for precedent (as illustrated by its casual discarding of Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent shielding independent agencies from at-will presidential removal, only the day before) suggests that birthright citizenship is still in critical condition: the loss of a single justice in the majority could reverse the holding.

The opinions are worth walking through one by one, because together they reveal something bigger than this case: how little the professed “originalism” of the court’s conservatives actually constrains them when the history is inconvenient. Here’s my rundown of the six (!) opinions in the case.

Chief Justice Roberts: Getting the Basics Right

The chief justice, writing for the court, achieved a competent version of standard originalism. Heavily relying on historical sources and historically informed amicus briefs, the chief points out—correctly—that the English common law rule that shaped the background of U.S. citizenship law treated all kinds of temporary visitors and even persons subject to expulsion as nonetheless capable of producing British children if those children were born within the territory. (Anthony Michael Kreis has recently written a comprehensive account of the development of this principle that is worth your time.) Roberts also correctly points out that the most natural reading of the word “jurisdiction,” being subject to the laws of the United States, is that the framers of the Amendment meant what they said.

Contra the dissenters, especially Thomas and Alito, Roberts appears to implicitly recognize that if—as Thomas and Alito insisted—the framers of the Amendment were fixated on ideas like domicile and allegiance, meaning where a family had made its permanent home and where its loyalty lay, they could have used those words. And he recognizes, as I pointed out in The UnPopulist back when this whole mess began, that the handful of traditionally recognized exceptions to the birthright principle are all cases where the United States did not, or could not, extend the full coverage of its laws to a person—as, for example, foreign ambassadors who have diplomatic immunity. In other words, this applies to people who are genuinely outside U.S. jurisdiction, immune from or beyond the reach of at least some American laws.

The signal virtue of Roberts’s opinion is simplicity in two respects. First, the opinion rightly treats the case as a simple one: Did the framers mean what they said or didn’t they? Second, he recognizes that simplicity was also a deciding principle for the rule that they adopted: in order to foreclose the possibility of another Dred Scott, which had stripped citizenship of not just slaves but all Black Americans, it was critical to adopt a principle that didn’t require some uncertain judicial analysis (like who was “domiciled” where) but that permitted categorical application. Dred Scott had been possible only because the Constitution left citizenship undefined, and the framers meant to leave judges no room to improvise again. The birthright principle that American citizenship attaches to anybody born subject to American law is just such a rule, and it is what the framers adopted. Whether someone is born subject to American law is a simple fact; where their parents’ true home and loyalties lay is a lawyer’s argument waiting to happen.

Justice Jackson: The Only One Who Understands Reconstruction

The vice in Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion is that it is stuck in the standard rut of conservative originalists, who, when they disagree—as they did in this case—throw selective citations to history at one another, without serious thought as to whose voices ought to count for what, and why.

Justice Jackson’s concurrence corrects that. Her opinion adds the real historical context: prior to the enactment of the 14th Amendment, the citizenship of Black Americans—and not just in the South, but in the free North as well—had been pervasively called into question by more than just Dred Scott. Of particular importance, free states that had originally enfranchised free Black Americans and treated them as citizens often passed antebellum legislation stripping those rights. At the same time, Southern states, long before Dred Scott, enacted the infamous “Negro Seamen” laws that barred free Black sailors from their ports and often imprisoned them, denying that those sailors were entitled to the same right to travel within the United States and participate in commerce as white citizens.

In response, Black Americans developed a rich discourse about why they were entitled to citizenship and a universalistic vision of the multiracial, inclusive, democracy that included them as citizens. As Jackson emphasizes, they did not advance a narrower theory applicable only to themselves, but rather a general principle extending to all. One would have thought that an originalist understanding of the meaning of the constitutional provision that guaranteed Black citizenship would have paid at least some attention to what its Black advocates had said at the time, but only Justice Jackson took the trouble to do that work. And the framers did not ignore that discourse: as Jackson shows, they wrote its universal vision into the Constitution.

Justice Kavanaugh: An Unnecessary Present for Donald Trump

Justice Kavanaugh was a dissenter in all but name: on the crucial question of whether the 14th Amendment protects birthright citizenship, he said not necessarily. But he voted with the majority because he believed that the president alone lacks the power to decide what to replace it with. In his view, the protection lives in the citizenship statute, not the Constitution, meaning Congress could take it away tomorrow.

His opinion has two notable features. First, President Trump seems to want to pretend that Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, immediately claiming on Truth Social, contrary to the actual majority opinion, that Congress has the power to change birthright citizenship. In fact, five justices explicitly rejected this position. Second, the logic of Kavanaugh’s opinion—which claims that the “unifying principle” of the longstanding exception to birthright citizenship “is that the parents in all of those varied circumstances were not U.S. citizens and were citizens of other nations, whether tribal or foreign,” would actually go even further than Trump’s executive order. In principle this would also permit Congress to strip citizenship from, for example, children of green card holders. That is more than even the theory’s own academic champions have proposed.

Justices Thomas and Gorsuch: Domicile Confusion

Clarence Thomas wrote the longest (and somewhat repetitive) dissent, but the nub of it is that when the framers of the 14th Amendment said “jurisdiction,” they really meant (but somehow didn’t think to say) “domicile.” Domicile, roughly, is where you have made your permanent home. This means that children of temporary visitors, who haven’t moved into the United States with the intent to remain, don’t count. (Think tourists and students.) And notice that this is not a modest carve-out but a different test altogether: not whether a child is born under American law, but whether her parents have settled here for good. In a footnote, Thomas acknowledges that this opens a lot of confusion about children of undocumented immigrants who have moved here for good, and thus would seem to be domiciled—and so, on Thomas’s own theory, their children would be entitled to citizenship, the very result he voted against. Rather than solving this contradiction, Thomas vaguely gestures to commentary suggesting that they somehow would be unable to acquire domicile, because unlawful status inherently precludes it.

Justice Gorsuch wrote a separate opinion, in addition to joining Thomas, to briefly make the last point from Thomas more explicit. He, too, endorses the domicile theory, but observes in the text rather than in a footnote that there are many undocumented people who have been here a long time with the evident intent to remain permanently, and the logic of their position seems to suggest that their children ought to be entitled to citizenship. He does not embrace that result—he dissented—but at least he says the quiet part out loud.

Thomas’s long historical excursus boils down to one claim: that in early America, domicile functioned as the next best thing to citizenship—settle here with the intent to stay, and you were treated as one of us. If that were true, reading the 14th Amendment’s “jurisdiction” as code for domicile would at least be plausible. But it is not true. Brooklyn College’s Anna O. Law has just published a book showing numerous ways in which antebellum states regulated immigration and membership, contrary to Thomas’s seeming vision of a world in which people could change their civic membership just by moving house. For a federal example, remember that the 1798 Alien Enemies Act let the president summarily expel any foreigner from a hostile nation unless he was “actually naturalized.” Not domiciled, but naturalized as a citizen. Citizenship, not domicile, was the line that mattered, the opposite of what Thomas needs. The framers knew that world and precisely to overcome its shortcomings and confusion, they anchored citizenship in something simpler: birth within the reach of American law.

Justice Alito: Incoherence

And then there’s Alito. He simply buys all of the debunked historical myths. He endorses—again, clearly contrary to the evidence—the idea that there were no immigration restrictions in the antebellum period. That myth does real work: it lets restrictionists claim the framers could not have contemplated illegal immigration at all. He also swallows the confused idea that the exclusion of Native Americans from birthright citizenship was some kind of aberration, when in reality many Native Americans at the time and for decades thereafter did not want citizenship and would have understood forcing it on them as an affront to their sovereign nations.

Interestingly, Alito’s and Thomas’s opinions are almost completely at cross-purposes when discussing the pre-1868 system. Alito at one point refers to “the ability to settle” as among the “rights traditionally associated with citizenship,” quite the opposite of Thomas’s vision of people settling left and right regardless of formal naturalization. Alito also interprets Elk v. Wilkins, the case identifying that Native Americans weren’t covered by the birthright clause, as excluding Mr. Elk from citizenship even though he had “taken up residence”—that is, become domiciled—“among the general public” (though the case doesn’t tell us where Mr. Elk’s parents lived or the status of his children). For Thomas, domicile evidently drove citizenship. For Alito, citizenship evidently comes first and domicile cannot change a person’s status. In short, the two dissents cannot both be right.

Perhaps most troubling in Alito’s opinion is a passage toward the end where he suggests that any person who is born with foreign citizenship is “subject to a foreign power” and hence not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States for the purpose of birthright citizenship. He explicitly cites Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala as countries that grant citizenship to the children of citizens who are born abroad (as most nations do), and concludes that children of undocumented immigrants from those countries would, for that reason, not be entitled to birthright citizenship.

That view is inexcusably terrible for multiple reasons. First, it makes U.S. citizenship dependent on the law of foreign nations: if Mexico or Guatemala changes its citizenship by descent law, then on Alito’s account the status of the children of Mexican or Guatemalan undocumented immigrants changes. Making American citizenship contingent on the ever-shifting, often ambiguous nationality laws of nearly 200 other countries would be wildly impractical, and nothing in the 14th Amendment suggests it.

Second, just like Kavanaugh’s, this argument cannot be cabined to undocumented people; the children of lawful permanent residents may also get citizenship in their parents’ home countries, and if Alito is to be believed that entitles the U.S. government to exile them too. And this is no edge case: most countries, including the United States in most cases, extend citizenship to their citizens’ children born abroad. Alito’s theory would thus exclude not a stray handful but the vast bulk of children born here to legal immigrants.

Third, it implicitly draws on longstanding bigoted slurs about divided or contingent loyalties that have long been applied to both Jews and Catholics and also drove the infamous internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The logic is identical but somehow worse: a tie the child never chose—a citizenship conferred by some foreign government at birth—converted into proof of divided allegiance. While I don’t believe that Justice Alito subscribes to any of these hateful views, it is particularly disappointing that he apparently cannot recognize that he is promoting the same ideologies that drive them.

The Un-Originalists

At the end of the day, the right result prevailed in this case, however narrowly. But that four justices voted to nullify a long-settled, black-letter, fundamental constitutional right is still deeply disturbing. It is an invitation to try again next time, perhaps enlisting Congress in the attempt rather than by presidential decree. And it reveals the grim reality of the professed “originalism” of some, if not all, of the conservatives on the Roberts Court. The actual history, text, original understanding are not a guide for them. They are a pretense, a way to rationalize desired political outcomes. If the history is with them, all the better. But when it is not, and in this case it overwhelmingly was not, cherry-picking, willful distortion, and outright falsehoods can always be mustered.

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Book Review

Let’s agree that liberalism is in a global crisis.

By liberalism, I mean the ideas and institutions underlying the modern social operating systems of capitalism, democracy, and science. By global, I mean throughout the WEIRD world: western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. By crisis, I mean that electorates are chronically unhappy and turning to populist demagogues, authoritarian movements, and other illiberal alternatives.

Let’s also agree that the crisis is multicausal and overdetermined—meaning that there are more than enough plausible explanations to go around. They include disappointing economic growth, skewed income gains, mass migration, urban-rural and college-noncollege economic and cultural bifurcation, antisocial media, religious decline, calcified governments, rickety political structures ... well, you get the idea.

Finally, let’s go out on a limb. Let’s stipulate that the crisis has a spiritual element. Let’s agree that many people feel the want of more than material goods and political voice. They feel an absence of meaning in their lives. Call it God, call it purpose, call it transcendence; call it the desire—no, the need—to make a difference during our short time on this little ball of rock. Philosophers, drawing on Aristotle and the Greeks, sometimes use the term eudaimonia, a state of flourishing that arises from striving toward the good for its own sake (as opposed to hedonism, the pursuit of comfort and pleasure). Perhaps that has gone missing?

If the first two things are true, then much of what ails liberal societies can be addressed, at least in principle, with political, economic, and institutional reforms. But if all three of them are true, then we have a gap which economic and political measures cannot fill. Call it a meaning gap. We would need to answer—or at least better answer—the timeless question posed by philosophers: what is the good life, and how can we find fulfillment pursuing it?

That gap is the subject raised by Ryan Avent, a former journalist for The Economist, in his new book, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies. Introducing his ambitious thesis, Avent begins (a bit peculiarly) with himself. Prone to depression, he felt a painful absence of meaning and faith. “I don’t think I’m alone here,” he writes (his italics). “I don’t think I’m the only one who has become aware of an absence.”

Avent came to think that the modern West suffers from a similar problem: it no longer tells an inspiring story. Busy careers and bulging supermarket shelves are not enough. “We have a deep need, a biological need, to coordinate our actions through grand stories that help us understand why the world is the way it is and what we are trying to do, that imbue life with meaning and purpose,” he writes. “We want sensations and answers liberalism does not provide.”

Individuals need motivating stories, but Avent claims—his most interesting point—that societies need them even more. Shared moral narratives are a critical social technology: “The world has gotten better because the meaning shared across it has evolved in ways that have expanded our collective capabilities.” Shared meaning allows trust and cooperation on an otherwise unattainable scale; it inspires “great sacrifice for each other”; it structures our markets and institutions. “The stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing here and why shape our collective capacities, and our collective capacities determine everything.”

Pre-liberal faiths, such as tribalism and Christianity, provided meaningful stories—sometimes for better, though often for worse. In the recent past, liberalism, too, had a story: of a grand human endeavor of progress, equality, and liberation. Yet today, the author says, mass consumerism, fragmented media, tech-driven sociopathy, and cultural nihilism have taken a wrecking ball to meaning. In its own way, careerism has been just as bad; what Avent calls the Modern Faith “has no guidance for people in our situation” beyond urging that we “achieve professional success, make money, job done.”

If any of this sounds familiar, that might be because the charge that individualism, industrialization, and consumerization lead to anomie and nihilism has roots that go back to Plato among the ancients and Rousseau and Marx among the moderns. Modernity never fully recovered from the attacks of Nietzsche, who claimed that secularism (which he despised) had demolished Christianity (which he also despised) and left behind only stupefying consumerism (which he also despised).

In the first half of the 20th century, the meaning critique faded amid two global hot wars and one cold one, but in the Me Generation era it rebounded with a vengeance. Think of President Carter’s “malaise” speech of 1979, in which he decried “a crisis of confidence ... that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” (Fun fact: Carter did not use the term “malaise” in the malaise speech.) Think of Hillary Clinton’s 1993 “politics of meaning” speech:

We realize that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy, and freedom are not enough—that we lack meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively; we lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another. ... [T]he signs of alienation and despair and hopelessness … are all too common and cannot be ignored.

Today, postliberals, many of them conservative and Christian, have (without apparent irony) embraced a version of the very not-conservative and not-Christian Nietzschean critique, claiming that liberalism attacks faith, family, nation, and tradition, thereby undermining its own foundation and opening the way to the very authoritarianism that liberals abhor. (The postliberals are less than forthcoming about their preferred governing regime, which would arrive at authoritarianism a lot faster.)

Can thoughtful liberals meet these critiques? They are certainly trying. In fact, the most thoughtful analyses of liberal shortcomings come from liberals. Thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, James Davison Hunter, Alexandre Lefebvre, Brink Lindsey, Adrian Wooldridge, Alexander Zakaras, me, and Avent are engaged in something like a family argument, dividing in more or less three ways.

Classical liberalism argues—with Locke, Mill, and modern libertarians—that providing meaning is not liberalism’s job. Rather, liberalism’s founding principle and distinguishing strength is precisely that it sidesteps questions about life’s purpose and the nature of the good, allowing a multiplicity of moral visions to coexist and thrive. If you want to know the meaning of life, ask your pastor or guru.

Values liberalism agrees that liberals embrace no single vision of the good, but it rejects the notion that liberalism is value-neutral. To the contrary, liberalism presupposes and promulgates a hefty bundle of values, such as empathy, reciprocity, fairness, equality, lawfulness, truthfulness, forbearance, and (of course) freedom. Values liberalism draws inspiration from (among others) the philosopher John Rawls and the political theorist William Galston—and, more recently, from Alexandre Lefebvre, who writes, in his feisty 2024 book Liberalism as a Way of Life, “I propose that liberalism is a good way of life.”

Deficiency liberalism accepts many premises of the other two schools, at least in theory; but it argues that neither classical liberalism nor values liberalism has, in practice, risen to today’s real-world challenge. In fact, they have objectively fallen short, which is why we’re in a crisis. If liberalism does not find a meaningful story to tell about itself, and if it cannot find a way to provide inspiration and purpose, it will be abandoned in favor of worse alternatives—which, guess what, is exactly what’s happening.

Avent is in the deficiency camp. Liberalism “is the best way to preserve peace and to foster prosperity, to understand the cosmos, and it provides ample room for each of us to find meaning where we can,” he writes. It is “the best we’ve come up with so far” and “gets us much of the way toward where we want to be.” But: “It does not get us all the way there.” In italics, he writes: “We need a story that tells us why we should care where humankind ends up.” Not one to understate, he adds, in a heading: “Our Survival Depends on the Discovery and Embrace of a New and Better Faith.”

With a buildup like that, the reader might wonder what kind of new and better faith the author has in mind, but he declines to make suggestions. “I don’t know what the right stories are,” he says. “There are ideas out there,” he assures us. “There are many versions of many stories, stories that build on each other, adding twists and variations and inspirations, and if we all keep sharing them we may wind up somewhere new and thrilling.” And there the book ends.

Avent’s non-answer is, to say the least, anticlimactic, but it does have the (liberal) virtues of candor and humility. I closed the book feeling more grateful than disappointed that it does not offer any grand and horrible “new” ideas. There’s something to be said for framing a problem without pretending to have solved it. I felt more let down by the book’s lamentable lack of empirical data and research; vast troves of polling, reporting, and scholarship on everything from politics to happiness are ignored in favor of generalizations and opinions.

Regardless, Avent’s main point—that, like it or not, liberals need to get into the meaning-making business—demands thought. Is he right? Maybe. I see merit in all three theories of the meaning gap.

I still incline most toward the classical liberal school, though. If you want to know why meaning went missing, look first to meaning-making institutions and leaders. Look to schools that teach left-wing pablum instead of civics and history; to churches that embrace culture wars and partisan politics; to media companies that algorithmically trash institutions and norms. Look above all to political leaders who choose demagoguery over moral leadership. Demand that they do better.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see today’s liberals propound an inspiring new story, and I hope we can. That is what Jefferson did in the Declaration, what Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address, and what King did in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Lefebvre is right: to those searching for the good life, we have plenty to offer.

Even so, filling the meaning gap is not our primary problem, and it is not primarily our problem. Avent is right to say that we can and should help to fill the meaning gap, to whatever extent we can. But we cannot succeed without support from responsible and civic-minded churches, schools, business and media leaders, politicians, and—especially—voters. If they do not step up, then yes, the liberal experiment will fail.

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Back in 2025, Donald Trump created controversy by accepting a gifted jet—a “gift” that may have cost American taxpayers up to a billion dollars to ready—from Qatar. This week, he put it into service for the first time: flying it to North Dakota for the dedication of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, with the jet slated to lead a Fourth of July flyover days later.

MS NOW explains:

The jet is meant to serve as a “bridge,” easing the strain on aging aircraft until two purpose-built planes enter service in 2028, the administration official and the Air Force spokesperson said. Trump has said that once he leaves office, the jet will be donated to his presidential library. …

Just weeks before the president announced the gift, the Trump Organization announced a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar in “collaboration” with a Saudi company and a firm owned by the Qatari government. ...

“The president time and time again makes clear that he is willing to [accept] and actively seeking gifts from foreign governments where the American people have significant national security interests, and Qatar is perhaps the most glaring and tangible example of that,” [said] Donald Sherman, president of the government ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

It’s hard to keep track of Trump’s various scandals, controversies, and self-dealing (although we at the Executive Watch desk do our best to help with this!). He has so utterly flooded the zone with improprieties that episodes like this one barely register. Indeed, a sequence like this—Qatar’s $400 million jet “gift” arriving weeks after the Trump Organization signed its own deal with Qatari-linked money—might have been a crisis moment for a past administration. For this one, it’s par for the course.

The Constitution, for what it’s worth, specifically provides that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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After federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens during an unprecedented immigration crackdown in Minneapolis this past January, ICE quietly dialed back its splashy street operations. That restraint didn’t last. Internal documents show the White House pushed the agency to hit a new daily arrest target, and ICE more than doubled its pace in a matter of days—even sweeping up a nun on her way to Mass along with immigrants who had no criminal record and were seemingly following the rules.

The New York Times reports:

Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates. Agency leaders in recent days ordered top ICE officials to focus more of their officers’ efforts on picking up immigrants they want to deport. … ICE officers have arrested people at check-ins with immigration authorities, during traffic stops and on the street. ...

ICE officials were told that the White House wanted an increase in arrests, according to three officials with knowledge of the conversations. One of the officials said that it was unclear how long the pace could continue, but that ICE officials had been told that 2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement. ...

In South Texas, Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun, was arrested on her way to church on Sunday morning, according to Sister Norma Pimentel, her colleague. Sister Letty is a local nurse who also helps at a parish in the region. Sister Norma called local leaders after learning of the arrest, and congressional officials soon got involved and pushed for her release. On Sunday, she was let go from ICE custody, and Sister Norma was there to greet her. Sister Norma said that Sister Letty was distraught upon her release. “It took her awhile to be able to talk — she was crying,” she said.

None of the people named in the Times’s piece—a nun, a nurse, a father with a court date already scheduled for 2027, a man driving to a soccer game—were accused of violence or anything coming anywhere near the public-safety threats normally invoked to justify immediate enforcement. Their underlying immigration statuses may differ in ways that matter legally, but none of that actually impacted who got swept up. And, of course, that’s precisely what a quota facilitates; it pulls in anyone who can help hit the target—who they actually are is an afterthought.

Except, as we’ve come to understand, “afterthought” may be too generous to apply to this administration. Senior White House aides have spoken openly about reversing immigration-driven demographic change. Stephen Miller, the right’s point person on purges, could not be more forthright about his desires for mass-scale deportation of immigrants. That’s why, for this movement, a policy that rewards volume over judgment isn’t an unintended side effect. It’s actually the mechanism that lets agents pursue a nativist vision of the country while justifying it through quota fulfillment.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Criticize ICE and you may get a visit from Homeland Security—anytime, anywhere. Federal agents have started showing up at the homes and even hotel rooms of ordinary Americans who criticized the agency online or by email, warning them that they may be under criminal investigation for constitutionally protected speech.

NPR reports:

David Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter last week when he noticed his doorbell camera back home had captured some unusual footage. In recordings from hours earlier, he could see what looked like two law enforcement officers in blue jackets waiting on his front porch in Rochester, N.Y. …

The agents asked Hilary Streever to tell her husband to call them back and left a form for him to sign. It said “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” and described federal laws that make it a crime to threaten federal officials. Later, the Streevers would learn the same agents presented the same form to a Syracuse poll worker earlier that day, and accused her of threatening an ICE officer on her Instagram account. …

Just a couple hours after Streever landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Thursday evening, a third Homeland Security Investigations special agent tracked him to the airport hotel he was staying at that night. The agent left a business card with the front desk, raising questions about whether Streever is under surveillance.

“This is clearly out of line,” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which advocates for free speech, about the investigation into Streever. The First Amendment protects the rights of Americans to voice their concerns to their government, Steinbaugh said. “The government doesn’t have to listen to those, but it doesn’t get to dispatch federal agents to your door and stalk you across the state of New York,” he added.

Nobody was charged with a crime. Nobody made an actual threat. What connects these episodes is a government agency deploying the machinery of federal surveillance against its critics—ordinary individuals, at that, rather than public commentators or political officials—and counting on fears of a knock at the door to ensure future silence.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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