DOHA, QATAR — On a sunny morning in April, the airy lobby of the outpatient clinic at the hospital is buzzing with patients arriving for their appointments. In the midst of all the activity, a nondescript man wearing a navy tracksuit pushes a little girl with pink glasses in a small wheelchair. She sports two pigtails secured with Hello Kitty hair ties and a fuzzy jacket, also pink — the requisite color “for girls,” she later says in English she learned from the Cocomelon YouTube channel, her favorite.

Outside Sidra Medicine, the sun bears down on a line of bronze sculptures depicting a human fetus at various stages of development. The installation, which the artist Damien Hirst named “The Miraculous Journey,” presents an impressive introduction to the hospital, a glassy Cesar Pelli-designed building in the Education City area of Doha. The medical and research facility is one of the only places six-year-old Ifat and her father, Najeebullah Nasiri, have seen since they arrived in Qatar’s capital over a year ago after fleeing Afghanistan. They are only allowed to leave the U.S.-run army base in Doha where they’ve been living to attend hospital appointments.

Ifat is in a bright mood, bubbling over with snippets of English phrases, extensively listing her many likes and dislikes: cats, yes; dogs, no. Her little sister, Surwat, yes; if Ifat is given a lollipop, she wants a second to take home for Surwat. But also, no, because Surwat is too “noisy.” America, yes, because it means living in her own house, sleeping on a Hello Kitty bed, and going to school. But Qatar, no. Qatar does not have a school she can go to. It’s where she has been living but it’s not home.

On this white-hot Thursday, Ifat is at Sidra for occupational therapy. After undergoing three surgeries to separate fingers that have fused together, she needs to exercise her fine motor skills to combat the stiffness in her hands, so her therapist guides her as she stacks colorful, hollow blocks over a wooden stick. The trouble with her hands is among the many complications of Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare genetic disorder that blisters skin so severely that the resulting lesions can resemble third degree burns. In Ifat’s serious case, the fragility extends to internal membranes like the throat lining, and makes it impossible to eat solid food. Her corneas also become dry and inflamed, which has happened over a dozen times since she’s lived in Qatar. On such days, her eyes barely open and she is a shell of herself, her father, Najeeb, says.

After the appointment, in the sitting area across from the hospital café, Najeeb fans out medical reports to demonstrate his daughter’s long history of care, which before the pandemic — and before they fled Afghanistan — included visits to India and Pakistan for treatment. One recent report from Sidra notes that Ifat runs the risk of developing skin cancer later in life, or other complications if her disease and symptoms are not properly managed in a clean environment — no easy task in the tiny dorm room they now call home. To occupy his daughter, Najeeb hands her his phone, but she shoves it back initially, chiding him in a stream of Dari for not having the right app open. The error duly corrected, the videos start streaming, and she watches, rapt — giggling at the screen in spurts, occasionally peppering her dad with questions he answers in soft monosyllables.

“This waiting is the main thing that is difficult … with a sick child in this [120] degrees hot weather in Qatar,” Najeeb says.

Two years after the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the world has turned its gaze toward other global catastrophes — new wars, fresh threats to democracy, rising inflation. In the United States, even if individual members of Congress continue to express concerns about the fate of Afghans still waiting to be resettled, the legislative body as a whole seems to have moved on. But for those Afghans in the pipeline, the bureaucracy grinds on haltingly, bewildering and traumatizing in the name of process.

When Najeeb and his wife, Atefa, escaped Kabul with their two children in April 2022, they believed that they would be processed for resettlement to America quickly. After all, Najeeb had been working for the U.S. Embassy when it shuttered in August 2021. Plus, their little girl’s sensitive health situation, they reasoned, was sure to put them on a fast track. They were manifested for a U.S.-run evacuation flight to Qatar in April, 2022, which seemed a positive sign for their hopes of resettling in America. In Doha, an expedited processing site for Afghan refugees, their case would surely move forward quickly.

But spring turned into a summer of anxious waiting and watching, and summer to winter. Now, as the family faces another winter in limbo in their cramped, shipping container-like room at the Camp As Sayliyah army base, the door to America appears to close on them. (The State Department did not respond to specific questions about the Nasiri case, citing confidentiality of visa records.)

What makes it worse, Najeeb says, is to log their indefinite wait time in units of his little girl’s daily suffering — trapped in the monotony of drab, bad days. Watching Ifat pray for her ticket to America has been excruciating. “Why she’s saying ‘America, America’ — because everyone is talking in the base about going to America,” Najeeb says in imperfect but clearly discernible English. “This type of thinking … obviously, I don't like. I try to busy her because it gets more difficult for us every time she is asking to go to America.”

The Special Immigrant Visa, which allows Afghans and Iraqis who served the U.S. military or mission during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to move to the U.S., has its roots in the 2006 defense budget law, and was formalized in 2009. While the program has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, it was among the many casualties of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. Amid bans on immigrants from Muslim countries and extreme vetting that can stretch on for years, the SIV backlog grew — and SIV interviews for applicants in Afghanistan slowed to a trickle. They resumed in February 2021, weeks before President Joe Biden announced plans to withdraw all American troops from the country. The State Department boosted consular processing capacity to Kabul in the months that followed; the first SIV evacuation flight left in July of that year.

Najeeb worked as a financial assistant for the diplomatic security force employed by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul between March 27, 2020, and Aug. 14, 2021, according to a letter his employer at the federal contractor GardaWorld sent to the Department of State. Having seen acquaintances languish with the yearslong SIV processing backlog, he was initially skeptical of the utility of applying when the U.S. announced plans to withdraw. Plus, he hadn’t seriously considered that his family would have to leave their home behind.

But something happened on Aug. 15, 2021, that made the prospect of leaving their home not just real — but imminent. The Taliban captured Kabul. The U.S. suspended relocation flights for SIV applicants and also disbanded its relocation task force. The Americans “lost control of the gates and wall” of Camp Alvarado at the Kabul International Airport, according to a June State Department Office of Inspector General report, and moved its consular operations to a safer location within the airport.

Three days later, Najeeb went to the Kabul International Airport to see if he could get his family on one of the outgoing flights. He saw there a mad rush — people shoving each other to get a spot on the plane. Over the cloud of panic, the Taliban fired gunshots into the air to force order, but all that did was sow further fear. Najeeb couldn’t even get near the departure area. But even if he had, he knew it would be impossible for Ifat to travel safely under such conditions. Surwat, too, was less than a year old at that time. So Najeeb and his family stayed behind and recalibrated their exit strategy.

But things continued to deteriorate. Reuters reported on Aug. 22 that seven people were killed in the airport crowd crush. The threats only escalated after that: A suicide bomber attacked the airport resulting in the deaths of 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. military personnel on Aug. 26. The U.S. retaliated with a drone strike three days later, killing 10 civilians. A State Department review of the withdrawal later found “insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios.”

On Aug. 31, the U.S. suspended all consular operations in Kabul as a security measure and moved some operations to the embassy in Doha, Qatar. Still, the U.S. secretary of State announced that 123,000 people had been successfully evacuated by the end of that month. This included almost 37,000 Afghans who were applicants for the SIV visa. In October, the disbanded evacuation task force was revamped as the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts. Flights from Afghanistan to Qatar resumed and started sending SIV beneficiaries and applicants to Doha for further processing “with the cooperation of the Taliban,” per the OIG report.

Before the Taliban took over, Najeeb says, he and his family enjoyed a wonderful life. They lived in an apartment on the same block as his parents and felt financially comfortable. They spent weekends visiting friends and relatives nearby, sitting in their yards and chatting for hours. Some days, they took the girls out to parks, arcades, restaurants, shopping centers. Atefa would put on a smart salwar-kameez, wrap a matching chador around her head and wear bright lipstick. The parents would take photos of the girls sitting riding toy horses, in ball pits, on park benches. They were happy, Najeeb says — save for the fact that the medical care Ifat needed was not available in Afghanistan.

When Ifat was born, her hands and legs were raw “like red meat,” Najeeb remembers, but doctors in Kabul couldn’t seem to figure out why. So Najeeb took her to India, where at just 21 days old, she was diagnosed with EB. Kids born with this genetic abnormality are sometimes deemed “butterfly children,” because their skins are fragile like the wings of butterflies. Living with EB, or caring for a loved one who has it, is a daily ordeal. Wounds have to be properly bathed and bandaged — a task that is physically excruciating for the children and mentally torturous for the caregivers. The immense emotional cost and social isolation associated with EB is well-documented. Ifat’s condition is particularly serious. To get appropriate care for her, the Nasiri family made multiple trips to India and Pakistan before the pandemic. Even on these rather grim excursions, the parents would try to show Ifat, and later her little sister, the local tourist spots and treat them to milkshakes and fries at McDonald's. They sometimes thought how much easier it would be to live in a place where medical care for Ifat was readily available, but they weren’t sure how to leave their home.

Once the Taliban took over, it became too unsafe for them to stay. Worried, Najeeb spoke to his employers, who told him they would give him documents so he could file an SIV application. His company had liaised with the State Department regarding many at-risk employees and assured Najeeb that his young family, too, was on the evacuation list. This was vital — because of Najeeb's U.S. government job, his family was a potential target for the Taliban. But waiting for the proper documents to even apply for an SIV took longer than expected.

Sourcing employment verification documentation had always been a burdensome part of the multi-step SIV application process — and only became more so after the U.S. withdrawal. If HR departments dissolved or supervisors died, moved on, or, say, were kidnapped by insurgents, the process could come to a standstill. And even after applicants filed, they were likely to run into delays. In 2018, Iraqis and Afghans sued after being made to wait much longer than the Congress-mandated nine months to have their applications processed — sometimes for years — which, they argued, kept them in constant, imminent danger. The class of plaintiffs waited, on average, 2.5 years just for the first stage, the Chief of Mission approval, and another five, for the final decision.

“It all sounds very formal and legalistic,” says Adam Bates, supervisory policy counsel at the International Refugee Assistance Project, which represented SIV applicants in the lawsuit. “But this process is a lot more like spending eight years at the DMV than a formal legal proceeding.”

The State Department said that as of April 2023, SIV applicants are being relocated to Albania from Afghanistan for expedited processing and that automation has helped speed things along. In its report for the second quarter of this year, the department noted an average processing time of 270 days, or just under nine months, for SIV processing, but the OIG has since criticized the department’s quarterly tallies as “inconsistent and potentially flawed.”

That same OIG review, released this August, found that despite attempts to increase staffing and automate communications, 840,000 SIV visa applicants and their family members remained in Afghanistan as of April this year. “Without additional dedicated resources to address the situation, the backlog in SIV applications will remain a significant challenge,” the watchdog agency concluded.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t until March 2022, eight months after the Taliban takeover, that Najeeb was finally able to file for the SIV. Since he already had a visa for Pakistan that was soon expiring, and because the U.S. was intermittently running flights to and out of the neighboring country to evacuate Afghans, his employers advised him to fly there and wait. The month after he applied for his SIV, he hopped on a plane with his family for the short trip to Islamabad.

On the other side of the world, in the U.S., an Afghan evacuation-related group chat involving several nonprofits and State Department liaisons buzzed daily with new activity. One day in March 2022, an official flagged a family with a medical condition — the Nasiris — that needed some additional attention. Details of what the condition, later called a “derm issue,” entailed, were initially left vague. Task Force Nyx, a volunteer outfit that had been helping at-risk women and girls out of Afghanistan, agreed to help. The group, led by Sara Gilliam and Laura Deitz, normally does not handle many SIV cases, but they got involved because they believed the Nasiris were being prioritized and would only need help with logistics.

“We figured since they had been evacuated quickly to Pakistan, they’d be off to Qatar and then to America soon,” Deitz says. Once they learned about the severity of Ifat’s condition, the group mobilized, organizing medical records and dispatching money for requisite doctor’s check-ups, transit paperwork and a blender to mash up Ifat’s food while the family was staying at a guest house in Islamabad. Everyone was relieved that April when the Nasiris were flown from Pakistan to the U.S. base in Doha. Typically, only families who had cleared preliminary pre-travel screening and were matched with potential resettlement pathways were sent there.

(A State Department official, who declined to be identified on the record but did not give a clear reason for doing so, said that its relocation team works “to find appropriate medical care options for affected individuals,” once they learn that a family has a medically fragile case. Advocates and SIV volunteers noted that the focus a case receives can depend somewhat on individual lobbying efforts to Congress or liaising with State Department officials directly.)

Things were looking promising for the Nasiris. So the Task Force Nyx caseworkers went ahead and located clean living spaces in Michigan, medical specialists for Ifat’s treatment, and a local family with kids who had EB that could offer the Nasiris some support. “We are going to give Ifat and her sister just their dream pink-princess overload bedroom,” Gilliam, of Task Force Nyx, said in December. “There's going to be a happy ending here.”

That happy ending is proving elusive.

Camp As Sayliyah is at the far end of Doha's Industrial Area, the neighborhood that’s home to the thousands of Asian and African migrant workers who maintain Doha’s gleaming urban center 30 minutes away, traveling back and forth each day by metro or cars they rent to work for ridesharing apps. When the Nasiri family arrived there, settling into their boxy, windowless living quarters, they were grateful to be in a safer place — and happy that Doha offered better medical care for Ifat than, say, Pakistan. But they were anxious for the next leg of their journey to begin.

The Nasiris had three shots at life in America. First, the SIV track. Second, because Najeeb was atypically early in his SIV process — he had not yet obtained his Chief of Mission approval, which Afghans on the SIV track typically already have before being relocated to Qatar — the U.S. government had referred him for humanitarian parole. That’s a lever long used to authorize temporary entry into the U.S. for migrants in dire circumstances. It would not provide a permanent pathway to citizenship but would allow, at least on paper, a quick way to escape imminent danger. For Afghans, parole was rolled out as a part of Operation Allies Welcome, launched at the conclusion of the U.S. withdrawal to “support vulnerable Afghans, including those who worked alongside us in Afghanistan for the past two decades, as they safely resettle in the United States.” Simultaneously, in May, 2022, the Nasiri family was also placed on the refugee pathway, which entailed at least a 12-18 months wait time and more rigorous vetting requirements. After SIV and parole, this was their third and final shot.

Atefa, a 26-year old with a soft face and sharp eyes, says she envisions her two daughters experiencing quotidian pleasures in America that she herself could not openly enjoy growing up in Afghanistan, especially under Taliban rule: picnics in the park, going to the beach, learning to swim. Even at their very young ages, her little girls already have big ambitions. Ifat wants to be a doctor (and, sometimes, a firewoman) and the precocious Surwat, a police officer. Atefa never discourages them, she says, she wants them to develop their own ideas and interests. The young mother has plans for herself, too, apart from taking care of her family. She studied biology back home at university and would like to pursue that interest again in America. She also wants to learn how to drive. “The thought of being able to one day make it out of Qatar, go to the U.S. and live a safe and calm life,” she says, buoys her, giving her the strength to keep going. 

Najeeb is proud of his girls too. He encourages Ifat to speak confidently in public — and tells her she should never be ashamed of her condition. Perhaps it has worked too well, he jokes. His younger daughter, not yet 3, is spunky, always fighting other kids at camp if she thinks they are bothering her older sister. In America, his daughters would have a chance to be normal kids, less dependent on their parents. His wife, too, could study further and maybe even become a teacher. She is young and has the ability, says Najeeb, who is 27 himself.

“In my life I have experienced a lot of things,” he says. “I lost my studies, I lost my country, I lost my family. It’s [been] so difficult to come here ... so I want all the happiness of the world for my children, for my wife.”

But their path to America became thornier as time passed. In July, 2022, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security agency that decides on immigration benefits, denied Najeeb humanitarian parole — citing “a lack of evidence” to “establish urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons,” according to an employee not authorized to speak on the record.

This was not altogether surprising. Soon after it was announced with lofty objectives, the parole program turned into a dead-end for most Afghans. Applications sat unadjudicated for months; denials started trickling — and then pouring — in. Worried, advocates wrote letters to the Biden administration, trying to drum up concern. 

Later, internal emails and other records obtained by the American Immigration Council and IRAP revealed that the USCIS adjudicators were ill-equipped for the volume of Afghan parole applications — so they paused processing while they figured out how to proceed and quietly tweaked protocol. The agency later updated its guidance for Afghan parole, specifying requirements to prove ties to America and demonstrate targeted harm in Afghanistan. Between January 2020 and April 2022, the government only approved 114 of 44,785 Afghan applications — a mere 0.3 percent.

The agency also rejected almost half the requests to waive application fees during this time, gathering $19 million ($575 per person, which would be prohibitive for many Afghans) for applications that, in many cases, were never adjudicated, according to FOIA-ed records. In September, the Biden administration announced the end of its targeted parole program for Afghans through Operation Allies Welcome although specific parole programs for countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua remain in place. Afghans can still apply for humanitarian parole as a discretionary benefit on a general basis and those already in the country on parole were able torenew their legal status this year. Thousands of Afghan parole applications filed after the withdrawal remain pending, however.

“There is no real reason that they cannot provide [an efficient parole program] for Afghans,” says Laila Ayub of Project Anar, a community organization that provides legal services and advocacy on behalf of Afghans. “We have been kept in the dark about what is happening with these applications and rely on anecdotal evidence from our own clients and other attorneys.”

In September, 2021, the White House revised relocation efforts for Afghans under the fresh banner of Operation Enduring Welcome, now promising to prioritize those on permanent resettlement tracks — refugee relocation, SIVs and immediate family members of U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

As the Nasiri family waits for the SIV and refugee cases to be adjudicated, temperatures in Doha have risen to over 120 degrees. Their room doesn’t offer the girls much by way of entertainment — but it does have an air conditioner. The communal spaces in the hangar-like buildings where other Afghans gather for programmed entertainment or food are far from their living quarters — and often felt much hotter because of their sheer size, Najeeb says.

So during the day, the entire family remains restricted to the windowless space, outfitted with just a bed, floor mattress, a cupboard, and small shelves for storage. Sometimes, they go for walks in the middle of the night. It’s cooler then.

For Ifat, already constrained by her condition, being restricted to one room is far from ideal. She cannot nap during the daytime because her wounds itch. She screams in pain during bath time in the communal bathroom. On the good days, when she and her sister are not watching cartoons or squabbling with each other, they scribble on the walls with crayons. It is their way of expressing pent up emotions, Atefa says. But despite her parents’ best efforts, Ifat cannot escape skin infections resulting from the Qatari heat and the realities of communal living at the camp.

According to the State Department’s agreement with the government of Qatar, the U.S. is responsible for all medical care of Afghans in its custody at the As Sayliyah base. So officials at the camp coordinate with International Organization of Migration case workers to take migrants for appointments at various hospitals around the city. Depending on whether Ifat is doing well or poorly, these visits can vary from three to six a month, some to maintain adequate functioning of her eyes or hands or digestive tract; others, week-long stretches of hospitalization to treat infections and inflammation. Ifat also needs surgery to insert a feeding tube so she can get proper nutrition without hurting her digestive lining but given the family’s living conditions during their uncertain wait in Qatar, that procedure would be too tricky. 

These days, the stress and claustrophobia grind the parents down too — chipping away at their already-paltry reserves of hope. They try to protect each other from their own worries: Najeeb won’t tell his wife about the more confusing case updates, dealing with spikes of anxiety alone. Atefa tries to reassure her husband when he talks about wanting to give up and go back to Afghanistan. But she turns over and over in her mind conversations with other adults at the camp in which they offer questions and theories about why her family’s immigration case is delayed. Ifat complains that her mother does not dance with her anymore, but the pressures of this in-between life have corrupted even the purest moments of joy Atefa shares with her daughters. She no longer feels like dancing.

It doesn’t help when they see other families in the camp move on to new lives. Najeeb says he’s watched the number of families there grow from several hundred, to thousands, then back down as relocations quickened. But the Nasiris remain stuck. From time to time, the parents confide their anxieties with their caseworkers from Taskforce Nyx. The volunteers, on their end, try to approach members of Congress and prod State Department officials — but those efforts yield diminishing returns. And witnessing Ifat’s physical turmoil and her parent’s deteriorating mental health takes a toll on the volunteers as well. “One of the things I have always been mindful of in the refugee journey is that that inertia, that limbo, can, in many ways, be just as difficult — or more difficult in a different way — than the flight process,” says Gilliam from Taskforce Nyx.

“It’s compounded in their case, by having a very, very sick little girl suffering before their eyes and just feeling like no one in the outside world is listening to them — or cares.”

On Feb. 7, 2022, the family received a big blow: a Chief of Mission denial in Najeeb’s SIV case. In other words, Najeeb had failed to pass the first key hurdle in the special visa process. The notice mentioned “insufficient length of employment” as the reason, meaning they believed he had worked at the U.S. mission less than the requisite year. Letters sent to the U.S. government by GardaWorld, Najeeb’s employer, verified that his length of employment was over a year.

Denial at this level is frequent. Kim Staffieri, co-founder and executive director of the Association of Wartime Allies, has been doing case work and education around SIV for eight years. She says she has seen denial like the one Najeeb got “more times than I can stand,” including, in one case, for an applicant who had worked at the U.S. embassy for a decade. “It just makes your mind explode. How did you come to this kind of conclusion?”

The statute governing the process requires the government to explain “to the maximum extent feasible … including facts and inferences underlying the individual determination,” which means all the reasons for denying someone at this stage, says Bates, the lawyer from IRAP. Often, the denial notice will cite that “derogatory information” has surfaced about the person’s time as an employee (if that person was rightfully or wrongfully terminated, for instance); or note that the applicant is suspected of fraud. But, adds Bates, “it is not unusual for applicants to be denied for reasons that are ill-explained or incoherent.”

Since last winter, the Nasiri family has been caught in a Kafkaesque security screening process for their refugee case as well. During their interviews, the intelligence officers in Doha, likely Federal Bureau of Investigation attachés, kept bringing up Atefa’s broken cell phone, which she says was damaged when Ifat, who was watching videos on it, smashed it in a fit of rage during bath time: How was the phone really broken? Has someone smashed it on purpose? The implication was that Najeeb had broken the phone himself because he had something to hide.

Najeeb says he even offered to hand over the phone in case the interviewers wanted to fix and check it — or get permission to get it fixed himself. But that doesn’t seem to have made a difference. In one recent meeting with Atefa alone, the officers told her she could request to be relocated with just her girls. Najeeb and Atefa both insist that’s not an option. Najeeb worries that Atefa would struggle with Ifat’s special needs all on her own in a new country far from family where she doesn’t speak the language. Atefa, for her part, fears her husband will slide into depression if left in Doha alone.

“If I have a problem, solve it. If it’s not solvable, reject my case,” Najeeb says. “If I'm a criminal, please tell me that this is your problem — this is not [solvable] and you are not eligible for America.”

In May, Najeeb received an email saying, confusingly, that he was being rejected for refugee resettlement as well because his application “was previously denied.” He plunged into panic: This was his first time applying for refugee status. How could his application be “previously denied”? “It is important for me to receive clear and consistent information regarding the status of my case,” he wrote back via email. “If my case has been denied, please provide a copy of the decision letter including a reason for the denial.”

A month later, on June 4, that letter arrived. The reason for his denial? “Discretion.” “After a review of all the information concerning your case … negative factors outweigh positive factors in your case,” the document read. Applicants had no right to appeal but could request a discretionary review. The family was at a loss. “In the current conditions of Afghanistan and considering my daughter's medical condition, this judgment is not fair to us, and if the reason for my case's rejection [was] said, I could have defended myself,” Najeeb says.

A source in the U.S. Army Reserve familiar with security vetting and the SIV process, who spoke anonymously due to fear of retaliation, said it’s hard to know what kind of information would have triggered such a denial — whether it was something old or new, serious or innocuous. It could have been a communication with a suspicious person or an entity in a log of intercepted telecom communications that go back several years, the U.S. Army source said. In the past, applicants have been denied for something as simple as “the U.S. government errantly using internet translators to mistranslate people's social media posts or being within X degrees of a name of someone who pops up in a security database,” says Bates, the IRAP attorney.

“In a lot of ways security vetting is still something of a black box,” Bates adds. “People denied for security reasons are often not given any coherent explanation or detail which both makes appeals [process] something of a charade.” In 2020, Bates’ organization filed a lawsuit challenging “discretionary” denials for Iranian refugees because of beefed up refugee vetting under Trump. An IRAP report on refugee vetting practices from 2021 noted that such denials were based on “speculative concerns rather than expressly articulated security-related reasons” and allow the Homeland Security agency doing the vetting “free reign to deny refugee resettlement with little accountability.”

POLITICO first contacted the State Department officials overseeing relocation efforts at Camp As Sayliyah regarding the Nasiri family’s case in March. The officials agreed to an interview in May, on the condition that it be an off-the-record briefing followed by answers to general questions on background, without specific attribution. Throughout, the official declined to comment on the Nasiri case specifically, citing privacy and security protocols.

A copy of the written responses the officials referred to during the interview were supplied upon request on May 24. In it, the official wrote: “There are many reasons a case may be delayed, from medical to administrative processing. As we do not separate families, when one individual is delayed, the entire case becomes delayed.”

The official added that every Afghan undergoes a “rigorous and multi-layered” vetting process that involves biometric and biographic verification by multiple national security, homeland security, counterterrorism and intelligence agencies. “While we continue to improve our system for relocating and resettling Afghan allies in the United States, what won’t change is our commitment to keeping the United States safe,” the official wrote.

In June, POLITICO sent successive rounds of written follow-up questions. We received the State Department’s responses in August; the official declined to provide the number of Afghans processed at Camp As Sayliyah, again citing “privacy and security reasons.” The official added that applicants for refugee resettlement who are denied are free to “engage a lawyer at their own expense” and appeal in the case of SIV or request a review in the case of a refugee denial.

In the early, chaotic days of the evacuation, when the U.S. scrambled to get people out of Afghanistan, vetting agencies exhibited lapses in data-gathering and sharing, which right wing groups led by former President Donald Trump’s immigration adviser Stephen Miller seized on and criticized at the time. Since then, questions about the appropriate amount of vetting have dominated debates about Afghan relocation in Congress. Some, like Staffeiri of AWA, which advocates for SIV applicants, say that current security vetting protocols are meant to help protect the Afghans themselves from their persecutors — even though the bureaucrats who do the vetting sometimes end up making mistakes in the implementation.

The actual risk posed by refugees is miniscule. According to a 2019 report by the Cato Institute, a person living in the U.S. faces a 1 in 3.9 billion chance of being killed by a refugee per year, compared to, say, 1 in 4.08 million by someone holding a tourist visa.

But critics argue the U.S. government’s past record on whom it lets in is riddled with inconsistencies — even among Afghans. Applicants trusted with sensitive information in their jobs for the Defense and State Departments, such as Najeeb himself, who are then screened again pre-evacuation, can later “disappear into the SIV security for extended periods of time (or forever),” Bates says.

Meanwhile, in 2022, the Intercept also reported on the case of Hayanuddin Afghan, a former member of a CIA-backed militia, who was allowed to resettle in Philadelphia despite reports that his anti-Taliban group targeted civilians. (In fact, war criminals dating back to the World Wars were relocated to the U.S. — and even had their records scrubbed — if they agreed to provide the U.S. with intelligence.)

Disparities do appear to exist between Muslim and non-Muslim groups. A Los Angeles Times investigation recently found that 60 percent of the asylum seekers who were prosecuted at the Texas border were from Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan. Many critics also point to the treatment of Afghans fleeing the Taliban after the U.S. withdrawal with the relatively unfussy entry process afforded to Ukrainians escaping the brutal conflict with Russia, also a U.S. antagonist, in the Uniting for Ukraine program. Ukrainians could file entry applications online without having to prove their employment history, allegiance to the U.S. — or even that they were in imminent danger. They also did not have to pay fees.

“To me, the main takeaway is that [the U.S. government’s] Uniting for Ukraine is what it looks like when the U.S. government wants to say ‘yes,’” Bates says. “What the government is offering Afghans is what it looks like when the U.S. government wants to say ‘no.’”

The politicization of Muslim refugees has become so acute, advocates say, that even legislation promising additional vetting for Afghans is having trouble getting through Congress. The Afghan Adjustment Act, for example, would offer extra security checks if Congress agreed to pathways to citizenship for evacuees in the U.S. and an expansion of the SIV program. This is the “only bill that solves everyone’s problems,” says Chris Purdy of the nonprofit Human Rights First. But, as he and others point out, the legislation and certain other protections were nevertheless left out of the Omnibus spending bill last fall and keeps getting bumped this year. Even small wins, like the parole extension announced by the Biden administration, come with assurances of additional layers of screening.

“The Afghans applying for re-parole have all been subjected to vetting, then continuous vetting, now additional vetting… all due to ‘optics,’” said a USCIS source, granted anonymity to speak without fear of retaliation on the matter. “And yet, ‘We need more vetting if they are to get green cards!’”

According to Heba Gowayed, a Boston University sociologist and author of Refuge, populations fleeing conflict from Muslim-majority countries tend to be treated differently from other immigrant groups, perennially viewed through a security lens. Even if they qualify on paper through the scant available pathways, and satisfy the higher standards designated for them, they go through “immense logistical violence,” Gowayed says. For Muslim refugees and other vulnerable populations, the bureaucracy can be extremely arduous — before, during, and even after resettlement. They encounter more logjams, more hoops to jump through, more angst, and more punitive consequences.

The refugee program and other special pathways are “intended to be humanitarian, the process itself is deeply inhumane,” she adds.

The Nasiri family’s case is one among many that remain unresolved two years following the Taliban takeover — with family members, fixers and others languishing in Afghanistan and third countries for closure.

The refugee denial diminishes the Nasiri family’s prospects of moving to the U.S. But Najeeb has retained a lawyer from IRAP and filed an appeal to their SIV preliminary denial in June, which cited a contract mix-up on the employer’s end as the reason Najeeb’s term of service may have appeared “insufficient” — and provided the right contract number. In September, he also formally requested a review of his refugee denial.

If these last-ditch attempts don’t work, he and his family will have to look for refugee status elsewhere — another country where they know no one or have had no direct dealings with in the past. A State Department official said that the agency works with individuals at the Doha camp who “do not qualify” for U.S. relocation to find “alternate durable solutions.” (In the past, Afghans suspected of being security risks were sent to Kosovo, although the official says that is no longer the case.)

In June, the Nasiri family was directed by the IOM to interview with a Canadian official for possible resettlement there. If cleared, they will likely take the opportunity, Najeeb says, even though he is plagued by the wall of denials he is facing on his U.S. cases. August has been a particularly bad month. One of Ifat’s closest friends at the camp was resettled and she cried for hours. Then just a few days later, on the 29th, Najeeb took her in an ambulance to the hospital because her eyes were swollen shut again, thanks to the dry, hot air in Qatar. This time is very “bitter” for Najeeb and his wife, he says. “I want to get out of this hopeless situation.”

But, once again, he and his family find themselves being asked to do the one thing that, by now, has become unbearable: to wait.

Ali U. Ahmar, Safina Ibrahim, and Farkhunda Fazelyar helped with interview translations in Pashto and Dari for this article. 

But just a couple days later, at a NATO summit in Vilnius, member countries insisted it was only a matter of time before Ukraine would join the alliance. They even dropped the requirement for Ukraine to abide by a Membership Action Plan — NATO’s rigorous program which ensures aspiring countries meet the alliance’s military, economic and democratic standards. Zelenskyy visits the U.N. General Assembly and White House this week, bringing Ukraine’s NATO aspirations back into the news.

Pundits cast the war in Ukraine as ground zero of a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. Through its vigorous defense against Russia, they argue, Ukraine is a battle-tested soldier for democracy and thus worthy of NATO membership. Membership will, in turn, reverse the further erosion of Ukraine’s flawed democracy. Or so the argument goes.

But that argument misses an important distinction: NATO is designed to defend countries which are already democratic, but it’s wholly unequipped to promote democracy within those countries. So Ukraine’s membership in NATO, contrary to the conventional wisdom, wouldn’t bolster the cause of Ukrainian democracy.

Democracy succeeds when its principles are embraced and manifested in laws, political norms and institutions; and when it is defended by anti-corruption advocates, civil liberties and civil rights organizations, and media freedom groups. Unlike physical territory, democracy can’t be defended with defense pacts, with bombs or bullets, with missiles or minefields.

The NATO charter might require aspirants to support democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. But it fails to prevent democratic backsliding once countries join the alliance. Member countries Hungary and Turkey are prime examples. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have presided over the persecution of independent media, the silencing of dissent and the erosion of rule of law. Both have entertained closer ties with Russia amid the war in Ukraine, with Erdoğan recently meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi.

Despite their democratic backsliding, Hungary and Turkey remain members of the alliance in good standing and have even extracted concessions for stalling Sweden and Finland’s accessions to NATO. The United States might entice these increasingly illiberal allies with arms deals, but NATO is powerless to address the root cause of their obstinance. Hungary says its stonewalling of Sweden’s membership is a response to the European Union’s suspension of billions of dollars of its funds. What is the EU’s reason for the freeze? Hungary’s democratic decline.

Hungary and Turkey’s slides toward authoritarianism offers a cautionary tale for Ukraine’s membership aspirations.

A case can be made that NATO isn’t threatened by the presence of a few democratically deficient members. Contrary to the rhetoric of a grand, global struggle between democracies and autocracies, the U.S. often finds common cause with illiberal countries. The U.S. works closely with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for instance, in fighting violent extremism in the Middle East, and the Philippines hosts American military bases to help the U.S. defend its interests in Asia.

That’s a fair counterpoint, but one that opens a can of worms about the strategic logic of the transatlantic alliance structure. After all, if NATO doesn’t exist to defend democracies, what is it for? If member countries signed up to defend only other democracies, will they be less likely to keep their commitment when less democratic countries are admitted? Will countries, such as Georgia, which aspire to membership — while withstanding Russian aggression and struggling to make democratic reforms — begin to think the membership criteria is squishy or hypocritically applied?

To be sure, Ukraine has made some progress in cleaning itself up, and President Zelenskyy has been more of a reformer than some of his predecessors. News of his personnel purges regularly interrupts battlefield updates. Last summer, Zelenskyy sent waves through Ukraine when he fired his prosecutor general and the head of his security service for “grave failure to perform their duties.” More than 650 cases of treason were then opened. In January, six deputy ministers and five regional administrators were fired for corruption, and recently, Zelensky overhauled all of Ukraine’s regional military recruitment offices after the discovery of embezzlement.

Zelenskyy takes a hard-line stance against corruption, calling it out as a national scourge. But such a crusade is only necessary in an ailing political system — a system which, to some extent, implicates Zelenskyy as well.

When Western financial institutions sought independent heads atop Ukraine’s oligarch-run firms, Zelenskyy fired his cabinet for taking the initiative too far. Zelenskyy dismissed his prime minister after he clashed with media tycoon and oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky over appointments at a state-owned electrical company. Kolomoisky’s TV network had helped make Zelenskyy a famous comedian and later gave his presidential campaign preferential coverage. Kolomoisky is under U.S. sanctions, and was charged earlier this month with fraud and money laundering. Zelenksyy’s anti-corruption initiatives, whether sincere or merely performative, are clouded by his closeness to Kolomoisky, and his deference to other oligarchs.

In July, a Swiss intelligence report observed “authoritarian traits” in Zelenskyy as he tried to push Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko out of contention for Ukraine’s presidential elections in 2024. Citing martial law, Zelenskyy has since canceled the 2024 presidential election.

Consolidating democracy takes time. Before being admitted in 2020, North Macedonia participated in the Membership Action Plan for more than 20 years. Montenegro spent eight years in the program before its admittance in 2017. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia continue to grapple with fragile democracies, trying to make democratic reforms in pursuit of their membership aspirations.

Ukraine righteously battles for its territory and survival, and Zelenskyy has valiantly steered his country through devastating conflict. It’s natural that Ukraine would seek NATO membership, as it would enhance the defense of its borders.

But at what cost? Other analysts have well articulated the risks of a devastating escalation with Russia, or the threat to the American credibility when the U.S. makes security promises with thin public support. And giving Ukraine NATO membership in the short term removes a powerful incentive for it to strengthen its democracy in the longer term: namely, the promise of (eventual) NATO membership.

But there’s another risk. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has insisted that it is not an alliance arrayed against Russia but one designed to defend democracy. Admitting Ukraine while it is plagued by democratic shortcomings would further erode NATO’s reputation as a defender of democratic norms. Ultimately, it could be yet another discouraging case study in how NATO can defend democracies from without, but not from within.

It’s a real controversy in the world of antitrust law, once a relatively staid arena that has lately produced fierce debate in Washington, on Wall Street and beyond.

At issue is an obscure but highly important piece of legal interpretation issued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission that describes how the agencies review proposed mergers and acquisitions under federal antitrust laws. These so-called “merger guidelines” have existed in varying forms for more than 50 years, but DOJ antitrust head Jonathan Kanter and FTC Chair Lina Khan released a much-anticipated proposal in July to overhaul these guidelines as part of the Biden administration’s broader effort to crack down on monopolies.

The proposal has been praised by progressive activists but faced significant blowback elsewhere. Two prominent Obama administration officials took to op-ed pages to sharply criticize the draft; antitrust scholars have been hotly debating the merits of the proposal; and lawyers in the private sector have issued pointed critiques. For their parts, Kanter and Khan have publicly tried to tamp down what one of them described as “hysteria” generated by the proposal, which is open for public comment through today.

Before we get into the details, it is critical for understanding the intensity of this debate to know that the Justice Department’s antitrust division under Kanter, and the FTC under Khan have not been faring particularly well in the courts since they were confirmed in 2021. Khan recently came under fire from House Republicans after two high-profile court losses involving failed efforts to block acquisitions by Meta and Microsoft. The Justice Department’s track record in the courts under Kanter has attracted less public blowback, but it is at least as mixed — if not demonstrably worse — than the FTC’s performance under Khan.

There have been some victories on the part of the Justice Department, including successful challenges to a proposed merger in the book publishing industry and an airline industry alliance, but those efforts have been offset by a series of losses that have resulted in pointed words from the presiding judges.

A judge rejected the DOJ’s challenge to a merger in the health care technology industry after concluding, among other things, that the case “rest[ed] on speculation rather than real-world evidence.” A merger challenge in the agriculture industry fell apart because the department “ignore[d] the commercial realities” of the sector. Another judge dismissed a case brought to block a merger in the defense industry, arguing that the government had attempted to “gerrymander its way to victory” by proposing a narrow analytic framework that did not reflect “market realities.” After these losses, the department either did not appeal, eventually dropped its appeal, or lost its appeal.

Against this backdrop, the newly proposed merger guidelines read a lot like a strategic public lobbying effort — a bid to will into existence an expansive and enforcement-friendly legal framework that modern courts have not endorsed either in the particulars or in broad strokes, and whose wisdom as a matter of domestic economic policy is open to serious question. There are some laudable elements to the proposal — including its detail and clarity about its purported legal underpinnings — but it is silent or vague on critical points throughout.

Indeed, the document on the whole — which includes 13 guidelines and appendices spread over roughly 50 pages — resembles a large and self-serving grab bag for antitrust enforcers to search through in order to pick and choose ways to prevent mergers from going through. And it provides further evidence to support the position that many skeptics of the progressive antitrust reform movement have long held — that Kanter, Khan and their cohort are so opposed to business combinations on grounds of political ideology that they are almost totally indifferent to the ways in which ordinary Americans might benefit from transformation in the modern economy.

Perhaps the most notable and far-reaching change in the draft guidelines is that they appear to silently abandon the modern lodestar of antitrust analysis — the so-called consumer welfare standard — which has guided merger enforcement policy for decades and has served as a central governing principle for regulators and courts.

Under that standard, regulators and the courts have generally recognized that there are often (if not always) economic benefits to business combinations resulting from greater operational efficiencies, and they have focused on preventing mergers that might harm consumers — in the form of higher prices, reduced output or diminished quality.

Kanter, Khan and their ideological allies within the progressive antitrust community, however, claim that focus has been far too narrow. They argue that lax and myopic antitrust enforcement is responsible for a broad array of problems in our economy — including economic inequality and a decline in the rate of small business formation — and maintain that we would be better served by following an approach to antitrust enforcement that supposedly prevailed in the first half of the 20th century, when there was relatively less emphasis on economic analysis in antitrust law.

The first proposed guideline, for instance, proposes a small number of presumptions that would allow regulators and the courts to block a broad array of proposed mergers regardless of their effects on consumers — even if consumers stood to gain from lower prices. One of them is that a merger that creates a firm with a market share of over 30 percent presents too great a threat of undue concentration regardless of the overall state of the market.

This seems absurd on its face. It would appear to mean that a company with a 29 percent share of some market could be blocked from making an acquisition that would increase its market share by as little as two percent, even if the rest of the market is highly decentralized among a significant number of competitors and even if consumers would benefit from the merger in the form of lower prices or more products.

How did Kanter and Khan come up with this particular bright-line rule? The answer is revealing, if not exactly reassuring.

The supposed basis for their position is a Supreme Court decision from 1963 that arguably suggests that a merger resulting in a 30 percent market concentration is necessarily unlawful under antitrust law regardless of any benefits that might accrue to consumers. That figure, however, did not come from any statutory text. It was apparently drawn from case law at the time concerning so-called “exclusive dealing” arrangements, which tend to implicate different concerns than mergers.

And in any event, a lot has happened in the last 60 years — including, most notably, subsequent court decisions that directly contradict Kanter and Khan’s characterization of the law, as well as dramatic changes to how our economy operates and significant improvements in our understanding of economic markets and concentration. Those are advancements that Kanter and Khan publicly tout in support of their agenda, except, as in this case, when recognizing those advancements is apparently at odds with their objectives.

There are variations on these problems throughout the draft. A separate proposed guideline, for example, concerns so-called “vertical” mergers, which involve two companies that operate at different levels of a supply or distribution chain (for example, a cotton manufacturer and a clothing company). The guideline lists a variety of loosely described qualitative factors that would give regulators significant leeway to block a vertical merger from moving forward — including “a trend toward vertical integration” in the relevant markets, whether the “nature and purpose of the merger is to foreclose rivals,” and whether the merger “increases barriers to entry.” At the same time, the guideline never suggests that the effects on consumers (good or bad) should merit any consideration.

Vertical mergers present unique analytic challenges, but the government — both the DOJ and the FTC — has struggled to block these combinations in the courts. Under the circumstances, it is hard to read this section as anything more than an effort to make it easier for the government to win these cases when they want to.

Another proposed guideline indicates that regulators could block a merger if they conclude that it would “contribute… to a trend toward concentration,” but here too, there is little practical guidance about what this means. The cases cited in support of the guideline are roughly half a century old or more, and there is no recognition that a mere “trend toward concentration” in a market could be offset by substantial benefits to consumers from the combination. The underlying presumption seems to be that mergers are inherently bad — as opposed to transactions that could be desirable or not depending on the underlying facts and circumstances.

It might be tempting to write this all off as an esoteric dispute over a government memo, but the importance of the proposed guidelines stems from the dual purposes of the document — one that is descriptive, and another that is normative.

First, the final guidelines are supposed to constitute a guide to how the agencies are actually making enforcement decisions. They are intended to provide a roadmap for private parties throughout the American economy regarding the kinds of transactions that are likely to draw scrutiny from the agencies, which can ultimately decide to take the merging parties to court to prevent the transaction. Even if the government ultimately loses, these challenges can have a serious chilling effect on business combinations throughout the economy — including ones that might otherwise provide substantial value to consumers and other parties — because lengthy government investigations and litigation are costly, time-consuming and ultimately uncertain.

Kanter is well aware of these dynamics and in fact has attributed a widely recognized slowdown in M&A activity to the agencies’ aggressive enforcement posture. The problem with this sentiment is that the government is currently obtaining its leverage by exploiting the costs of investigation and litigation on private parties rather than credibly establishing a deterrent in the courts through targeted and successful litigation that generates support from the judiciary.

Historically, the guidelines have also served as persuasive authority that courts have often relied upon in ruling on merger challenges by the government. The new proposal, however, frequently reads more like aggressive and outdated legal advocacy as opposed to a dispassionate effort to articulate government enforcement policy and to align it with prevailing law and economic analysis. That is the very approach that the DOJ and FTC have been trying and frequently failing at in the courts under the Biden administration.

Unless the guidelines are meaningfully revised following this comment period — among other things, to clarify the relevance and priority of consumer interests in the agencies’ analysis and to loosen or discard some of the stringent rules whose contemporary legal underpinnings are dubious — it is far from clear whether the final product will receive the same level of deference in the courts. Indeed, the result could be to undermine the agencies’ credibility among the judiciary and to exacerbate a losing trend that is already bad enough. That would be bad for the Biden administration and for the very ideological revolution that Khan and Kanter are trying to fuel.

One great irony of all this as it relates to the Justice Department is that Attorney General Merrick Garland likely understands these issues as well as anyone given his own extensive, often under-recognized, background in antitrust law.

Garland’s senior thesis in college was about economic concentration and government policy in mid-20th century Britain. In law school at Harvard, Garland was a research assistant for Philip Areeda, who, a year after Garland’s graduation, published the first edition of a seminal treatise on antitrust law that remains one of the most important texts in the field. Later, Areeda asked Garland to serve as a lecturer during Harvard’s 1986 winter term.

The following year, Garland published a paper in the Yale Law Journal about the scope of the so-called “state action immunity doctrine,” which insulates states from antitrust liability when they regulate through state-supervised professional bodies in a way that reduces competition among businesses. At the time, some antitrust scholars were arguing that it should be easier for courts to strike down these state regulations under federal antitrust law, but Garland criticized this “revisionist proposal” as a legally dubious and unworkable federal power grab — a position that ultimately proved to be in line with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law.

Garland went on to practice antitrust law in the private sector before being appointed as a judge, and looking back on his article today — nearly 40 years later, at a time when antitrust law is also in the midst of potential upheaval — it reads like a prescient call for regulatory and jurisprudential stability in an area of the law with significant economic stakes for the country, and as a critique of ambitious and politically-inflected efforts to stretch antitrust law beyond its current reach. (Perhaps not surprisingly, there was reporting before Kanter’s confirmation that suggested that Garland wanted someone else — someone outside of the progressive antitrust and anti-corporate community — to lead the division.)

Like Garland, Kanter was Senate-confirmed, so Garland may not believe that he is entitled to have the last say on the proposed guidelines even if he is the boss at DOJ. Plenty of people — including me — have also taken issue with Garland’s moderate tendencies in various areas during his tenure as attorney general. In this particular instance, however, some serious moderation might be good for the government and for the public.

In truth, the program laid out by Dans and his fellow Trumpers, called Project 2025, is far more ambitious than anything Ronald Reagan dreamed up. Dans, from his seat inside The Heritage Foundation, and scores of conservative groups aligned with his program are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington. They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.

And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy — Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.

The Project 2025 team is scouring records and social media accounts to rule out heretics — effectively administering loyalty tests — and launching a so-called Presidential Administration Academy that tutors future MAGA bureaucrats with video classes in “Conservative Governance 101.” Dans says 17 lectures have been prepared (with titles such as “Oversight and Investigations” and "The Federal Budget Process”), with another 13 in production, and nearly a thousand potential new bureaucrats recruited from around the country are already in training. These efforts are intended to ensure that the chaos and high-level defections of Trump’s first term never happen again, along with prosecutions like the ones the ex-president now faces.

The broad outlines of this agenda — which build on efforts begun toward the end of Trump's first term — have been known for some time. But it is only recently that many of the details have emerged, as well as how far-reaching these aims are. It has also become clear that, even more today than in 2016, Trump’s personal agenda has become the party’s agenda, despite all the Republicans who have defected from him. And that the new GOP establishment is using his populist insurgency to resurrect — in fact, entirely reconceive — its old Reaganite assault on the federal government. In its current formulation, this has less to do with sheer size — as Nikki Haley bravely pointed out at the Aug. 23 debate, Trump himself “added $8 trillion to our debt” — than on restoring “accountability” to government.

“It’s not just about 2025. It’s about ’29 and ’33 and ’37,” adds Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former domestic policy chief, who is now CEO of the Trump-endorsed America First Policy Institute. Rollins, like Dans and others who consider themselves aligned with the goals of Project 2025, believes the training program amounts to a new front in the conservative movement. In the past, she says, “the business of governing and process was not our strong suit.”

That’s going to change, says her associate Doug Hoelscher, former director of Trump’s White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, who recently took over the America First Transition Project at AFPI, which is rolling out a similar agenda of its own. “Biden put about 1,200 people in the field on Day One. President Trump put in about 500,” Hoelscher says. “That shows how unready the right has been historically to govern.”

While they have a willing vehicle in Trump — not to mention the support of most of his primary opponents — many conservatives recognize they will have to compensate for Trump’s built-in liabilities. If they truly want to dismantle the “deep state” they believe they have to create, almost from scratch, a workforce that won’t sacrifice competence to Trump’s obsession with loyalty above everything else.

“This is a coming-together of the movement that has never been seen before,” says Dans, who keeps on his desk a replica of Reagan’s burgundy leather plaque inscribed in gold lettering, “It CAN Be Done.” Dans gained prominence in the latter stages of the Trump term when he joined John McEntee, the former body man for Trump who rose to head of the Presidential Personnel Office at age 29. They ousted alleged disloyalists such Dale Cabaniss, who ran the Office of Personnel Management, which manages benefits and retirement issues for the federal government’s civil service. Now McEntee is on board at Project 2025 and what he started in 2020 is the GOP template for the future. Together, with James Sherk (another former Trump official) they are seeking to resurrect “Schedule F,” an executive order Trump adopted in the last weeks of his administration–and Biden later rescinded--to expand the number of federal workers he could fire from the usual 4,000 or so political appointees to 20,000 or more who occupy key policy-making positions.

The exact number being targeted is still being decided, says Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, who has been tasked with implementing the Project 2025 policy program. But ultimately the goal is to remove what Dans calls the “tenured class of political high priests.”

Some engaged in the 2025 project say they intend to move beyond what Vought calls “updated Reaganism” and the “post-1950s National Review fusionism” that supplied the intellectual construct for the conservative movement in the mid-to-late 20th century.

“I love Ronald Reagan. But it’s not the 1980s, it’s 2023. It’s not just a big government we’re up against but a weaponized one,” says Vought, who is now head of the Center for Renewing America — one of some 75 conservative groups, many formed in just the last year or so, that have signed onto Project 2025. Too many executive branch agencies are no longer answerable to the president, he says, and constitutional oversight has morphed over the decades into unconstitutional control by an “imperial Congress.”

If Trump manages to make it back to the White House his first target would almost certainly be the Department of Justice and the FBI, the two agencies he has long viewed as overtly antagonistic to him.

But that’s only a start.

“We think it’s more systematic than it is just about Trump. We have political prisoners in America for the first time I can remember,” Vought says, referring in part to those convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. “We have people that are in jail that are no threat to their community and no flight risk, that are being mistreated in jail. The court system has adopted a paradigm that they are a threat to democracy.”

As a result, Vought says, “We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over.” Vought is reassembling his old team at the Trump OMB and describes his role as drafting fresh executive orders, playbooks and memoranda for cabinet secretaries to be “ready on Day One of the next transition. Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.”

‘Experts at killing bureaucracies’

For Trump personally, of course, this is a live-or-die agenda, and Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own “Agenda 47” program. Trump’s public career has been marked by his ferocious conviction that he has been victimized by one element of the “deep state” or another since the start of his presidency — the Defense Department wouldn’t follow his orders, the FBI tried to undermine him with Russiagate, no one built his wall fast enough and so on. And Trump is in danger of becoming a “political prisoner” himself if he’s convicted of one or more of the 91 criminal counts listed against him in four separate indictments. “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” the former president declared at his first campaign rally in March.

Dans and others involved in Project 2025 concede that their assault on the “administrative state” is not going to focus on politically delicate entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans Administration programs and retirement plans, unemployment compensation and agricultural price support programs — all of which amount to about half the $6.3 trillion federal budget. “That is not going to be on the front burner,” Dans says.

Out on the campaign trail, other leading GOP candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are trying to outdo each other by openly embracing — rhetorically at least — the agenda of taking down a federal government “weaponized” against conservatives. The top target for all of them is the same as Trump’s — the DOJ. Earlier this month, Ramaswamy declared he wants to slash nearly half of the non-defense federal workforce, amounting to a million employees, and to eliminate the Department of Education, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the IRS and the Commerce Department. As for DeSantis, his spokesperson Bryan Griffin told POLITICO Magazine that he’s been out ahead on the issue, saying: “Ron DeSantis is the only candidate for president who can break up and rein in the bureaucracy.”

Trump, of course, contends that it’s all his idea: “Everyone knows his America First agenda actually works, which is why many are copying him,” his spokesperson Liz Harrington said in an email. Trump’s Agenda 47 platform includes “a ten-point plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption” and pledges to achieve what he failed to do in his first term by moving up to 100,000 government positions out of the “Washington swamp.”

Dans is somewhat vague when asked about specific efforts to inject Project 2025 into the GOP presidential race. He and others want to avoid getting entangled in the ugly war of words on the Republican campaign trail. But the new conservative coalition has been “in touch with every major candidate” about these plans, says Hoelscher. POLITICO Magazine has learned talks have been ongoing with officials as high as Susie Wiles, Trump’s senior advisor, and David Dewhirst, a top aide to Ron DeSantis (Dewhirst also recently joined the project as a senior consultant). Project 2025 has also reached out to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s been hinting at an independent run, as well. And Dans has set up a legislative outreach committee to garner GOP champions on Capitol Hill, though he admits that “is really in the beginning stages right now.”

Dans says that while the new movement is seeking to ensure the elimination of dissident bureaucrats like Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general who refused to implement Trump’s travel ban on Muslims in 2017; and Alexander Vindman, the former NSC official who in 2019 accused Trump of perfidy over Ukraine, the Covid-19 crisis proved to be the best illustration of the problem of an unaccountable federal “priesthood.”

“The archetype of what we want to end in a bureaucrat is none other than Dr. [Anthony] Fauci,” Dans says. Many conservatives believe that Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helped cost Trump a second term by allegedly overreacting to the Covid crisis without taking directions from the president and helping to shut down the economy unnecessarily.

“No bureaucrat should have an action figure made of him,” jokes Dans. “Fauci had 50 years on the job in one of the most technically demanding and ever-changing professions in bio-science. Either the person is a genius on the order of Einstein or is Machiavellian in terms of keeping power. I would submit the latter.”

Vought says his team is also working on a slew of detailed plans on the DOJ in particular that would allow the White House to “defund a lot of functions.” One proposal would require Congress to start with a 25-percent cut in FBI funding to eliminate the bureau’s intelligence capabilities, which have transformed it “from a law enforcement agency to a domestic intelligence agency.” Another proposal would gain White House control of the solicitor general and bring Justice Department attorneys into line with the president’s wishes, as well as allow them to raise legitimate questions about election “fraud” without fear of retribution.

Two key figures involved in Project 2025 were both recently indicted along with Trump in Georgia: former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who’s head of the Conservative Partnership Institute; and Jeffrey Clark, who is working for one of the groups aligned with Dans, the CPI-launched Center for Renewing America. Clark, an environmental lawyer who almost precipitated a mass resignation by Justice Department attorneys in December 2020 when Trump threatened to make him acting attorney general, is seeking to implement Trump’s first-term wish to eliminate any independence by the DOJ. In a paper published in May by the CRA, Clark argued the idea the Justice Department “is or should be independent” is unconstitutional.

Furthering the Trump agenda, CRA is also working on a paper that will take classification decisions out of the hands of deep-state bureaucrats. It is developing other plans to allow a president to halt congressionally mandated funding at his pleasure, as Trump did when he held up foreign aid to Ukraine allegedly to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, eventually touching off the impeachment crisis.

All such efforts, Vought insists, would respect the principle of checks and balances and restore constitutional order as the Founders intended. “It’s more trying to get back to the Founders’ understanding of the executive branch,” Vought says.

Indeed, the irony of all this — and it’s a bitter, almost unresolvable irony — is that both sides of the political spectrum are now holding up the “Constitution” as the thing they most want to preserve, and yet they remain utterly opposed about how to do it. For Democrats it’s about holding Trump accountable under the Constitution; for Republicans, it’s about taking down the unconstitutional administrative state they believe is after Trump. No negotiations between the two sides are planned.

Many of the key players in this ambitious program openly acknowledge that their efforts were doomed in the first Trump term because they didn’t know what they were doing; it was no contest confronting a Democrat-stuffed “deep state” (as well as all those RINOs Trump brought in), and conservatives have never been good at translating movement ideology into action going back to Reagan and the “triumph of politics.”

Along with Meadows, one of the godfathers of the new conservative insurgency is Dans’ boss, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, which came of age in the Reagan era and is now reinventing itself as the main mouthpiece of Trumpism, overseeing Project 2025.

“What we’ve never gotten right in the modern conservative movement, even under Reagan, was having a network of right of center professionals who were ready to go,” says Roberts. “To get 10,000 to 20,000 names into this database who are not only submitting their resumes but also being vetted to some extent, and who, depending upon the classification of the position we think they’re suitable for, are going through these training modules — that’s the part that’s never been done before.

“Do we have conservatives who are experts at killing bureaucracies?” Roberts says. “No. The conservative movement has not developed this capability. But we’re going to as a result of Project 2025.”

‘Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise’

Little of the Project 2025 agenda is likely — even remotely likely — to happen, of course.

In recent decades, a few small agencies have been privatized, some powers ceded to states and localities. But the growth of the federal bureaucracy generally goes in one direction, history teaches, as demonstrated over the decades by the GOP’s spasmodic efforts to eliminate the Department of Education — now viewed as the evil font of “wokeism” — which Reagan declared on the 1980 campaign trail to be a “bureaucratic boondoggle.”

Moreover, while the orneriness of the Pentagon and military leadership were a problem for Trump — and a particular target of the new agenda — the Trumpists also want to be hawkish on China. And that’s going to present a huge problem if they want to bring the military-industrial complex — which everyone involved in Project 2025 agrees is the most out of control — into line with White House wishes.

One of the few generals who hasn’t abandoned Trump — and works for the America First Policy Institute — is retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who complains in an interview that Biden is going too easy on Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Eventually we’re going to have to draw the bright line. And this administration hasn’t drawn it yet,” Kellogg says. His proposal is to resurrect something like NSC-68, the founding strategy for the Cold War adopted under Harry Truman in 1950. “Give me an NSC-68 for China,” Kellogg says. The problem: NSC-68 created the modern national security state — and a new one will almost certainly make the Pentagon and defense industrial complex even more unwieldy since external threats tend to enlarge the national security apparatus. Just look at the Department of Homeland Security. And recall that Reaganite attempts to dismantle the Department of Education were abandoned after its 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, suggested that the U.S. could lose the Cold War in the classroom.

Moreover it strains credulity to describe Congress as “imperial” when in so many respects, critics say, Congress has actually neglected its duties or kicked them over to the White House — avoiding such as issues as new Authorizations for the Use of Military Use (AUMF), for example.

Some conservative scholars and government experts say that Project 2025’s grand plans to transform the federal bureaucracy are often comically naïve. Not only are they unworkable, critics contend, but if they’re implemented they will likely only render the federal government even more incompetent than conservatives now say it is. And certainly more chaotic and amateurish than in Trump’s first term.

“What it totally reminds me of is the Iraq occupation: 21-year-old kids who just came out of Patrick Henry College running a country into the ground,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, “That sounds like their vision for America.”

Kabaservice, a conservative himself who works for the libertarian-oriented Niskanen Center, concedes many of the Project 2025 plans for reform are “legitimate.” One chapter of the new Mandate for Leadership, co-authored by Dans, Donald Devine and Dennis Dean Kirk, sounds anodyne enough. It calls for a better examination-based hiring system, pay for strong performers along with cuts in what they see as a too-generous pension system, and easier ways of dismissing poor performers. But “Schedule F,” Kabaservice says, is nothing less than “an attempt to eviscerate government and replace it with Trump stooges.”

In many ways, the notion that one can replace decades of on-the-ground experience — say in running a health care bureaucracy or policing the border — through a video training program is very Trumpian. Who better to hire legions of unctuous but untried newbies, after all, than the man who declared, “I alone can fix it,” and who routinely used to say — whether the subject was Covid-19 or nuclear weapons — that he knew more than the scientists and generals.

The deeper problem, Kabaservice says, is that “Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise. They actually seem to believe all you need to know about running a country that underpins the global order is something you can know by being a mom.”

Dans dismisses these criticisms by recalling William F. Buckley’s famous quip: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

“I would trust a mom coming back into the workforce who had just successfully raised four kids to be able to manage an agency,” says Dans. “We have a lot of faith in our common man. We are the party of the forgotten man, the citizen farmer, the folk who really make this country run. I think a lot of it is intuitive, respectfully. We live in a modern society where an entire class of managers have managed to insert themselves and make it increasingly complex and intermediate all these points to the extent where no one actually understands the functioning.”

Kevin Kosar, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has also argued that conservatives need to create a pipeline of people good at governing. But he says they’ve had so little experience at legislating in the post-New Deal era — with minor interludes of power such as the mid-80s and ’94 Newt Gingrich takeover of the House — that they don’t really know how to accomplish government reduction. He says the biggest problem with this grandiose new agenda is just how murky it really is, not to mention its end goal. “It’s entirely up for grabs. What if they get the White House? OK, boom. They get Schedule F. Boom. Does that mean we no longer have a weaponized government? Is it fine now?”

The Trumpers involved in Project 2025 say they realize they can’t replace everybody — and they don’t want to. Vought says he wants “career number crunchers” at OMB who possess “the continuity of expertise” to stay on — only to add more political appointees to keep them in line.

But the project’s authors are the first to admit that implementing most of it will require enormous political power that they do not currently have. “Yes, this is daunting, there is no doubt about it,” says Roberts. “It requires not just a plan and it doesn’t just require the personnel. This requires controlling not just the White House but both chambers of Congress.”

Dans pooh-poohs such concerns and says he’s focused on the long term. “This is all about bringing newcomers to Washington. This land is your land, this federal government is your federal government. It’s not just the sole province of people in the metro D.C. area,” he says. “I believe that within 350 million Americans we can find conservative warriors who are at the top of their game.”

‘I know the good ones. I know the bad ones.’

But can they? For people who have focused mainly on the headlines in the last few years — currently dominated by Trump’s fourth indictment and the nasty repartee on the GOP campaign trail — it may look like a second-term President Trump would have some difficulty implementing such plans. Certainly, he might have trouble finding experienced, nationally known people to stock his Cabinet.

After all, since the end of Trump’s last term and especially the Jan. 6, 2021 uprising, a parade of high-level former officials — starting, of course, with his vice president, Mike Pence who is now an opponent in the primary — have vociferously broken with him. These include the most senior members of his cabinet — his former attorney general, secretary of state, U.N. ambassador (another current opponent) and several ex-defense secretaries and national security advisers. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, has called him “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” As his criminal trials at the federal, state and local levels move forward — especially in the Georgia case with its 18 co-defendants — more former acolytes may be “flipped” to turn against him.

But a large phalanx of loyal Trumpists remains in Washington — most of them scattered in conservative action groups on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue — and few of them seem to care whether Trump runs as a convicted felon or not. Among them are the directors of the AFPI, sometimes described as a Trump “cabinet in waiting”: Larry Kudlow, the former chair of CEA; Rick Perry, Trump’s secretary of energy; Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary and former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who heads the Center for a Healthy America at AFPI; Kellogg, who could run the Pentagon (another possibility is Chris Miller, Trump’s last acting defense secretary); and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who implemented Trump’s neo-protectionist policies and writes in his new book, No Trade Is Free, that Trump will go down as “a great president, truly one of the greatest.”

Others who would likely be in line for senior jobs are Vought, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration pit bull, who has formed yet another aligned group under CPI, America First Legal, that is challenging nearly every Biden executive order in court. A second-term Trump also could bring in his many loyalists on Capitol Hill, like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

One former Trump official, Troup Hemenway, said all the disaffections from Trump have made things easier. “Folks actively opposed have kind of revealed themselves and they’re not going to be invited back,” he said.

The candidate himself, speaking in Iowa in March, seemed to agree. “When I went there [to the White House], I didn’t know a lot of people; I had to rely on, in some cases, RINOs and others to give me some recommendations, but I know them all now,” Trump said, referring to “Republicans in Name Only.” “I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the weak ones. I know the strong ones.”

Perhaps. But the biggest mystery — and challenge — will be determining who the new loyalists will be. For the America First Policy Institute, which is helping to implement Project 2025, its grandest ambitions lie in soliciting governors and state attorneys general to the cause, among others. AFPI will soon launch America First “state chapters.” Adds Rollins, AFPI’s CEO: “What AFPI is building is very much an outside of Washington D.C. approach. There is so much talent and so many really incredible people currently in college or in the private sector who would love to come in.”

Another challenge will be training and vetting the right people to do what conservatives have traditionally hated to do — deploy the power of the federal government — without themselves becoming the new enemy. “That’s the most expensive part,” says Roberts. “It’s probably 75 percent of the costs of this project — building the conservative ‘LinkedIn’ as we like to call it. There is vehement agreement that this is the most important part of the project.”

‘A furious reaction against elites of all stripes’

However that plays out, it is hardly an accident that so much public outrage exists against Washington elites, that Project 2025 has leapt to embrace it, and that Trump has so effectively exploited it over the past six years. Indeed, if one sets aside the outrages committed by Trump — and a lot of the other craziness now possessing the GOP — Project 2025 very likely has a substantial political base. One that isn’t going away.

Why? For the last several decades both political parties have offered up lesson after lesson in misdirection: from the folly of deregulating markets and skewing taxes to favor multinational companies and capital gains-earners at the expense of the working class to launching one of the least-justified and costliest wars in modern history in Iraq, one that had a disproportionate effect on working class families who make up the bulk of the armed forces. This created deep anger and resentment over the crushingly unequal society the United States has become, feeding populism not only on the right but the left as well. (Recall how the once obscure socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) nearly defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries on the strength of his own populist agenda.)

In his new book, Lighthizer even makes a point of thanking labor leaders and Lori Wallach — perhaps the most respected trade expert in the progressive movement — as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator who was a constant advisor and liaison with many on [Capitol] Hill.” The rage against Washington also extends to Trump’s last Defense chief, Chris Miller, a career special forces soldier who views, like most of the new Trumpian right, the Iraq invasion as a monumental disaster based on lies and “wants to fire most of the generals at the Pentagon, slash defense spending by half, shut down the military academies, break up the military-industrial complex,” according to an intimate profile of Miller by Peter Maass published in March.

As a result, the intellectual conservatism of Buckley and other conservative thinkers has been transmuted into its virtual opposite, and the Project 2025 team has embraced it. As Matthew Continetti writes in his 2022 book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism: “What began as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the 21st century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes.”

Some critics believe this is all rhetorical window dressing for what would be, in a second Trump term, four years of personal vengeance at any cost. Kabaservice says the new concept of “national conservatism” embraced by the Project 2025 crowd — code for Trump’s odd, ungainly blend of neo-protectionism, neo-isolationism and Reaganite trickle-down economics — is merely an “attempt to intellectually retrofit a rationale for Trumpism.”

But it would be a mistake to think that even if Trump somehow goes away — either into retirement or into prison — Republicanism will change with him gone. That’s because Trump’s success in merging the conservative movement with his political persona is really an extension of the mistrust of elites in Washington, and that sentiment won’t subside any time soon. As Continetti writes: “Untangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Donald Trump won’t be easy.”

The new right, and now national conservatives, are in “a condition of fracture and flux” and it has become hard to tell any longer who belongs on the Right and who doesn’t, Continetti says.

Now Trump’s acolytes are filling the vacuum. But it is possible that, as happened in Trump’s first term, the new conservative revolution will eventually eat its own. After all, starting with the saga of Jeff Sessions — the ultra-conservative senator who was one of the earliest Trump backers and then found himself ousted as attorney general — the Trump administration was characterized by loyalists who were never loyal enough for him.

One present and growing danger, Vought concedes, is that “an uncomfortable number of former Trump folks” aligned themselves with DeSantis, beginning last fall before the Florida governor’s campaign began to tank. Some like Vought say they are worried that too many former Trump devotees are removing themselves for consideration for positions in a second term.

Dans says this new Republican revolution is trying hard to “learn from the mistakes” of the old one — which is one reason the Project 2025 team is, like Reagan, avoiding threatening people’s entitlements. But it is also true that if they succeed with even a small part of their ambitions, Reagan could end up looking like a milquetoast middle-of-the-roader left behind on the ash heap of history.

Asked by moderator Kristen Welker if he’d sign a 15-week abortion ban at the federal level, he remained steadfastly non-committal. Trump insisted instead that he “would sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”

To the extent this promise means anything, it’d necessarily entail a settlement deeply unsatisfying to social conservatives; they are disunited and on their back foot on the issue while Democrats are almost uniformly in favor of the “Women’s Health Protection Act” that would establish a sweeping right to abortion at the national level.

Also, notably, Trump portrayed himself as a neutral arbiter, rather than an advocate and leader for social conservatives.

Well, there’s always the argument that abortion policy should be decided at the state level, right? Trump didn’t leave himself this out since he denounced, in the harshest terms, the six-week ban that Ron DeSantis signed in Florida.

“I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” he said of the legislation that’s been a long-held policy ambition of his own party. Trump’s condemnation naturally extends as well to Ohio, Georgia and Iowa, which have similar laws, if not governors with the temerity to be running against him for the Republican presidential nomination.

So far the reaction to Trump’s remarks has been muted on most of the social right, which is a sign that we may have passed an event horizon. In 2016, Trump had to hew to social-conservative orthodoxy to win the Republican nomination. Now, he may well define the orthodoxy.

Trump’s 2016 run showed the relative strength of various parts of the Republican coalition. He jettisoned entitlement reform and survived, even thrived, because of it, and the same was true of free trade.

Fiscal conservatives were relatively weak. If Trump had been a moderate on abortion or gun rights, though, it probably would have been a different story.

If Trump had said anything like his “Meet the Press” comments in 2016, he’d likely have lost the nomination — with Ted Cruz happily slicing and dicing him.

Political circumstances are different now, of course. The party is freaked out about the politics of abortion in a way that it wasn’t in the pre-Dobbs era, and open to more pragmatism.

Still, Trump clearly is playing by different rules. Not too long ago, the great former Indiana GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels became political persona non grata in the party by suggesting a truce on cultural issues.

Trump can rely on his supporters to deploy contradictory justifications for whatever he says or does.

If he says things that go way too far and potentially turns off voters, it’s because he’s a fearless truth-teller — whereas anyone who objects on grounds that Trump should be more politically careful is a RINO sell-out who needs to learn from Trump’s bold example.

If Trump says something that throws an important conservative cause under the bus or communicates a willingness to compromise, it’s because he’s ruthlessly practical and focused on electoral success — whereas anyone who objects on grounds that Trump should be more courageous and principled is a heedless zealot who doesn’t care about winning.

The common thread is that Trump is right no matter what he says or how he comes down on an issue.

Trump is right when he’s the most “pro-life president in American history,” as former Vice President Mike Pence put it back in 2018. (And that was before he delivered the court that would throw out Roe v. Wade.)

He’s also right, or not so wrong as to be roundly criticized, when he’s clumsily trying to find an off-ramp on the issue.

Trump may now be bigger than any cause, or put another way — he’s the cause. He doesn’t need a transactional relationship with social conservatives any longer, if many of those voters now value the relationship for its own sake.

Perhaps DeSantis and other candidates can use Trump’s comments against him in Iowa, but it’s proven difficult to convince anyone Trump is a moderate on anything to this point. Since he himself is in many regards the main cultural issue in our national life, he’s by definition a culture warrior. How soft can the guy promising “retribution” really be?

All that said, Trump will eventually probably try to clean up his remarks, and he’ll have more latitude to do it because his supporters are so forgiving. He can say he’s decided, after all, that 15 weeks is the best cut off for a federal prohibition but that, wouldn’t you know, Democrats are more unreasonable than he thought and a deal isn’t possible.

As for the Florida ban, maybe he’ll avoid calling it “terrible” in the future and say he’s happy to defer to the states.

One way or the other, he’s likely to get away with his heresy because so many of his supporters believe, almost by definition, that he’s not capable of it.

On one side of the country, Donald Trump was airing his vision of a “lost” and weakened “nation in decline.” On the other — just days before a debate at the Reagan Library here that Trump is not expected to attend — keepers of Ronald Reagan’s flame were calling Trump a “spoiled brat in a sandbox,” or “Voldemort.”

In the post-Trump era, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which helps sustain the Reagan Library, has served as a platform for some of Trump’s sharpest critics in the GOP. Following Trump’s loss in 2020, it launched a marquee, two-year-long speaker series called “A Time for Choosing,” drawing from Reagan’s iconic 1964 address of the same name and envisioning a “fresh look — through reasoned, intellectual discussion — at the issues, ideas and policies that will define the Republican Party for decades to come.” It invited Trump antagonists like former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, former Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas to speak.

When Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and member of the Reagan foundation board of trustees, opened the series in 2021, he said, without naming Trump, that it was “horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end.” (To which Trump responded by calling him a “RINO” — Republican-in-Name-Only — and a loser.)

The foundation also invited politicians who were more sympathetic to Trump to the series, including Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of State; Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair; and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. The foundation’s president and chief executive officer, David Trulio, a former Trump administration appointee, told me he’s still hoping Trump attends next week’s debate and said the point of the speaker series was to feature “a range of thought leaders.”

But Trump himself — now the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024 — was never invited to address the future of the party here. And it wasn’t hard to guess why.

One member of the foundation’s board of trustees, granted anonymity to discuss internal foundation matters, called Trump a “spoiled brat in a sandbox.” “So many of the things that Trump did, and what he stood for, are just not consistent with the Reagan philosophy,” the board member said.

“I wouldn’t want to condone what Trump had done by inviting him to speak,” this trustee said. “That would be sort of an acceptance of his behavior over the years.”

Another board member told me the series “wasn’t an anti-Trump thing,” but that Republicans already knew what Trump had to say. As for the foundation’s publicly stated explanation that the decision not to invite Trump wasn’t about Trump at all — that it wasn’t extending invitations to any former president — an adviser to a third member of the foundation board said, “Yeah, right. Let’s go with that one.”

For at least some members of the board, the adviser told me, Trump “drives them nuts.”

“The legacy of Reagan, fair or unfair, right or wrong, was ‘shining city on a hill’ — upbeat and positive and have a beer with Tip O’Neill,” the adviser said. “And Trump is Voldemort. He was the opposite. He wanted to burn everything to the ground, attack people.”

It’s that choice, as much as any policy distinction between candidates, that Republicans are making in the run-up to 2024. It’s the tension between a sunnier brand of conservatism and the more menacing, grievance-fueled politics of Trump. It’s the difference between a former president who, upon announcing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, wrote, “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead,” and a former president who has cast his election as the “final battle” to reclaim a country that is “rigged, crooked, and evil.”

Given Trump’s yawning lead in Republican primary polls, it’s seemed for several weeks now that that choice, at least for 2024, has been made. And when I showed up here last Friday night, for a “Summertime Sizzle” on the grounds of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, what surprised me is how many of the attendees, ordinary Republicans who hold Reagan in enough esteem to patronize his library, were just fine with that. Overwhelmingly, their choice was Trump.

The event, on a terrace overlooking the rugged countryside of Southern California not far from the gravesite of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, was a social function. But coming shortly before next week’s Republican presidential debate, to be held in the library’s expansive Air Force One pavilion, the subject of Trump — the expectation he won’t attend, his open disdain for the leadership of the foundation charged with promoting Reagan’s legacy, his dismissiveness, at times, of Reagan himself — wasn’t far from anyone’s mind.

“Reagan was a president that respected the office,” Bruce Williamson, a realtor, told me when he came off the dance floor. He said he has “great respect for the man.”

But when I asked if the GOP was more of a Trump party or a Reagan party, he didn’t hesitate. “It’s probably more of a Trump party,” he said. “And I think it’s a good thing. … These boys are starting to realize if we want to be in control, we have to win. And he can win.”

As the sun disappeared over the hillside and the temperature dipped below 70 degrees, the disc jockey put on “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” then the upbeat, danceable “Kids in America” and “Just Can’t Get Enough.” 

James Greenfield, another Republican, dismissed the foundation leaders as “a bunch of RINOs” who he said were “tainting the legacy of Reagan at this very institution … when you see the RINOs being invited to speak here.”

Compared to that sea of Republicans, Jessie M. Stone, a retired chemist, told me, “Trump is alone.”

“Trump,” she said admiringly, “is his own party.”

And Reagan? In today’s Republican Party, it’s hard to say exactly where he stands, even if nearly every Republican politician still reflexively invokes his name. When I called Michael E. Reagan, the late president’s son, to ask him about it, he told me, “My dad today, I think would be hard-pressed to get nominated.”

He could win a general election, Reagan said. But in a primary, “I think they might have a real problem with him.”

There is almost no legacy in the old GOP that Trump, in his overhaul of the party, has not delighted in torching – from the Bush dynasty (“We need another Bush in office about as much as we need Obama to have a 3rd term,” he once said), and the “warmonger” Cheneys to “stone cold loser” Mitt Romney (to the point the senator’s niece, Ronna McDaniel, had to jettison her family name) and the late Sen. John McCain.

Compared to his treatment of those politicians, Trump’s regard for Reagan has been more circumspect, at least lately. His catchphrase, “Make America Great Again,” wasfirst popularized by Reagan, with his “Let’s Make America Great Again” slogan during his 1980 campaign. In 2020, Trump and the RNC were sufficiently convinced of the 40th president’s appeal that they raised money off his name, something the Reagan foundation at the time asked Trump and the RNC to stop doing. And last week, Trump defended his support for exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape, incest and life of the mother by citing Reagan; Trump told a conservative audience that his position was “like President Ronald Reagan before me.”

Still, Trump is one of the few Republicans who has publicly criticized Reagan. In the 1980s, he wrote that people were “beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.” While president, he asserted he was a “far greater” president than Reagan, and while campaigning for re-election, he compared himself favorably to him.

“We liked Ronald Reagan, right?” Trump said to chants of “We love you” at a rally in Michigan in the final days of his 2020 campaign. “But nobody ever said, ‘We love you. We love you.’”

The truth is it’s not hard to argue Reagan was the more successful politician. He won the presidency twice in landslides. In 1984, he carried 49 states, and the Reagan Revolution proved enduring enough that when Reagan left office, he was succeeded by another Republican, George. H.W. Bush. By contrast, Trump lost the popular vote twice, was impeached twice and oversaw the GOP’s loss, during his tenure, of both the Senate and the House. When he left office, he handed the White House to a Democrat, Joe Biden, while fomenting a riot at the Capitol.

When Gallup polled Americans earlier this year, Trump’s public approval rating stood at 46 percent, more than 20 percentage points behind Reagan.

But that’s Americans. Among Republicans, the view of Trump is more positive than among the electorate overall — and the assessments of Trump and Reagan are sharply divided. In a Pew Research Center survey this year, 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said Reagan had done the best job as president over the past 40 years. But nearly the same number — 37 percent — said Trump had.

The question isn’t strictly academic, at least for Trump’s rank-and-file supporters. Following his loss in 2020, activists in at least a handful of county-level Republican parties in states ranging from Wisconsin and Montana to Iowa, North Carolina and Reagan’s own California moved to add Trump’s name to fundraising dinners that traditionally had honored Abraham Lincoln or Reagan, or both.

“In our county, it was controversial,” Craig Lohmann, chair of the Republican Party in Black Hawk County, Iowa, told me.

First Trump supporters wanted Trump’s name added to the county’s Lincoln Dinner, “then other people said, ‘Well, if we’re going to add him, I want Reagan added, too.’ You know how politics works — ‘I’ll vote for it if you’ve got Reagan’ and ‘I’ll vote for it if you’ve got Trump,’ so there you go, and you have the Lincoln-Reagan-Trump Dinner.”

The county party elected this year to strip Trump’s name — and Reagan’s — back off the dinner because Trump is once again a candidate, said Lohmann, a supporter of Trump rival Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor. But the decision wasn’t easy. Where fans of some politicians are inclined to wait to honor them posthumously, he said, “Trump supporters, they want recognition now.”

Over and over in California, I spoke with Republicans who believed the Trump and Reagan legacies could coexist. Ken Khachigian, a former Reagan speechwriter whose old Selectric typewriter is displayed at the Reagan Library and Museum on the Boeing 707 that flew Reagan as Air Force One, told me “the basic principles” of the Reagan era were “still alive."

“The basic message can co-exist,” Khachigian said. “It’s just different ways of delivering it. It’s the difference between a violin and a bugle.”

At the picnic outside the library, Robert Lanza, a Trump supporter who owns a car dealership, said he told Reagan when he met him at a hockey game in Reagan’s retirement that he was “the greatest president we ever had.” (He was being nice at the time. In reality, he said he’d put him in his top five). He said Reagan “had a way of being conservative in a more appealing way” than Trump does. But he imagined Reagan and Trump would have “got along pretty well,” and he said he could see Reagan “giving him a lot of coaching.”

“Like a boxing coach in his corner,” Lanza’s daughter, Emily Lanza, chimed in.

Still, it was hard to imagine Trump ever expressing anything like the phrase of Reagan’s I’d passed by on a wall inside the building: “The whole idea of the presidency is having somebody in the Oval Office who can try to get above the bickering and buttonholing in the cloakrooms and corridors and say, ‘Look, enough of this. Let’s just get something done for a change that will help the people.’”

“I care about Reagan and my father’s Republican Party,” said Mark Brainard, a Republican before becoming an independent in 1989, when I caught up to him playing cornhole on the library lawn.

Today, he said, the party is “held hostage” by a former president who is “attacking all the institutions. It’s the Department of Justice, it’s the FBI. It’s the Constitution.” And it’s the leadership of the Reagan foundation — here at what his wife, Joy, a Democrat, called “a sacred place for me.”

Trump, said John Herrington, Reagan’s former energy secretary and a former member of what he said has now become a “very liberal” foundation board, is “not the image that the Reagan Library wants.” He said memorabilia collectors still send him requests for autographs, and he senses that for a certain brand of Republican, the Reagan legacy “gets better and better as the years go by.” Republican politicians still clamor to speak at the library and attach themselves to Reagan’s name.

However, Herrington told me, “I think most of the Reagan fanatics, acolytes — and I’m one, I’m an acolyte — are dead.” And he doubted Trump would suffer from any tension with members of the current board.

“He’s got his own legacy now,” Herrington said. “He doesn’t need it.”

The Reagan Library and Museum is a major attraction, pulling in hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The speaker series, featuring a who’s-who of the Republican Party, drew a stream of national press reports. It wasn’t fashioned to tilt the scales in favor of any one brand of conservatism, Trulio said, but to “surface new voices” in the GOP. He said he sees “no conflict” with Trump.

Trump took a sharply different view. When the series began, in 2021, he lit into Fred Ryan, chair of the foundation board, writing that “Ronald Reagan would not be happy to see that the Reagan Library is run by the head of the Washington Post, Fred Ryan. How the hell did that happen? No wonder they consistently have RINO speakers like Karl Rove and Paul Ryan. They do nothing for our forward-surging Republican Party!”

Later, after the library was named as the host of the second debate, Trump went after the Reagan foundation’s leadership again, writing, “the Second Debate is being held at the Reagan Library, the Chairman of which is, amazingly, Fred Ryan, Publisher of the Washington Post. NO!”

Still, Trump participated in a previous debate at the library in 2015, and Trulio said it would be “great” if Trump came to next week’s debate. (That seemed highly unlikely when we spoke, after Trump skipped the first debate, in Milwaukee. Later that day, people familiar with Trump’s plans confirmed he will be in Detroit speaking to striking autoworkers on the day of the debate, potentially upstaging it.) The goal of the foundation, Trulio said, was to make the Reagan Library the kind of “dynamic intellectual forum” that Reagan envisioned when he opened the library in 1991.

The Reagan foundation is also trying to ensure that Reagan is not lost in that conversation. It is making a push on Instagram and other social media platforms, in part to reach people who were born after Reagan left office. Touring the library, I overheard a docent telling two couples — one from New York and the other from Alabama — that “the kids today don’t know anything about” the 1980s and about the ways the conflicts of that era could inform ones today.

People I spoke with at the library did remember Reagan. But they also sensed the gulf between his era and the present may be too wide to bridge.

“You look back at the Reagan years, there was decency in politics,” said Tom Mazlo, a 50-year-old mortgage broker from suburban Philadelphia.

His wife, Shannan, added, “We’ve lost that.”

When I asked if they were optimistic that it might return, Tom Mazlo said, "No, I don’t see any reason to assume things will change.” His wife said, “We’ve started down a path.”

On a patio outside the library, Rod Snyder, a retired tax accountant, shook his head. He’d come to see Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speak at the library in March as part of a book tour separate from the speaker series. He knew the Reagan foundation was inviting other speakers in. Foundation board members envisioned their work as contributing to a longer arc of thought about conservatism than any one election.

For the purposes of 2024, however, the idea that discourse, either from speakers or debates like the one scheduled for Wednesday night, might move any votes seemed far-fetched to Snyder. He was considering voting for a third-party candidate. A modern-day “A Time for Choosing,” he said, “doesn’t seem to be where we’re at.”

In the Republican primary, he said, “It looks like Trump.”

That year, Chrysler (now part of Stellantis) was sliding toward bankruptcy and insisted that to avoid going under, it needed deep concessions from the UAW, including sharply reduced starting pay and a two-tier wage structure in which pay and benefits for future workers would remain permanently below those of workers hired before 2007. The UAW’s leaders decided, unenthusiastically, to agree to those concessions, with Ford and G.M. demanding similar provisions.

But Fain wasn’t ready to go along. As a committeeperson at Local 1166, he led his local union to vote against ratifying the contract. It was a rare act of defiance from rank-and-file workers amid the high-profile negotiations, and Fain wasn’t at all reluctant about making his defiance public. He loudly denounced the givebacks at a council meeting, saying, “Two-tier wages have no place in this union."

And in a letter to UAW leadership that reached the media, he said that in approving those concessions, “you might as well get a gun and shoot yourself in the head.”

It was a remarkable public break with his union’s leadership and an important inflection point in Fain’s career.

With that defiant step, Fain declared his independence from the political group — known as the Administration Caucus — that had run the UAW for six decades. And the move also set him up for a higher position — for years in staff jobs at UAW headquarters in Detroit, then later to be catapulted into the union’s presidency.

Throughout, Fain was known for his unremitting opposition to concessions, a stance that has directly led to today’s walkout in which the UAW, for the first time ever, has struck all three Detroit automakers at once. The strike has sent shock waves throughout the auto industry, inspired workers across the U.S. and sent President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump rushing to demonstrate who can show more support for the workers.

Fain, 54, had a bumpy ascent within the 400,000-member UAW. Sometimes union leaders “moved him up in the hope of shutting him up,” said one friend of Fain’s, Scott Houldieson, a Ford assembly plant worker in Chicago and long-time UAW dissident. Other times UAW leaders grew irate with Fain and demoted him. Fain’s official union biography says, “Many times… he was ostracized for speaking up.” The UAW didn’t make him available for an interview.

Being a prominent dissident put Fain in a good position to run for high union office after an embarrassing crisis hit the UAW in recent years. Prosecutors unearthed a huge corruption scandal in which a dozen UAW leaders, including two former presidents, were ultimately convicted of embezzling more than $5 million in funds for luxury items and travel, from hotels and golf trips to cigars and liquor.

Fain raised his hand to run for UAW president last year only after the union’s members voted to hold direct elections for top UAW leaders for the first time in the union’s history. That made it possible for a dissident like Fain to have a chance to win, because the Administration Caucus would no longer have total control over who would be chosen president.

“After 75 years of iron-fisted rule by the Administration Caucus, people were reluctant to step out and challenge the ruling group,” said Houldieson. “Shawn had the courage to do that. Not many others did.”

There’s somewhat of a paradox to Fain. On one hand, Fain, a blunt-talking and compelling speaker, comes across as a traditionalist, talking of his God and faith and three grandparents who worked in auto plants. He carries around an old, well-worn pay stub from one grandfather who went to work for Chrysler in 1937, the year of the famous sit-down strike that unionized G.M. At the same time, Fain comes across as a militant, channeling Bernie Sanders as he bashes “the billionaire class.” He sometimes quotes Malcolm X and says “we have to be willing to stand up and get our demands by any means necessary.”

Fain ran for UAW president as an insurgent, and one of his main talking points was “no concessions.” Throughout his campaign, he belittled previous UAW presidents for not being tough enough towards the automakers.

After eking out a narrow victory in March, Fain promised that in this summer’s contract talks with GM, Ford and Stellantis, he would demand that they roll back some of the detested concessions dating to 2007, especially the two-tier pay structure.

Fain has repeatedly argued that at a time when Detroit’s automakers have racked up record profits, they should reward their workers, particularly because auto workers’ pay has fallen so far behind inflation (by 19 percent since 2008, according to one think tank).

In making these arguments, Fain, like the legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther who led the union from 1946 to 1970, has framed this fight as one to help not just auto workers, but America’s entire working class.

“We’re all fed up with living in a world that values profits over people,” Fain said earlier this month. “We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us just continue to scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed and together, we’re going to fight like hell to change it.”

Also much like Reuther, Fain has roiled the White House at times. He castigated Biden for not doing enough to ensure that the new electric vehicle battery plants being built with federal subsidies will pay high wages. Some Democrats have voiced fears that Fain’s harsh words for Biden will push some UAW members into backing Trump or staying home in November 2024.

“He’s taking a very militant line and acting very different from past union presidents,” said Harry Katz, a professor and former dean of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “He tore up a Chrysler contract offer and threw it in the trash. He benefits from acting unpredictably. He keeps the companies off balance.”

Fain broke a decades-long tradition by refusing to shake hands with the automakers’ CEOs before the negotiations began. Instead, he went to factories around the country to shake hands with rank-and-file workers and mobilize them with his us-against-them rhetoric.

“The very existence of billionaires shows us that we have an economy that is working for the benefit of the few, and not the many,” Fain said. “It feels like we’ve gone so far backwards that we have to fight just to have the 40-hour workweek back. Why is that? So another asshole can make enough money to shoot himself to the moon?”

Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, said Fain deserves credit for changing the narrative about workers and their role in the economy. “Going back decades, we’ve approached negotiations as, ‘What can labor give to help us be competitive?’” Masters said. “But with Fain, it’s more that labor is entitled to its fair share and it’s time to address all the inequality.”

The UAW strike has been getting huge publicity and public support — one poll found that 54 percent of Americans support the walkout, while 18 percent oppose it.

That’s even as Fain has pushed a huge and ambitious list of demands: raises of more than 40 percent, a cost-of-living adjustment, a 32-hour workweek, ending the two-tier pay structure, restoring reduced pension and health benefits, creating a jobs bank for laid-off workers, and converting temporary workers to full employees with full benefits after 90 days on the job.

“Shawn has been very tough to date. That has caught the companies off guard,” said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley professor and former auto worker who attended a three-day bargaining strategy session that Fain led.

While the automakers have blanched at Fain’s many proposals, saying they’re exorbitantly expensive, some Fain supporters say he was merely putting forward the demands that rank-and-file workers wanted.

Frustrated with Fain’s long list of demands, Ford CEO Jim Farley said, "You want us to choose bankruptcy over supporting our workers.”

Masters said that by making so many ambitious demands, “Fain may have painted himself in a corner that he can’t get out of without losing some face.” In other words, even if Fain wins, say, large wage increases, a cost-of-living adjustment and an end to two tiers, some union members might nonetheless be angry that he didn’t also win on a 32-hour-workweek, improved pension benefits, a jobs bank and improvements for temporary workers.

As for politics, it’s also possible Fain has fumbled things. He has railed against Biden and said that his traditionally Democratic union was withholding any endorsement from the president, at least for now — moves that Fain hopes will pressure Biden to do more to ensure high wages at new, federally subsidized battery plants. But some longtime labor watchers fear that Fain’s harsh words and non-endorsement will push some UAW members into Trump’s camp.

“It was a big mistake for Fain to criticize Biden so rudely and hold off on endorsing,” Katz said. “Biden has been the most pro-union president of our lifetime. I think Fain, by using that language, fuels support for our fascist former president, and I’m scared about that.”

Trump is trying to seize on the opportunity, saying he will go to Detroit next week to speak to union members. In response, Fain laid into Trump: "Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”

Ultimately for Fain and his union, it all depends on how the strike concludes.

“He can have a real victory here,” Shaiken said. “But there has to be an end game, and nobody is clear on his end game.”

Three years later though, little has changed, at least according to Fredrik deBoer, better known as Freddie deBoer, the leftist lightning rod, once-academic, always-writer who has re-made a name for himself on Substack with over 46,000 subscribers. As deBoer sees it in his new book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, elites of all races mishandled that historic moment as the protesters’ demands either became immaterial (like representation in the arts) or unpopular with the working class (like defunding the police). Not only was defunding either never achieved or quickly reversed — perhaps because working-class Black people did not want it to happen — no material change to Black people’s misfortunes was achieved.

As deBoer, who is white, puts it in his book: “If you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.” Rather than making gains in a fight for economic and racial justice, the 2020 racial reckoning was led unsuccessfully by “a Black professional class whose interests and biases are not the same as that of the median Black voter.” They were joined, he writes, by “strivers who question the value of striving, affluent critics of affluence whose behaviors deepen economic inequality, and white people who are arch critics of whiteness.”

DeBoer is endlessly critical of left-wing movements including 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests precisely because, as he says in the book, he is “relentlessly sympathetic” to them. Raised by communists and hardened by the failures of his activism against the Iraq War, deBoer’s Marxism is pessimistic, prickly and somehow still relevant in a country and world that is post-Marxist in every real sense.

DeBoer argues that the failures of left-wing movements are not inevitable, and a class-focused politics that can win is not just possible, but imperative. As deBoer explained it to me, “Basic economic anxieties are understood by the large majority of the American people” and any good — morally and politically — left-of-center politics would start there.

“If it's true that the left is not appealing to the working class,” he said, “then that is a failure of the left and not of the working class. We have to do a better job.”

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Marc Novicoff: You write that it’s the fault of the elites that the social justice energy of 2020 went nowhere. But the American working class, at least defined by education level, mostly vote for the “far right” party, as you call the GOP. And it's obviously the GOP who voted down many of the reforms proposed after George Floyd's killing. So, why do you conclude that elites are to blame rather than conclude that the country isn't as left-wing as it appeared in the summer of 2020?

Fredrik deBoer: It's the job of any given political movement, particularly of the left, to appeal to everyone, especially the traditional constituencies of the left, which are the people on the bottom. I am a Marxist, and I borrow from the Marxist tradition in terms of defining class and then defining who the various movers and shakers in our political system are. There's all kinds of different ways in which you can define who the enemy is, from a left-wing perspective. But everything that is truly of the left means up from below. If there is no movement from those who are in some way the downtrodden, the underneath, the less privileged and if we aren’t trying to lift them up, then it is not a left-wing project.

Poor people don't vote. OK. The rate at which people vote is heavily correlated with their income to the point that somebody who is a member of the upper middle class is just dramatically more likely to vote than somebody who's a member of the bottom 20 percent of earners. In the 2016 election, there was a narrative that Trump was elected by laid-off iron workers from the Milwaukee suburbs or something. But if you look at the exit polling, I think the median Trump voter in 2016 made like $89,000. The people who are powering the conservative movement in this country are guys who own John Deere dealerships, you know what I'm saying? There’s a whole class of people who we don't generally think of as being part of the upper class of the United States. I think a plurality of American millionaires are small business owners who own things like car dealerships, or HVAC businesses. Those guys are the face of the enemy and in fact, those are the kind of guys that oftentimes will get into state politics and become state legislators.

If it's true that the left is not appealing to the working class, then that is a failure of the left and not of the working-class. We have to do a better job.

Novicoff: You write that the racial justice protest movement in 2020 was run by the Black professional-managerial class as opposed to working-class Black people. But as you also say about Occupy Wall Street and a couple of other movements, movements need leaders and leaders are more likely to be elites. So was the failure of 2020 inevitable, or is there a way for a political movement to have working-class leadership?

DeBoer: During the period of the greatest gains for Black people in this country, the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the early to mid-1960s, of course, there was a leadership class among the people who made that moment happen. As I say in the book, leaderlessness is a fantasy and a fiction. The point is not that we shouldn't have a leadership class. The point is that in that time period, you had less social distance between people from different educational bands, different economic bands and from all sorts of cultural bands because there were much more robust civic institutions that were not in the workplace.

The Black church was perhaps the single most important organizing factor in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement because the Black church had a capacity to bring people together from across different levels of education, from across different levels of income. The Black churches were in networks that spread out through both urban and rural spaces. And these were real social networks like between human beings who knew each other intimately, which allowed for the creation of that movement.

Nowadays, those institutions largely don't exist. Church attendance has fallen off a cliff. Famously, we don't have the kind of robust civic organizations that we used to have, like bowling leagues or Elks clubs, things of that nature. And the internet is extremely efficient at sorting us into particular affinity groups, which means that we don't cross paths with people who are from different walks of life. So it's not that there were no elites within the earlier eras of American social foment. Martin Luther King was an academic before he was a great civil rights leader. The point is that because of the nature of American civic society now, there is a class I’m critiquing in the book — which I belong to — which lives at an educational remove, an economic remove, a cultural remove, and a linguistic remove from big swaths of the country. And I think that it has had palpably negative effects for left organizing.

Novicoff: If you've seen left-wing movements fail time and time again and continue to shoot themselves in the foot, why still be involved with left-wing organizing?

DeBoer: I can't sleep if I don't. I've just moved a couple of months ago to a new house in the suburbs and I'm getting set up to do peer counseling for other people with mental illness to scratch that itch. I have a very bleak perspective on human life. I'm politically always a pessimist, and my writing is often relentlessly critical. I feel like I must have skin in the game of actually busting my ass and trying to do this stuff in real life because if I don't, then I really am just an internet critic.

I was doing a ton of anti-Iraq-war activism in 2003-2005. I exhausted myself doing it, and it was a deeply bleak situation because we were right. We were proven right by history in every sense. And it made no difference whatsoever. We did not achieve anything at all in an obvious sense. But there is one essential thing that we did achieve: if you get an American history textbook and you open up to the section on the Iraq War, it will say that the war was met with fierce public resistance, and it was the first war in American history with significant protest movement prior to the beginning of the war. So, that's not much, but it does mean that history will never be able to say that no one knew it was wrong to invade Iraq and I'm willing to die on that hill.

Novicoff: You're a Marxist, which people may find easy to dismiss. What does Marxism mean to you and what remains relevant about Marxism today?

DeBoer: Marxism is a theory of history and how history proceeds, what drives history, and the events that constitute human history, which implies an economic critique of the current order which we call capitalism and suggests a political response and alternative to capitalism. Marxism is founded on the belief that value in a capitalist society and the production of profit stems from the working class who takes the raw materials, who uses the factories and the apparatus of production, and then creates a commodity that is sold for more than it cost to create it. It's not the ownership class that created that value. It's the workers who created that value. And that means that the basic process of capitalism — the creation of profit — is inherently exploitation.

It doesn't matter how much you pay the workers; it doesn't matter how nice you are to the workers. As long as you are making a profit, you are taking something that was created by labor and you're hoarding it away for yourself. Marxism also suggests that over time, the internal contradictions of capitalism will inevitably break the system down and create the kind of crises in society that can create the opportunity for a new kind of society, which is based on shared ownership rather than the accumulation of profit. What's good about Marxism? Marxism is true.

Novicoff: The American left-of-center has bemoaned for decades that the working-class votes against their economic interests. How do you go about changing that?

DeBoer: You have to remember what politics is in the most basic sense. So, politics is about appealing to people's material self-interest. In other words, you get what you want from voters by making them understand that you will give them what they need, personally. Karl Marx said directly that you don’t change people's minds by appealing to abstractions about the public good; you change people's minds by playing to their best interests.

And so how do we do that? Well, we stitch together an argument that says, there's many different races in this country; there's many different religions; there are many different gender identities and sexual identities. But what is common to a vast majority of the American people is that they know what it's like to have anxiety about how to pay the rent or the mortgage. They know what it's like to struggle to be able to get necessary medical care covered by their insurance, if they have insurance at all. They know what it's like to feel like they can't afford not to work, but they also can't afford to put their kid into a daycare so that they can work. These basic economic anxieties are understood by the large majority of the American people.

You practice good class politics by showing them and saying, “Hey, look, this child tax credit, this has the opportunity to raise a ton of families out of poverty.” And you say, “Hey, look, the child tax credit is a race-neutral program, so everyone takes advantage of it, which is good, but also, because of the distribution of American poverty, it ends up being a very deeply anti-racist program because it helps to rescue Black families in particular from poverty.” And that's class politics. You are showing people that they share mutual interests. And the alternative is to say, “There's Black people and there's white people, and they have an immense gulf between them in life experience. They’re two opposing camps. We want to treat one of those groups as the one that should be the beneficiary of all of our political will and kindness, but we're going to continue to emphasize difference rather than sameness.” I think that's just totally nonsensical as an approach to politics, and I think that that is where the American left has gone wrong.

Novicoff: How do you see the role of the Democratic Party in advancing the goals of the American left-of-center? Should leftists support Biden and the Democratic Party's moderate agenda or not?

DeBoer: There's a subsection of the book called “The Democratic Party: Neither everything nor nothing.” I think that any kind of intelligent leftist has to be motivated in a couple of different directions at once. The first is to understand that we cannot possibly just abdicate partisan politics and say, “That is a pool of corruption that I won't sully myself in,” because then we're just letting go of the levers of power in our society.

But you also have to understand that the Democrats will always fuck you. There will never be a time in your life as a leftist when the Democrats won't fuck you. The Democrats fuck you because of structural elements of what the Democratic Party is, who funds it and what its purpose is. And so you have to go into every single election and say, “I am prepared to strategically vote for a Democrat in a particular election because the alternative is worse. How can I help to envision a better future where I don't have to hold my nose and vote for the Democrats?”

The permanent misery of American politics right now is that the only route to really dramatically better outcomes is with more parties to vote for, so that there are more options, so that the parties that we have feel more pressure to compete with each other and present better alternatives. But, the problem is that in any given election year, if we start a third or fourth party, that's going to sap support from the party that we might otherwise vote for and help our opponents. I don't really know how to get out of that problem. I've semi-seriously said that what we should do is decide to add two more major American political parties, one right-leaning and one left-leaning, and say in 25 years, you're going to have candidates that you can vote for in these parties. But, you can't vote for them for 25 years.

I don't know how you actually pull this off, but in the long run, hold your nose and vote for the Democrats. If you're in a safe state, like I have been for a long time, vote for a protest candidate if that feels appropriate and one of them appeals to you, but always understand that in the long term, the Democratic Party cannot be the vehicle of a truly left-wing movement and we have to keep our eyes on the horizon for better alternatives.

Novicoff: The conclusion of the book is that class must be the primary basis upon which the left organizes. Given the fact that the base for America's leftmost major party is increasingly college-educated people with means, is this feasible, and how would it work?

DeBoer: This is going take a lot of arguing and persuading and careful discussion, but one of the things that people have to understand is you can't build the kind of society we want to build if you're defining rich people as only people who make more than like $400,000 a year, ok? You need to start taxing the upper middle class and even the middle class more than you're taxing them right now. The problem is, as you suggested, that the Democratic Party has a ton of people in what's considered their base who are making $100,000 to $200,000 who are therefore making dramatically more than the American median household income, but who don't see themselves as wealthy or affluent, who will tell you that they're struggling to make ends meet, etc. And they're all for taxing the rich as long as the rich doesn't include them.

But if you just look at it structurally, we can't continue to define the rich so narrowly and expect to be able to tax just them and build the kind of social state that we want. That being said, look, eventually, all of these Park Slope liberals — I say that as someone who lived in Park Slope — bougie, hyper-educated, meritocratic, urbanite, enculturated, left-leaning, white Democrats, they're going to have to put up or shut up, right?

At some point, you have to actually demonstrate that you care enough to open up your pocketbook and give a little bit more money to the tax man. And one of the really unfortunate things about the current state of liberal identity politics is it never puts them in that position, right? Twenty-first century identity politics are so relentlessly focused on these absurd cultural trivialities, like racial diversity at the Oscars, that you're not actually putting well-to-do liberals and leftists in a position where they actually have to decide, “Am I secretly a Republican when it comes time to tax me?”

Following Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to drop the Senate dress code for members — widely seen as an accommodation for the senator from Pennsylvania, who often roams the halls of Congress in a baggy hoodie and shorts — conservative commentator Monica Crowley called Fetterman a “revolting slob.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called him “disgraceful.” (Fetterman retorted: “Thankfully, the nation’s lower chamber lives by a higher code of conduct: displaying ding-a-ling pics in public hearings” — a reference to when Greene displayed uncensored pornographic images of Hunter Biden during a hearing.) Sen. Susan Collins took a more lighthearted approach, joking that she’d wear a bikini to the Senate floor before clarifying that, “obviously,” she wouldn’t.

As a menswear writer who has focused on the topic of suits for the past 12 years, I think the Senate should enforce the dress code and Fetterman should wear a suit — not only in the Senate chamber, but even when walking through congressional halls. Formalwear can communicate a sense of respect. We dress up for weddings and funerals to show our loved ones that we honor them. In the same way, when politicians conduct their work on matters of great importance, they wear suits to demonstrate that they honor the American people whom their work will impact.

In arguing in favor of the dress code, I seem to be in the company of Fetterman’s many conservative critics. But I’m not. Their comments — and the glut of conversation both online and in the news — suggest they fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of putting on a nice suit. Clothing is a poor proxy for a person’s more important inner qualities, such as character, capability and intelligence. Respectability can be more directly measured by a person’s actions. The reason the Senate should maintain the dress code is precisely because clothing is not all that important — next to debates over who gets welfare and who goes to war, fashion is simply not a serious concern. The dress code is about something deeper than that. The point of wearing a suit to Congress is to give physical form to the genuine ideals in your heart: your dedication to upholding your oath of office, your devotion to the institution of democracy, your unshakable commitment to the constituents you serve. If you don’t demonstrate these ideals through your behavior, a suit won’t make up for it. By focusing too much on the mere appearance of respectability, Fetterman’s critics lose sight of the deeper, more meaningful aspects of what it means to serve honorably.

There’s no better example of this misunderstanding than Roger Stone — a longtime supporter of former President Donald Trump. Stone complained to Newsmax this week that Fetterman’s casual style is an “insult to the Senate” and yet it is Stone who stands by a president who attacked more governmental institutions than any president in modern history. Stone has shown more outrage over sweatshirts than over Trump’s interference in Justice Department investigations, his coarsening of the public discourse, his sexual assault allegations or even his attempt to overturn the results of an election he unambiguously lost. In the Danish documentary A Storm Foretold, Stone can be heard laying out plans to help Trump cling to power after his electoral loss. “Fuck the voting,” he said. “Let’s get right to the violence. Shoot to kill.” He would later lobby Trump for a pardon for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. Forget hoodies — this was the real “insult to the Senate.”

Similarly, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who said that the new dress code bothers him “big time,” signed a letter along with 45 other Republicans imploring Schumer to reverse the decision. The letter argues: “Allowing casual clothing on the Senate floor disrespects the institution we serve and the American families we represent.” But Tuberville was one of the 11 Republican senators and senators-elect who tried to stop the electoral vote count during the 2020 presidential election. And surely it’s more disrespectful of U.S. institutions for Tuberville to freeze the nominations of over 300 military officers than it is for Fetterman to show up for work in baggy clothes.

There’s another, perhaps more practical reason that Fetterman should button up, and it has to do with the fact that you’re reading this essay right now — and not, say, an analysis of his legislative contributions. Both the media and those of us on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter have spent months talking about his attire — the past week intensely — when Fetterman and his staff should be working to make sure constituents hear his political message and know what he’s accomplishing for them. As I said before, clothing itself doesn’t really matter all that much; it’s the person under the clothing, and the choices they make, that count. Does Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, really want to spend the next few years answering questions about clothes instead of achievements?

The potential for distraction in the absence of a dress code goes beyond Fetterman, too. Congress is a circus nowadays. With cameras in the Senate and House chambers, politicians grandstand to create viral social media moments, which they milk to drum up the base, fundraise and inflate their celebrity status. The most likely outcome of this dress code scandal is that most male members will continue to wear their suits, and when Fetterman one day leaves office (or when Republicans retake the Senate), the old dress code will be reinstated. But there’s a risk of a lax dress code creating more sideshows. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has already used clothing props for political theater, and it would be a shame if, one day, politicians arrived in increasingly ridiculous outfits for attention. Such moments drive online discourse and mainstream media chatter, which sucks the air out of discussions about more meaningful matters.

While we argued over gym shorts this past week, the United Auto Workers began their massive strike, Vladimir Putin continued to wage his war in Ukraine and the U.S. government careened toward a government shutdown. If Republicans genuinely want to fix the Senate’s dress code, they should work with Democrats to pass a spending bill — Fetterman has already pledged that he’ll wear a suit if Congress can manage this.

Donald Trump is expected to once again skip the GOP primary debate on Sept. 27, when his Republican challengers will gather to pitch themselves at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. For some conservatives affiliated with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which helps sustain the library, that’s all well and good.

Trump is “a spoiled brat in a sandbox,” says one member of the board of trustees.

“Trump is Voldemort,” says an adviser to another board member. Since Trump’s presidency, the Reagan Foundation has invited a spate of Trump antagonists to speak — from current primary challenger and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming to Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who kicked off the foundation’s 2021 speaker series saying of Trump’s White House curtain call that it was “horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end.” Trump responded by calling him a “RINO.”

More Trump-friendly figures have been invited to speak as well — Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to name a couple — but the former president himself hasn’t gotten the invite. Of the foundation’s public explanation that it wasn’t inviting any former presidents to speak, the adviser says: “Yeah, right. Let’s go with that one.”

The feud has become a proxy for the ideological power struggle rocking the GOP, with conservatives torn between the optimism of Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” and the grievance and doom of Trump’s “American carnage.”

“It’s that choice, as much as any policy distinction between candidates, that Republicans are making in the run-up to 2024,” writes David Siders in this week’s Friday Read, a dispatch from the library. “It’s the tension between a sunnier brand of conservatism and the more menacing, grievance-fueled politics of Trump.”

Read the story.

“[He is] lying like a dead dog.”

Can you guess who said this about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**

Did Kremlin Assassins Come to D.C.? … In March 2007, two men assaulted and shot Paul Joyal, an American security analyst and critic of Russian leaders, outside his home in a Maryland suburb near Washington. Joyal survived, but the case, handled by the Prince George’s County Police Department, remains unsolved. Police came to believe it was a random crime gone wrong. But what if it was something more sinister — an international hit on the doorstep of the nation’s capital? And what if local police aren’t equipped to investigate potential foreign ops? Following the suspicious death last summer of another Putin critic in D.C., Michael Schaffer spoke with Joyal about how to investigate such fishy cases in this week’s Capital City column.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Congress this week, but his reception was much more mixed than his first big trip to the Capitol. A growing number of Republicans have questioned and even criticized America’s support for the war effort. Not kept up with the latest geopolitics? Here are some tips to help you through when your friends bring it up this weekend (from POLITICO’s Gabriel Gavin):

- President Joe Biden wants an extra $24 billion to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Put that in perspective: Instead, he could give every American $70.

- Times are tough. When Zelenskyy landed in Washington on Thursday, the Pentagon even had to cut back on the traditional military band.

- See if your pals can guess who Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance was talking about when he tweeted: “Look I know Schumer changed the dress code but letting someone in the senate chamber dressed like this really crosses the line.” Hint: It’s not Sen. John Fetterman.

- Biden’s “blank checks” for Ukraine actually add up to $113 billion so far — which seems like a drop in the ocean compared to last year’s eye-watering $6.27 trillion federal budget.

Why #BLM Failed … Marxist Substacker Fredrik deBoer, better known as Freddie deBoer, has become a lightning rod on the left for his criticisms of liberal social movements. In his new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, he claims that the summer of racial justice protests in 2020 failed to create substantive change in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, blaming elites in the movement for focusing on goals he considers relatively inconsequential, like diverse representation at the Oscars, and unpopular ideas like defunding police. By eschewing broad economic messaging, he tells Marc Novicoff in this interview, the left loses the thread — and that applies not just to 2020, but to 2024. “If it’s true that the left is not appealing to the working class,” he says, “then that is a failure of the left and not of the working class. We have to do a better job.”

‘You Might as Well Get a Gun and Shoot Yourself in the Head’ … That’s what United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, then a rank-and-file union member, wrote to UAW leadership back in 2007, when the union brass agreed to sharp concessions to Chrysler. Fain was having none of it. In a rare act of defiance, he led the Local 1166 to vote against the contract. It was an inflection point in a career that would launch him to the top of the union, which this week hit all three major Detroit automakers with a walkout for the first time in history, sending both Trump and Biden rushing to show their support. “In making these arguments, Fain, like the legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther who led the union from 1946 to 1970, has framed this fight as one to help not just auto workers, but America’s entire working class,” writes Steven Greenhouse.

**Who Dissed answer: That would be Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a perennial McCarthy opponent who has used the impending government shutdown to call for his removal as Speaker. The “lying” jab came after McCarthy accused Gaetz of colluding with Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell to work against him.

politicoweekend@email.politico.com

There was no way Harry Truman was going to win a full term for himself in 1948. No way.

It would have been hard for any successor to Franklin D. Roosevelt to have gained the nation’s approval. But the contrast between the patrician, regal Roosevelt and the bespectacled, unimposing Missourian was particularly stark. Moreover, the years immediately following the end of World War II were unsettling: A wave of strikes by labor unions determined to make up for the wartime wage freeze, rampant inflation, the first signs of an emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union that shattered the hopes of a post-war tranquility.

The discontent was clear when the 1946 midterms brought Republicans into control of the Congress for the first time in 16 years. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the Democratic coalition was beginning to come apart on both ends. On the left, former Vice President Henry Wallace — whom Truman fired as commerce secretary for his sympathetic views toward Russia — was mounting a presidential bid under the banner of the Progressive Party. On the right, Southerners were chafing at Truman’s civil rights agenda, which included federal laws to crack down on lynchings and poll taxes, and a bigger federal role combating employment discrimination. Mississippi Gov. Fielding Wright, in his inaugural address, warned his fellow Democrats that they could not rely on the South’s electoral votes.

And not all of the dissatisfaction with Truman was ideological; all through the first part of 1948, there were efforts to find a different Democratic nominee simply because few thought Truman could win. A prominent liberal group, Americans for Democratic Action, urged the party to nominate General Dwight Eisenhower. (The future Republican president disclaimed any interest in politics at the time.)

When Democrats met in Philadelphia for their nominating convention, Truman won the reluctant approval of his party, which chose Kentucky Sen. Alben Barkley as Truman’s running mate. The candidates did deliver rousing acceptance speeches, but they seemed far less significant than what had already happened: the breathtaking defection of much of the South.

After a contentious floor flight, the party adopted a strong civil rights plank, with Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey urging them to “walk out of the shadow of states’ rights, into the bright sunshine of human rights.” With that, dozens of Southern delegates stormed out of the convention. A month later, in Birmingham, Ala., a “States’ Rights Democratic Party” — Dixiecrats for short — nominated South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond and Mississippi’s Fielding Wright as their presidential and vice-presidential candidates. And in four Southern states, the ticket ran under the banner of the Dixiecrat Party, all but ensuring that those states’ electoral votes would go to Thurmond and Wright.

By contrast, the Republicans seemed well positioned to win the presidency. Their candidate, New York Gov. Tom Dewey, had run a respectable campaign against FDR in 1944, and had chosen California Gov. Earl Warren as his running mate; that meant the GOP had a real chance to capture the two big states on each coast.

With Truman’s job approval at a historically low 37 percent, there was good reason for the political and journalistic establishments to paint Truman as a sure loser. The polling firm of Elmo Roper even announced in early September that it would cease polling on the presidential race, because the outcome was so clear. Major news organizations in the days before the election ran pieces heralding the incoming Republican administration. Most famously, the Chicago Tribune went to press election night with the banner headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Spoiler alert: That is not what happened. Truman won a clear plurality of the popular vote — a 4.5 point margin — and a comfortable 303 electoral votes. No, he didn’t win New York, thanks to the Wallace vote and Dewey’s popularity in his home state. Yes, he lost 39 electoral votes in four Southern states to the Thurmond-Wright ticket. It didn’t matter. Truman scored narrow victories in California, Illinois and Ohio, and returned to the presidency.

Post-election analysts pointed to Truman’s combative “Give ‘em hell!” approach and a strong showing among Black people, labor and the farm vote, as well as Dewey’s risk-averse campaign and stiff-backed personality. (“The little groom on the wedding cake,” as Dorothy Parker famously called him.)

What was overlooked — then and now — is how perilously close the United States came to a deadlocked contest that would have rocked American democracy, shaking the public’s confidence in our electoral system while giving Southern segregationists a chance to extort the country.

How close did America come to a constitutional crisis?

Look at two key states. In California, where nearly 4 million votes were cast, Truman won by about 18,000 votes giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes. In Ohio, where nearly 3 million people voted, Truman won by just 7,000 votes, giving him that state’s 25 electoral votes. If 12,000 voters in those two states had changed their minds, Truman would have wound up with 253 electoral votes, Dewey with 239 and Thurmond with 39 — with no candidate winning the necessary 266 electoral vote majority.

Imagine the nation’s voters waking up Wednesday morning to discover that they had not elected a president. The first likely response would be confusion: What happens now? They would have learned that under the Byzantine rules laid down by the 12th Amendment, the House of Representatives would vote not by individual members, but by state delegations — one state, one vote. The single member from Alaska would have the same vote as the 45-member delegation of New York. It would take a majority of delegations — 25 out of 48 — to elect a president. If a state delegation was tied, that state would not be counted, but a victorious candidate would still need 25 states. And the members would have to choose from among the top three electoral votes finishers: Truman, Dewey and Thurmond.

But nothing that “simple” would cover the sheer head-scratching nature of an election without a majority. In the weeks after the November vote, the spotlight would first fall on the presidential electors — the real voters who choose a president. And in 1948, the general belief was that members of the Electoral College were more or less free agents. While some states had laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate under whose name they ran, most states did not; and if a rogue elector chose to defy those rules, it was unclear what could be done about it. The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t get around to forbidding such “faithless electors” until 2020.

The likely consequence would have been attempts to persuade electors to switch enough of their votes to make an electoral majority; one plausible case would focus on making the popular vote winner the president. But how many GOP electors would be willing to face the wrath of their party back home?

For example, if Dewey, who had made clear his refusal to bargain with segregationists, were to urge his New York electors to vote for Truman, how many of them — from conservative upstate regions of the state — would accede to that request? And how many Truman electors from states like Georgia, Tennessee and Florida would switch their votes to Thurmond to deprive the president of an electoral majority? In fact, the key reason for the States’ Rights Democratic Party to exist was to force the election into the House, where the South would hope to win deep concessions on civil rights from whomever emerged as president — and there were any number of Democratic House members outside the four Thurmond-won states in sympathy with that effort.

If we assume that electors would not deliver the presidency to Truman, a deadlocked election would move the contest to the Congress — with enough uncertainty to boggle the mind.

One daunting factor was the makeup of the new House and the 48 state delegations. Democrats had majorities in exactly 25 states, the bare minimum needed for a majority. But four of those states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina — had voted for Thurmond. (Other Southern states like Georgia had committed segregationists in their delegations.) If the House delegations of any one of those four Thurmond states cast their votes for the South Carolina governor, there would be no majority. And under the 12th Amendment, the House was required to keep balloting until a president was chosen.

But that was only the beginning of the muddle. Suppose a state delegation voted with a plurality but not a majority for Truman. Would that state’s vote be counted? Would House members vote by secret ballot or public declaration, which might make a huge difference? And who would make those rules? The outgoing GOP-controlled Congress or — more likely — the incoming Democratic majority? Would those rules be drawn up by a standing House committee, or by a special committee appointed by the majority and minority leaders?

Now suppose the House was deadlocked ballot after ballot (as had happened back in 1801, when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr had each received the same number of electoral votes). In that case, the incoming vice president, chosen by senators on a one-member-one-vote process, would assume the office of the presidency. (Senators would have to choose among the top two finishers — Barkley or Warren). Here again the nominal numbers are misleading. There were 55 Democrats, but eight of them were from states that had voted for Thurmond and Wright. While they could not vote for the Mississippi governor, they could abstain; and if they did, would the Senate rules require a majority of all senators, or just a majority of those voting? (It was just such a rule that ultimately enabled Kevin McCarthy to win the speakership earlier this year.)

Add to this uncertainty, consider the dilemma that would have faced the most conscientious House members as they tried to weigh the factors in their votes. Should they support the candidate who won their district? The national popular vote? Should they, in the spirit of Edmund Burke’s “Letter to the Electors of Bristol,” vote for the candidate who in their judgment would make the best president regardless of how voters back home had chosen — even if that vote threatened political extinction?

Behind these arcane parliamentary questions lay a deadly serious issue: As noted, the entire purpose of the Southern rebellion was to force the election into the House, where the Southern segregationists held the balance of power. From the time Fielding Wright had thrown down his challenge to national Democrats at the start of the year, the Southern Democrats were determined to stop the use of federal power against state-sanctioned discrimination; it was Mississippi Sen. James Eastland who declared “keeping the Negro out of politics” was the central goal of the states’ rights movement.

If anything, the Truman campaign’s outreach to Black voters, with the administration moving to desegregate the armed forces and put an end to the poll tax and other tools of voter suppression, had toughened the stance of the segregationists. Moreover, they could count on the support of at least some conservative Republicans; while the GOP platform in 1948 had been more committed to civil rights than the Democrats’ platform, there were plenty of conservatives who opposed these civil rights proposals — like a Fair Employment Practices Commission — as federal government interference with private enterprise. Their ranks, combined with those of Southern Democrats, could prove a serious obstacle to a quick resolution of the presidential logjam.

Trying to game out what would have happened is a fool’s errand. The potential resolutions could lie with the votes of electors; with a decision by Republican House members to swing their delegations to Truman; to a House deadlock long enough to lead to Alben Barkley assuming the presidency; to the speaker of the House becoming president for an indeterminate amount of time. It’s also possible that a covert bargain between Southern Democrats in Congress and the party’s congressional leaders would have put any civil rights proposals on the back burner. (As it is, the Truman administration’s enthusiasm for such measures was noticeably less during his full term.)

What is more certain is that those 12,000 voters in California and Illinois saved the United States from a constitutional crisis and an episode that would have thrown into doubt Americans’ sense that their electoral system worked. It was not until 2000 that we had a seriously contested election, and that came at a time of peace, prosperity and a relatively tranquil political atmosphere, in comparison to 1948. And it wasn’t until the most recent presidential election, in 2020, that a more serious threat to American democracy emerged in the form of a president who sought to use his power to retain an office he had lost.

But for a handful of voters in a few key states, future generations would have learned about a 1948 presidential election that was not the triumph of an underdog, but an episode dominated by months of confusion and paralysis, eroding decades of confidence in our political process.

A New Jersey Democrat currently serving his third full term in the Senate, Menendez was indicted last Thursday by federal prosecutors who laid out an elaborate and damning case involving secret payments funneled through an American-based businessman, all tracing back to favors the senator allegedly performed on behalf of the Egyptian government.

Even for New Jersey, which a 2014 Harvard study named one of the two most politically corrupt states in the country, the details are eye-popping. Cash totaling almost half a million dollars stuffed into closets, drawers and clothes in Menendez’s home. Gold bars, the price of which the senator allegedly searched on the internet, totaling $100,000 in value. A Mercedes Benz.

Menendez is a notorious political brawler who has survived scandal before — in 2017, a jury deadlocked on corruption charges that could have sent him to prison for years. But his luck seems to have run out, with party leaders in New Jersey abandoning him in droves — particularly the state’s all-powerful county chairs, who largely determine the outcome of primary elections — and national Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman (Penn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) calling on him to resign.

In short, Menendez is done. Regardless of his legal fortunes, he’s not going to be renominated next year. But what about the remainder of this term? If history is an indication, that is entirely up to his colleagues in the Senate.

The Senate has not expelled a member of its body since 1862, during the Civil War. In modern times, only the threat of expulsion has compelled Senators to resign, rather than face the indignity of seeing their colleagues toss them out by vote. Several of those historical examples suggest that it’s possible for Senate Democrats to unhinge Menendez from his seat, but it won’t necessarily happen quickly.

No example proves this point better than the case of Harrison “Pete” Williams, the disgraced New Jersey politician who was convicted of crimes related to the famous ABSCAM case. Ironically, Bob Menendez currently fills the same seat that Williams ultimately resigned.

Between 1978 and 1980 the FBI conducted a sting operation in which agents posed as Arab businessmen and offered cash bribes to 31 elected officials. Ultimately, one senator and six House members took the bait.

Williams, a four-term Senator and leading liberal in Congress, was the highest-ranking official to go down. In a bizarre and intricate scheme, he agreed to help an undercover FBI agent posing as an Arab sheik to resolve hurdles in his U.S. immigration process in return for the sheik and his friends making a $100 million cash infusion in a mining business in which Williams held a secret 18 percent stake. Williams and his associates would then sell their interest to a second group of (fake) businessmen at a $70 million profit.

The parallels between the Williams and Menendez cases are striking. While Williams never had the opportunity to stash cash and gold in his home — after all, there was no deal to be had; it was a sting — both men were alleged to have funneled foreign payments through real companies (in the Menendez case, through a halal meat enterprise; in Williams’ case, a mining operation). Both men also allegedly turned their corruption into a family enterprise. Where Menendez’s wife has been indicted alongside her husband, FBI tapes showed that Williams boasted to undercover agents of an earlier scheme in which he pressured the state’s casino authorities to approve a deal that benefited a company that employed his wife in a low- or no-show job.

ABSCAM was somewhat controversial. Lawyers for the defense argued it was a classic case of entrapment, and in the case of Williams, there was something to the argument. During an initial encounter with the undercover agents, Williams seemed to demur. It took several months to get him on board. But once on board, he exhibited little compunction about profiting from his office and boasted frequently to agents of his past criminality.

When federal prosecutors indicted Williams in 1980, the Democratic-controlled Senate launched and then promptly suspended an official investigation, on the premise that such a parallel procedure would prejudice his criminal trial. But in May 1981, when a federal jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts, the Senate, now in Republican control, opened hearings. It took roughly three months for the Ethics Committee to vote unanimously for a resolution to expel Williams, and over the course of the year, Williams, who was appealing his conviction, tangled with his colleagues in federal court over their right to expel him and the proper scope of a full Senate trial.

It didn’t help his case that he was unrepentant. To his dying day, Williams would claim he was convicted of a “dishonest crime,” meaning he was entrapped, because “somebody else creates the situation for which you are convicted.”

When one of Williams’ defenders, Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, recommended that the body censure, rather than expel their colleague, arguing that expulsion had traditionally been reserved for cases of treason and insurrection, his Democratic colleague, Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, answered in disgust: “If non-treasonous behavior be the sole benchmark of fitness to serve in this body, then one must ask how fit is this body in which we serve?” Eagleton emerged as one of Williams’ most vocal critics and argued that if the convicted politician wouldn’t do them the dignity of vacating his seat, “we should not perpetrate our own disgrace by asking him to stay.”

Ultimately, Williams ran down the clock. Only when his appeals were rejected in late 1981 and only when it became clear that the Senate would expel him on a bipartisan basis, did he relent. In March 1982 — more than two years after his initial indictment — he resigned his seat.

That’s not a story that augurs well for a speedy outcome in the Menendez case. While good money suggests his Senate days are numbered, Menendez is likely to hold on for as long as possible, if for no other reason than to maintain negotiating leverage with prosecutors and to raise money for his defense. He will become an albatross around the necks of fellow New Jersey Democrats and House and Senate colleagues in tough races. His presence in the Senate makes it all the harder for Democrats to build a case against GOP corruption next year.

More recent examples don’t suggest a different outcome. In November 1992, multiple women accused Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) of sexual misconduct. It took almost three years for a long ethics process to unwind — one that did little credit to Packwood or to the Senate. Facing the likelihood of expulsion, in October 1995, Packwood finally resigned. The same was true of Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican who allegedly arranged illegal hush payments and a lobbying job for a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. It took almost two years after the first revelations of misconduct before Ensign agreed to resign, and again, only because his colleagues seemed prepared to expel him.

All of which means, it’s in the Senate Democrats’ hands. They can drag it out, or they can expedite expulsion proceedings and make it clear to Menendez that he can leave quietly out the back door, or they can toss him out the front in full light of day.

Everyone deserves their moment in court, but there is a difference between legal and political proceedings.

Bob Menendez deserves the opportunity to explain to his colleagues how, on a senator’s salary, he came to possess a Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible (sticker price, $60,000) and $100,000 in gold bars, to say nothing of envelopes of cash bearing the fingerprints of his co-defendants. He should also have the opportunity to explain why he presumably never reported these assets or paid taxes on them. But the Senate doesn’t need to wait for his criminal trial to unfold before initiating its own investigation, and it shouldn’t take months for such a process to play out. There is evidence in abundance that allows for a speedy resolution of his ethics case and a vote on the Senate floor.

The modern record suggests that embattled Senators will cling to their seats tenaciously, only until they know the die has been cast. Chuck Schumer and his caucus have a job to do. History shows them exactly how to get it done.

As an expert who’s studied nonverbal communication for over 50 years, 25 as an FBI agent specializing in decoding human behavior, I saw through the canned speeches to the real men and women on the debate stage. Ron DeSantis’ furrowed glabella, Vivek Ramaswamy’s bright smile, Nikki Haley’s tensed jaw — these telltale bits of body language revealed their inner thoughts with an immediacy and authenticity that words could never achieve.

Body language is our most direct and honest form of communication. And when it comes to debates, it can make the difference between a swing voter Googling your name or switching the channel. So I’ve put together some personalized tips for each candidate to improve on their last debate performance, seize the limelight and align what they want to say with how they look saying it.

Ron DeSantis Needs to Chill

With his furrowed glabella (the area between the eyebrows), tense face and forceful vocal tone, Ron DeSantis’ nonverbal language screamed “I’m angry!” at the first debate. Anger is fine when it is warranted, but not as your default expression. Instead, the governor should strike a friendly, approachable tone at the beginning of the debate, and save the harsh frowns and agitato voice for beating back direct challenges. When he says everything in the same register of grievance, without variation or dynamics, his most important points blend in with the rest of his speech, washing over the audience. Contrast is key.

Careful With Those Arms, Vivek Ramaswamy

Vivek Ramaswamy looked the most comfortable on stage at the last debate, and that translated into a major spike in curiosity about the millennial biotech entrepreneur turned presidential hopeful. With his broad gestures and bright smile, he almost looked like he was having fun — until Nikki Haley went after him. His resulting grimace, distorted smile and nervous looking about detracted from an otherwise magnetic performance. He should steel himself for attacks so that his face doesn’t give away his surprise and anxiety. He should also make sure that one of his strengths — quick comebacks — doesn’t become a weakness. Sometimes he’s almost too quick. He doesn’t give the audience time to register a barbed remark, like Ronald Reagan used to do. Finally, Ramaswamy ought to mind his wingspan. Last time, he went too far with some of his gestures, violating Haley’s personal space. Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, folks.

Chris Christie, You Have Hands: Use Them

Chris Christie’s decades of public service gave him a tremendous advantage last time around. He used his eyes to demonstrate both what irks him and what he cares about — glaring at opponents, popping his eyebrows to highlight key points. This time around, he should use his hands more forcefully; in particular, he should point to the specific individuals he disagrees with, as if probing bread dough — a dramatic, accusatory gesture with a great effect. He could also use his hand like a cleaver to chop up his arguments. The key is to use big, confident gesticulations. Soft gestures are exactly that: soft. They register in the brain as lacking commitment.

Look ’Em in the Eye, Mr. Vice President

Mike Pence started slow in the last debate. He needs to get into the fray faster, with a more forceful tone and emphatic, outward hand gestures, shaping his speech like a conductor’s baton and commanding the audience’s attention. In particular, gestures with spread fingers draw the eyes and heighten drama. Pence also needs to address his opponents directly — last time, he kept his shoulders squared with the audience and moderators. To appear strong and capable of addressing problems head-on, he should look right at his challengers and show the audience he won’t back down.

Tim Scott Is Poised. Now He Needs to Be Fierce.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott appeared poised at the last debate, using palm-open gestures to communicate openness, bringing his hand to his chest to show emotional sincerity and speaking with the compelling cadence of a church pastor to deliver his message with gravity and clarity. But he will have to do more with his hand gestures and facial expressions if he wants to interject himself into the undoubtedly boisterous second debate. Jabbing a finger when an opponent goes on the offensive, smirking to deflate over-the-top criticisms and knowingly shaking his head to point out moments of disagreement will garner attention from the hosts and, perhaps more importantly, from the camera.

Give ’Em the (Index) Finger, Nikki Haley

As the former South Carolina governor and secretary to the United Nations, Nikki Haley is no stranger to debate. She certainly demonstrated her willingness to challenge her opponents last time, tensing her jaw, swiping the air to emphasize her talking points and unleashing a vocal barrage on Ramaswamy, who clashed with her again and again. This time, the stakes are higher. She will need to interject herself into every conversation to prove her points and garner more screen time. When the time is right, Haley must use that overwhelming combination of self-assurance, knowledge and experience, combined with strong facial and hand gestures, to command the stage and to show her opponents she’s not to be messed with. When she holds up her hand to push back on something, she needs to spread her fingers wide to heighten the effect. Also, Haley has a tendency to gesture too quickly — she’ll raise her index finger to prove a point but lower it before it’s made an impact. Haley’s got to keep that finger up like she’s castigating a football team at half-time to show her opponents just how powerful she is.

Please, Doug Burgum, Spare Us the Props

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum had one nonverbal trick at the last debate: a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution that did not move the needle one iota. Running for president is about passion, something Burgum’s relaxed face and easy smiles did not indicate. There are a few nonverbal ways he can telegraph the necessary drive and panache: raising or lowering his voice to create contrast, popping or furrowing his eyebrows to emphasize surprise or disagreement and squarely facing his opponents when he challenges them. He doesn’t need props — only his hands. But to use them, he’ll need to let go of the podium, rather than holding onto it like a sinking ship.

All Donald Trump Has to Do Is Be There

As with the last debate, former President Donald Trump is indicating that he will be absent. But he’s missing out on an opportunity to speak to undecided voters. He could make the biggest body language impact on the stage simply by showing up.

Menendez was unsparing in his response.

“He called for my resignation and he wanted me fired because I dared to fight back on behalf of my boss,” Rasmussen, now the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said in an interview. “To me it indicates he can hit you but you’re not allowed to hit him.” 

Menendez seems to still believe he’s wrapped in Teflon, insisting in a press event Monday that he’s not resigning his Senate seat after being indicted for the second time on bribery charges. 

But his remarkable half-century run in politics looks all but finished after a young, straitlaced prosecutor matter-of-factly laid out the depth of his latest alleged corruption on Friday.

The accusations were so egregious, and showed such a staggering pattern of venality, that loyal Democrats who lavished praise and donations on him for years, even as he faced previous corruption charges, had no choice but to jump ship. By 5 p.m. Friday, Gov. Phil Murphy called for Menendez’s immediate resignation, and many others followed. By Saturday morning, another fellow Democrat, Rep. Andy Kim, said he’s running for Menendez’s seat. 

It marked a steep and swift fall — and one that Menendez still seems not to recognize. He unleashed a lengthy and defiant statement Friday suggesting he is a political target and that his ethnicity is a motivating factor. He did so again Monday in his native Union City, saying that “prosecutors get it wrong. Sadly, I know that.” 

Menendez’s response offers a window on an operating style that made him an extraordinarily powerful politician, one with papal status back home in the Garden State: Walk with a chip on your shoulder, attack your opponents, never back down. He’s simply hard-wired differently. Most people who escaped prison through a hung jury might think twice before jaywalking. Menendez instead threatened his opponents right after the mistrial, won another term a year later and, several people who know him said after Friday’s indictment, seemed emboldened by it all. 

But there was one strikingly notable difference when he stood before dozens of reporters Monday insisting he’ll prove his innocence and remain in office. He didn’t have his friend and fellow senator Cory Booker there (and Booker would call for Menendez’s resignation Tuesday). He didn’t have Gov. Phil Murphy there. He didn’t have a single person of statewide influence at his side. All he had was a partial response to the indictment and the familiar offensive tactic that his opponents “see a political opportunity for themselves.”  

“That worked for him as long as he got away with it, and he got away with it for a long time,” Rasmussen said. “Now all of a sudden that’s not working for him anymore, and that’s what happens to a bully.” 

In Hudson County, where Menendez grew up, politics is famously a blood sport ruled by bosses. Just east of Union City, in Weehawken, Aaron Burr fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel. A few blocks south is where Jersey City Mayor Frank “I am the law” Hague infamously reigned for more than three decades. In Union City alone — 1.3 square miles of concrete and pavement in the shadow of Manhattan — two consecutive mayors were convicted of corruption and for many years it was a mob outpost. 

The son of Cuban immigrants raised in a tenement in the notoriously ethics-challenged county, Menendez made his name early as a young Union City school board member who turned on his mentor — the city’s mayor — and wore a bulletproof vest to court to testify against him. The vest was no dramatic flourish. Menendez had not only turned on former Union City Mayor William Musto, but essentially the city government and mob bosses, alleging public corruption (Musto was convicted of racketeering but won reelection a day after being sentenced to prison; his immediate successor, Robert Botti, was convicted and sentenced in a bid-rigging scheme.) 

"I didn't need anyone to tell me to protect myself," Menendez has reportedly said.

Menendez may have feared for his life then, but it had only just begun politically.

Menendez gained local clout as mayor and became a sort of folk hero at home once he moved on to the state Capitol in Trenton, where he was a representative, and then to Washington, D.C. For the last 17 years, he has served as an immensely powerful senator. He became known as an effective legislator who mastered constituent services. Even as the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — where he dealt with dictators and globally consequential matters like Iranian nuclear deals — Menendez recognized the power of local retail politics. On just one day in August, for example, he held a press conference on funding for a new hospital program, held a round table with farmers and appeared with families of drug overdose victims to push legislation to crack down on fentanyl. 

“If you ever followed Bob Menendez in any of the parades … the guy is the pope,” said one Democratic official close to the meeting among Murphy and state leaders following the indictment. “People are coming up to him, taking pictures, hugging him. People just see him as what their children can become.” 

Sure, he’d gathered clouds of corruption the higher he rose, and even stood trial on charges of bribery in 2017. But that ended in a hung jury and Menendez pushed a Trumpian narrative that his political opponents were after him. Walking scot-free from a corruption trial on a technicality cost him exactly zero political capital. In fact, New Jersey’s Democratic machinery quickly rallied around him for a reelection bid he’d win a year later. As one North Jersey operative put it, Menendez’s continued involvement in Hudson County politics made him both a powerful senator and de facto county boss. 

“He was able to raise money, he had deep reach, he could back up threats that he made. So that obviously extended the length of his influence and power,” the operative said. 

And in perhaps the clearest example of his sustained influence after the trial, Menendez effectively installed his son, Rob Menendez, a lawyer with no political experience, in Congress with no opposition and the full backing of state party leaders.  

The killer instinct that made Menendez one of the most powerful and enduring politicians in a notoriously cutthroat state has never been far from the surface. In what has become a famous example of Jersey’s vindictive brand of politics, Menendez stood outside the federal courthouse in Newark after his 2017 mistrial and issued a warning to his rivals. 

“To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat,” he said, “I know who you are and I won’t forget you.” 

Menendez won another six-year term in 2018. Prosecutors allege that year is exactly when he started trading on his influence. Between 2018 and 2022, he allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes — in gold, cash, a Mercedes-Benz and mortgage payments for his wife — from three New Jersey businesspeople. 

His “corrupt arrangement” included providing “sensitive, non-public U.S. government information to Egyptian officials,” secretly aiding the Egyptian government and helping one New Jersey company gain a monopoly on the export of certified halal meat to Egypt, which led to increased costs of meat suppliers and “was detrimental to U.S. interests,” federal authorities said. 

Simply being indicted a second time is, perhaps surprisingly, not the sole reason Menendez’s political career is now believed to be in its terminal stage. Timing is one element. Menendez was first indicted in 2015 and stood a two-month trial that ended in November 2017 — a year before his next election, giving him in effect a clean bill of political health on the trail. 

This time he faces the prospect of waiting for trial as he seeks reelection in 2024, and the Democratic Party will hardly want to pour money and resources into what would otherwise be a safe seat in a presidential election year.  

“All it would take is someone with half a profile and he’d lose,” the North Jersey operative said. “The reality is that he’s done as a United States senator.” 

Another reason for that is the case itself. Whereas prosecutors struggled in 2017 to cleanly connect dots between campaign finance donations, luxury trips and official favors for a friend, they have now unveiled a set of allegations that is instantly relatable to anyone who’s watched “The Sopranos.” 

“If you presented somebody with a movie script and said part of the story was we’d trade gold bars and cash and track it with DNA, and then we’re going to find the cash…you’d say we’ve got to edit that out of the script because it’s not believable,” said Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, who has a frosty relationship with Menendez and who is running for governor in 2025. “The only people that deal in gold bars are cartoon villains.” 

Former Democratic Sen. Bob Torricelli, who considered running for Menendez’s seat if he were convicted in 2017 — and who was likely one of the intended targets of Menendez’s courthouse threat — said the crimes Menendez is accused of committing may stand out well beyond New Jersey. He would know better than most: He ended his Senate reelection campaign in 2002 amid pressure for ethics violations. 

“There are always indiscretions in politics, as there are in any profession,” he said. “This is not only atypical of the United States Congress, it is unprecedented. It is unprecedented not only in this Congress, but in all Congresses that I’ve ever known and all that preceded us.”

Barring another mistrial or some legal clearance of Menendez’s conduct, the fairytale of the American ideal he built his career on may only be a footnote to the darker story the world is about to watch unfold in a Manhattan courtroom. 

“It’s over. He’s not even in hospice,” a longtime Democratic operative who knows Menendez well said. “The priest is there. It’s just looking at the clock to get to last rites.”

It was a not-so-subtle indication of just how Trumpified the GOP has become. (Sure, many Republicans wear red ties, but the variety has really taken a nosedive since the rise of MAGA.) It was also a reminder that fashion can send powerful political messages. 

Ever since the first televised presidential debate — when Richard Nixon’s mid-gray suit faded into the background of black-and-white TV screens, while John F. Kennedy’s dark worsted suit cut a winning silhouette — politicians have paid special attention to how their clothes make them look on-screen.

But some haven’t paid quite as much attention as others. Here’s everything the candidates got right — and what they desperately need to improve — to pop on the debate stage like President Kennedy did: 

Ron DeSantis Dressed Better Than Ever

DeSantis looked better than usual on the debate stage. His suit was classically proportioned: The lapel ended about halfway between the collar and the shoulder joint, the tie echoed the width of the lapel, and the points of the shirt collar were long enough to neatly tuck underneath the jacket. The gorge, which is the tailoring term for the seam that connects the jacket’s collar to the lapel, was also positioned in such a way that the lapel’s notch sat roughly horizontally with the shirt collar. These proportions made for a classic look, and when historians look back on this debate, DeSantis’ outfit won’t look too out of touch. There is one way DeSantis could brush up his look: Because he has a somewhat stocky build, much of his tailoring would benefit from having a slightly lower buttoning point, which would lengthen the lapel line and give him a more elongated silhouette.

Vivek Ramaswamy Dressed Just Like DeSantis

At the first debate, Ramaswamy was plagued by a bad collar gap — the tailoring term for when the jacket’s collar floats away from the neck. In the second debate, he still could have tightened his collar a bit, but he looked better than some of the other male candidates fighting with floating jacket collars. Much like DeSantis, Ramaswamy’s suit featured good proportions: a lapel that ends about halfway from the collar to the shoulder, a tie that echoed the lapel width and a shirt with collar points long enough to neatly hide under the jacket’s lapels. In this way, the suit framed his face nicely. Unfortunately for Ramaswamy, DeSantis wore almost the exact same outfit, but better. He might have struck a better chord by going with a different tie and standing out as his own person.

Nikki Haley Looked Patriotic

Although I’m a menswear writer, and not a womenswear expert, I’ll say that Haley’s presentation looked well tailored. During the first debate, she went with a sparkling white dress — famously the color of the women’s suffrage movement. In the second debate, she wore a deep red dress made from a satin-like fabric. Time will tell if she decides on blue for the third debate — a move that Hillary Clinton made during the 2016 debates, signaling her patriotism. You can see the hallmarks of good tailoring: Her clothes moved with her, not against her, unlike some of the male candidates tonight. The somewhat lustrous fabric gave her a stronger presence on stage. But one wonders if her outfit would have supported her more as a speaker, rather than taking attention away from her message, if it were made from something more matte.

Doug Burgum Nailed the Classic Silhouette

Burgum’s outfit tonight was similar to Ramaswamy’s, which is to say that he nailed many of the proportions of a classic silhouette. Unfortunately, he suffered from a bad collar gap whenever he moved. The coat’s sleeves also looked poorly tailored, such that they rode up on his arms, revealing more shirt cuff than they should have. A small point that will perhaps go unnoticed by most viewers: While Ramaswamy wore a half-Windsor knot tonight, Burgum wore a four-in-hand. The fights between supporters of these two knots are almost as fierce as tonight’s primary debate.

Chris Christie’s Mauve Tie Refuted Trump

Once again, Christie was one of the few male candidates who didn’t look like a simulacrum of Trump. Tonight he wore a patterned mauve tie with a poplin button-down — a professional look with a hint of American conservatism that doesn’t try to follow in Trump’s footsteps. Like many of the other candidates, Christie’s suit suffered from a collar gap. A visit to a good custom tailor would have fixed this. There was also a glint of something in his jacket’s breast pocket — possibly eyewear — which was a tad distracting.

Mike Pence Was Drowning in His Jacket

Pence is known for wearing a slightly extended shoulder, which, on some men, can lend a more flattering proportion. But in Pence’s case, it makes his jackets look too big on him (even his dress shirt collar tonight looked too large for his neck). Tonight, the slightly narrower lapel left a lot of open space between the end of the lapel and the shoulder joint, emphasizing the broadness of the chest. As a whole, his coat looked like it was swallowing him. His tailoring could be improved by wearing a slightly narrower shoulder and a more classically proportioned lapel. And while a few of the male candidates wore solid red ties — Trump’s signature move — it was particularly striking on Pence, who would seem to have more of an incentive than most to move out of the former president’s shadow.

Nice Tie, Tim Scott, But Fix Your Collar

Most of the candidates wore dark-colored outfits fit for a conservative occasion. But this sort of ensemble leaves little room for expression. Scott successfully went for something bolder, choosing a striped tie that combined blue and red — much like Reagan’s tie in this 1991 portrait by Everett Raymond Kinstler.

However, Scott’s coat could have been improved. Whenever he moved one of his arms, the opposing lapel buckled away from the chest. A well-tailored jacket should have lapels that sit relatively flat on your body, even as you move. Scott’s shirt collar was also too small for this suit. These stingy collars come out of early 2000s menswear trends, when designers shrank the male silhouette: a short suit jacket, narrower shoulder and razor-thin lapel. It looked out of place on the debate stage.

One thing’s for sure: On the stage at the Reagan Library, nobody could rival the Gipper on style.

That’s because Congress has given scores of government agencies power to independently finance themselves, reasoning that their functions are too important to be left to the uncertainties of the annual appropriations process.

But now, the constitutionality of independent agency funding is at risk in a case pending before the Supreme Court. The opinion could lead to a sea change in how essential government agencies function — and to potential chaos every time Congress engages in brinkmanship over funding.

In the case, known as CFSA v. CFPB, the Community Financial Services Association is seeking to block the enforcement of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules designed to protect consumers against abusive payday loans. The CFSA is arguing that Congress violated the Constitution’s appropriations clause when it granted the CFPB a portion of the Federal Reserve’s operating budget.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found for the CFSA, using sweeping language suggesting that only moneys appropriated through the annual Congressional process are legal. The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on Oct. 3.

If the Court sides with the Fifth Circuit, the implications are vast.

Essential government agencies and programs, including Social Security and Medicare, both of which are administered by independently funded bodies, would see their sources of independent funding vulnerable to challenge. The Federal Reserve, responsible for monetary policy and our payments system, would be particularly at risk, given that it runs on fees and profits from its market operations just like the CFPB. The budgets of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, responsible for regulating the nation’s largest banks, and the Federal Housing Finance Administration, responsible for overseeing housing finance, are also independent, coming from funds paid by the entities they regulate.

Requiring these agencies to seek direct Congressional approval for money to function would be particularly dangerous in times of crisis.

When I chaired the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, we had to ramp up our funding quickly to protect Main Street bank depositors. We were able to do so because Congress had long given the FDIC authority to set and fund its own budget through deposit insurance premiums paid by banks. Without that ability, people could have suffered delayed access to their insured deposit accounts as their failed banks shuttered until Congress saw fit to fund the agency.

Independently funded agencies like the FDIC don’t have unfettered authority to spend wildly. Congress sets various limits and parameters, including for the CFPB. The agencies are subject to continuous oversight by their congressional authorizing committees. And Congress can, of course, at any time, change or limit their self-financing authority, as it sees fit.

Congress chose to fund these agencies outside the normal appropriations process because this ensures they have a reliable, stable funding source no matter the vicissitudes of the legislature or powerful monied constituencies.

Imagine the disfunction if the Fed’s budget could be held hostage to congressional dissatisfaction over interest rate policy, or if a member of Congress unhappy about a failed bank in his district could try to block the FDIC’s budget. Individual agency budgets could be put at risk by disgruntled politicians or lobbying interests.

But even beyond the potential cascading effects of the decision on other agencies, the CFPB itself also needs reliable, stable funding.

In the years leading up to the financial crisis, industry lobbying blocked state and federal legislative efforts to strengthen mortgage lending standards. Millions of mortgages were made to borrowers who had no hope of repaying them. Resulting defaults and foreclosures wreaked havoc on our economy.

Congress created the CFPB in 2010 and insulated it from political and industry interference in carrying out its consumer protection mandate in order to stop the kind of reckless lending that led to the financial crisis. And it worked. Today, the CFPB is a big reason why there is very little distress in mortgage finance, even as other sectors of our financial system are under pressure.

People of good will can differ on its funding structure. (I had strongly supported the CFPB but thought its funding should come from more traditional regulatory assessments.) But that’s a policy issue for Congress to decide, not the Supreme Court.

The appropriations clause of the Constitution directs that no money be disbursed except by Act of Congress. It says nothing about the nature of those acts or annual appropriations. It says nothing about the duration of approved funding, except for the military where it prohibits appropriations longer than two years. It clearly vests with Congress authority over spending to support government functions. It allows the kind of protections that help Americans’ lives to continue to run smoothly, even when Congress isn’t.

The Supreme Court should respect Congress’ decision about CFPB funding and do the conservative thing. Reverse the 5^th Circuit and let Congress’ decision stand.

That was a core contention of former vice president Mike Pence’s speech on populism a couple of weeks ago, and former Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) says the same thing in a new Wall Street Journal op-ed. 

“The future of this party,” Pence said in his speech, “belongs to one or the other, not both.” For his part, Danforth writes, “The traditionally conservative and Trumpian populist wings of the GOP have arrived at the same conclusion: They can no longer coexist in the same party.”

I’m an enormous admirer of Pence, and no one can doubt the sincerity and honor of Danforth, but this is too simplistic and runs counter both to the history of conservatism and to its present. 

One problem with the all-or-nothing formulation is that, based on the current correlation of political forces, it would mean “nothing” for conservatives. Certainly, if this question is being litigated in the 2024 primary, the hope for conservatism — with Trump currently stomping the rest of the field — is not high. 

But it’s never been an all-or-nothing proposition before. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush all had broad populist streaks. 

Consider Reagan, obviously a hero and exemplar for conservatives. In a signature 1977 speech to CPAC, he pushed back against the idea that conservatives were “a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority.” No, they were “a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs.”

He referred to a New Republican party that “will not be, and cannot, be one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism. If we are to attract more working men and women of this country, we will do so not by simply ‘making room’ for them, but by making certain they have a say in what goes on in the party.”

Reagan’s position on the Panama Canal — “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours” — was meant to pull emotional strings. He criticized crime, welfare and affirmative action in sometimes harsh terms that shocked polite opinion. He identified with the rising social conservatives, who were, according to their elite critics, the great unwashed of American politics, the way Tea Party activists and Trump enthusiasts would be portrayed decades later. 

In his book, The Right, Matt Continetti notes that the supply-sider journalist Jude Wanniski predicted a Reagan landslide in 1980 “because he is a conservative populist where Goldwater was a conservative elitist.”

Now, of course, Reagan had deep-seated views that ran counter to contemporary populism — he was a dyed-in-the-wool free marketer, who supported free trade and immigration and a vigorous, if prudent, American posture abroad. 

Needless to say, Trump is much more of a pure populist, but even he wasn’t all or nothing as president. He pursued and achieved a number of significant traditional conservative policy goals, whether tax cuts, deregulation, more exploitation of fossil fuels, destroying a terrorist enemy overseas, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and appointing conservative justices, among others. 

On many specific issues, there’s overlap between the two supposedly irreconcilable sides of the Republican Party. There are conservative and populist reasons to disdain and counter the elites who want to impose ESG on companies, who run our system of higher education, who seek to force a green-energy revolution and who were advocates for lockdowns and mandates during the pandemic. 

Everyone on the right is hostile to the permanent governing apparatus in Washington, D.C., whether they call it the bureaucracy, the administrative state or the deep state. And everyone distrusts the press whether they call it the mainstream media, the legacy media or the corporate media. Those terms can have different nuances of meaning, with the favored populist phrases — deep state and corporate media — having more edge and a greater flavor of anti-elitism. 

A basic issue in this discussion is how to define populism, which is a nebulous concept. Perhaps the most basic populist idea is that the people should be trusted more than the elites and are better than the elites — something most post-World War II conservatives, certainly those in elective politics, have believed, too. 

Populism is also simply a mode of politics in a democracy. Success usually requires identifying with the broad mass of the public and having an identity markedly distinct from the governing elite — for instance, both Reagan and George W. Bush were brush-clearing cowboys in their spare time.

Danforth says populists stoke an “us v. them” division and contrasts them with Abraham Lincoln, who sought to preserve the Union. 

The weakness in this contrast is that Lincoln himself had populist appeal — that’s what the branding as a “rail-splitter” was about (in reality, the politically ambitious, upwardly mobile attorney had zero fondness for rail-splitting). And perhaps our most populist president, Andrew Jackson, was a confirmed Unionist. 

Also, the substantive content of populism changes over time. In Lincoln’s day, support for tariffs and industrial policy — key elements of Lincoln’s policy — constituted elitist economics. Now, of course, the opposite is true. 

There’s a genuine debate between conservatives and populists over trade, industrial policy, levels of federal spending and foreign affairs. These are consequential questions, but it’s easy to imagine shades-of-gray outcomes in all of these policy debates that fall within or close to the practical Republican consensus over the years. 

The deeper problem with populism is that its suspicion of elites can curdle into conspiracy theories. Its belief in the importance of the democratic will can express itself in an impatience with constitutional constraints. Its natural combativeness can lead to an effort to find, and create, enemies that knows no bounds.

All of which brings us to Donald Trump. Danforth writes, “Populists have relentlessly undermined our Constitution. They have falsely asserted that elections are rigged, that President Biden is illegitimate, and that we should ignore our courts. They have opposed the peaceful transfer of power and encouraged a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.” 

But Ron DeSantis is a populist-inflected Republican who hasn’t, say, encouraged mobs to attack the Capitol. What Danforth is talking about here is the most fervent Trump supporters, which is why his qualifier elsewhere in the piece of “Trumpian populism” is important. 

It’s possible to favor greater regulation of freight rail — an early legislative priority of the populist Republican senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance — without buying into any of Trump’s lunatic rants on Truth Social.

The crux of the matter is that if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, the GOP will have embraced or looked past his unworthy conduct and sentiments that in any other Republican Party would have been considered disqualifying. Mike Pence and John Danforth are right to warn against that and fight to keep it from happening. 

If Trump wins, his style of politics will be further vindicated in the GOP and lead to yet more imitators. Already, Vivek Ramaswamy has seemed to go out of his way to make people think he believes in conspiracy theories in order to gain street cred, and the performative outlandishness of Arizona’s Kari Lake has made her a political celebrity.

The stakes are indeed large, even if this isn’t really a fight between conservatism and populism.

In a GOP primary field of mostly former President Donald Trump mimics vs. a few Trump critics, former South Carolina Governor and Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley has carved a unique niche for herself.

The lone woman in the race, she talks tough on immigration, but also shares poignant stories from her background as the child of immigrants. She casts herself as a fighter — just ask fellow candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whom she once again pummeled at Wednesday night’s primary debate — but also a unifier who can work through the stark political divisiveness plaguing the country. While her opponents try to either become Trump or else tear him down, she maintains a precarious balancing act, trying to bridge the pre-Trump GOP with the post-Trump party of today.

“She neither hugs him nor hates him,” writes Michael Kruse in this week’s Friday Read.

Accusations of taking both sides have followed Haley throughout her career. But what if that’s exactly what’s giving her a boost in the polls?“ The conventional wisdom is that this is a time for choosing, for all Republicans, and for her, too,” Kruse writes. “Conservatism or populism (in the framing of former Vice President Mike Pence)? Backward or forward? Trump or not Trump? The gambit of the Haley candidacy is that it doesn’t have to be so. Voters don’t have to choose. They can choose her.”

Read the story.

“Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”

Can you guess who said this about Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy this week? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**

The Government Could Shut Down. But D.C. Already Has … You’d think a government shutdown would have a major impact on a city built around the business of government. But since 2020, much of that business has taken place online, as work-from-home became the norm. Lunch spots, parking garages, shopping centers downtown — they’re already struggling to draw pre-pandemic crowds. Which raises the question: How acutely would a DC that works over Zoom really feel a government shutdown? “For all practical purposes for D.C., the federal government has been shut down since March 9, 2020,” says Yesim Sayin, executive director of the D.C. Policy Center. Michael Schaffer explores the looming post-pandemic shutdown in this week’s Capital City column.

Didn’t catch the second GOP primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday? Well, neither did the frontrunner. Here are some talking points to get you through all your friends’ hot takes this weekend (from associate editor Dylon Jones):

— If you’re part of the 72 percent of Republican voters who consider Donald Trump to be the strongest candidate to take on President Joe Biden in 2024, you might praise him for skipping the debate and heading to Michigan, where there’s an autoworker strike, to drag Biden for encouraging the transition to electric vehicles. Others will note that Trump’s trip came a day after Biden went to Michigan himself — becoming the first U.S. president to ever join a picket line, standing with UAW workers in Belleville. Either way, you can point out that the general election battle for blue-collar voters is already well underway this primary season.

— If you’re among a liberal or Never-Trump crowd, expect some giddiness about all the bashing of 45. It was no surprise for former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to go in on Trump (if someone mentions “Donald Duck,” just roll your eyes and smile knowingly), but this time around, Vice President Mike Pence, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis got in on the action too, criticizing Trump for skipping the debate and, in DeSantis’ case, for contributing to inflation during his presidency. That’s right: Those of you out there who are Biden fans can now say you agree with Ron DeSantis about something.

— Steel yourselves for an onslaught of “hot for teacher” jokes. You can blame Christie for bringing it up: He knocked President Biden for “sleeping with a member of the teacher’s union.” You can also blame Pence for achieving entirely new heights of awkward when he said minutes later that, though his wife isn’t in the union, “I have been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years.” Yes, of course, there’s already a T-shirt.

— The naked disdain between Haley and Ramaswamy reminded at least one Democratic Twitter user of another political grudge match between a woman with years of experience in federal office and a male, millennial up-and-comer: Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar vs. now-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primary. It’s not the first time Ramaswamy has been compared to Buttigieg — videos of each of them asking questions of politicians as baby-faced Harvard undergrads recently circulated. But as noted by my colleague Adam Wren, who has spent an “unnatural amount of time with each of them” (his words), the similarities are superficial at best. Read his study in contrast between the two for more — and to see which Harvard alum really is a good Ramaswamy comparison.

How to Shut Down a Government … As a U.S. Rep for South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, Mick Mulvaney joined a group of hardline conservatives who’re using the threat of a government shutdown to push their agenda. In 2013, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to block President Barack Obama’s signature health care bill, they succeeded in shutting down the government for 16 days. Then, in 2018, as President Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney found himself not pushing for a shutdown, but executing one. So POLITICO’s Ian Ward called him up to ask just how exactly the imminent shutdown on Sunday could play out. “[It] was a unique experience,” Mulvaney told him. “I wondered how many people would laugh, cry, wail, scream, do whatever when they found out that I was the one to shut the government down.”

The Cost of ‘Free’ Land …  At the turn of the 20th century, Rebecca Clarren’s ancestors fled antisemitic violence in Russia for the United States. They found hope at their new home, a patch of land on the South Dakota prairie provided by the federal government, and Clarren grew up hearing stories of their tenacity and grit. But after she began reporting on the region as an adult, she came to confront an insurmountable fact: The home that delivered her family from oppression was built on the oppression of others, taken from the Lakota. In this excerpt from her new book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance, she explores that complicated history — and what to do about it in the present.

**Who Dissed answer: That would be Nikki Haley, who once again clashed with Ramaswamy at the second GOP primary debate in Simi Valley, California on Wednesday night. This particular blow-up focused on TikTok, where Ramaswamy recently appeared in a post with boxer Jake Paul. “This is infuriating because TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps we could have,” Haley said.
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Credit unions escaped the overdraft debate back then for two reasons. The first is their reputation for being small, nonprofit, member-owned entities; one would hardly think they would become addicted to charging their most vulnerable members high fees. The second is a lack of data because credit unions are exempt from federal reporting requirements on overdraft fees.

But now, we have data from at least one state: California. Thanks to a 2022 law, California credit unions are now required to report how much income they receive from overdraft fees. And the first report of that data reveals that many California credit unions are taking millions from their most vulnerable customers and spending it on perks and bonuses for executives that resemble those of big banks more than nonprofits.

Let’s be clear: Overdraft fees can be predatory. Every overdraft by definition turns money from someone who has run out of it into nearly pure profit for the bank or credit union that charged it because they get paid back immediately when the next deposit hits. Eighty percent of overdraft fees come from just 9 percent of account holders, highlighting that this product is targeted at people living paycheck to paycheck who run out of money from time to time. The time people are out of money is usually short; on average, it took just 13 hours for people charged an overdraft to find the money, when one bank gave them the time to fix it.  

California’s data shows that some credit unions are making a lot of money from overdraft fees. California’s largest state-chartered credit union, Golden 1, took $24 million in overdraft from their members, while spending $6 million a year for naming rights for an NBA stadium in Sacramento. North Island Credit Union bought naming rights for a famed music venue in Chula Vista and created an exclusive entrance, ticket discounts and other perks for some of its members while taking over $10 million last year in overdraft and non-sufficient funds charges from its members. Do these business practices sound like those of nonprofits designed to provide basic banking services to people who share what the law calls a “common bond,” such as a workplace or other connection required for membership? Or are they what would expect from for-profit banks?

The full picture among California’s 114 state-chartered credit unions is alarming. Overall, they took in $252 million in overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees (NSF) in 2022. Thirty credit unions earned half or more of their net profit from overdraft and NSF fees alone. Any financial institution, bank or credit union, that relies on overdraft fees for a majority of their earnings is operating in an unsafe and unsound manner. Federal and state regulators have been asleep at the switch allowing this to occur at banks and credit unions.

Take Frontwave Credit Union, which earned $7.8 million in overdraft and NSF fees in 2022, equal to $63.73 per each of its 122,550 members. Without these fees, Frontwave would have been in the red for the year. Frontwave is one of eight California credit unions whose entire profit came from overdraft.

Twelve other California credit unions lost money overall, despite overdraft revenue that was often quite high. Chief among them was the Police Credit Union of California, which charged their members $1.84 million in overdraft fees while losing $510,572 for the year. Law enforcement officers, like other public servants, deserve better.

The data does show some good news. Ten percent of California state-chartered credit unions report zero overdraft fees, and just under 20 percent report fees in the single digits of total net earnings. These credit unions show that you don’t need to rely on overdraft fees.

California’s credit unions are hardly unique. While many avoid overdraft, a handful heavily rely on it, just like some banks. One suspects similar trends across the country. Several of Michigan’s largest credit unions have been sued for abusive overdraft practices and research from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau shows credit unions averaging similar overdraft fees as banks.

Most of America’s largest banks and many smaller ones recently reduced overdrafts by more than half, and some eliminated the product entirely. Big banks made these changes for a variety of reasons, including the result of media and congressional scrutiny, competition from financial technology apps, and bank executives wanting to do the right thing. Credit unions have largely escaped such scrutiny, and without national data we have no reason to believe they are changing their ways. California’s data is a wake-up call for the nation as a whole.

Leaders in Washington are saying the right things but doing little. President Joe Biden targeted overdraft fees as part of his crackdown on junk fees. Bank regulators have mentioned the risks of unfair and deceptive overdraft practices. However, regulators have not yet proposed new regulations, and they continue to give the most predatory overdraft banks passing regulatory grades. This spring when Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic failed, bank regulators argued that potential disruptions to workers' paychecks justified tens of billions in bailouts to large corporations who used those banks. But when it came time to provide actual relief to the workers whose paychecks were disrupted, regulators were deaf to calls from Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock to address the overdrafts caused by the failures. Federal regulators of credit unions are split on the practice: Todd Harper, chair of the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) has spoken out against abusive overdraft practices, but the NCUA Board has a Trump-appointed, Republican majority that is continuing to deregulate. 

If Washington regulators will not act, then California and other state regulators can. More sunlight and smarter regulation can help return millions to the pockets of those living paycheck to paycheck who deserve access to basic banking at fair prices. States should start by requiring the data just as California did.

Next, they should eliminate tricks designed to cause overdrafts, such as posting debits before credits, a practice more common among credit unions than banks. Finally, no credit union or bank should be allowed to continually rely on overdraft revenue for the majority of their earnings. State regulators can step up and institute this policy.

One would think nonprofit credit unions whose mission is to serve the underserved would avoid relying on overdraft fees. Until recently, we had no information on what was going on among credit unions and overdraft. While federal bank regulators require banks over a certain size to report overdraft income, the credit union regulator does not. I have testified before Congress that all credit unions should be required to report this data, too, but Congress has not acted.

California did. Now we know the problem. Let’s solve it and stop making it so expensive to be poor.