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First, a new poll showed that women’s support for President Trump — among voters of all political stripes — is tanking. A national survey of more than 1,600 women conducted by Bellwether Research and Consulting found that Trump’s approval rating hovers at 32 percent; even among women who voted for him, especially married women, one in four now disapprove of his leadership and policy priorities.

Specifically, 68 percent of all women surveyed oppose construction of the White House ballroom, with nearly half (43 percent) of Republican women agreeing. Other Trump administration priorities that face majority opposition are tariffs (63 percent), construction of data centers (61 percent), and childhood vaccine schedule changes (55 percent).

Meanwhile, concern about the economy appears to be far more important to women than the administration acknowledges: 38 percent of all women surveyed identified the “economy/cost of living” as the most important issue facing the country, followed by healthcare, Medicare, and Social Security. (Ranking at 11 percent were democracy, government, and the rule of law together; sigh, we have some work to do.)

The Contrarian has been reporting on political engagement of midlife and older women and tracking signs of potential for collective influence — things like the uptick in minivan-driving and married women who have formed frontlines against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and mobilized to thwart the SAVE Act, the Republican-sponsored voter suppression bill (that Trump is furious he can’t get the Senate to pass). By design, it would uniquely impact millions of women’s ability to register and cast a ballot — codifying the quiet part Trump administration officials have started saying out loud. I wrote at the time, “The writing is on the wall: These are voters who should be better understood and motivated to mobilize in 2026. Not because we desire the attention. (Lord knows we are used to being invisible! We like it that way. Trust us, it is a gift.). But because we may well be the ones best suited — in sagacity, in tenacity, in temperament — to help save democracy.”

But wait, the young are at the gates! Enter Daisy Chain Fields and 45,000 super fans (and many of their moms and dads) who gathered in Irvine, California, last weekend to sing and scream along with 23-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo, the event organizer, and a slew of other young artists — Grammy award winning- rapper Doechii and pop singer Chappell Roan, among many others — for an all-star, all-female line-up. Inspired by and in honor of its apparent Lilith Fair 1990s roots, Sarah McLachlan also took the stage, as did feminist-punk trailblazers Bikini Kill, Gen X icon Alanis Morissette, and every generation’s icon Stevie Nicks.

Daisy Chain Fields made clear it is about far more than music. It is a festival designed to create joy and communal experiences in support of women’s, reproductive, and LGBTQ rights. Ten non-profit groups selected by Rodrigo were on-site providing education and information — and on stage introducing the bands — enabling a new generation of activists to acquire the knowledge, tools, and confidence to step up in civic life.

Rodrigo quickly proved herself a deft organizer and potent philanthropist: she persuaded all of the talent to perform for free and donated the day’s proceeds, totaling $10 million, to the ten partner organizations: Baby2Baby, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, Center for Reproductive Rights, FreeFrom, Jhpiego, John Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health, National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Institute for Reproductive Health, National Women’s Law Center, and Planned Parenthood. At the end of the night, Melinda French Gates joined Rodrigo on stage to announce that her own philanthropy, Pivotal, would match every dollar raised, bringing the grand total to $20 million.

If you haven’t yet caught the wave of media coverage of Daisy Chain Fields, I urge you to take a look. The aesthetic alone will make you smile, I promise — even for those of us who wouldn’t go near the sweltering SoCal scene with a ten-foot pole. That’s me, and even so, I rejoiced in every second I followed along. From Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, one of several deliberate activations for festivalgoers — this one entailed writing a note on a paper slip and tying it to floral trees — to the hippie-dippy candy-colored peace button décor adorning the performance stages, who says activism can’t be in technicolor, marked by whimsy and joy?

This juxtaposition — older women responding to the dark deeds of the Trump administration, younger women’s communal celebration of reclaiming their rights — fills me with hope. If the work ahead is truly intergenerational, we can paint a future as bright as flowers. This is the essence of a daisy chain, after all — our stories, our dreams, our skills — woven together, draped over our shoulders, worn atop our heads as crowns.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

Every day (Monday-Friday), we’ll update this space with protests, signs, and other public demonstrations against the actions of the administration. Keep checking to see how Americans all across the country are protecting and defending democracy. Get help organizing from Indivisible, find protests in your area at mobilize.us, and send us your protest photos at submit@contrariannews.org.

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Trump’s onslaught has created economic chaos from coast to coast. The Economist recently examined the results of Trump’s horrific approach: labor shortages, shrinking workforce, slower growth, and loss of economic dynamism. “Longer-lasting damage may come from a slowdown in high-skilled immigration,” it found. “America turned its ability to attract the best of the brightest into an extraordinary economic advantage. Mr Trump’s immigration crackdown risks leaving the country with fewer workers today and fewer innovators tomorrow.”

Instead of targeting dangerous criminals, the Trump regime has systematically deported — en masse — law-abiding, productive, non-white migrants. “A surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands. . . includ[ing] people married to U.S. citizens, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim, and others with a temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke.” The New York Times reported last week. The statistics repudiate the regime’s lie that its approach protects innocent Americans. “The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent.” [Emphasis added.]

The Trump team does not hide its ambition to “ethnically cleanse” America. His immigration crew has transformed the status of hundreds of thousands of non-white persons from countries in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean by revoking their Temporary Protected Status. Hardworking people who are legally present must nevertheless prepare to lose employment, separate from family, and either flee the nation or face forcible expulsion.

In rounding up TPS refugees and other legally present immigrants, the administration has violated due process rights and subjected thousands of people (over 23,000 in total) to deportation under hellish conditions in third countries in which the deportees have no connection to their families and where they are subject to torture and often repatriation to their country of origin. Scores of immigrants — some with serious medical conditions and most under duress/physical restraint — were recently deposited in Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, of the 6,668 refugees admitted since October 2025, 6,665 are white South Africans.

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Trump’s authoritarian goons have also run roughshod over First and Fifth Amendment rights by attempting to deport critics of the regime’s policies. Just as Trump’s minions, according to whistleblowers, concocted evidence of antisemitism to suppress academic freedom at universities, they have devised a national security pretext to stamp out dissent on foreign policy.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Noël Wise in California held that the Trump regime had violated international students’ constitutional rights by targeting them over their views on the Middle East, specifically their criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. This ruling follows a similar decision delivered last year by Ronald Reagan-appointed U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young in Massachusetts, who held that “[n]o one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and noncitizens alike.

Judge Wise excoriated Trump’s assault on free speech, finding the record “replete with examples of the government enforcing the Revocation and Deportation provisions against noncitizens who have publicly expressed—through their speech, writings, or participation in protests—disagreement with Israel or support for Palestine.” But, as Wise held, “noncitizens are afforded First and Fifth Amendment rights to the same extent as citizens,” adding:

Wise, therefore, held that delegating broad discretion to the secretary of State to trample on protected speech in the name of vague goals, e.g., “countering support for terrorist groups and addressing antisemitism,” runs afoul of the First and Fifth Amendments.

Judge Wise’s conclusion is worth savoring:

Foundational to America’s enduring democracy are our freedoms of speech and the press embodied in the First Amendment. In the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength. That strength is diminished when members of our society—citizens and noncitizens alike—must self-censor and “behave” or suffer the government’s retaliation. In March 2025, that retaliation was directed at those engaged in pro-Palestine and anti-Israel speech.

In September 2025, caught in the government’s net were people critical of Charlie Kirk. In May 2026, it potentially included “weighing in on a peace deal that’s being negotiated” in Iran regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Tomorrow, or perhaps even today, targets may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply express opinions the government does not like.

This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it. Zealous protection of our Constitutional right to free speech is a provocative demonstration of our country’s powerful lack of fear.

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In the face of Trump’s racist, cruel approach, Americans have recoiled at the abuse of immigration laws to terrorize minority communities, remake American demographics, and silence critics. A July NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found 65 percent of Americans think ICE has gone “too far.” Even more surprising, on border security, which “had been Trump’s reliable strength since his second inauguration in January 2025,” his support dropped to a net -5, the worst result since the Strength in Numbers/Verasight tracker launched in May 2025.

And an August Economist/YouGov poll found “Trump is badly underwater on immigration,” with only 40 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval (a net -13 percent), “down from +11 at the start of his second term, when 51% approved and 40% disapproved.” Contrary to Trump’s ICE fusillade, large majorities favor a path to citizenship for those who were brought here as children (63 percent), are married to U.S. citizens (62 percent), have lived here more than 20 years (58 percent), or have children who are U.S. citizens (55 percent).

Likewise, a survey released Wednesday from University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation conducted in 11 competitive states and 28 congressional districts across the country showed broad support for legal status for noncriminal immigrants (Democrats 75 to 89 percent, Republicans 55 to 78 percent, overall 65 to 84 percent) and reducing illegal immigration by requiring employers to verify work status and expanding legal work visas (75 to 90 percent of Democrats, 67 to 89 percent of Republicans). Huge bipartisan majorities “favor hiring several hundred more asylum judges and staff to significantly speed up the process of evaluating claims (Democrats 72 to 87 percent, Republicans 66 to 83 percent, overall 71 to 83 percent).

In sum, the MAGA reign of terror against immigrants has not only been a law enforcement, constitutional, and economic disaster — it has also been a political loser.

Savvy Democrats should advocate replacing rogue, wildly deceitful, corrupt, and violent agencies (both ICE and Customs and Border Protection) with law-abiding, professional entities that Americans can trust to implement sane policies to protect the border, facilitate legal immigration (i.e., provide an adequate supply of workers), and rationalize our asylum process. Any Trump official who broke the law (including any who lied to Congress or the courts) must be held fully accountable.

After experiencing Trump’s heinous overreach, the American people are way ahead of the politicians. They should know that the midterms provide the opening to end this shameful chapter in immigration policy and reclaim our deepest-held values.

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See you on Thursday!

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The two updated us on recent court cases they’ve partnered on, the protests at East Potomac golf course, and Skye’s new book: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times, which Hilary Clinton called, “A manual for people who are tired of wringing their hands and are ready to roll up their sleeves.”

Coffee with Contrarians is live every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 9:15am eastern at ContrarianNews.org

The Republican nominee for Governor of Colorado claims he’s mastered the “rules of engagement” for casting off “demonic oppression.” Oddly, that supernatural claim might be one of the least interesting — and most believable — parts of his biography.

Victor Marx runs a multi-million-dollar Christian ministry that’s built on incredible tales of salvation, most of which are no easier to prove than his claim to be a master of “spiritual warfare.”

The stories begin with Marx’s personal narrative of overcoming childhood trauma — including supposedly being forced to murder a man at age seven. Marx has committed these harrowing accounts to his memoir, The Victor Marx Story: People Will Admire You for Your Success… But They Will Relate to You Because of Your Pain (now in its fourth edition) and a slick online movie with the same title but a tweaked subtitle: When Impossible Is The Only Way Out.

The salvation stories extend to what Marx describes as his calling as a “high-risk humanitarian.” In 2022, Marx claimed he’d helped liberate “over 43,000” women and children who were being “sex trafficked” or held in other forms of captivity. “We’re best known,” he told the interviewer, “for recovering women and children from ISIS.”

Then there’s Marx’s work in the spiritual realm, where he’s claimed to have freed hundreds from demonic “attachments” — including the late MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, who wrote the intro to another Marx book, on Christian masculinity, titled The Dangerous Gentleman. Marx has bragged of his undefeatable prayer powers against evil, insisting: “We just don’t lose.”

Marx is sixty-one and deeply tan, with a beard that runs more salt than pepper. He speaks slowly, with a pious intensity and a Cajun drawl. He describes his candidacy as a mission from Jesus: “I know I’m called to this,” he’s written. “It’s clear we’re right in the center of God’s will.”

Marx built his reputation on extravagant claims. (His late mentor, Dr. James Dobson, blurbed his Dangerous Gentleman book by declaring: “Victor Marx may be the world’s most interesting man!”) But during the Republican primary campaign, Marx’s allegiance to the truth emerged as a central question. One GOP opponent — a fellow pastor, no less — called out Marx on the debate stage as “corrupt,” a “con man,” and a liar. His other GOP opponent called him “unfit” and “a fraud,” asserting that Marx “makes up these tall tales, these tall stories, and I just don’t believe him.”

Marx answers such critics with circular aphorisms: “Just because a person does not believe the truth, it does not make it a lie.” To his doubters, he’s added: “I have no need to prove to anyone what we’ve done over the last many years. People believing it or not, it has no bearing on our work.” Marx has been evasive with the press — and did not respond to an interview request from The Contrarian. With no apparent irony, he has put “accountability,” “transparency,” and “ending corruption” at the top of his gubernatorial issue agenda.

With Victor Marx, it is challenging to tease out man from myth.

The Marx story begins with ghastly (but curiously… cinematic?) stories of childhood trauma growing up in the Deep South. There’s the story of how he was sexually abused as a five-year-old on a chicken farm and then abandoned to die in an industrial cooler — before a just-in-time rescue by his family. This assault was allegedly followed by the “country-justice” capture of his tormentor, whom Marx describes as being beaten, “hog-tied,” dragged by tractor, and subjected to a mock execution-by-hanging from a pecan tree.

Then there are the tales about his wicked stepfather, “Mr. K,” who worked as a bail bondsman and salesman, but claimed he’d been trained by the NSA in “torture and methods and mind control.” He allegedly forced young Victor to do the following:

• Decapitate a dead cat as a three-year-old, and then wear the carcass on his head so that the “blood dripped down my body.”

• Pull the trigger of a revolver, as a seven-year-old, to murder a “vagabond,” who was then buried under the floorboards of an old house.

• Watch the mutilation and incineration of a corpse at a morgue.

This same man also allegedly hooked young Victor up to a battery, forcing him to watch a film reel of a child being horrifically abused — delivering electrical shocks to keep young Victor from closing his eyes. Mr. K allegedly also subjected him to near-drownings in the bathtub, and once went on a drunken gun rampage, shooting out the lights in Marx’s home in a fury about the household electrical bill. Along the way, young Victor also fell in with a “groomer” and was victimized in a pedophilia ring that operated from “dark homes where weird rituals were happening, which I didn’t understand.”

In Marx’s telling, he found redemption from this ceaseless abuse by joining the Marines, finding Jesus, and undergoing hours of trauma therapy. Marx writes that he shares the stories of his childhood trauma as a lesson about God’s love, because “Jesus wants to rescue you as he has done for me.”

Does Marx intend readers to take his story as literally true? Or as a parable for redemption? In a recent interview with a Colorado news station, he defended his narrative as completely factual, declaring “all of it” is true.

Recovering from his trauma, Marx also turned to martial arts — becoming what he describes as a “7th degree black belt” in Keichu-do, a form of hand-to-hand combat he calls “Cajun karate.” Marx claims to have trained with elite military operators from Delta Force and SEAL Team in the martial arts, in addition to “over 30 world champions.” In a related skill, Marx bills himself as “World’s Fastest Gun Disarm Man,” for the speed with which he can snatch a weapon from someone holding him at gunpoint.

This background in the Marines and martial arts has helped Marx carve out a unique niche in the landscape of Christian ministry, where Marx bills himself as a “high-risk humanitarian.” As Marx describes the work, his “teams” embed with military or law enforcement units in conflict zones — from the Middle East to South Asia to the Mexican border — and help liberate trafficked women and children. Marx likens his crew to “a special forces unit,” and a fact sheet currently on his ministry website touts having “saved women and children in 30 nations.”

Marx’s descriptions of these rescue missions are at once harrowing and oblique, creating the impression that Marx is a commando for Jesus operating at the edges of civilization. As he recently told a radio interviewer: “Sometimes it does get cowboyish.” He described getting involved in a firefight near Mosul, Iraq. “Our rules of engagement has never been to kick in doors and shoot people,” he said. “But when we’re in the middle of it, you get shot at. You know, you got to hurt people’s feelings back.”

In an appearance on the Christian nationalist Flashpoint broadcast in 2022, Marx claimed to have helped a huge number of the vulnerable: “We help set captives free. I know it’s a biblical term, but we actually do it physically — women and children who are being sex trafficked.” He added, with a veneer of modesty: “We tried to stay quiet about some things. But it didn’t last for very long, by the sheer number of women and kids we were helping. To date it’s over 43,000.”

In more recent years, Marx has added “spiritual warfare” to his story arc. Marx’s roots in Colorado include working for the conservative culture warrior Dobson of Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs. But, different from Dobson, Marx situates himself in the charismatic tradition of Christianity, whose believers hold that the spirit world — and the struggle between angelic and demonic forces — is not at all metaphorical.

In this Ephesians-inflected worldview, there is a hidden supernatural plane of existence where spiritual warfare is ever present, and individuals can be oppressed by evil spirits, leading to suffering in their terrestrial lives. This torment, in turn, can be relieved by casting off demons in prayer, a skill that Marx claims to have perfected, telling an interviewer that he’d become a “reluctant exorcist.” (Marx clarifies that he’s not, in fact, acting like a Catholic priest. “We never use the word ‘possessed,’” he’s said, opting instead to describe the work as setting people free from their “demonic assignments.”)

To describe Marx’s full backstory as far-fetched is an understatement. As the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently put it: “Marx is the sort of character Carl Hiaasen might have conjured if he took mushrooms and wandered into a Pentecostal church.”

But this much is undeniable: Marx has turned his gift at storytelling into booming success for his ministry, All Things Possible. Registered as a not-for-profit rather than a church, the ministry’s financial records are public. From 2020 to 2024, the last year for which tax returns are available, Marx’s ministry raked in nearly $28 million in gifts. A not-insignificant portion of these donations benefit Marx and his family. In 2024 alone, Marx, his wife, two children employed by the ministry, and an entity called Victor Marx LLC collectively received more than $317,000.

Marx’s ministry serves up slick production values — including a snazzy website that solicits donations and sells videos, as well as courses and other merch. The faithful can support Marx’s “Protecting Children’s Innocence Task Force.” The promotional materials promise that each donation sends a message: “Evil Is On Notice.” For more heavenly battles, the ministry recently released a full-length feature film on “spiritual warfare” called The Unseen War — available to purchase for just $19.95.

It is perhaps unsurprising that as he moved into today’s world of politics, Marx proved to be a prodigious fundraiser. In part thanks to an early endorsement from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Marx tapped into a network of donors that staked him to nearly $3 million for the gubernatorial primary campaign.

But as the Republican contest unfolded, the veracity of Marx’s narratives received significant scrutiny — once tales that were true-enough for the purposes of ministry work were subject to the level of fact-checking that any candidate might expect.

During this public vetting, Marx abandoned key claims about his humanitarian work. Pressed by an interviewer about how many women and children he’d actually saved, Marx flatly denied he’d ever suggested the number was in the tens of thousands: “I have never said — ever — that… I rescued 45,000 people,” adding: “I would never say anything like that.” In another interview, Marx blamed the inclusion of this 45,000 figure on a campaign website as the mistake of an “independent contractor.”

On the debate stage, however, Marx’s opponent Scott Bottoms — a state representative who is also the pastor of a Colorado Springs congregation — accused Marx of having “conned my church” by telling him specifically that he had “rescued 45,000 people.” (From his dais, Marx retorted that Bottoms was “mean,” before deflecting, vaguely, that “accusations without evidence are nothing more than gossip or a lie.”)

So how many women and children has Marx rescued through his ministry? When asked by journalist Kyle Clark of Denver’s 9News, Marx said he couldn’t disclose that figure “for security reasons.” As a range, he offered: “It’s more than one. And less than a bunch.” The true answer, Marx asserted, was immaterial to the people who’ve given his ministry millions. “Whether people think we rescued 1, or 100, or 300, or 3,000,” he said, “I think the response is still gonna be the same.”

In the same interview, Marx refused to stand by his own post on X in which he described completing 130 missions, saying: “That doesn’t sound accurate.” When pressed to name several of the 30 nations where his ministry claims to have rescued women and children, Marx became flustered: “I don’t, I mean… I don’t memorize every place that we’ve gone.”

Marx has previously described his horrific childhood experiences of abuse as “unprovables.” And true enough, there does not seem to be any evidence to support his most dramatic claim of being forced to murder a man. In his book, Marx writes that he confessed, as an adult, about his supposed involvement in the “vagabond” killing to both the local sheriff and the FBI, but that neither agency chose to open an investigation into a cold case with no specific evidence.

In the 9News interview, Marx was pressed on whether he’d killed others — as an adult. He gave the chilling reply: “Does it matter!?” (He then added, obliquely: “I’ve been in other situations where, you know, possibly people or persons died.”)

Clark clearly did not find such answers satisfactory. Later, as one of the moderators in the primary debate, Clark recapped some of Marx’s most incredible assertions:

You claim that you’ve been all around the world armed to the teeth rescuing women and children from captivity. That you’ve stopped human smugglers at the Mexico border and made them ‘pay a price.’ That you, as a civilian, called in a U.S. military air strike that killed 70 ISIS fighters. That you’ve done 150 high-risk missions and everyone has been a success.

He then posed an audacious question to Marx: “How should voters decide whether you’ve lived one of the most extraordinary lives in human history — or whether you’re a liar and a fraud?”

“I can’t help it if I’ve had an extraordinary life,” Marx retorted, adding, nebulously: “The proof is just in people and what we document.”

In the end, the many controversies about Marx’s past didn’t deter his voters. In the primary election, he eked out a victory by about 2,500 votes to advance to the general election. Neither of his GOP opponents has endorsed him, and at least one party official quit rather than support Marx.

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What does the rise of Victor Marx tell us about American politics?

The risk is less that this fabulist will become the chief executive of a major state. Colorado is losing its “purple” reputation — and hasn’t elected a GOP governor in nearly a quarter century. The Democratic nominee, Phil Weiser, is the state’s sitting attorney general and won an impressive primary victory over sitting U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Cook Political Report rates the contest a “Solid D.”

What’s important about Marx is that he represents the evangelical base of the GOP choosing to nominate one of their own for a state’s highest office, rather than rallying behind a more mainstream politician who promises to champion their interests. While not an overt Christian nationalist, Marx has said Christians are called to ”occupy” earthly government until Jesus returns.

Marx also embodies a deepening of post-truth politics on the MAGA right, for whose voters the myth and charisma of a candidate — be it Victor Marx or Donald Trump — is far more important than the reality of the resume.

The ascendance of Marx also underscores how notions of spiritual battle have captivated the far-right in American politics — from the grassroots voters to the Speaker’s office. Academics have long highlighted the danger of applying the angelic-vs.-demonic logic of spiritual warfare to the world of politics, because believers can come to see their partisan opponents as controlled by evil, rather than simply holding different beliefs or ideology.

For a man who fetishizes fighting, Marx sees dueling with demons as the pinnacle of combat. “The supernatural realm is the highest form of warfare known to mankind,” Marx has told his followers. And, as with his campaign, Marx feels himself allied with God when he is batting evil spirits. “We destroy them,” Marx has claimed, and “banish them to perfect judgment from Christ.”

Tim Dickinson is the Senior Political Writer for The Contrarian

Without congressional approval or congressional appropriation of funds, Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House, aiming to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. The law is clear that Congress is in charge of federal property and must authorize this change. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit explained: “Congress has not ceded unfettered authority to the Executive Branch to dramatically redesign, reshape, and reconstruct the White House—the People’s House—to fit a particular President’s desires.”

Also, it is estimated that this will cost about $600 million, and though some of the money will be privately raised, there will be significant cost to the federal treasury. Congress, which exclusively holds the power of the purse, has approved no funds for this.

It is stunning that none of the justices argued or even suggested that Trump’s actions are legal. There is no doubt that Trump’s unilateral action violates the Constitution and federal statutes.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a congressionally chartered organization that seeks to preserve and promote the United States’ architectural and cultural heritage, brought a lawsuit challenging the demolition of the East Wing and the building of the enormous ballroom. Under well-established legal precedent, an organization must allege, among other things, that one of its members has standing to sue.

Standing requires that an individual has personally suffered an injury. The complaint in the case identified Alison Hoagland, an architectural historian and professor emerita in historic preservation. In her declaration, she said that she has been a member of the National Trust for over 40 years, and is currently a trustee, and serves on its executive committee. She said that she routinely walks in front of the White House and in Lafayette Square directly across from the White House, and she “intend[s] to continue” doing so. She said that the demolition of the East Wing and the construction of the ballroom will substantially change for the worse the aesthetics of that area.

The federal district court concluded that this was sufficient for the National Trust to have standing to sue and found that the demolition and construction of the East Wing was illegal and unconstitutional. Judge Richard Leon, widely regarded as conservative, ruled that the construction of an underground bunker, which Trump said is needed for national security, could continue. But the above-ground demolition and construction had to stop until there was congressional approval.

The appeals court agreed. It pointed out that the Supreme Court many times had said that claims of aesthetic injury are harms sufficient to allow standing to sue. For example, it pointed to Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw (2000), in which the court held that individuals who lived within driving distance of a river and who fished in it and picnicked along its banks had standing to challenge water pollution. The appeals court in this case said that under the Trump administration’s “cramped standing theory . . . no one [would be] injured by a decision to raze the Statue of Liberty, to obscure the names on the Vietnam War Memorial, or to install a political billboard atop Mount Rushmore.”

Astoundingly, that is exactly the implications of what the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation of the United States. It was a 5-4 decision, with the majority comprised of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The court concluded that no one was injured by the president’s demolition and construction and said “we have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete or particularized injury under Article III.”

But this conclusion ignores the plaintiff’s complaint and the law. The plaintiff did not allege a claim based on “offense, disagreement, or distaste.” Rather, the plaintiff alleges an aesthetic injury and, as Roberts pointed out in dissent, “[o]ur precedents . . . have noted that an injury to a plaintiff’s mere esthetic interests can qualify as concrete and particularized” and therefore sufficient for standing.

Roberts — joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — explained that “Hoagland’s injury suffices for standing. A historic preservations such as Hoagland can be aesthetically injured in a concrete, particularized way by a transformation of a historic building that she frequently enjoys, just as an environmentalist can sustain a concrete, particularized aesthetic injury from the extinction of a particular animal or the transformation of a particular forest or river that he regularly enjoys.”

The effect of the Supreme Court’s decision is that no one will have standing to sue to challenge the president’s actions in destroying the East Wing and building a giant ballroom even though this is violating the Constitution and federal laws. Rather than performing its essential function of being a check on illegal actions by the president, the Supreme Court has empowered him to ignore the law and to nullify Congress’s powers under the Constitution.

It is frightening to see the five conservative justices twist the facts and ignore the law to allow Trump to do something that is clearly illegal and unconstitutional. Whether the ballroom is built is far less important than the court undermining the rule of law in this way.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

In her posts, she wrote she refused to “perform” mourning for a controversial political figure whose career was built, in significant part, on hateful rhetoric. She expressed an opinion. She did not celebrate his death.

The distinction should not have been difficult to understand. Yet in that moment, recognizing that distinction was apparently less expedient than firing Ms. Attiah. The Post claimed her posts violated its social media policies and could endanger the safety of its employees. It was a flimsy excuse, as an independent arbitrator confirmed last week by ordering the Post to reinstate Ms. Attiah, with back pay. This was a victory for her, for the integrity of journalism, and for freedom of expression.

Ms. Attiah’s unjust termination came amid a political climate in which the price of dissent could be professional ruin. Online mobs, emboldened by support from political leaders, sought to dictate the terms of the public’s response to Kirk’s killing. Only grief and praise were acceptable reactions, and those who noted or objected to Kirk’s inflammatory and often racist statements were expected to remain silent. A Reuters investigation later found that 600 Americans were punished in a “pro-Trump crackdown” in the wake of Kirk’s murder. The Trump administration and its allies used the killing to falsely portray the left as uniquely violent, while labeling anyone who criticized his politics as morally suspect and unpatriotic. They cast a wide net a few weeks later with an executive order targeting nonprofit organizations, including those focused on immigration, race, and economic justice.

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That campaign did not exist in a vacuum. After Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress in November 2024, conservative activists aggressively promoted a narrative about why Democrats had lost. They claimed that progressive leaders had become too “woke,” too focused on identity politics, and too attentive to marginalized communities instead of the rising cost of eggs.

Rather than challenge that premise, many left-of-center thought leaders fell in line, writing one election post-mortem after another, bemoaning the fact that the Democratic Party had lost sight of what and who is important. Political scientist Mark Lilla provocatively called for the “end of identity liberalism,” which essentially boils down to ‘power first, and then, maybe we can “help these people.”’ These so-called thought leaders tacitly admitted their willingness to sideline some of the very voices and communities that have led (and continue to lead) movements that make our society more just.

Their capitulation had consequences. It signaled that attacks on social justice groups and dissenting voices did not merit fierce resistance. More dominoes fell. Some of the country’s most powerful law firms struck cowardly deals with the Trump administration, rather than use their legal expertise to challenge dubious executive orders. Major corporations scaled back diversity initiatives after the administration issued executive orders targeting DEI programs. News organizations settled baseless multimillion-dollar lawsuits brought by Trump. Some universities and businesses increasingly treated political pressure as simply another condition to manage. By acquiescing, they chose the path of least resistance and helped normalize an antidemocratic culture of silencing dissent.

For the first months of the Trump administration, the story was one of institutions retreating in the face of intimidation and political pressure. Ms. Attiah’s case offers a different lesson. Her vindication came last week. The arbitrator determined that the Post had violated its labor agreement and failed to establish that she engaged in “gross misconduct.” The ruling, of course, is a major win for Ms. Attiah, who waited nearly a year for justice. But its significance extends far beyond her case. The decision rebukes a broad effort to push dissenting voices out of public life, prosecute them, or falsely label their actions criminal, unprofessional, or dangerous. It tells those who dare to speak truth to power that their rights are not optional.

Democracy requires room for dissent — as well as political, policy, and moral disagreements. Everyday Americans can fight, and they can win, even when up against a billionaire-owned media outlet.

Our organization took on Ms. Attiah’s case for the same reason we challenged the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID, fought its mass termination of federal employees, served as co-counsel in the birthright citizenship case, challenged Trump’s renaming of the Kennedy Center and taking over public golf courses in D.C., and fought attempts to browbeat an Olympian through a bogus prosecution for “vandalizing” the reflecting pool. We will continue to unapologetically and tirelessly use the rule of law to defend our democracy.

Jenice R. Robinson is the communications director at Democracy Defenders Action.

Susan Corke is the executive director of Democracy Defenders Action.

Except that it is not. Mr. Trump’s war in Iran…is anything but accomplished. Half a year in, the conflict has deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight.

He finds himself stuck in a maddening purgatory between full-fledged combat and genuine peace. He is reluctant to resume an all-out bombardment despite his thunderous threats, yet has been unable so far to broker an agreement to end the war on satisfactory terms. He has no victory to take credit for, yet is paying the political price in terms of the toll on the American economy and his party’s chances in the fall elections.

Bluntly put, Trump has produced a defeat of unprecedented proportions, handed the Iranian leadership a new lease on life, and given Tehran control of the Strait of Hormuz — a benefit of more utility than a nuclear weapon — without obtaining restrictions on its nuclear weapons program, despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary.

Historian Robert Kagan writes:

Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The dominant power in the region going forward will be Iran, not the U.S. or Israel. Neighboring countries are already making their adjustments to this new reality. More distant powers will too. For years, the world has been dealing with an Iran constrained. It will now discover what Iran unleashed looks like. . . . .

Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz is a more useful instrument of power than a nuclear weapon would be. A nuclear weapon might deter an attack, but control of the strait gives Iran leverage every day, over dozens of countries. With it, Iran can reward friends, punish enemies, extract revenue, force the loosening of sanctions, and make governments think twice before opposing Iranian policies. It can do all of this without firing a shot, and while preserving the ability to threaten violence when necessary.

Iran’s regime remains intact, retains its missile program, can reconstitute its terror network (with monies it will extract from control of the Strait), and claims bragging rights that it laid low a decrepit, delusional bully who threatened it with genocide.

Most obviously, Iran demolished the U.S.’s status as protector of international waterways. With control of the Strait, Iran “is also claiming the right to decide who may pass. It has proposed excluding vessels associated with governments it deems hostile, such as the U.S. and Israel, and it has demanded compensation from nations that participated in attacks against it,” Kagan explains. In place of free passage through a key waterway, Iran has “establish[ed] the principle that passage through the strait will henceforth be a privilege that Tehran can grant, condition, delay, or deny.”

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As strained as Iran’s economy is, and as much pain as its people have absorbed, its regime is widely expected to outlast the Trump presidency. The U.S. will struggle to maintain any semblance of sanctions against Iran, which stands to collect fists full of currency from ships seeking passage through the Strait.

Trump’s empty threats of a new era of economic warfare against Iran based on secondary sanctions on other countries are as devoid of credibility as his military ultimatums. Vivian Salama writes for The Atlantic:

[S]econdary sanctions make the U.S. more vulnerable when its own economy is already under pressure, with the technology, manufacturing, and financial sectors likely to bear the brunt. Oil and gasoline prices have already risen, inflation remains a problem, and voters are unhappy with a conflict they were told would make their country safer. The American public’s approval of the war with ​Iran has fallen to its lowest level since the first days of the conflict…. With the midterms approaching, Republicans have little reason to welcome another round of economic pain, let alone the possible U.S.-induced global financial crisis that [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent talked about.

Salama confirmed that regional experts see Trump’s sanctions threats “less as an escalation strategy than as the latest step in the administration’s continuing search for an exit from the war.” The pattern is eerily familiar:

The administration keeps reaching for a bigger threat because the last one failed to deliver a decisive victory, or even a face-saving off-ramp. Deadlines move. Threats get grace periods. “Maximum pressure” is followed by more maximum pressure. The question is no longer simply how Washington plans to force Iran to negotiate. It is how the U.S. gets out of a war in which its options seem only to shrink.

In the real world, the U.S. has failed to achieve any of its stated goals (e.g., eliminating Iran’s missile arsenal, ending its nuclear program, obtaining regime change, curbing its regional influence) and certainly has no clear strategy for doing so now that its complete aversion to resuming military action is out in the open.

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The harm to U.S. national security is profound. Senior brass has warned the hapless Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that our continued deployment is unsustainable, with the most dire warning coming from the chief of Naval operations, who reports only one quarter of the fleet is deployable.

Our munitions stocks are dangerously low, impairing military options in the region and beyond. “The U.S. has rushed so many munitions to the Middle East to fight Iran that military planners are concerned the loss of firepower is diminishing America’s ability to defend against potential threats from China and Russia,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The cuts have been so deep that the U.S. inventories in Europe of PAC-3 Patriot air defense interceptors and ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile System] surface-to-surface missiles are deemed to be ‘beyond critical.’”

Within the region, our influence is at a low ebb, with Gulf allies now looking for partners other than the U.S. As Kagan notes: “Saudi Arabia’s rejection of the U.S.-and Israel-backed Abraham Accords in favor of a strategic compact with Pakistan and Turkey hints at the shape of the future.” Outside the Middle East, both allies and foes recognize that the U.S. lacks the strategic smarts and staying power to defeat even a second-rate power.

So forget “Mission Accomplished.” Don’t bother with “victory” triumphalism. This international humiliation far surpasses U.S. setbacks in Vietnam or even Iraq. Perhaps the worst strategic blunder in U.S. history is entirely Trump’s doing, aided and abetted by incompetent Cabinet flunkies and congressional Republicans too cowardly to live up to their oaths to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Booting Republicans from office en masse is the essential first step in addressing this catastrophe.

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In September 2025, I focused particularly on retired general officers. Many undoubtedly understood what the removal of experienced commanders and the politicization of military leadership could mean for readiness. I argued that they needed to say so publicly — a difficult proposition given the military tradition of remaining outside partisan politics even after leaving uniform.

But that is not the argument I want to revisit here. The Iran war, and the accumulating evidence of the strain it is placing on American military readiness, has brought me back to a question I wrestled with during Trump’s first administration: Why do so many qualified and respected officials remain in senior positions when the president’s decisions and rhetoric are plainly at odds with their own judgment and, in some cases, their character?

There is a tendency among senior national-security officials — military and civilian — to imagine themselves as the last responsible adult in the room. If not me, who? If I leave, who keeps this from getting worse?

A number of officials from Trump’s first administration later described some version of that calculation. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he repeatedly wrestled with whether to resign but remained in part because he feared that someone more compliant might replace him. John Kelly made a similar argument about his tenure as White House chief of staff, suggesting that his effectiveness should be measured partly by what Trump did not do while Kelly was there.

Then-Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor anonymously penned a New York Times opinion piece in September 2018 that said he was “part of the resistance” inside the administration. He argued that he had to stay “to thwart parts” of Trump’s agenda and “his worst inclinations.” Taylor later acknowledged that resigning might have sent a stronger message.

The rationale is understandable. Experienced officials can sometimes prevent the worst outcomes. I have shared that hope. Just last week, I wrote about CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow in those terms.

But nothing in Trump’s tenure as president — in either term — tests that rationale as much as this administration’s prosecution of the Iran war. Six months into this conflict, 18 Americans have been killed and 757 wounded; the Pentagon only days ago added another 60 wounded personnel to its earlier official count of 697. The administration is seeking another $67 billion for the war.

Reporting last week said the war’s depletion of critical defensive and offensive munitions is affecting planning and deterrence requirements involving China and Russia, including inventories of air defense systems in Europe and Asia. More troubling still, U.S. intelligence reportedly assesses that Moscow may view that vulnerability as an opportunity to escalate against American interests and allies in Europe. Separate reporting indicates the purpose for Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow was to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin not to test NATO’s resolve, such as military provocation against one of the Baltic states.

Responsibility for these developments is not evenly distributed. Trump chose the policy. Hegseth administered it while continuing to remove or marginalize experienced military leaders.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine’s responsibility is different. His role as the president’s senior military adviser is to provide his best military judgment about the feasibility, costs, and risks of the policies the military is being directed to execute.

Before the war, Caine reportedly warned Trump that the United States lacked the munitions and allied support necessary for a prolonged conflict and that American personnel would face significant risks. This month, CNN reported that he has been searching for an “off-ramp,” arguing privately that escalation could backfire and that airpower alone is unlikely to achieve Trump’s objectives.

But there is another part of the story.

CNN also reported that Caine has been less direct with Trump than with other senior officials. One source familiar with their interactions said he was “pulling punches.” The same report described Caine as being mindful of maintaining his access to the president and careful in presenting military options and their consequences.

I am not suggesting that Caine has failed in his duties. However, if Caine has softened that judgment to preserve his access to Trump, then the issue is no longer simply whether he is the responsible officer in the room. It is whether preserving his place in that room has begun to compromise the very purpose of being there.

The distinction, therefore, is not between civilian failure and military innocence. Trump chose the course. Hegseth helped shape and administer it. Operational commanders and military institutions should be held accountable where planning, preparedness, or execution fell short. And Caine should be judged on whether his advice was sufficiently candid and forceful before and during a war whose consequences increasingly resemble the dangers he reportedly foresaw.

Perhaps Caine concluded that preserving his relationship with Trump was essential. Such a calculation would not be frivolous. Trump has demonstrated little reluctance to remove senior officials who challenge him.

But preserving access becomes harder to defend if doing so requires tempering the advice that access is supposed to make possible.

That is where the familiar “adult in the room” defense becomes more complicated. Officials from Trump’s first administration argued that remaining gave them opportunities to prevent worse decisions. In retrospect, some of those claims deserve more credit than they initially received. But the argument cannot become self-validating: The fact that a respected official remains close to the president cannot itself be evidence that he is exercising meaningful restraint.

Caine may have warned Trump. Or he may also have calibrated those warnings to preserve his influence with a president who dislikes contradiction. We cannot know from the outside where that balance lies.

Six months into this war, however, the difference between preserving access to influence the president and preserving access by softening unwelcome advice matters. The relevant question is no longer whether competent people remain in the room. It is what they have done with the influence their presence was supposed to provide.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

The growing divide between the United States and Canada continues, driven by Donald Trump. The President has chosen to sow animosity and engage in a trade war, disrupting $872 billion in commerce and poisoning relations with what has been a friendly, peaceful, loyal neighbor. It’s difficult to find a reasonable explanation for Trump’s behavior because there isn’t a good reason to inflict such damage to a relationship that has been so close for so long.

Trump’s ego, his desire for dominance (and for others’ acknowledgement of their subordination), and his view of international relations that sees trade and alliances as a burden and cost to United States are the only motives that can plausibly be offered for his ongoing dispute with Canada. If the president cannot impose his will on other people and countries — no matter the issue — he seems to view this as weakness, both personal and national.

Trump’s drive for supremacy and the subservience of others has been a feature of his presidency and the element fueling the exercise of his power. Selecting incompetent people for his Cabinet (see Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy for starters) and getting Republican senators to fall in line and confirm his nominees (see Bill Cassidy) even though they knew unqualified people were being put in positions of responsibility has been the point. A similar dynamic has been present in NATO. Trump has made repeated threats and demands, while alliance leaders try to limit the damage Trump can do — with regard to Ukraine and Russia, Greenland, trade, and the future of the alliance itself — by appeasing Trump and offering effusive praise (see NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte).

Though Republican members of Congress remain too fearful of Trump to offer much opposition, the tide has been turning overseas, as other countries are less willing to concede to Trump’s ego and mercurial nature to stay in his good graces. The person who has led the way: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Mark Carney to Canada’s Rescue

Carney, who replaced Justin Trudeau in March 2025, is meeting the moment, not only for Canada but for the free world. His prior career had been in finance and central banking. After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Oxford University, he worked at Goldman Sachs and the Canadian Finance Ministry. He was governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and governor of the Bank of England from 2013 from 2020. (These positions are equivalent to chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve.) Though it was widely believed that the Canadian Liberal party would be voted out after several years in power, Carney won an election he called in April 2025 by making it about who would take on Trump and fight for Canada’s interests.

Since his return to the White House in 2025, Trump has had his eyes on Canada. One of his first actions was to impose steep tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, saying that these countries were taking advantage of the United States. Trump sees trade as a subsidy to others, so he wanted to make American trading partners pay with tariffs for access to the American market. His erroneous view that other countries are paying for such access — when in reality American companies and consumers pay through higher prices and inflation — has not budged. Trump has also talked repeatedly about making Canada a part of the United States, saying that “Canada would be much better off being the 51^st state” and that it is “not viable as a country.” He even repeatedly called Carney’s predecessor “governor” as a taunt.

Carney in effect said “enough.” He argued last year that Canada could no longer count on the United States. Trump’s comments about annexing Canada, he stated, “are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.” Moreover, he told his fellow Canadians that their country was entering a new era: “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves.”

Carney has characterized Trump as a threat to peace, order, and prosperity. At Davos in January, Carney spoke about Trump’s threats to take Greenland by force. He said that in the past, “American hegemony helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” But now, he argued, “This bargain no longer works … great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” Saying that “the rules-based order is fading,” he maintained that the only honest assessment is to acknowledge that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” It was time to abandon hope that countries could “go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.”

Carney’s understanding of Canada’s relationship with the United States informed the latest round of trade negotiations between the two countries, which ended without an agreement as talks broke down on August 18. The on-again, off-again tariffs that the United States had imposed since Trump returned to office had been the subject of months of negotiations. An especially intense three days of talks took place in response to the U.S. imposition in July of 50 percent tariffs on several Canadian goods. It had appeared that a deal would be struck. However, in the end, Carney told his team to suspend the negotiations. He identified two major issues to which he said he could not agree, as they amounted to undermining Canadian sovereignty.

One issue had to do with the French language. Canadian law requires French-only product labeling for goods imported to Quebec, as well as online media and tech companies to promote Canadian content, including French language programming in particular. The United States wanted an exemption from these requirements. Carney responded that this demand was an unacceptable threat to the French language and the culture of Quebec. A second issue was seen as an even greater challenge to Canada’s sovereignty. The Canadian team accused the United States of introducing a demand late in the negotiations that would allow the United States “to be able to review and potentially dictate the terms for Canada’s trade agreements with other countries.” These were seen as going too far, prompting the prime minister to proclaim that he would protect Canada’s culture and would never compromise Canada’s sovereignty: “The attitude, at the negotiation table, that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States … that’s not something we’re going to accept.”

“Unfriending” One’s Friends

The relationship between the United States and Canada has been close and friendly for more than 150 years. The two countries have the longest undefended border in the world. They have shared common interests in advancing liberal democracy, maintaining open trade, and partnering in mutual defense as part of the NATO alliance.

Recent developments serve as another chapter in the story of the American retreat from its post-World War II global leadership role and speak to the larger disengagement from, and even hostility toward, the community of nations to which the United States has bound itself for decades. Trump’s America is not simply redefining its relationships with its friends, allies, and trading partners; it is actively breaking them.

The importance of the United States to the global order can be seen in the reactions to Trump and the U.S. government since January 2025. Seemingly daily, Trump has said, proposed, threatened, or actually done something — tariffs, ending foreign aid programs, picking a fight with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin, seeking to revive the Monroe Doctrine, longing for Greenland and Canada, withdrawing from international agreements and organizations, ousting the leader of Venezuela, and waging war against Iran — that sparked a substantial global reaction. There has been no shortage of commentary and analysis (including mine) discussing some way in which Trump is destroying so much of what the United States and the world have built over the past 80 years.

This is because the United States has long held global political, economic, military, and institutional influence and power. No other country has rivaled the United States in possessing and exercising such capability. Even though numerous countries may have wanted to ignore Trump’s utterances and policies, the very turbulence of his tenure has illuminated the dilemma others face: America’s centrality meant that Trump couldn’t be ignored.

But things are changing. U.S. significance is being diminished. NATO’s European members are putting up more money to supply Ukraine, U.S. foreign aid to developing countries is slowly being replaced, China’s trade with the world is growing, energy markets are responding to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and keeping oil and natural gas prices lower than expected. The world is learning how to get along without a vast U.S. role and presence. Moreover, there is widespread recognition around the world of U.S. failures in Iran, growing familiarity with Trump and the realization that it’s possible to disregard what this White House says, hightened realization that the United States cannot be counted on to make a credible commitment, and a willingness to follow through with the type of disengagement Canada is undertaking. All this speaks to a greater ability and disposition to build a post-American order.

Getting to “There” from “Here”

It is unclear what this emerging order will look like. Maybe it will involve a dominant China exercising its own global leadership or dominance. It could involve a multipolar world with one pole being a European-based liberal democratic community. Maybe the United States will have more resilience and standing than appears possible in the middle of the Trump presidency. Or perhaps there will be further descent into upheaval and conflict reminiscent of the 1930s.

No matter what unfolds, there is no going back to the way things were. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028 and seeks to rebuild what has been lost domestically and overseas, turning the U.S. government and U.S. foreign policy toward something more normal and reasonable, it will not be enough. The United States will find that other nations cannot or will not count on it as fully as they have in the past, and this will be true for a long time. Trust is easy to destroy and hard to rebuild.

Nonetheless, the United States can again be part of building a secure relationship among a community of nations with shared interests. It has done so in the past and can again. As President Bill Clinton once said, “there’s nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what’s right with America.”

David Bernell is a professor in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University. He is coauthor of the Substack newsletters Defending Democracy, and Barrels to Batteries. He is also author of the books Constructing US Foreign Policy: The Curious Case of Cuba, and The Energy Security Dilemma.

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Trump delusionally “ordered” Lake Ontario to be renamed “Lake America,” in another cringeworthy temper tantrum amidst a self-defeating trade war with Canada. In addition, his lame effort to order an end run around a judge’s order barring him from slapping his name on the Kennedy Center — with lawyers threatening to tear down the historic institution unless he gets his way on renovations and a two-year closure — earned him a court tongue-lashing on Thursday, forcing him to put off its planned September 8 defacement (trying to rename the plaza adjoining the building). And Trump’s latest, desperate effort to inject confusion into midterm voting was thwarted on Thursday, thanks to the order of U.S. Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts, who “once again temporarily prohibited the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out a plan to restrict mail-in voting… [that] appeared to overstep its legal mandate and could spark chaos by changing rules fewer than 70 days before an election.”

And, to the amazement of experienced political consultants in both parties, Trump’s minions continue to freak out over Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff’s innocuous barb aimed at Trump babysitter hanger-on and obsessive fan Natalie Harp, thereby reinforcing his persona as a decrepit, needy has-been.

“Their relationship appears enmeshed and pathological,” observed former George W. Bush White House adviser Pete Wehner. “The information she passes along to him is unvetted, unfiltered, and highly warped and unreliable.” Aside from the creepiness, “She is further distorting the world for a man who, with every passing year, is detaching more and more from reality. His world is narrowing to a pinhole.” His courtiers’ over-the-top defense only confirms Trump is emotionally enfeebled.

As political and court defeats pile up, Trump becomes more unhinged and desperate to boost his public image. With his approval ratings sinking, he demanded his aides whip up “a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests.” You can practically hear Democrats guffaw, ‘Oh, really!?’ They could not be more delighted that Trump intends to saddle his party with constant reminders of a record that an overwhelming percentage of Americans (including crucial independent voters and Hispanics) deeply dislike. (‘From the president who brought you a war you didn’t want, more expensive healthcare, dangerous lettuce, and…’)

The New York Times sums up how Trump risks becoming a “liability” for his party, and the Democrats’ response:

He has urged supporters to “pretend” he is on the ballot and suggested he will spend significant campaign cash reserves.

Democrats are just as eager for him to play a starring role. Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, argued that congressional Republicans had been boxed in by the president and rendered little more than a rubber stamp for his agenda.

“Donald Trump controls the Republican caucus in Congress like a bunch of trained seals,” Mr. Raskin said . . . . “This is essentially what the November elections are about.”

Well, if Trump insists, let’s all pretend he is on the ballot! Democrats are practically gleeful, ready to pounce with more mockery and sharp humor, which in turn will likely provoke even more hysterical responses from Trump and his supporters.

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The horror show for Republicans is just getting underway. Trump’s planned unprecedented midterm convention on the eve of 9/11 (!) has all the makings of another bust. “Republicans are privately questioning if it strikes the right tone amid the electorate’s tightening budgets — and the wisdom of diverting candidates from their districts just weeks out from Election Day,” CNN reports. “Further compounding concerns: expensive entrance fees for lawmakers, competing events like the start of the NFL season and 9/11 commemorations, and some state parties struggling to drum up enthusiasm with their members.”

“[T]here’s the overarching fear — that an event once dubbed ‘Trumpapalooza’ will indeed end up being far more about promoting the president than the candidates who are actually on the ballot,” CNN observes.

Some of this would be amusing — especially for Democrats who stand to benefit from the spasm of self-inflicted injuries — if not for the power that the president of the United States wields. Taken together, incidents of this sort (plus Trump’s vindictive threats against the wrongly accused “vandals” of the reflecting pool, firings of Stars & Stripes journalists, a bizarre vow to deploy the military against the bond market, and nonstop touting of imaginary positive polls) underscore Trump’s delusional isolation from reality.

The nonstop stream of ostensibly “small,” petty, and entirely politically daft outbursts reminds us that an emotionally unstable, decaying figure atop the only global superpower (though that status has become a subject of increasing debate) poses enormous risks for the U.S. and the rest of the world. It’s not the laughable midterm ad campaign that should keep us up at night, but the realization that someone so obviously off his rocker is making life-and-death decisions about war and peace, blowing up trillions in market value and family wealth, deporting hundreds of thousands of hard-working migrants, and striving to bollix up the smooth operation of the upcoming midterm elections.

Now is no time for legacy media sanewashing of Trump nor for Democrats to underplay the urgency of the moment. Trump’s danger to the republic has never been greater, nor has MAGA Republicans’ cowardly refusal to grab the wheel and protect the country been more dispiriting.

It is up to voters to deliver an unequivocal, overwhelming defeat to this MAGA cult of personality. Only then would Congress be able to recover its constitutional role, implement real checks on his mad reign of terror, and devise a plan for holding accountable those who have driven the country into a ditch.

But, in the meantime, more Trump self-reverential ads please!

Those cases and our over 300 other legal matters at Democracy Defenders Fund and Action are helping light the way, thanks to you. That’s because your paid subscriptions help fund my and my pro-democracy colleagues’ fights in the courts of law. Those paid subscriptions also support our award-winning Contrarian journalism in the court of public opinion. If you are not a paid subscriber, we welcome you to become one at only $7 a month and power our fight in both those courts.

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As I told Peter Baker for his top-of-the fold New York Times story pointing to our work, defiance is rising. There has been a decided thaw in the climate of fear of Trump over the past year and a half. To be sure, a minority of dissenters stood strong from the get go: independent media like The Contrarian, civil society groups such as Democracy Defenders and our numerous allies, the labor movement and other clients we have represented, state attorneys general who we have litigated with, the lower federal courts who answered the call, Never Trump conservative leaders, and others.

But in the first year of Trump’s return, that felt like the exception, not the rule. No longer. As we and our allies have won more and more and Trump has lost again and again, things have changed. Recent weeks have been an inflection point.

Just look at our docket this week alone. It kicked off on Monday with breaking news about one of the landmark First Amendment wins of the Trump era. Representing Attiah, a star journalist, we challenged the Washington Post’s attempt to characterize her commentary as a journalist and opinion editor as “gross misconduct.” An independent arbitrator ruled that Attiah was wrongly terminated and ordered that she be reinstated at the Post with full back pay.

You can’t have an authoritarian like Trump without enablers like Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and the shameful act of anticipatory obedience represented by firing her in cowardice because she dared tackle the complexity surrounding the heinous killing of Charlie Kirk, daring to talk about how wrong that was but also who he was and the gun violence crisis in our country and who is responsible for it. To Baker’s point, Attiah was defiant, and so were we in representing her with her union, the Washington Post Newspaper Guild — and the arbitrator certainly called it as she saw it.

Building on that First Amendment win, this week we filed a lawsuit on behalf of Stars and Stripes journalists to stop the Department of Defense from unlawfully firing them. These journalists were simply defending the independence of this storied military newspaper and insisting that it remain free from political influence, particularly in the wake of Pentagon pressure to punish those responsible for reporting on conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth is among Trump’s worst enablers in the Cabinet (which is really saying something), and our journalist clients are standing up to that. We are proud to represent them alongside our incredible partners at Lawyers for Good Government, the Government Accountability Project, and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.

Speaking of defiance in the face of Trump’s enablers, this was another big week in your and our fight to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. When we started our incredible, over-5,000-strong Block the Merger coalition, the mega mashup was viewed as a done deal even though it could cost over 15,000 jobs and threatens the First Amendment, media pluralism, and democracy itself. Then coalition helped build the momentum for state attorney generals to sue. And now we are supporting them in holding firm in enforcing antitrust law, going to trial, and winning structural remedies.

We were grateful to the leader of the AG’s group, Rob Bonta of California, for standing up to what he described as Paramount’s “leaking and lying” about settlement discussions that were supposed to start this past Monday, shutting them down because of those shenanigans, and hanging tough. To back him up, our Block the Merger coalition launched a major new “No Concessions“ campaign to thank and support him and the other 11 AGs who are suing. No unenforceable settlements will do.

Another example of unequivocally rejecting illegality is our work in the Kennedy Center case on behalf of our heroic client, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), with our Democracy Defenders and Washington Litigation Group colleagues. As we explained last week, the Kennedy Center board jammed through a proposal to put Trump’s name back on the facade, adding “Restored and Renovated by Donald J. Trump” to the name of the building and renaming the grounds the Donald J. Trump Plaza — in defiance of the court’s order — and said it was going to start implementing this plan on September 8.

Then this week, Trump threatened to literally demolish the Kennedy Center if he can’t get his way. It’s more like a mob threat than a legitimate legal argument — and though it’s supremely childish, it’s also just the latest thuggish maneuver we’ve seen from Trump’s government.

We immediately raced to court, requesting an emergency hearing and an injunction to stop Trump before he could do more damage. That emergency hearing on Thursday was a doozy. Before the hearing, word traveled through the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — whose wife is on the board of the Kennedy Center — would attend the hearing and talk to the press. Though one would think the Commerce Secretary would be busy trying to salvage his collapsing trade talks with Canada, he apparently instead was more focused on boosting the president’s ego. And sure enough, Lutnick sat in the first row of the gallery behind the government.

But the real action began moments later, when the hearing began. The judge immediately indicated the first of many issues he had with the government: Why is the administration insisting on taking action on September 8? What’s the rush? The government had no answer. After our further prodding, the government finally conceded and filed notice right after the hearing ended that it would push back implementing its plan for at least another month — a crucial win to stop the government from wrecking the Kennedy Center before the court has a chance to rule.

The pummeling didn’t stop there. The judge continued hammering away, stopping the government lawyers in their tracks as they tried to pontificate about the dire straits of the Kennedy Center and the wonders of the president’s special powers. With a look of polite annoyance, Judge Christopher Cooper pointed out that this argument, which also took up pages of the government’s brief, had nothing to do with the question at hand: what Congress intended in the statutes governing the Kennedy Center.

When the government finally turned to the substance, Cooper appeared to find those arguments equally wanting. The Justice Department argued that it could name the plaza after Trump because that wasn’t technically part of the Kennedy Center (literally the building itself), so it didn’t violate the law expressly stating that the center is a memorial for President John F. Kennedy only. But Cooper asked if, under that theory, would it be legal for every sliver of the Kennedy Center complex to be named after other presidents or donors — a Barack Obama parking garage, a George W. Bush campus. As Cooper said, “The whole thing would be for sale, basically.” The government didn’t disagree.

That colloquy gave away the whole game. If a memorial center designed to commemorate one president is surrounded, on its own complex, by scores of parcels named after other people — including donors — that would necessarily dilute the tribute to Kennedy, contrary to Congress’s statutory mandate.

And on and on it went. One of Cooper’s sharp questions even drew laughs from the gallery, when he pointed out that if there is a fund named the “Trump Kennedy Center Fund” — another bone of contention, which we are challenging — that surely implies that there is something called the “Trump Kennedy Center,” which would seemingly be a direct violation of his earlier ruling. The government faltered yet again in providing a reasonable answer.

With the government’s concession that it will leave well enough alone in September, the judge will have time to digest our arguments and emerge with a carefully reasoned decision. We are confident that we will ultimately prevail, just as we did last time.

These victories, Contrarians, are yours — powered by your paid subscriptions. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we hope you will consider becoming one to support these legal matters and cases and the excellent journalism at the Contrarian, including the best from this week, as shown below.

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March on Washington 2026

We Marched for Freedom in 1963. In 2026, the Job Still Isn’t Finished.

To mark Friday’s March on Washington, Tianna Mays and Diamond Brown wrote on how the inequities driving the 1963 March on Washington are all too present today. “Sixty-three years later, we know that progress can be reversed, rights can be stripped away, and democracy can be weakened.”

Defend the Vote. Sustain the People.

Michael Franklin considered what events like the March on Washington — past and present — say about what works in the fight for democracy and civil rights, and what (or who) is sometimes left out of the conversation. “Marches like this can create a standard we should bring to our organizing.”

The Tea ft. LaTosha Brown, Co-Founder of Black Voters Matter Fund

April Ryan spoke with Latosha Brown about what the 63rd March on Washington means, mobilizing Black voters going forward, and new reports on ICE facilities. “We have to get beyond this idea of believing that our communities are separate. Understand: we have a common enemy and we’re going to have to use our power. We have people power.”

The Contrarian Covers the Democracy Movement

This week, we have coverage of Friday’s March as well as protests in Texas, Oregon, Tennessee, and more. See marchonwashington2026.com for more on Friday’s action and what we can do next to protect voting rights, civil rights, and fight for economic justice. And see this week’s

Calls to Action for more ways to keep democracy from being a spectator sport.

Elections & Voting

Democrats Bounce Back in the Heartland

Jen Rubin gave us a report on how the Trump show is playing for MAGA candidates nationwide. “Trump can insult voters by claiming affordability is a hoax, but rural voters … know that diesel and fertilizer prices have soared, rural hospitals are closing, and tariffs have decimated farm sales.”

Annie Andrews Wants to Flip South Carolina

On the podcast this week, Tim Dickinson spoke with Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee for Senate in South Carolina, about what’s driving her run to give voters a real choice against self-proclaimed policy non-expert Darline Graham. “This election, I believe, is going to come down to two issues: affordability and healthcare.”

Atlanta Was the Only Choice for the 2028 DNC. As Usual, Democrats Blew It

Carron J. Phillips wrote on the DNC’s missed opportunity to take the 2028 convention south as evidence of the party’s “organizational incompetence” — and worse. “The Democratic Party doesn’t deserve Abrams or Black voters in the South. The continued disregard for the backbone of its voting base shows how racism has hindered Democrats’ ceiling.”

Fear Tactics, Real Violence

The Federal Agent in the Pew Is the Point

Omar H. Noureldin wrote on the systematic surveillance-as-intimidation of Minnesotan immigration activists — which included, according to newly-unveiled court filings, undercover officers posing as protesters and monitoring meetings at churches, parks, libraries, and schools. “The agent in the pew does not have to arrest anyone if everyone becomes afraid to sit down.”

Strange Fruit, Still. Still.

Shalise Manza Young gave us a searing investigation of the persistence and resurgence of a national horror. “Reportedly, at least seven Black people have been discovered hanged this calendar year; in almost all of them, local law enforcement quickly ruled them suicides before an autopsy had been performed and without any real investigation into the circumstances.”

Make America Unhealthy

Heidi Overton and the Overton Window

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf wrote on Trump’s newly-announced plan to nominate Heidi Overton as head of the Food and Drug Administration. She’s an anti-abortion, anti-gender affirming care, anti-vax anti-expert who “indicates the administration’s further normalization of gutting healthcare and drug safety.”

We’re Preparing to Send Measles Back to Kindergarten

Jeff Nesbit wrote on a back-to-school season in which classrooms nationwide will be less than immune to once-rare diseases. “Across the country, roughly 280,000 children are entering school without documentation of completing their two-dose measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) series.”

Spoiled Systems

Child Labor Violations Are On The Rise. Some States Are Making It Worse.

Veronica Goodman wrote on the alarming, yet unsurprising, lax enforcement of child labor laws under the Trump administration — and how some states are responding better than others. “Between 2016 and 2025, the number of child labor violations spiked by 54 percent.”

Latinos Back Efforts to Block the Paramount-Warner Merger

Roman Palomares and Juan Proaño of LULAC wrote on how Latino and Hispanic communities — nearly 49 percent of Los Angeles — will disproportionately bear the consequences

of the proposed Paramount-Warner merger. “Every studio absorbed by a rival is one fewer buyer for a script, one fewer employer for a crew, and one fewer distributor willing to bet on a story its franchise slate does not need.”

The Trump Administration’s March to the Spoils System

Max Stier wrote on the White House’s efforts to dismantle the merit-based, nonpartisan system that has long managed the nation’s 2 million civil servants — subjecting us all to “diminished public services, weaker oversight, the likelihood of increased corruption, and a less effective and responsive government.”

Cartoons, Culture, & Fun Stuff

This week, our cartoonists took on what no one asked for (Ballroom Dancing, Michael de Adder; What Are You Getting in Trump’s America?, Nick Anderson), what anyone could have predicted (Economic D-Day, Nick Anderson; Aim, Misfire, Ready, Michael de Adder; Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling), and what everyone mourned (A Life of Many Colors, Michael de Adder; ‘Light of a Clear Blue Morning’, RJ Matson).

Dolly Parton’s Greatest Legacy Was Her Giving

Meredith Blake remembered the country music icon through her lifelong dedication to using her wealth and status to make the world a better place, including donating over 300 million books to children, funding life-saving vaccines, uplifting LGBT activism, and much more. See also Meredith’s piece from October on the one American hero we can all agree on: We Will Always Love You, Dolly Parton.

Culture Clash

Media Center

Monday, 9:15am ET: Norm and Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward

Join HERE

They talked about the bigger meaning of Friday’s March on Washington, the importance of mobilizing Black voters ahead of the midterms, and why the battle for economic and racial justice are intertwined.

You can join The Tea with April Ryan, live every Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30pm ET.

More than two months behind schedule, Sean Duffy’s scandal-plagued reality series finally arrived on YouTube last week.

The Great American Road Trip follows the transportation secretary, his wife, Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, their nine kids, and their son-in-law, House candidate Michael Alfonso, as they travel to destinations like Yellowstone National Park and Independence Hall. It is partially inspired by Road Rules, the MTV reality series on which the Duffys met, and was even made by the same company, Bunim/Murray Productions.

When Duffy started publicizing the series this spring, he described it as a patriotic travelogue designed to boost domestic tourism ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. “To love America is to see America,” he said on Fox News. “And there’s so much to see in this beautiful country.”

Few would dispute such a claim.

More troubling, however, is that Duffy filmed the show while employed as the nation’s transportation secretary, and that his large family’s vacations were paid for by sponsors including Toyota, Shell, Boeing, and Royal Caribbean. These companies, regulated by the very federal agency he is still, in theory, running, paid up to $1 million for placement in the series.

Ethically speaking, it was a complete disaster — the kind of scandal that, in ordinary, pre-Trump times, would have instantly torpedoed Duffy’s political career. The Real World alum responded with the defensive bluster he has been honing since his MTV days, telling the supposedly “miserable” critics of the show to stop complaining and teach their kids “civics & patriotism.”

The backlash was followed by a mysterious delay. The show was supposed to premiere in mid-June, but as celebrations for the 250th came and went, The Great American Road Trip was nowhere to be found. By the time the series finally landed in late August, kids were already back in school in most of the country — making it hard for an average American parent to throw them into the car and hit the open road.

The Great American Road Trip is not, as Duffy promised, an advertisement for the United States and its natural beauty, rich history, or tourism industry (which could surely use a boost right now). Instead, it’s a tedious, self-absorbed showcase for the extended Duffy clan, who evidently believe that reality TV stardom is their birthright.

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Produced by Bunim/Murray Productions, the company behind The Real World and a slew of other reality TV hits, the show is the unscripted equivalent of a hacky network sitcom about a tightly-wound dad, his feisty wife, and their large brood of boisterous children. In this series, the United States is — at most — a supporting player to the Duffy family.

Over the course of six episodes, the Duffys spend as much time visiting family landmarks — like the converted Boston firehouse where Sean lived while filming The Real World or the chapel in Arizona where Rachel and Sean got married — as they do visiting actual tourist destinations like the Grand Canyon.

Even if you have the capacity to watch the entire series without suffering a rage stroke in the process, you will learn virtually nothing about American history or the many wonders this country has to offer. You will, however, learn more than you ever wanted to know about the Duffy kids, their bowel movements, their college plans, and their Sweet Sixteen party preparations. You will hear the Duffys talk extensively about their Catholic faith. And you will watch them pray over deep-fried food in at least three different states.

The Great American Road Trip is somehow worse than what it appeared to be in the trailer. Not only is it an ethical dumpster fire riddled with conflicts of interest, it’s also a brazen attempt to launch the next generation of Duffys into careers in reality TV, right-wing media, and MAGA politics (like their parents).

Most fatally of all, it’s operating from the assumption that the Duffys are somehow interesting, eccentric, or telegenic enough to sustain several hours’ worth of screen time. If only! The Osbournes, they are not. (The most-watched episode has racked up a measly 22,000 views.)

Below I’ve compiled five of the show’s worst moments — and one noteworthy omission.

Disclaimers

Each episode opens with a carefully worded legal disclaimer noting that “no taxpayer dollars were spent for the participation of Secretary Duffy’s family,” and that production costs were covered by a non-profit funded by corporate sponsors (whose logos appear at the end of each video). I’d check the comments to see how all this legalese is going over with the public — but I cannot, as the comments are disabled!

Adventures in constipation

Easily the most ridiculous episode of GART is the one where the family visits Yellowstone. There’s roughly one minute in total about bison and the history of the park. Then we get 29 minutes devoted to the Duffy family’s various medical adventures. Evita, the eldest Duffy child (who is pregnant), gets a traveling tech to do an ultrasound in her hotel room so she can do a gender reveal while on vacation with her family — an extravagance few people outside of reality TV could afford. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Patrick is rushed to the emergency room, 90 minutes away from the crew, because this is rural Montana — with what appears to be appendicitis but turns out to be…severe constipation. (See clip above.)

A show about a kid who really needs to eat more fiber: what a tribute to America!

“The Harvards of the World”

The series follows a season-long arc about seventeen-year-old daughter Paloma and her college application process. In clips that have been making the rounds on social media, Duffy warns his daughter about going to Harvard (even though she hasn’t even been accepted). “They have professionalized figuring out how they can take good, young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds,” he says, as ominous music plays in the background.

This conversation sets up the episode when the family travels to Boston, where they visit the house that Sean lived in when he was on The Real World nearly 30 years ago, catch up with his co-star Montana McGlynn, tour some colleges, and meet with a priest who assures them that Harvard — which, again, Paloma has not gotten into — is not a godless cesspool.

Brought to you by Boeing!

The first few episodes of GART are relatively light on product placement, but in the back half of the season the corporate shilling goes into overdrive. A trip to South Carolina includes a visit to a Boeing facility to “marvel at American ingenuity and innovation,” and presumably not ask any questions about the 737 Max. Later on in Texas, Duffy checks out an asphalt and concrete plant operated by CRH (yet another sponsor) which is somehow even less entertaining than it sounds.

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Kids on camera

I gasped out loud in the first episode when — TRIGGER WARNING — Duffy playfully swats his wife’s behind after they’re done praying and putting the kids to bed. It’s a pretty obvious attempt to show that they’re still hot for each other after decades of marriage, an attraction that can’t be dimmed by the daily grind of work or child-rearing. It’s gross, to be sure, but playing it up for the cameras is what this couple has done for 30 years.

Their kids, however, shouldn’t have to be a part of the performance.

Ultimately, the most morally reprehensible part of GART is the way that the Duffys put their minor children on camera — violating their privacy, exposing them to public scrutiny, and sharing potentially embarrassing personal information with the entire world, all in the name of creating “content” to boost the family’s visibility. Kids — especially kids like the youngest Duffy, Valentina, who is six years old and has Down Syndrome — cannot meaningfully consent to participating in reality TV (or its even more sinister twin, the family vlog).

There are countless examples of children who grew up on reality TV or became underage YouTube influencers — with disastrous results. This tends to be true even, maybe especially, when the family purports to be wholesome while using reality TV to advance a conservative political and religious agenda, as the Duggars did for decades and the Duffys are doing now.

Whither Royal Caribbean?

There is at least one sponsor conspicuously absent from the final version of the series. The trailer released in May shows the Duffy family frolicking on board Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world (which, according to Gary Shteyngart, resembles Istanbul “had it been designed by idiots.”) But these scenes don’t appear anywhere in the episodes posted on YouTube. Maybe producers decided it would be too tone-deaf to show a cabinet member and his family enjoying a free vacation on an obscenely gargantuan, gas-guzzling cruise ship at a time when people can’t afford basic groceries — much less safely eat them? Who knows! But given how much can go wrong on cruise ships, I am glad we were spared the possibility of a “Dad-comes-down-with-norovirus” storyline.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.