2026-05-15 18:00:00
On Saturday, Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, used a speech at Kansas City International Airport to deliver an unusual message. Customs and Border Protection officers stood around him as a backdrop, and in his right hand, Mullin held the squishy pink ball he carries as a stress-management tool, gripping it as he spoke. The United States isn’t fully prepared to host the biggest, most expensive sporting event in world history—and, he wanted to make clear, it’s not his fault.
Kansas City, Missouri, will be one of 11 U.S. host sites for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which starts June 11. The soccer tournament is the world’s most popular sporting event, and Mullin said the United States is expecting as many as 7 million international visitors. Although Mexico and Canada are co-hosting the tournament, more than three-quarters of the matches will be played in the U.S., and Mullin has likened the security challenge to protecting “78 Super Bowls.”
Mullin said that the 76-day DHS funding shutdown this spring put the safety of the World Cup in jeopardy, and he blamed “kamikaze Democrats” who “will do anything to destroy our nation as long as they can find a way to get back to power.” The shutdown—over Democrats’ demands to rein in ICE—ended April 30 when Republicans settled for a procedural work-around. “Can we still deliver? Yes,” Mullin said. “Were we able to be as proactive? No. Absolutely not.”
Mullin, who took over the department in March after President Trump ousted Kristi Noem, has acknowledged that he is not a soccer fan. But as a former wrestler, he knows how to set up a takedown. Although the stated purpose of Mullin’s speech was to promote a Republican proposal for an additional $70 billion to fund immigration enforcement, it also allowed him to pre-deflect blame if something bad were to happen during the World Cup. Mullin made appearances on Fox News this week to drive that message home.
Mullin has lots of reasons to worry. The war with Iran and its proxies. The presence of foreign leaders and top U.S. officials, including Trump, at the games. Lone-wolf attackers with innumerable possible grievances. In an era of heightened political violence, any high-profile public event is a potential target for extremists, and the country remains deeply polarized and heavily armed.
Mullin said he is especially concerned about “soft” areas outside the stadiums: Bars, restaurants, and public transportation will be packed with crowds. Missouri has mobilized its National Guard to help with those locations, and Mullin urged other states to follow. “Everybody remembers the correspondent dinner with the active shooter,” Mullin said in Kansas City, referring to the event last month in Washington, D.C., that was cut short by a gunman’s failed attack.
Each host city will be responsible for coordinating the security of its venues, and DHS, the FBI, and other federal agencies will provide logistical support. FIFA, which organizes the World Cup, has provided $625 million for additional security funding to the host cities through FEMA (which is part of DHS). The money was partly delayed during the shutdown, but checks have since gone out, Mullin said.
I asked a DHS official involved in the preparations what the mood was like at department headquarters with the event less than a month away. The shutdown, and Trump’s removal of Noem and her team, “definitely interrupted planning,” said the official, who is not allowed to speak with reporters. “There is confidence the team will rise to the occasion, but the challenges and the strain are real.”
The Transportation Security Administration is a main source of anxiety at DHS, two officials told me. The Trump administration is planning to deploy TSA officers to help screen fans at stadium entrances, and heightened attention will be paid to games attended by foreign dignitaries and U.S. leaders. The stadium work will divert officers away from U.S. airports that are expected to be busy with an influx of soccer fans. DHS declined to tell me how many TSA officers it plans to send to stadiums.
Mullin said on Fox News recently that TSA lost nearly 8 percent of its workforce when its staff went without pay during the shutdown. The agency has about 65,000 employees, including roughly 50,000 transportation-security officers. The DHS official I spoke with outside official channels told me that TSA officials “aren’t adequately prepared to manage the stadium work and the airport work.”
DHS’s digital defenses are even more ragged. On Tuesday, Mullin told Fox News that the U.S. cybersecurity agency, CISA, lost 1,100 staffers during the shutdown—a third of its workforce. “You can’t have connectivity with local law enforcement and emergency management without having secure cyber,” he said. “We are months behind.”
The DHS official I spoke with mentioned concerns about potential travel delays at land-border crossings with Mexico and Canada, especially between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, where the two cities have several back-to-back games. CBP is preparing to temporarily reassign some airport officers to those land crossings. One agency official I spoke with said that new facial-recognition technology and other improvements will help speed up processing times, but visitors unfamiliar with CBP screening procedures could slow things down.
Seattle is preparing to stage a Pride celebration on June 26, the same day the city is scheduled to host a match between Iran and Egypt, two nations that criminalize homosexuality. Egypt’s soccer federation sent a letter to FIFA in December “categorically rejecting any activities related to supporting homosexuality during the match.” Amid their country’s ongoing war with the United States, Iran’s soccer authorities have also demanded a ban on rainbow Pride flags in the stadium.
[Read: The quintessential Trumpian sport]
Federal aviation authorities have banned unauthorized drone flights over the stadiums, and Andrew Giuliani, the director of the White House’s World Cup task force, has described drone incursions as a leading threat. DHS has been issuing grants to cities and states—not only those hosting World Cup games—to stop illegal drone flights, and Trump officials organized a conference last November for cities and states to meet with private companies that manufacture counter-drone technologies. But two DHS officials told me that the decentralized approach to drone response creates a risk that some stadiums will be better prepared than others.
Trump officials say they’re preparing for a possible surge in sex-trafficking cases during the tournament. On Monday, the Treasury Department issued a bulletin through its financial-crimes division warning that “individuals visiting or residing near host cities may be vulnerable to sex or labor trafficking” amid “the surge in economic activity” created by the World Cup. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which leads anti-trafficking efforts and seizes counterfeit merchandise, is preparing to deploy around the games, but any mention of an ICE presence at the World Cup may leave some foreign-born fans on edge.
DHS officials say that ICE’s immigration-enforcement officers have no plans to target the tournament. “Routine immigration enforcement operations will continue consistently with longstanding DHS policy,” Lauren Bis, a department spokesperson, told me in a statement. “At this time, there are no plans for large-scale immigration enforcement operations specifically targeting World Cup venues or attendees.”
It is an irony of the “America First” era that the Trump administration gets to host the two biggest sporting events in the world within a span of two years. The 2026 World Cup has been talked about as a security test run for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but in many ways, the cup is the bigger challenge. It involves 11 cities, rather than one, posing a greater risk of stretching federal resources too thinly. The crowds at the stadiums will be much bigger, and the money will be too.
Some host cities seem to be preparing with the same degree of trepidation that Mullin has conveyed. Mike Sena, the executive director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center—a fusion center for law-enforcement agencies—testified to Congress earlier this year that the delayed delivery of $51 million in grant funding to the Bay Area as a result of the shutdown left agencies little time to get ready. Both San Francisco and New Jersey have canceled plans to set up a large outdoor “fan fest” showing matches on giant TVs for thousands of spectators. Local organizers said they’re now planning to hold viewing parties at smaller venues, and although they did not specifically cite security concerns for the move, those outdoor “soft” sites can be challenging and costly to secure.
[Read: Here’s another way America will choke at the World Cup]
FIFA’s 2018 selection of Canada, Mexico, and the United States to host the World Cup was celebrated at the time as a crowning achievement of North American economic integration. Since then, Trump has scrapped the NAFTA treaty that was the foundation of that vision. Later this year, once the games are over, the three countries are due to renegotiate the USMCA, the successor to NAFTA. Trump is threatening to withdraw entirely and is feuding with Canada over tariffs and threatening unilateral military strikes on cartel targets in Mexico. The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement that Trump is “focused on ensuring that this is not only an incredible experience for all fans and visitors, but also the safest and most secure in history.”
Politics will loom over the games nonetheless. Immigrant fans, especially from Latin America and Africa, are pillars of the U.S. soccer-going public. They have also been prime targets for Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Immigrants often root for the nation of their birth, even if they have little or no desire to live there again, and it seems safe to expect the matches to fire up culture-war battles over “divided loyalties” and what it means for immigrants to successfully assimilate.
The best scenario, and one that has played out in other host nations as anxieties increase during the countdown, is that the on-field drama of the games is compelling enough to keep attention on the players and their teams. That outcome will also require competent American security, and possibly some uncharacteristic deference from a U.S. president who enjoys being the center of attention. FIFA’s leaders have been cultivating Trump seemingly for this very reason, awarding him their inaugural “peace prize” last year. They’re hoping the American president will be happy as a successful host even if he can’t be the star of the show.
Michael Scherer contributed to this report.
2026-05-15 05:35:00
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The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, effectively demolishing a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is a “five-alarm fire,” former Representative G. K. Butterfield Jr. told me this week. As southern states rush to draw new boundaries eliminating majority-minority districts, as much as a third of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats. Butterfield, a former CBC chair, knows that risk well. But he also knows the less visible yet still enormous effects that Callais could have at a local level in silencing the voices of Black voters.
In 1928, George K. Butterfield Sr., a Bermuda-born dentist, moved to the eastern–North Carolina tobacco town of Wilson. Although roughly 48 percent of Wilson’s 19,000 citizens were Black, only about 40 Black people were registered to vote—but local authorities, pleased to have Butterfield in town, allowed him to register.
Less to their pleasure, Butterfield founded the local NAACP chapter, and in 1953, he decided to run for town commission. By now, Wilson had more than 500 Black registered voters, although most of them were gerrymandered into a ward with many white voters in order to dilute their power. But when the votes were counted, Butterfield and a white candidate were tied, 382–382. A blindfolded child drew a name out of a hat, and Butterfield became the first Black elected official in eastern North Carolina since Reconstruction. Two years later, he won reelection after striking a deal with a mayor to support a new recreation center in exchange for his backing, then became the council’s finance chair. (Some of the details in this account are based on the younger Butterfield’s recollections.)
The city’s white power structure had seen enough. When the Butterfield family went on vacation, the council called an emergency meeting and changed the election system from wards to at-large seats—in other words, every voter in the city would now cast a vote for every seat, not just the seats in their ward. That diluted Black votes because now Butterfield had to run not against one opponent but against a whole slate. The new rules also mandated that voters had to vote for every seat that was on the ballot—meaning that Black voters couldn’t try to work as a bloc by voting only for a Black candidate or two and leaving other slots blank. It worked: Butterfield lost his 1957 reelection bid.
If Wilson’s ploy had occurred with the Voting Rights Act in full force, it would likely have been struck down under both Section 2, which bars discriminatory voting systems, and Section 5, which required some jurisdictions to “pre-clear” any changes with the U.S. Department of Justice. But the VRA was still several years away. When a Butterfield ally challenged the system in 1961, the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled against him; the following year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
These events made a deep impression on Butterfield’s son and namesake. “I was 10 years old, and I quickly realized that the rules can really determine the outcome of an election,” he told me. Butterfield Jr. participated in voting drives in college, attended law school, and then returned home. “I came back home with the intention to file some type of voting-rights litigation against the city, kind of to avenge what had happened to my father,” he said. Working with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he successfully challenged at-large districts in Wilson County. That was the start of a political career that culminated in more than 18 years in the U.S. House.
Much of the reaction to Callais so far has focused on how it might affect the U.S. House and state legislative districts. This is understandable because these bodies are powerful, and the immediate effects will be more measurable. But the possibility of local and county bodies deciding not to draw new lines but to eliminate lines altogether will also have sweeping negative effects across the South.
When the Voting Rights Act was passed, Martin Luther King Jr. said he hoped the law would lead to not just Black state representatives but also Black “county commissioners, sheriffs, city councilmen, police chiefs and even mayors.” This dream has come true. One study calculated that in 1964, the year before the law passed, only 56 Black people held local elected office in the South. By 1980, 2,265 did. The results were not only symbolic: These offices control things such as schools, parks, roads, and sanitation—services that have a direct, daily effect on lives, especially those of poor people. As a new paper finds, increases in representation produced significant material improvements in the lives of Black citizens, and in many cases white ones as well. (Butterfield Jr. emphasized to me that the VRA didn’t create a right to elect Black officials; it creates an opportunity for Black voters to elect their preferred candidate, regardless of that person’s race.)
Those leaps depended on the elimination of at-large districts, which had long been common throughout the South. This was slow work, but the VRA and subsequent court rulings made it effective. Data gathered by J. Morgan Kousser, a historian at Caltech, record more than 1,000 successful challenges to at-large voting systems across the South from 1965 to 2024. The Brennan Center for Justice says challenges to at-large systems still account for most vote-dilution cases.
Now that progress could be rolled back. Although the Justice Department has vowed to bring lawsuits against districts drawn under the VRA pre-Callais, Kousser told me that he expects initial efforts to focus on federal and state elections. “I don’t think the Justice Department will get to the localities during the Trump administration,” he said. Nonetheless, he predicted that this was just a matter of time. “I think that the Justice Department is going to go after every minority Democratic officeholder.”
Some local officials may not wait for Washington. On April 22, a week before Callais, two GOP state representatives filed a bill to switch the city-council elections in Jacksonville, another city in eastern North Carolina, from a mix of wards and at-large seats to fully at-large elections. The ward system has been in place since 1990, when a lawsuit successfully challenged the at-large system as discriminatory against Black voters. Wyatt Gable, one of the representatives who introduced the bill, explained it as a way to guarantee “fairness and equal voice in local government”—an entirely Orwellian justification. (Neither Gable nor Phil Shepard, the other sponsor, replied to interview requests.)
Whether the bill will become law is unclear, but in the past, the effort to bring back at-large districts would have been very vulnerable to a legal challenge. In Callais, the Harvard Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos argues, “the Court changed the framework for Section 2 racial vote dilution claims in ways that make these suits effectively impossible to win.” At the very least, they will be harder, because plaintiffs will have to prove intentional racial discrimination to succeed. And if Congress does not pass new legislation to defend voting rights, efforts like this could succeed across the South. The result could be a hollowing out of Black political representation and influence, not only in Washington and in state capitals but also in towns and counties—a step back toward the days when George K. Butterfield Sr. was a rare and vulnerable exception.
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When Bots Write Comedy, the Joke’s on Us
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Hollywood, no stranger to existential crises, is finding itself torn on the rise of generative AI. Supporters of the technology argue that it’s the cost-saving future of show business, but opponents say that it could be the end of true creativity. As the debate over AI use rages on in the real world, the fictionalized entertainment industries of Hacks and The Comeback are similarly preoccupied. These self-aware comedies, each following women trying to leave their mark in Hollywood before their cachet expires, have satirized the business with cutting specificity. In their final seasons, the critique extends to AI’s temptations and shortcomings, ultimately making the case for the inefficient art of comedy.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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2026-05-15 04:43:00
You hear wild stuff all the time now. Like this story that Nat Friedman, a former CEO of GitHub, told recently at a conference. Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water. It informed him that it was monitoring him via a connected camera in his home. “I’m going to watch to make sure you do it,” the bot supposedly said. Friedman did as he was told, and, moments later, the bot sent him a frame of him drinking the bottle of water and said good job. “I felt like I did do a good job,” Friedman said.
The world is only a few years into the AI boom, and this strange brew of hype, utility, and creepiness is commonplace. On X—arguably the beating heart of AI insider discourse—investors, influencers, programmers, researchers, podcasters, and countless hangers-on reach out across the algorithm to shake you by the shoulders. Claude “broke down my entire life with eerie accuracy. No horoscopes. No tarot. Just pure AI,” one post reads. Another crows: “Our team is stunned. We gave Claude Opus 4.6 by @AnthropicAI $10k to trade on @Polymarket. It’s now has an account value of $70,614.59.” The post includes a graph with a small asterisk that notes that this trading was part of a trading simulation and not done with real money.
A defining feature of all this evangelizing is its frenetic pace. If you are not paying close attention to the daily AI discourse, a lot of the conversations are almost unintelligible. From week to week, narratives whipsaw. A new prompt seminar “WILL CHANGE HOW YOU BUILD WITH AI FOREVER”; no, wait, prompting is dead. Claude “CHANGES EVERYTHING”; actually, it’s all about OpenAI’s Codex now. Get in, loser, we’re vibe-coding websites. Scratch that: We’re vibe-trading now—earning money while we sleep.
It all moves so fast that veterans of the AI discourse jokingly yearn for the good old days … of 2022.
I’ve written previously that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing their mind. Some of that is attributable to the aggressive fanfare or the way that the technology has been explicitly positioned to displace labor. But lately, I believe, it’s the accelerated nature of the AI boom that’s driving people everywhere mad. Both the conversation around the technology and its implementation are governed by an exponential logic. Intelligence, revenues, capabilities—all of it is supposed to hockey stick, say the boosters. New, supposed breakthroughs are touted but then immediately couched with the reminder that this is the worst the technology will ever be. Because AI systems have bled into every domain of our culture and economy, it's exceedingly difficult to evaluate the effect of the technology outside of a case by case basis. That you can’t begin to wrap your mind around the AI boom or orient yourself in it is a feature, not a bug, for those building the technology. But for anyone just trying to adapt, it’s difficult not to feel resentful or alienated. Silicon Valley is trying to speedrun the singularity, and it’s polarizing the rest of us in the process.
The whipsaw itself has existed for several years. Since the arrival of ChatGPT, the AI boom has toggled around an “It’s so over”–“We’re so back” axis, with the industry seeming to fall short of its own mythology, then announcing yet another paradigm shift. But the latest shift from chatbots to coding agents—self-directed tools like the one that apparently minded Friedman’s hydration habits—has turbocharged this churn. Boosters see the agents, unlike chatbots, as a convincing step toward the predictions of AI executives that the technology could eliminate untold white-collar jobs and rewire the very nature of work. Adoption and usage of models such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex have skyrocketed, alongside revenues. Bubble talk (for now) has chilled out, and CEOs are saying things like “Think of this as the dawn of a new Atomic Age.” We’re so back.
In AI research, a popular sentiment is that a “jagged frontier” exists in AI utility and adoption: AI tools can be extremely, unexpectedly good at some human tasks and extremely, unexpectedly bad at others. As this frontier becomes even more jagged, it appears to be pressing people deeper into their previously held opinions of AI, such that AI evangelists and skeptics are living in different worlds. On Reddit and LinkedIn, workers are lamenting managers who have cute names for their bots and who mandate that every marketing summary be run through Microsoft Copilot. Some of those workers say they are writing their memos, pretending to be chatbots, just so they have some agency in their job.
Elsewhere online, programmers are beginning to describe an affinity for coding agents that is veering into unhealthy territory. “I’m up at 2AM on a Tuesday,” Anita Kirkovska, the head of growth at an AI company, wrote recently, “not because I have a deadline, but because Claude Code made it so easy to keep going that I forgot to stop.” She describes a “competence addiction” caused by the tools making her so productive: “You hit a prompt, the agent succeeds, you get a dopamine hit. The agent fails spectacularly, you get adrenaline. Both are reinforcing. Both keep you at the terminal.” Kirkovska argues that she sees this among all kinds of AI power users—an unsustainable flow state in which decision making begins to falter and people become sloppy as they grind away.
MIT Technology Review’s Mat Honan describes the feeling that too much is changing, too fast as “AI malaise.” You’re starting to see it in surveys—a recent Gallup poll finding that only 18 percent of Gen Zers said they felt hopeful about AI (a drop of 9 percent in the past year), or an NBC News survey showing that AI has a favorability rating of 26 percent. It’s bubbling up in the physical world—in the 20 data-center projects canceled because of local opposition in the first quarter of this year or in a college-commencement ceremony at which students booed a speaker extolling AI as “the next Industrial Revolution.” You can see it in a few isolated, and inexcusable, acts of violence, such as the homemade bomb thrown at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home.
I’d argue that the most common feeling about AI is somatic: a low-grade hum of difficult-to-place anxiety that’s the result of loud people constantly suggesting that the near future will look very little like the present and that nothing—your job or the social contract—might survive the transition.
The AI industry’s own apocalyptic messaging is feeding into this feeling. Even when AI executives urge for a deescalation in AI rhetoric, as Altman did in a recent blog post after the attacks, the language is grave. “The fear and anxiety about AI is justified,” he wrote. “We are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.” A similar dynamic was at play in the rollout of Anthropic’s Mythos, a new model that the company claimed was so powerful that Anthropic could not release it widely because of concerns that it would lead to a global cybersecurity crisis. Should you be impressed, terrified, excited at the thought that the internet as we know it might no longer work? (Anthropic, of course, has a history of AI doomerism and a clear financial interest in making its products look historically powerful.)
As the industry has warned about AI’s risks, it has also done a remarkably poor job of articulating the positive vision of the future it wants to build. Attempts have been so grand as to come off as wildly patronizing. In April, OpenAI published a 13-page blueprint on “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” with the quaint subheading: “Ideas to Keep People First.” Perhaps the most thoughtful (or at least the longest) articulation of what AI can do for good, a 14,000-word essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” is more of a wish list than a plan. And even at its most sincere, Amodei’s vision still comes off as alienating, even dystopian. Near the end of the piece, Amodei imagines a scenario in which AI has rendered the current economic system irrelevant. One solution, he muses, might be to create a new system in which economic decisions, including the allocation of resources, are off-loaded entirely to AI. He then nods to “a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.” Left unanswered is who gets to participate in that conversation. On X, the writer Noah Smith posed the question more bluntly: “In 20 or 50 years, will the heads of AI companies be de facto emperors of the world?”
Everything is flooding in faster than most people can process. Last week, Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, posted on X that he now believes that there’s a 60 percent chance that, by the end of 2028, “AI systems might soon be capable of building themselves.” AI CEOs have made many erroneous predictions about superintelligence, so should any of us really believe that a version of the singularity is 18 months away? What is a person to do with this information? Buy stock? Buy guns? Probably not learn to code. Here we are in 2026, living in a time when the insiders are girding themselves for a moment when the entire world becomes a computer, while many others are worried about gas prices and just trying to get through the day.
About the only thing clear in this moment is that a power struggle over who gets to define the coming years is looming. It is a struggle between the AI labs and between nations. The White House has intimated that it may very well be a struggle between the government and Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley AI lobbying spend suggests the same. But for most of us, navigating the jagged frontier will feel personal. What may seem like a civilizational imperative or seven-dimensional war-gaming to AI CEOs will seem to others like little more than Silicon Valley giving their boss a compelling reason to lay them or their loved ones off.
For the past decade, popular technology platforms—many of them built or championed by the same cohort who are building today’s AI tools—have favored acceleration over consideration. They incentivized us to operate by this same logic, often as the worst and loudest versions of ourselves. Over time, these tools flattened our arguments, our politics, our culture, compressing them into the same endless fights, such that people became ensconced in their own bespoke realities.
The same dynamics govern the AI conversation. The AI boom is a race, a gold rush, and the chasm between AI’s true believers and the malaised masses is getting wider. In the same feed, you can read a blind item about AI researchers taking up smoking because they believe that AI is going to cure lung cancer and a reported dispatch on “the shared feeling of being harvested by the future” taking hold in the United States and China. Silicon Valley’s leaders pay lip service to a societal conversation about what comes next, but their actions say something else: Keep up or be left behind. Humanity rewriting the social contract together sounds nice; less so when you have a gun to your head. Time is of the essence, we’re told. Maybe that’s true. But how can we build a future if we can’t agree on the present? A cynic might conclude that our input isn’t desired at all.
2026-05-15 01:34:30
Donald Trump, probably by mistake, said something honest the other day.
Appearing on the White House lawn Tuesday afternoon, Trump was asked by a reporter to what extent Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” Trump replied, before elaborating: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
Trump was probably trying to lie here—he likely wanted to reject the premise that the economic pain caused by his war of choice is putting pressure on him to end it. The premise is obvious, but he has fervently denied it, in part to retain some leverage over Iran.
But his denial revealed a deeper truth: Trump has treated the public’s economic well-being as an afterthought. The thing he admitted so casually is the primary reason his popularity has cratered. Trump was elected to tackle inflation, and instead has made it worse.
[Rogé Karma: The one tiny problem with Trump’s affordability agenda]
Trump won the 2024 election in large part because the post-pandemic inflation shock doomed both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and Trump promised, “We’re going to bring those costs way down.” This goal was never realistic—reducing the nominal price level would have been virtually impossible without a recession. What many Democrats glumly assumed would happen, rather, was that Trump would change the definition of success from lower prices to a lower inflation level. And because the inflation rate had been slowly returning to normal since 2023, Trump didn’t need to do much to achieve this goal.
The factors that determine inflation often lie outside elected officials’ control. The Biden-era inflation surge occurred mostly due to the disruptive effects of reopening the global economy after the coronavirus pandemic, though the large fiscal stimulus he signed also contributed.
The rise in inflation under Trump, by contrast, is almost entirely a result of his administration’s policy choices. Every time he has faced a choice between price stability and advancing one of his priorities, he has picked Door No. 2. Some of the effects have been small. Trump’s legislative centerpiece, a huge tax cut, increases the budget deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, putting additional money into the pockets of consumers, which tends to nudge prices higher. Likewise, his restrictionist immigration policy has caused labor shortages in concentrated sectors. Last June, Adriana Kugler, the former governor of the Federal Reserve, warned that cutting off immigrant workers “decreases the labor supply and could add meaningful upward pressure to inflation by the end of the year in sectors reliant on immigrant labor such as agriculture, construction, food processing, and leisure and hospitality.”
On tariffs, higher costs are not a side effect but the mechanism by which the policy works. The goal is to encourage domestic production by raising the price of goods to the point where it becomes more cost-effective to make or grow something domestically than to import it. Goldman Sachs estimated last year that Trump’s tariffs would add a point to the inflation level during the second half of 2025 and the first half of 2026. Because the Supreme Court subsequently curtailed Trump’s ability to levy tariffs, the actual effect is almost surely lower—but inflation would be even higher if Trump had his way.
The Iran war is the culprit behind the recent inflation spike. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has prevented oil, gas, and fertilizer from reaching global markets, driving up the cost of food, transportation, and goods. The April data show that inflation has now risen 3.8 percent over the past year. Producer prices, a more direct measure of the costs of economic inputs, shot up 6 percent.
Trump may not have expected the war to take this long, or for it to throw off such a large inflationary shock. But a drawn-out conflict that led to an oil crisis was always a risk. Trump was willing to take the risk because he simply doesn’t seem to care enough about inflation to prioritize it over any other goal of his.
The problem is that voters do care more about inflation than any of Trump’s other goals. His approval on inflation is now lower than any American president in the history of polling. A new paper by the economists Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus finds that people have remained sour on the economy because of the post-pandemic price shock, which ended a long era of price stability. Anger over prices is key to understanding public opinion during the past four years.
The remarkable thing is that while the surge in inflation (and the public’s fixation on prices over other measures of economic well-being) took Biden by surprise, Trump knew when he ran that inflation was voters’ highest-priority issue.
Or, at least, he was told this repeatedly. During the campaign, Trump appeared to resist pleas by his advisers to focus on bringing down prices. He marveled at the language they had apparently suggested he use—“They call it ‘groceries,’” he said, bemusedly.
[Robert Kagan: Checkmate in Iran]
At one rally in August 2024, he held a kind of debate with his own speechwriters when he told the audience that he was following orders to focus on inflation. “They wanted to do a speech on the economy,” he said mockingly, casting his advisers in the role of schoolmarms. “So, we’re doing this as a intellectual speech. You’re all intellectuals today.” After wandering off and then back on topic, he broke the fourth wall again to reveal his misgivings: “Today, we’re going to talk about one subject, and then we’ll start going back to the other because we sort of love that, don’t we? But it’s an important—no, it’s an important—they say it’s the most important subject. I’m not sure it is, but they say it’s the most important. ‘Sir, inflation is the most important.’ But that’s part of economy.”
After he won, Trump continued to publicly question whether inflation was crucial to his victory. “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump told supporters in January 2025. “I said, ‘I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue for the people that I know.’ And I made it my No. 1. I talked about inflation, too, but, you know, how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”
Trump clearly didn’t want to believe he won the election because global prices spiked in 2022. And one consistent feature of Trump’s mental style is that if he does not wish to believe something, he won’t.
2026-05-15 01:05:11
Editor’s Note: On Thursday, May 14, 2026, Jonathan Haidt—a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a social psychologist at New York University—delivered this commencement address at NYU. His selection prompted objections from a small group of student leaders. We are reproducing his speech in full, so that readers may judge it for themselves.
NYU began holding commencement ceremonies here in Yankee Stadium in 2009. Since then, graduates have heard from prime ministers, presidents, Supreme Court justices, movie stars, civil-rights crusaders, and Taylor Swift. So I know what you’re all thinking: Finally, they brought in a social psychologist!
Perhaps that’s why over the past few weeks, as I’ve thought about what I might say to all of you, I’ve felt grateful. I’ve felt excited. But most of all, I’ve felt a strong sense of responsibility. Because I am part of NYU. I love this university, and I love the students that I have the privilege to teach. That’s why I feel a strong responsibility to do my small part to make this the great and memorable day that all of you, and your families, deserve.
Graduates, I see how hard you have worked. And I love how you also throw yourselves into the life of New York City. Because all of us made the same deal when we chose NYU: We traded in the campus quad for Washington Square, and the football stadium for the city that never sleeps.
Here’s something else I know: Most families have stories of struggle and perseverance, many of which began on distant continents. But all our family stories converge here, today, in Yankee Stadium, with a loved one graduating from New York University. So to all of the parents, grandparents, and other relatives and friends in the audience, and to all the teachers or anyone else who helped you reach this day, let us all thank you and applaud you.
As I sat down to write this address, I thought back to my own commencement, in May of 1985. I remember the mix of emotions I felt as I sat with my fellow graduates in our caps and gowns. On the one hand: pride, excitement, gratitude, and love for my friends. On the other, the sadness of knowing that an amazing chapter of my life was ending, and the fear of not knowing what would come next.
Our commencement speaker that day was a former Massachusetts congressman who said that in 20 years we would not remember anything from his speech. He was wrong: I still remember that he said we would not remember anything from his speech.
His words ring as a reminder to approach my role here with humility. So, while I will share several lessons that I’ve learned in my life and my research, if there’s just one thing from my address that you remember tomorrow, next week, and 20 years from now, make it this: Treasure your attention.
In 2014, when she was nearly 80 years old, the poet Mary Oliver wrote a short poem titled “Instructions for Living a Life.” It goes like this:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
It sounds simple. But paying attention is in fact one of the most challenging and meaningful things you can do. Because what you pay attention to shapes what you care about. And what you care about shapes who you become.
Taking control of your own attention has never been easy—which is why it’s one of the many things this university has tried to prepare you to do. In 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace gave one of this century’s best-known commencement addresses, at Kenyon College. He said, “the really significant education-in-thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” He was right, and he seemed to anticipate that, two decades later, there would be so many powerful people and big companies trying to take that choice away from you.
They compete with each other to capture your attention. Think about that phrase. It acknowledges that your attention is valuable. But it also reveals that some of the biggest corporations in human history aren’t trying to earn your attention, or deserve your attention. They’re trying to take it from you.
Consider just one example. Meta is valued at well over a trillion dollars, even though few of us have given it any money. How is that possible? Because it invented a business model that extracts attention from nearly half of all human beings and sells it to advertisers. Other industries followed: video games, dating, gambling—even investing has been gamified and optimized to keep us all staring and swiping. We’ve all had the experience of picking up our phone, maybe for a good reason, only to find ourselves, an hour later, mindlessly scrolling. That’s not an accident. That’s our phones and apps, doing what they were designed to do.
Let me tell you what I have learned, from my research and my teaching, about how to resist, how to reclaim your attention. I’ve taught a course at NYU’s Stern School of Business, now for 12 years, called “Flourishing.” On day one of that course, I ask students to do something simple: Turn off nearly all the notifications on their phones. Do you get an alert every time an email comes in? Many young people do, so, turn it off. Alerts for breaking news? Turn those off, too.
A week later, I ask them, “Did you miss anything really important?” The answer is almost always no. Then I ask: “Did you gain anything important?” Yes. Students are amazed at how much better life feels when they remove a hundred interruptions from their day. When they check things when they choose to, rather than giving a company the right to interrupt them as it pleases.
In the third week of my “Flourishing” course, I ask my students to take part in an exercise that they think is going to be a lot harder: I ask them to delete social-media apps from their phones, just for a week. I don’t ask them to stop using social media entirely. Many of them continue to use it through a web browser. But adding that little bit of friction for one week, by having to log in on a web browser rather than just pulling out a phone without thinking, puts us back in charge of deciding where our attention goes.
By the end of the week, most students are surprised by how easy it was. More than that, they’re surprised by how much freer they feel. They got back precious hours each day, and a feeling of agency over how to spend that time.
So treasure your attention more than the people who want to take it from you. Never forget what it’s worth. For Meta, it’s a trillion dollars. For you and your life, it is priceless.
Once you’re in control of your attention, you can start to ask yourself one of life’s most exciting questions: “What do I want to do?”
Of course, the answer to this question is going to be different for each of you. But looked at in another way, I think the answer may be the same for all of you. What should you do? You should do hard things.
This is among the most universal pieces of advice from our ancestors. In the words of two great philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The psychological foundation of this great truth is that humans, and especially young people, are not fragile. They are antifragile, to use a term coined by NYU professor Nassim Taleb. Fragile things break when they get knocked over or challenged, so we need to protect them vigilantly. Antifragile things grow stronger, so we need to expose them to challenges, diligently.
So how should you live these next postgraduate years, these years of transition? By repeatedly turning your attention toward doing hard things. Throw yourself into your next job, or academic program, or whatever your next adventure is. Take chances. Say yes to anything that will expand your capabilities.
And I’m not just talking about your career. Devote your precious attention to taking chances in relationships, too. You’ve heard it said that “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” That line becomes even more resonant once you understand that your heart is antifragile, too.
Which brings me to my final point. Because along with the question “What should I turn my attention towards?” comes a related question: “Whom should I spend my attention on?”
Once again, the answer is going to be different for each of you. And once again, the answer may also be the same for all of you: You should spend a lot of your attention on real people in the real world.
During your time at NYU, in-person connection was built into the architecture of your lives. You ran into friends constantly. Or maybe someone texted “pizza?”—and 10 minutes later, you were getting pizza. Shared experiences are easily launched in college. That’s part of what makes this place so special.
But today one of the most common experiences of adulthood—especially in ambitious cities, among high-achieving people—is a strange kind of loneliness. You can be messaging people all day. You can see everyone’s lives unfold in real time. And yet, despite all this so-called connection, you may find yourself feeling increasingly alone. Friendship now requires much more intentionality than it once did. So my advice, as you think about what does and doesn’t deserve your attention, is to reach out to others, even when it feels awkward.
Call someone you love just to say hi. Invite someone to dinner. Say yes when someone invites you. Be the one who makes things happen in the real world, and others will be grateful to you.
Think about your most memorable moments from your time at NYU. I’m willing to bet that almost none of them happened on a screen. Most of them probably happened while spending time with people who made you laugh or helped you grow. Keep making those moments happen.
So, NYU class of 2026, I want to end where I started, with Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
I cannot predict what your future will hold. But I can tell you this: At your age, at this point in your life, with a degree from NYU, you have opportunities that few people in history could have dreamed of. You have the opportunity to become the best, fullest, and truest version of yourself.
Here’s something else I can tell you: The world needs you to seize that opportunity with everything you’ve got. It won’t be easy. You’ll face the universal challenges encountered by all the generations who came before you, and you’ll face the unique ones that have arisen for your generation.
But if you treasure your attention, and then use it to do hard things, with other people, in real life, then––and trust me on this, as a social psychologist––your life is going to be amazing. And the world is going to be a far better place because you’re in it.
Congratulations, NYU class of 2026. May you all flourish.
2026-05-15 00:06:20
Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert from Alabama, spent years as a bit player in the world of election denial. He wasn’t a star with his own media platform, like the MyPillow guy. But he still gained a modest following by circulating conspiracy theories about President Trump’s 2020 defeat, including that poll workers gave Trump supporters—but not other voters—felt-tip markers to fill out their ballots, rendering them invalid and unreadable by voting machines. More recently, he’s asserted that a group of federal lawmakers is covering up foreign election interference. “They’re all puppets,” he said on the Rumble-streamed Real AF Patriot show in January. “They’re bought and paid for; it’s just by who.” He claimed that because of “undeniable” evidence of malfeasance, justice was coming.
On that last point, Parikh may actually be in a position to know. He is now pushing debunked election claims from within the systems he rails against as a special government employee in the Trump administration. The search-warrant affidavit that allowed the FBI to seize election materials in Georgia in January—an extraordinary intervention by federal law enforcement—cited an analysis by Parikh. Last fall, Parikh began a contract with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office that made him a player in the state’s process for certifying election equipment. He boasts of access to the Wyoming secretary of state, who, he said on Rumble, has invited him to participate in an online presentation with residents. And at 1:01 a.m. on Christmas Day, Trump made Parikh internet famous when he reposted a video of the 63-year-old testifying in court that election equipment could be infiltrated remotely.
Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. Another is the attorney Kurt Olsen, who was brought on last fall by Trump to investigate the 2020 election. Olsen’s work in the government—following years of pushing debunked or unsubstantiated theories—helped lead to the seizure of the Georgia ballots. In Arizona, federal probes of the 2020 election by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are under way. Olsen and other Trump administration officials have participated in extensive meetings about U.S. elections with senior members of the Justice Department in recent months, four people familiar with the meetings told us. In a statement, a DOJ spokesperson said, “The Justice Department is committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent.”
[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]
The president signed an executive order on March 31 that attempts to change the rules on mail-in voting, and his allies in Congress are endeavoring to reshape elections ahead of the midterms this fall, spending weeks debating a voter-ID bill that is almost certainly doomed. In April the Justice Department demanded that officials in Wayne County, Michigan, turn over ballots from the 2024 election. “There are some of us election deniers that are supporting the federal government, and things are changing,” Parikh—one of the people who helped Olsen unsuccessfully challenge voting systems in Arizona years ago—said on the Rumble show. Though he said the team he was working with was smaller than he’d like, he said it was filled with “quality people” who care about “fixing” elections.
Shortly before the Georgia affidavit became public, Parikh told us he wouldn’t get into the details of his work for the federal government. In a phone call, he said he would like voting equipment in all 50 states investigated but told us sternly and loudly that he could “neither confirm nor deny” the details of his government work. Yet in an interview with Talking Points Memo after the Georgia affidavit was unsealed, Parikh warned of a “cabal” that is compromising elections and compared himself to Ron Swanson from the sitcom Parks and Recreation, a character who despises the very government he serves. “Working for the government but hating them every bit. Right?” he told the news outlet. “That guy’s my hero.”
So many people are pressing debunked and unsubstantiated election theories from within the government that their presence has become a feature of the system. They range from those with immense power—including the president—all the way down to local officials. Others are investigating them. In Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican who is running for governor, seized about 650,000 ballots and other election materials in March after local activists alleged malfeasance when California voters last year overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional map in favor of Democrats.
[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’]
Bianco told us that activists with a citizen group known as the Riverside Election Integrity Team had complained to his office that the number of ballots counted by election officials exceeded the number of votes cast. “There’s obviously something wrong with the machines,” he recalled activists claiming, citing their own research, “because we didn’t have that many ballots.” County elections officials explained that the activists were relying on imprecise data. But Bianco was determined to find out for himself. “The intent of the investigation is to count the ballots and see how many there are,” he told us in a video interview.
When we asked what steps his investigators took to assess the validity of the activists’ claims, the sheriff grew exasperated: “There’s no steps to determine the validity,” he said. “The validity is the records.” He brushed aside criticism from Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, who went to court to try to stop the probe. And Bianco dismissed alarm among election experts who said that his moves could deepen public mistrust in the democratic process. “An investigation increases their confidence,” the sheriff told us. Soon after, the California Supreme Court ordered the sheriff to pause his investigation and preserve the seized material while it reviews the case.
Undeterred, the Riverside Election Integrity Team is working with activists from at least half a dozen California counties to help them get records from county officials to review the outcome of last year’s redistricting referendum. Greg Langworthy, who calls himself the group’s “de facto leader,” told us his group intends to scrutinize similar records after the midterm elections—before results are certified, a process that can take weeks in California.
At the federal level, one main focus appears to be proving foreign interference—which election deniers have floated as a possible justification for Trump to declare a national emergency that could allow him to attempt to take control over some aspects of the election. But the proof has been elusive.
Staff from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in recent months have briefed representatives for U.S. attorneys’ offices about potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and communications networks. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has accused U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence personnel of participating in a “years-long coup” against Trump that began with the 2016 election. In January, she was present at the raid in Fulton County, a highly unusual move for an intelligence official whose purview is foreign threats, not domestic law enforcement.
Gabbard’s team has found that voting machines in Puerto Rico contained security weaknesses that could make them susceptible to manipulation, but found no evidence that the machines were actually tampered with or that any votes were altered, according to people familiar with the findings. Two people briefed on the activities said local officials in Puerto Rico have heard nothing more from ODNI since last year. Jason Wareham, the CEO of Mojave Research, the company that conducted the security review, documented his technical conclusions in a signed declaration to Gabbard, which we reviewed. It states that Olsen (who did not respond to multiple requests for comment) made assertions about stolen votes that were not backed up by sufficient forensic evidence. Wareham told us he was informed by an ODNI official that, after Mojave’s review was complete, Olsen wrote a letter to Trump in which he claimed that the company was taking money from the billionaire George Soros and acting at his direction. Wareham “emphatically” denies the allegation, he told us.
An ODNI official told us that Olsen wasn’t involved in the office’s examination of Puerto Rico voting systems, and that information he provided “was done so voluntarily” and “reviewed in the context of all of the other information available to ODNI.” The official added that the decision to examine the systems in Puerto Rico was made internally and “not directly connected to Mr. Olsen’s broader efforts.”
[Read: MAGA thinks Maduro will prove Trump won in 2020 ]
The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us in a statement that “election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda. His entire Administration is working together closely on these issues,” she said. “The President will do everything in his power to lawfully defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”
Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández, who represents the island as a nonvoting member of Congress and caucuses with the Democrats, told us that in spite of the lack of evidence of infiltration, he worries that the Trump administration could “use Puerto Rico to build a conspiracy theory and a narrative to subvert elections in the broader United States.”
Many of the election deniers who now have power are familiar to anyone who was paying attention in the aftermath of the 2020 vote. Heather Honey, who as a Pennsylvania-based election activist sought to reverse Trump’s defeat and worked on numerous efforts to challenge elections in Arizona, now holds a key role at the Department of Homeland Security. There, she interacts with state election officials, many of whom don’t trust her, half a dozen of them told us. During a call with election officials last fall, Honey downplayed the impact of millions of dollars in funding cuts to cybersecurity initiatives (including one dedicated to elections) at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with securing the nation’s election systems, two officials told us. Honey told state and local officials that CISA had “strayed from its mission” and engaged in censorship, echoing claims by Trump supporters that CISA’s programs contributed to suppressing their views online. One of the officials, who works in cybersecurity, was stunned by her remark; his office’s previous work with CISA and federal law enforcement involved reporting death threats against elections officials and cyber risks. Those reports, he said, were driven by fears of violence and abuse, not political rhetoric. (Honey and CISA did not return calls for comment.)
The idea of finding foreign election interference in a past election and using it to declare a national emergency has been pushed by the attorney Peter Ticktin, a friend of Trump’s who helped promote a hypothetical executive order based on the theory. Ticktin—who also assisted in securing pardons for some January 6 rioters—admits he has no evidence that votes were flipped in 2020. But in an interview, he claimed that some machines used in that election had “chips” connected to a server farm in Serbia that could control electoral outcomes—and that Serbia is a “satellite of China.”
Ticktin is also trying to persuade Colorado Governor Jared Polis to grant clemency to Tina Peters, a former county clerk who was convicted of state charges tied to tampering with voting equipment. Last month, a Colorado appeals court upheld Peters’s conviction but ordered reconsideration of her nearly nine-year sentence. A January 21 clemency application that we obtained through an open-records request shows that Peters acknowledges having “made mistakes.” If granted clemency, Peters pledged that she would stay on the right side of the law. Her X account has since continued to feature dubious claims, including that Democrats oppose banning electronic equipment, because “They cheat.”
[Read: The last MAGA prisoner ]
Mike Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” has railed for years against supposed election fraud, alleging various disproved theories, including that software was tampered with to delete votes for Trump. He has used his clout in the election-denial community to create his own news network, LindellTV, with credentialed reporters at the White House and Pentagon. He also gets personal access to figures at the highest level of government. Lindell told us he has given federal investigators reams of “evidence” of wrongdoing in the 2020 election.
In July 2025, Lindell spoke online about his meetings with Trump. “I did just meet with the president—now this is the third time—about two weeks ago, and I’ll be hopefully seeing him again next week,” he said during an appearance on the Stern American video show. One focus for the administration, he said, is its work on the 2020 vote. But he explained that “a team going forward” is working “to get rid of these machines and computers” and to require people to vote by paper ballots that are hand counted. Lindell told us recently that he talks regularly with Olsen. Although the pillow salesman complained about what he considered the slow pace of federal investigations, he told us it’s a “blessing” that people like Parikh and Olsen are in positions of real influence to address attempts to rig voting machines. “The big thing is, you can take whole countries without firing a shot,” he said.
Election deniers ultimately want an overhaul of how U.S. states and localities record and count votes. Olsen tried to ban electronic voting equipment in Arizona in 2022—and lost. He represented Kari Lake, who was then running for governor, and Mark Finchem, who was running for secretary of state. They alleged that the nation’s transition to electronic systems and computer voting technology decades ago created risks of hacking and fraud, and argued that the devices violated the rights of Arizonans because the voting systems were vulnerable to cyberattacks.
The candidates and their attorneys asked a federal judge to scrap vote-tabulation machines and order votes to be counted by hand at the precinct level. (A top county election official testified that a hand count would require the hiring of 25,000 temporary workers and a building the size of an NFL stadium.) The judge threw out the case, finding that the plaintiffs cited only hypothetical allegations about the voting equipment. Olsen and another attorney were slapped with $122,200 in legal sanctions.
At the time, the lawsuit was bizarre to Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the governing board that has helped run elections in Maricopa County. Now he told us he thinks the case offers a preview of how Trump, aided by some of the same players, may be seeking to undermine the coming elections. “I was one of those that would real quickly just roll my eyes and think these people are just crazy,” Gallardo told us. These days, he takes them seriously. “They are hell-bent on making sure that elections are run under their purview—the way they want elections to be held.”
Finchem, now a state senator, is still trying to influence elections. He said during an online appearance in March that an election nonprofit he helps lead has been “feeding research” to federal authorities. “The dam is breaking,” he said in a recent fundraising appeal. Two weeks ago he posted a picture on X that appeared to be made with AI of a man bearing a resemblance to Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes walking near a county jail in handcuffs. (Fontes’s attorney sent a legal demand last week to Finchem asking him to retract the “defamatory content,” the letter, which we reviewed, said.)
[Read: The GOP’s stunningly swift gerrymandering drive]
Joanna Lydgate, the CEO and president of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, told us that she believes the ultimate goals of election deniers are to subvert America’s system of choosing its representatives and to make it easier to discard results that Trump and his allies don’t like. “I think it’s that simple; I really do,” she said. “Whether it’s an executive order or death by 5,000 cuts, it’s chipping away at our election system. They need to sow doubt; they need to undermine public trust; and each one of these narratives is a tactic to that end.”
In many ways, MAGA has already won its war against American elections. Confidence that a person’s state or local government will run a free and fair election is slipping. Trump’s administration is filled with election skeptics; federal investigations into 2020 are under way; and conspiracy theorists who were once marginalized now run some local election offices. Several officials who have been integral to running fair and transparent elections in past cycles told us they are already burned out—just as the deniers are getting started.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.
