One of the particularly frustrating things about President Trump’s push to send federal officials and red-state National Guard soldiers to cities to “fight crime” is that those cities (and cities generally) are already seeing declines in crime.

It is not the case that there is no crime in those cities, of course, any more than it is the case that national elections see no illegal votes cast. But it is important to recognize that — in the same way Trump’s rhetoric about voter fraud is aimed at changing voting laws — the emphasis on crime here is obviously about rationalizing and justifying the deployment, rather than the other way around. Could military deployments end crime in cities entirely? Probably, but I would imagine you don’t really want to live in a federally mandated police state.

Courtesy of Jeff Asher’s Real-Time Crime Index, which aggregates department data to offer a timely look at crime trends, here is how levels of violent crime in U.S. cities targeted by Trump have changed from July 2019 to July 2025 (the most recent month for which aggregate data are available). These figures are the total number of violent crimes over the preceding 12 months, in order to smooth out seasonal changes.

Notice that in Chicago and D.C., violent crime has been sliding for some time. In Portland, there was a plateau last year but violent crime is again trending down. (This is not how Trump describes the city.)

On a population-adjusted basis, you can generally see the pandemic-era increase in crime and how it has faded. Violent crime in Memphis is much more common than in Chicago, even as it trends down. Crime in D.C. is and has been relatively low.

You probably noticed that each chart shows January 2025, when Trump was re-inaugurated as president. In each city, population-adjusted violent crime numbers are down since that point. In each city, population-adjusted crime is down year-over-year.

There is always more that can be done to combat crime. The question that we should ask is when the government aims to go too far.

Photo: MacGruff the crime dog, seen in 1985. (National Archives)

It’s not often the case that you will be working on a quick article about something only to have the president of the United States directly validate your thesis. But it happens occasionally, particularly since Jan. 20. And it happened today.

At a White House event this afternoon, President Trump declared that his administration had “[taken] freedom of speech away” — the sort of thing that past presidents didn’t say, in part because they had far less reason to do so.

Trump: "We took the freedom of speech away because that's been through the courts and the courts said you have freedom of speech, but what has happened is when they burn a flag it agitates and irritates crowds."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-08T19:42:11.679Z

The event was focused on the purported threat posed by antifa, a loose-knit, microscopic collective of left-wing agitators that the administration has framed as an existential threat to the nation. During the discussion, the attorney general and the head of the Department of Homeland Security both presented antifa as a robust, insidious organization that demanded federal intervention, which is true only in that there is more grassroots interest in battling fascism than there was nine months ago.

Then Trump declared that one of his tools in combatting The Antifa Menace™ was instituting criminal punishments on people who burned American flags, something that he’s threatened on social media in the past but which continues to run afoul of First Amendment protections on speech. (See Texas v. Johnson.) Trump didn’t and can’t “take it away.”

As I said, I was already writing on the subject because of remarkable new data published by Pew Research Center this afternoon. Pew’s researchers asked Americans whether they viewed Trump’s use of presidential power positively or negatively, finding that most Americans considered his actions improper — and most disagreed that the changes he’s instituted have been positive.

The issue on which Americans were most critical? That Trump has improperly used his office to punish those who say things he doesn’t like. Which isn’t Congress making a law abridging speech (as the First Amendment prohibits) but is a reflection of Trump’s efforts to stamp out criticism and wrongthink.

So two-thirds of Americans think Trump is improperly using his power to punish those who make statements he opposes. Even more remarkably, that figure includes more than 40 percent of Republicans and independents who usually vote Republican. So even within his own party, a party that’s been fervently supportive of Trump, about 2 in 5 think that the president has improperly constrained speech.

I was originally going to end this post by noting that there was good reason for them to feel this way, articulating examples of Trump and his administration imposing costs on the free exercise of speech. But then the president just up and said it: we took the freedom of speech away.

Quod erat demonstrandum, I guess.

Photo: Trump in the Gold Office. (White House/Flickr)

A recent American presidency, you may be alarmed to hear, engaged in an action that was “arguably worse than Watergate” — an event still positioned in some circles as the gold-standard of presidential malfeasance. What might surprise you about this claim is that the presidential administration during which this horrendous act occurred was Joe Biden’s, not Donald Trump’s. What might further surprise you is that Biden had nothing to do with it.

So let us now talk about Arctic Frost, the FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that was turned over to special counsel Jack Smith once he was appointed in November 2022. It is Arctic Frost that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) described as Watergate-esque, making it the latest in Grassley’s fumbling effort to cast the Biden administration as the most nefarious since Richard Nixon’s.

What’s the new development?

As part of that effort, Grassley asked the FBI to sift through a set of restricted-access files to see what might turn up. FBI Director Kash Patel — also eager to portray the pre-him FBI as hopelessly biased against Trump and the right — turned over a September 2023 document indicating that the Bureau had received “limited toll records” linked to nine U.S. senators.

The document doesn’t say much more than that, except that a special agent conducted “preliminary toll analysis” on the data that had been received.

On X, Patel crowed about having “discovered and exposed the weaponization of law enforcement” as he shared a clip from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) complaining about the revelation. On Tuesday, Hawley demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi explain who “ordered the tapping of phones” of senators including himself.

So what’s a ‘toll record’ and how is it obtained?

Well, it isn’t phone-tapping. Such records don’t include information about the content of calls, especially in real-time.

Instead, toll records include data about calls, allowing for potential analysis of the “source or destination of a call; the times of calls; and the dates, frequency, sequence, patterns, and duration of calls to/from one or many telephones” (as a fairly old Justice Department handbook explains). It’s not clear what information about calls to or from the senators’ phones were obtained by the FBI, given the qualifier “limited” in the published document’s description.

Importantly, the authorization for obtaining the records followed the approval of a subpoena by a grand jury, according to CBS News. In other words, this wasn’t the FBI simply digging into phone records. It was the government presenting a case to grand jurors that the records would be useful in their investigation and the jurors agreeing.

Why would investigators want those records?

“The only thing we all had in common was we were all Republicans,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) fumed after the story broke. But that commonality is important.

Remember, Arctic Frost was an investigation into the effort to overturn the 2020 election, an effort that culminated in the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And phone calls made to senators that day played an important role in the investigation.

Here, for example, is the federal indictment accusing Trump of (among other things) conspiracy to defraud the U.S.:

Notice that it contains multiple mentions of calls to senators on Jan. 6 that were allegedly part of Trump’s effort to block the finalization of Electoral College votes.

In Smith’s overview of his investigation, presented to the Justice Department in the waning days of the Biden administration, he offers a pithier summary:

Same deal, though: Trump and his team were calling senators to pressure them to reject valid slates of electors. And since Trump was at the White House and his team was (mostly) at the nearby Willard Hotel, this cajoling occurred over the phone.

If you want to know who called which senators to apply pressure, there’s a straightforward way to do so: obtaining records of calls to those senators’ phones.

Is there any reason to think that the senators broke the law?

In fairness, we don’t know what data was sought and obtained. But there’s no reason to think, based on this document, that the senators were themselves targets of the investigation.

That said, there is reason to think that at least some of these senators were engaged with Trump’s effort to retain power. In the days prior to the finalization of the electoral votes, multiple senators publicly announced their intentions to vote against certification of the results. Hawley went out on his own, releasing a statement indicating that he would oppose the slate of electors offered by Pennsylvania (for contrived reasons). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) cobbled together a group of senators (and senators-elect) who announced their intention to oppose the final electoral tally, including Hagerty, Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appeared on Fox News Tuesday night to complain about being on the Arctic Frost list and to assert that he “made phone calls to a lot of people to find out what I should do as a senator regarding certifying the election and whether or not we should have hearings.” That’s true. But this downplays what happened pretty dramatically.

Remember, there was no reason to believe that there should be hearings into voter fraud by Jan. 6, 2021 — or even by Dec. 14, 2020, the day electors met to vote. Hell, there wasn’t reason to think there was anything suspect about the results by mid-November. But Trump was stoking the idea that the outcome was dubious (for obvious, self-serving reasons), building demand within his base for Republican politicians to agree. Graham did — to the extent that a grand jury in Georgia recommended that he be indicted in that state as part of the conspiracy to throw out its election results. Prosecutors declined to do so.

Why are Republicans making such a big deal out of it?

A few reasons.

One becomes clear when you consider the timing of the new information: just before Bondi was on Capitol Hill to face questions about her handling of the Justice Department. New claims rippling through the right-wing media universe centered on alleged abuse by the Biden administration gave Republicans and Trump allies a way to dismiss the obvious and explicit intervention by Trump in federal prosecutions at the moment. It was a useful way to say “Biden was worse,” which is in fact what a lot of the Republicans questioning Bondi ended up saying.

More fundamentally, though, Republicans simply don’t think Jan. 6 and the effort to overturn the 2020 election is worth investigating. Many of them see the probe into Trump’s post-election efforts not as an attempt to enforce accountability in the wake of a subversion of American democracy but, instead, as Democrats and Democrat-sympathetic investigators attempting to block their rightful power. This is much easier to believe if you are soaked in the right-wing media conversation, where the riot at the Capitol is seen as harmless or ancillary or both. To this day, most Republicans believe there was something hinky about the results of that election, a belief that’s largely a function of the concerted, unrelenting push by Trump and his supporters to insist, despite the evidence, that there was.

In addition to excusing Trump’s behavior, this idea also plays into the sense of victimization that Trump has stoked in his base. They and he aren’t doing anything bad; it’s the bad guys who are out to get them!

But, wait: Did Biden have anything to do with this?

No. Except that Biden was president in the wake of Trump’s first presidency and his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and that Biden nominated (and 20 Republican senators voted to confirm) an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who believed in adherence the rule of law and independence from the White House. Jack Smith’s appointment, you will recall, was meant to separate the probe from the Biden administration, given that Trump had just announced his bid to be the Republican nominee challenging Biden’s reelection effort.

That’s really the original sin here: Someone tried to hold Trump to account. And Donald Trump doesn’t like to be held to account, so his allies gin up elaborate explanations for why doing so was invalid. Was somehow, bafflingly, “arguably worse than Watergate.”

Photo: FBI headquarters in September 1974. (National Archives)

President Trump’s eager deployment of federal and federalized troops is ostensibly rooted in fighting crime. Maybe he actually believes that; he did apparently see some footage from 2020 on the TV and argue that it actually represents the current environment in Portland. But it’s almost certainly mostly a pretext. He’s wanted to have troops marching through the streets of D.C. for years and was reportedly just looking for a reason to send them out. There’s also not much evidence that the deployment in D.C. is having much effect on crime.

What’s happening in Chicago isn’t being driven by soldiers. It’s immigration officers — mostly Immigration and Customs Enforcement, augmented by other deployed federal officials — who are turning over apartment buildings and tackling residents. But the administration’s messaging has long dishonestly conflated “immigration” and “crime,” and its current rhetoric about Chicago often mirrors what the president is saying about threats everywhere else.

During an interview on CNN Tuesday morning, Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) was asked about the argument that Chicago has an urgent need to address violent crime. He offered a useful counterpoint.

Rep. Jonathan Jackson: "If this was genuine, Trump would be more interested in saying, 'How do we effectively deal with gun violence? How do we deal with gun manufacturers?' The city of Chicago does not have one gun shop." pic.twitter.com/JNc9radk0G

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 7, 2025

If the president’s concern about gun violence were sincere, Jackson argued, Trump “would be more interested in saying, ‘How do we effectively deal with gun violence? How do we deal with gun manufacturers?’ The city of Chicago does not have one gun shop, does not have one gun range.”

“How are these guns flooding our streets?” he continued.

It’s a very good question.

It is not the case that there are no gun dealers in Chicago. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) maintains a list of licensed firearm dealers in the U.S. Cross-referencing that list with Chicago-area ZIP codes shows only six licensed dealers in the city — a city of 2.7 million people.

Mapping dealers by ZIP code, you can see how few dealers there are in Chicago. Zoom in on the city below.

You might also notice that there are a lot of ZIP codes with a number of gun dealers not that far from Chicago. In fact, there are 14 licensed dealers in the 46350 ZIP code, an hour east in La Porte, Ind., home to about 22,000 people.

The ATF also tracks where firearms recovered from crime scenes were originally purchased. Just over half of the firearms recovered in Illinois in 2023 were purchased in Illinois. Another 16 percent came over the border from Indiana.

If that balance sounds about right — most from in-state, some from a neighbor — consider the numbers for Indiana itself. More than 80 percent of firearms recovered in Indiana in 2023 came from Indiana, while less than 2 percent came from Illinois.

This is Jackson’s point. It is much easier to buy a gun in Indiana than in Illinois, so a large percentage of guns used in Illinois come from Indiana. In fact, the number of firearms seized in Illinois that originated in that state is remarkably low compared to other states.

You may notice that many of the states with the most seized firearms that originated in-state are red states and that most of those with the fewest are blue. Those two things do correlate: the more a state voted for Trump in 2024, the higher the percentage of seized guns that originated in that state.

In the vast majority of states, most of the seized firearms that originated out-of-state came from red states — states where gun laws are often looser.

None of this excuses gun violence or is meant to suggest that such violence is entirely a function of lax gun laws in red states. But it is the case that a lot of the gun violence that occurs in Illinois and in Chicago uses weapons purchased outside of the city.

It is easier — and more palatable to Trump’s base — to send squads of enforcers into the heavily blue city to crack skulls. Combatting gun violence, though, might also benefit from efforts to reduce access to guns, reconciling Illinois’ efforts to limit gun ownership with its neighbor’s interest in putting firearms in shopping bags.

Photo: Biplanes over Chicago in 1931. (National Archives)

I will stipulate at the outset that I do not know how to reverse the long trend toward distrust in traditional American news sources. There’s probably a solution out there, likely something involving increased engagement in communications formats where people spend more time and less money. I’m pretty confident, though, that the answer is not taking established media institutions and attempting to realign them to meet the tastes of Americans who are actively hostile to media institutions.

When we talk about distrust in the media, we are usually (though not always) talking centrally about distrust among Republicans. In Pew Research Center’s June analysis of trust in news sources, Democrats expressed more trust than distrust in 23 of the 30 sources identified. Republicans expressed more trust than distrust in only eight. Among Democrats, there were 10 sources of news that were trusted by 30 percentage-point more respondents than distrusted them. Among Republicans, only one source hit that mark: Fox News.

You’ll notice that I’ve highlighted CBS News and The Washington Post on that chart. These are both news sources that fall into the traditional/institutional media bucket and both sources that have attempted or are attempting to remedy the decline in trust by appealing more explicitly to “all Americans” — meaning, obviously, more Republicans.

CBS’s shift is driven by its new owner, David Ellison — the son of megabillionaire and Donald Trump ally Larry Ellison. The Post’s, to which I can attest firsthand, is driven by the shifting approach of its owner, megabillionaire Jeff Bezos. In each case, net trust among Republicans dipped from net-positive or neutral in 2014 to negative by 2025 (as measured at both points by Pew).

The Post has seen an uptick in net trust among Republicans since 2019, a change that one might be inclined to attribute to Bezos’s accommodation of Trump and his base. But Pew notes that Republican trust in news sources surged upward since last year, a change “which has coincided with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.” More importantly, Republican trust in the New York Times has also shifted upward since 2019, to about the same extent that trust in The Post increased. In other words, there’s no reason to think that The Post’s improvement is a function of Bezos’s public moves to appease Trump, like spiking the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. And, in fact, Republicans are still more likely to distrust the paper than to trust it, by a wide margin.

Ellison has argued that the changes he’s advocating at CBS News, including the installation of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of the network’s news side, is an effort to “appeal to the 70 percent of Americans who define themselves as center-left or center-right,” as the Times reports. This is familiar framing for those who want to frame distrust in the media as being a function of its unfair coverage, arguing that the media is out of touch with mainstream America. For what it’s worth, analysis from the General Social Survey shows that only about a third of Americans are both mostly moderate and mostly independent. The remaining two-thirds are more partisan, more ideological, or both.

“We want to be in the truth business, we want to be in the fact business,” Ellison said earlier this year. But, of course, CBS and The Post have long been in the fact business and the truth business. The problem is that the fact and truth businesses are both suffering economic headwinds driven by the bullshit and rhetoric businesses. The current administration is hostile to facts that conflict with the president’s claims and is both leveraging and driving his base’s distrust in any outlet that’s actually in the business of generating facts.

What we can assume Ellison is really saying, of course, is that he wants to be in the business of generating the sorts of facts that won’t stir the ire of the president and his supporters. Maybe this will be good for the outlet’s bottom line — though that seems unlikely. Trump’s politics are rooted in the idea that his and his base’s worldview is rejected and mocked by traditional institutions including outlets like CBS and The Post. Each will be on a very short leash as it tries to appeal to those Americans, with coverage scrutinized endlessly for any perception of hostility to the president. It is an impossible standard to meet if one wants to be in the “fact business.”

Cynics will note that the Ellisons and Bezos are in other, non-fact businesses, too — ones that depend on the largesse of the federal government and therefore, in this moment, the approval of the president. Perhaps, then, the effort to publicly rescope the work of these institutions built to hold power to account is aimed less at some theoretical 70 percent of Americans than at one American in particular.

Photo: Harry Reasoner, CBS-TV, interviews Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1964. (National Archives)

Is America something fixed or something fluid? Is it a country founded on a perfect set of ideas or a country that has struggled to become perfect? Is it a system that works or one that sputters, one that’s being damaged or one that’s being fixed?

This debate undergirds an enormous part of the political conversation. It manifests in disputes about the Constitution, in the fight over immigration, in attacks on government spending and research. At the risk over being overly concise — particularly since this is mostly meant to be a rumination on Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “One Battle After Another” — it seems likely that some part of this is rooted in the idea that America achieved and now risks losing a position as the most dominant nation on Earth. The America that was, won. Can the America that is?

The position of the administration is that America is deviating from its path, led astray by deviants. Rhetoric from the vice president and Trump allies centers on the idea that the United States is a nation built centrally by 18th century writers and 19th century frontiersmen (the “White” descriptor not always left as subtext). That trajectory of greatness led the country to where it is, a path forward as unswerving and inevitable to their eyes as the Democratic Party’s historic embrace of Southern racism.

To protect the nation, they argue, we must protect that path. We must more tightly control how Americans think and who enters the country. We must return rigor and rigidity to the American system.

To a significant extent, this narrative is often used as post hoc rationalization for the centralization of power. But the rigidity is always there. The inflexible understanding of what constitutes America sits at the root of the effort. Make America great again, as it was.

The opposing theory is that the union isn’t perfect. That it doesn’t follow clean lines and never has. And, in fact, that this is what makes America great. America is a social experiment that shifts ingredients and approaches and achieved success through experimentation and flexibility. It is not and has never been a perfect machine, as any even cursory assessment of history will attest. But it can be made more perfect, by continuing to explore and test and adjust.

”One Battle After Another” is a terrific film, and an astonishingly timely one. I won’t get into the plot since if you’ve seen it there’s no need and if you haven’t I wouldn’t want to spoil it. But I will say that this tension between rigid and flexible is at its core: from the explicit tension between the fascist regime and opposing revolutionaries, to the search for racial purity in our national melting pot, to the question of what constitutes a family. The overarching national battle between rigid and flexible isn’t resolved in the movie, but the others are — with the forces of rigidity losing. Even, at one point, they lose to more rigid versions of themselves.

As a work of fiction, we shouldn’t see the outcome as particularly reassuring. (It’s telling, though, that some on the real-world right view the story as threatening.) What we might take from the movie instead is its reminder that fluidity is natural, if not unavoidable; uncertainty seeping out of and into order. Love strengthens a family more than DNA does. Inclusion strengthens America more than exclusion does.

American ideals and American success require defense. Improvement means eternal adjustment and improvisation. Creating a more perfect union means fighting one battle after another, indefinitely.

Photo via Warner Bros. Pictures.

The United States military killed more people on your behalf today, targeting a boat somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared footage of the destruction on social media, thereby fulfilling one of the apparent objectives of the strike. Hegseth used various Clancyesque vocabulary (though not “opsec”) while Trump celebrated the positive benefits for you, a U.S. resident.

The boat, he claimed, was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE” but was stopped off the coast of Venezuela before it was able to “[enter] American Territory.”

As journalist Matt Novak pointed out, though, Venezuela isn’t terribly close to the U.S. So — even granting the administration’s claim that the boat was smuggling drugs, which one might be justified in not immediately granting — how imminent was the threat to the U.S.?

To answer this question, we need to know two things. First, how far was the boat from the U.S.? Second, how fast was it going? The second question is actually the trickier one, so let’s tackle it first.

The only information we have at our disposal is contained in the shared video. It shows a small vessel with what appears to be two outboard motors on the back. (See the pink box below.)

The appearance is consistent with what are called “go-fast” boats, boats stripped down to do little more than carry a lot of drugs a long way very quickly. In 2016, the FBI published a report on these sorts of vessels, explaining how the government tracked and captured their occupants. The story does not involve the extrajudicial invocation of capital punishment.

What the report doesn’t include is an estimate of speed. So, for that, we turn to analysis from Jake Tunaley of the London Research and Development Corporation.

“The hulls are usually made of fibreglass with a sharp, vertically rounded bow and a transom stern,” Tunaley writes of such boats. “They are typically 30 to 50 feet long with a narrow beam and powerful engines delivering up to 1000 hp. This gives speeds of greater than 80 kts in calm waters, 50 kts in choppy waters and 25 kts in 1.5 to 2 m Caribbean seas.”

The “kts” there refers to knots, nautical miles per hour. That’s what we’ll use for our calculations.

Next, we need to figure out the distance the boat had to travel. That means figuring out (roughly) how far it is from the “Coast of Venezuela” to “American Territory.”

The territorial boundary of the U.S. is generally 12 miles from our coastline. If a go-fast boat left from the point closest to the boundary in Florida, weaving between Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as shown below, that’s about 1,000 nautical miles.

Assuming calm seas, a constant 80-knot speed and no aerial or surface interdictions, a smuggler could cover that distance in about 12-and-a-half hours. Perhaps not as long as one might think.

But Florida is not the closest American Territory to Venezuela. Puerto Rico is. And it’s less than 400 nautical miles away.

That means that the boat could have covered the distance in about four-and-a-half hours. (You can see the math here.) The vessel could also have chosen a shorter route by heading to the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, but that was probably not a desired destination.

These are very rough estimates, mind you, but the idea that a boat from Venezuela was headed to U.S. territory in short order is not that far-fetched. So we can instead spend our time wondering why, if the vessel was spotted near the Venezuelan coast, there wasn’t a way to impede its progress (and determine its intent and cargo) other than shooting ordnance at it to generate a social-media post.

Every year, the site 19th News conducts a national poll with SurveyMonkey that focuses heavily on issues of gender in American politics and society. This may not sound interesting, much less remarkable, but it is. Polling isn’t cheap, meaning that media outlets tend to focus on issues in the news and electoral questions. Detailed analyses of more fundamental aspects of the U.S. is invaluable.

I’m going to focus on a set of questions evaluating how Americans view gender roles, as the headline promises, but I do want to share one striking finding: Most Americans know someone who is non-binary. That includes half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents! (Those independents are what the “+lean” parenthetical below means.) Black Americans are the racial group least likely to know someone who identifies that way.

As you might expect, given broader trends in LGBTQ identity, younger Americans are more likely than older Americans to know someone non-binary. But even 4 in 10 Americans aged 80 and over say they do.

So when Donald Trump was running all those ads in 2024 attacking Kamala Harris as being for “they/them,” half of his voters could visualize someone they knew who he was talking about.

As I mentioned, the poll also presented respondents with a series of statements, asking whether they agreed or disagreed with the sentiment. On net — that is, subtracting those who disagreed from those who agreed — Americans didn’t agree with the idea that society would benefit from young people having families before pursuing career accomplishments or other goals.

But they did agree on net that families are better off when a parent stays home with kids and (to a much narrower degree) that there would be a benefit to returning to traditional gender roles. That’s because men were 23 points more likely to agree than to disagree, while women were 17 points more likely to disagree than to agree.

I want to drill down on the idea that toxic masculinity is a problem for society, something that was viewed with net agreement to the same extent that having a parent stay home was. (By the way, most of those who said one parent should stay home said it should be whichever parent wants to stay home.)

Here, again, there was a wide gender gap, with women being far more likely to agree it’s a problem than were men. There was also a partisan gap: Democrats and independents overwhelmingly see toxic masculinity as a problem while Republicans are more likely to disagree than agree that it is.

Generationally, it’s the youngest and oldest Americans who agree on net that toxic masculinity as a problem. More on that in a moment.

Broken out by race and gender, White men are the least likely to agree on net that toxic masculinity is a problem, save for men from other racial groups than those identified by the pollsters. In each racial group, women were more likely to agree on net than were the men.

The same holds by party. Notice, though, that Republican women are more likely to agree that toxic masculinity is a problem than to disagree with that idea.

Overlapping these responses, White, married evangelical men are among those most likely to say that they disagree that toxic masculinity is a problem. Make of that what you will.

When we look at the results by generation, we see a decline in agreement among millennial and Gen X respondents among both men and women, though women remain much more likely to agree with the idea than men regardless of age group.

Diving even deeper into the crosstabs — meaning, I must note, that we’re increasing margins of error — we see some interesting splits by age and race. Black men, for example, are generally likely to agree that toxic masculinity is a problem at consistent levels. White and Hispanic men, though, are not.

This chart also supports the “Gen X is the most reactionary generation” narrative — particularly among White men.

You will notice that I have not spent time here actually adjudicating claims about toxic masculinity or even its definition. Neither did the poll. For the most part, it’s beside the point.

I will note, though, that the group most likely to say they disagreed somewhat or strongly with the assertion that toxic masculinity is a problem in the U.S. was Republican men. The group second most likely to say so? 2024 Trump voters.

Photo: Artifacts from the Women’s Equality National Monument. (National Archives)

It has been the case since Donald Trump’s first tenure as president that he wants to slice the size of the federal workforce. During his period in the political wilderness (also known as the Biden administration), his allies, led by his first-term Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, put together a hefty document that included recommendations for sweeping layoffs. When Trump returned to office in January, bringing Vought with him, he and his team (then including Elon Musk) began indiscriminately laying off federal employees.

All of which is to say that the administration’s recent declarations that the shutdown allows them to slash the federal workforce are not Trump and Vought suddenly seizing upon a new idea. Instead, the shutdown offers a pretext for doing what they wanted to do anyway, to shift some of the blame for something that hasn’t proven too popular.

The same holds for other elements of the administration response to the shutdown. It’s a disruption in government that is also letting a team that has demonstrated its indifference to rules about spending and management lean into the punitive responses it has always sought.

Consider an announcement from Vought that he made on Musk’s social media platform on Wednesday.

Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY.

The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA

— Russ Vought (@russvought) October 1, 2025

Vought identified 16 states as targets of billions of dollars of cuts. The states below, to be precise.

Perhaps that map reminds you of something. Well, allow me to put a fine point on it.

These states also include a number of the country’s most populous. In fact, nearly 4 in 10 Americans live in states that Vought has announced will be the targets of cuts.

These are also states that contribute disproportionately to the nation’s gross domestic product.

The targeted states received $191 billion more in government services than they paid in taxes in 2023. Non-targeted states received much more in government spending, receiving $1.1 trillion more than they paid.

These sorts of things are generally abstractions to the president. So let’s put it in terms he might appreciate a bit more. While most of his voters live in non-targeted states (as do most of those who voted for Kamala Harris last year), nearly a third of 2024 Trump voters — some 24 million — live in states targeted for cuts.

The cuts Vought has presented are modest (in the scale of the federal government) and he frames them in a way that Trump voters are unlikely to oppose. But if Vought means spending from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, he’s talking about impeding money that often went to building and improvement projects, not whatever Republicans think of when they think of “Green New Deal” spending.

In other words, it’s very likely that Trump’s base will feel the negative effects of the administration’s partisan attacks. And not for the first time.

Photo: Russ Vought at the White House, March 2019. (White House/Flickr)

After every federal election, Pew Research Center conducts an incredibly useful bit of polling: asking Americans what they did on Election Day and validating that those who reported voting were actually registered voters. It takes a few months for the analysis to be completed, but the result is one of the most useful and detailed assessments of the electorate — and the non-voter pool — that is publicly available. Think exit polls, but more reliable.

I’ve used this analysis (the 2024 iteration of which was published in June) in the past to evaluate how Donald Trump’s base has evolved since the 2016 election. But after seeing a social-media post this week (which I’ll share in a moment), I realized that there’s a lot more information that can be presented to help explore how the 2024 election unfolded.

I came up with a little game. Below is a blank scatterplot, a chart that contrasts the margin of support in the presidential race (from more Democratic at left to more Republican at right) with the percentage of voters a particular demographic group constituted last year.

I know that’ complicated, so let me just explain what to do. Figure out what percentage of the electorate were White men last year and what margin they preferred the Democratic (Kamala Harris) or Republican (Trump) candidate in the election. If you think that they were 100 percent of voters and split evenly between Harris and Trump, you’d be wrong. But you’d click/tap right at the top center of the chart — at the place where 100% of the electorate meets zero on the left-right spectrum. If you think they were 50 percent of voters and backed Trump by 50 points, you’d tap/click at the intersection of the second horizontal line down and the third vertical line from the left.

That’s confusing, too. So just try it.

Once you do, it tells you how close you were. Was the actual value where you thought it would be?

Now try to guess where the values for Black voters (all of them, not just men) landed last year.

Contrast that with the values for White evangelical Protestant voters.

Why that comparison? Because it was a post from my former colleague Perry Bacon that inspired this experiment.

The number of white evangelicals backing Harris in 2024 is around the same as Black voters backing Trump. (15 percent of the group).

— Perry Bacon (@perrybaconjr.bsky.social) 2025-09-28T13:55:00.671Z

You’ll notice that his point is about shares of voters for Harris and Trump, not voters overall. We can test that, too. (Note the change in the question below.)

We can run the same experiment for years past, given that Pew’s been doing this since 2016.

The Pew data encapsulates an enormous range of demographic groups, particularly in more recent years. (There are some caveats I mostly elide here; feel free to go read the methodology in detail.)

At the bottom of this article is a version of the scatterplot that lets you compare demographics and years directly. One thing you might want to play around with is how voting shifted by age. For example, try your hand at how young voters voted in 2024…

…versus 2016.

And then compare that with older voters.

One demographic group I found interesting to consider, given the amount of attention that has been paid to it over the past few years, is Jewish Americans. Where do you estimate their support lands on our chart?

Anyway, here’s the whole thing. Lots of categories and cross-tabulations to explore. There are some gaps in the data for 2020 and (more often) 2016, so if a dot doesn’t show up on the chart for some combination, that’s likely why.

Find something particularly surprising? Let me know on social media or by email!

Photo: Balloon drop at the 1972 Republican convention. (National Archives)

It is stipulated at the outset that there have been gruesome acts of political violence in recent months that appear to have been motivated by hostility to right-wing politics or the administration. This is not really contestable and rarely seriously contested. There is, in fact, violence on the political left.

It is also the case, though, that right-wing political violence has been much more common in recent years. This is not a useful bit of information to the Trump administration, which actively seeks to ignore or bury it. The administration, like Trump himself, is committed to presenting political violence as centrally if not entirely a function of the left — obviously in part because doing so provides a rationalization for the administration to crack down on the president’s political opponents. Trump’s been champing at the bit to deploy the military against protesters, a desire so obvious that questions about his doing so were part of Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings to serve as Defense Secretary.

Over the weekend, Trump announced on social media that he would be directing the (since-confirmed) Hegseth to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” He further “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary” — apparently giving the military a green light to shoot at the purported “terrorists”.

Why Portland? Well, that’s an interesting story that reflects one of the central ways that Trump and his allies convince the right that there’s an imminent threat — a tactic so convincing that it apparently convinced Trump, too.

Bad reporting

In mid-June 2020, I noticed something weird about Fox News’s coverage of the racial-justice protests that had emerged in response to the killing of George Floyd: they were often accompanied by footage of violence or vandalism that had actually occurred more than a week prior. Tucker Carlson (then still a Fox host), Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were incorporating footage into their shows that had been recorded in late May. The reason for doing so wasn’t subtle; they (and Trump, who was president) hoped to suggest that a firm hand was needed to keep the lunatic left under control.

It didn’t work. But what I couldn’t have anticipated then was that Fox would still be using that footage five years later.

For a moment, Trump seemed to waver on his threat to send troops to Portland. In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.

“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’ ” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.

So what had Trump seen? Given his tendency to stay tuned to Fox News we can make some educated guesses.

Trump made his pledge to send troops to Portland on Saturday morning. On Friday, Fox News had several segments in which purported violence in the city was shown.

One featured Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security official who often appears on cable shows. As she was discussing an executive order Trump signed, the channel showed b-roll of events in Portland.

You will notice, though, that the footage was not timestamped for any date in September. Instead, they showed an encounter apparently involving tear gas that occurred back in June … and footage from protests in July 2020.

In the next hour, they ran the same playbook. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on, talking about how dangerous the left was next to footage of Portland violence from July 2020.

If this is what Trump was seeing, one can see how he might have been confused about the timeline (particularly if he wasn’t wearing his glasses). You can also see how the average Fox News viewer might be under the impression that Portland is a violent hellscape.

Particularly given the extent to which Fox News otherwise frames its coverage. The McLaughlin interview, for example, included a graphic purporting to show arrests of “antifa-aligned left-wing violent extremists” across the country — a series of events across the country that would seem to bolster Trump’s anti-antifa (is there a more concise way to say that?) executive order.

But the graphic is not only conflating arrests of protesters with “violent extremists,” it’s looping those purported extremists in with the category “antifa” — presenting people who oppose the administration’s actions with the sort of extremism that Trump is targeting. It’s an exaggeration almost as egregious and obvious as the use of vandalism footage from 2020.

Bad data

On Sunday, deputy White House press secretary Abigail Jackson took a different tack in suggesting that the left was uniquely dangerous. She shared a story from Axios with the useful headline, “Study: Left-wing terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30 years.”

Democrats, calling your political opponents Nazis has consequences.

Study: Left-wing terrorism climbs to 30-year highhttps://t.co/30NvIj9nzC

— Abigail Jackson (@ATJackson47) September 28, 2025

Jackson summarized the headline as “left-wing terrorism climbs to 30-year high,” a claim at odds with the graphic that accompanied the link in her social-media post. The number of attacks in 2022 was higher than the number this year, for example, though the 2025 numbers are only through July 4.

Perhaps you noticed something else striking about that chart! Here, take a closer look in case you didn’t.

Yellow is left-wing attacks. Gray is right-wing attacks. Knowing that, is your assessment of the problem the same as Jackson’s?

If we get rid of the stacked columns, the difference is even more obvious. The blue/left-wing line does finally emerge from the shadow of the right-wing mountain range … at least through July 4.

If we look at the three-year average of these events, we get a better picture of what’s been happening in the U.S. Yes, left-wing attacks (as measured by the Center for Strategic and International Studies) have been rising since the mid-2010s. But, in about the same period, right-wing terrorism began to skyrocket.

The researchers’ finding about the emerging gap between left- and right-wing attacks depends on the idea that there has been only one right-wing attack this year, the assassination of Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman. There has been a “striking” decline in right-wing terrorism, they write, allowing left-wing attacks to have become more common.

Explanations for the drop are “speculative,” they note, but they do offer a possibility: “many traditional grievances that violent right-wing extremists have espoused in the past—opposition to abortion, hostility to immigration, and suspicions of government agencies, among others—are now embraced by President Trump and his administration.” Put another way, the White House has gobbled up the right-wing fringe, meaning there’s less reason for fringe actors to use terrorism to effect their desired outcomes.

This is not the story the administration and its allies want to tell, though. So they center not on the fact that there have been four times as many right-wing as left-wing attacks in the past decade but on the determination that there have been five times as many left-wing attacks this year — since five is five times one.

And if you aren’t convinced that the left is more dangerous, just wait until you see what people were doing in Portland five years ago.

Photo: Trump watches himself on Fox News at the White House, June 27, 2025. (White House/Flickr)

Update: After this was published, it became clear that Trump hadn’t given up on his idea of invading Portland, so I tweaked the language I’d originally used.

Back in, oh, 2015 or 2016, I made a tool that let Washington Post readers create their own versions of Donald Trump’s signature baseball hats. After a while and after a change in The Post’s content-management system, it stopped working. I sort of forgot about it.

I have since remembered it. And, tonight, I got an email from someone asking if it was still around. So I figured I’d fix it. Here it is.

When you generate the image, you can just right-click / press-and-hold to save it and do whatever you want with it. I wash my hands of the whole thing.

Photo: Trump in Daytona. (White House/Flickr)

“DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON”

I don’t remember why we brought our two-year-old son all the way into Brooklyn to see the doctor. We were living way out near Connecticut at the time and traveling to downtown Brooklyn had to have taken at least an hour, if we were lucky. But his first pediatrician was there, the doctor who, when we showed up a few days after our son’s premature birth in an utter, tear-streaked shambles, had told us exactly what we needed to hear: You guys need to relax. He was always calm and never riled and, given that our son was running a high fever and that this was still new to us, calm and unriled was no doubt worth an hour in the car.

When we got there, another doctor was on duty. His bedside manner was not as reassuring, but he was a doctor and our son was seen and given ibuprofen to reduce his fever and that was about what we could hope for. So we scooped up our son and headed for the elevator, to the parking garage under the building so we could head home.

As we walked into the garage, my son started to seize. His little body twitched and his eyes rolled back and the panic that had spurred us to drive to Brooklyn suddenly soared into outer space. Our son had lost control, was doing something I did not know could happen and something that I did not know what could happen next.

Writing this now, six years later, I feel that panic. I tear up. That day, it was far worse, sheer terror — for us and no doubt for the people who were in the elevator we commandeered in our rush back up to the doctor. I remember their stunned faces watching me holding my tiny, convulsing son. They probably thought what I thought, that he was on the brink of death. But they, at least, weren’t his father.

We got back to the doctor’s office and pushed through the waiting room, interrupting the doctor as he was talking with other parents. (Parents who probably also still remember this moment vividly! I can’t imagine how I would have reacted if, after the pediatrician in that first visit told us to relax, some other father had burst in with a baby having a seizure.) The doctor noticed my son’s lips turning blue, put him on oxygen and summoned an ambulance.

That, thank God, was as bad as it got. My son stirred and regained control of himself. We got to the hospital where they simply kept an eye on him for a bit and, in a few hours, we went home.

What we learned (and wished we’d learned sooner) was that small children can sometimes have what are called febrile seizures, seizures that stem from fevers. In essence, the fever that results from a body’s fight against illness can, in small kids, short-circuit the connection between the brain and everything else. If the temperature rises too quickly, it can trigger a seizure. You do have to watch for the sorts of dangers that accompany any seizure, but, over the long run, the risk from such events is low. So are the chances it happens; my son hasn’t had another seizure since, nor has his brother. (Febrile seizures are believed to have a genetic component.)

Of course, the absence of further events may also be because we aggressively treat fevers as they emerge. Switching between ibuprofen and acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) every few hours helps control fevers and reduce the possibility of spikes.

Or so it has been explained to me by doctors, to whom I defer on such issues. I will opt for the opinion of people who went to medical school and have spent decades helping children get well on questions about the wellness of my children.

That day, April 20, 2019, was the most terrifying day of my life. Perhaps using Tylenol to combat the fever wouldn’t have prevented the seizure; maybe using it in the future didn’t prevent other ones. But since we began treating high fevers by alternating Advil and Tylenol, I have not since held my child’s limp body in my arms as I wonder if he is going to die. I choose to follow the guidance offered by that experience over the insistences of a guy posting his opinions on social media.

Photo: The view from the doctor’s office on the day it happened. The quote, of course, is from the president.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement regularly publishes data on the people being held at its detention facilities. Considered over time, those numbers are revealing. It is now the case, for example, that there are more ICE detainees being held in ICE custody who have not been charged with a crime than there are convicted criminals or people with pending charges — almost certainly the first time in the organization that’s been the case.

That’s because, until Jan. 20, 2025, ICE mostly did what President Donald Trump insists it is now doing: targeting criminal immigrants within the country’s borders. A far larger proportion of ICE detainees who’d been stopped by Customs and Border Protection — meaning primarily people stopped directly at the border as they sought entry into the U.S. — were people with no criminal convictions or charges.

Since Trump took office, though, that’s changed. First, the number of people being stopped at the border has dropped as fewer immigrants are seeking entry into the U.S. But, more importantly, ICE is spending a lot more money and energy scooping up non-criminal immigrants. A year ago, only about 3 percent of the people in ICE detention who didn’t have pending criminal charges or a conviction had been arrested by ICE. Now, more than half have.

The year-over-year change since last September is stark. The percentage of immigrants with criminal convictions who’ve been arrested by ICE is up about 80 percent. The percentage of immigrants with no convictions or pending charges who’ve been targeted by ICE is up nearly 2,000 percent.

Again, this is not generally what the president and his allies promised during the 2024 campaign. While the president did at times say that a second Trump administration would identify and deport every immigrant living in the country illegally — a group that is itself determined by vague and disputed boundaries — far more often he promised America that he would target the really bad guys, the criminals who he insisted were running rampant in the U.S., wantonly committing horrible acts of violence. But it turns out that people who are seeking permanent residency by following the rules are a lot easier to arrest and it turns out that the administration is more interested in the number of arrests than the target of them, so here we are. Trump told his base that immigrants were criminals and tasked his subordinates with arresting as many of them as possible, even if they turned out not to be criminals at all.

You likely noticed, though, that the image at the beginning of this article featured not an immigrant or an ICE officer but former FBI director James Comey, pictured in happier times and with a different president. Perhaps you see the throughline, but I’ll put a fine point on it anyway.

Comey, too, is the center of a narrative about his supposedly criminality that has been stoked and tended for years within the pro-Trump media bubble. He is not as sympathetic a victim as an immigrant parent seized outside his kid’s school, certainly, but the pattern is the same. Comey was presented as a nefarious force within the U.S. and a lawbreaker and, Trump’s base having accepted that, he is now being targeted for prosecution by the federal government.

I’ll take a moment here to note that, just as many of the non-criminal immigrant detentions are waved away as justified because those immigrants didn’t arrive on valid visas, Trump allies will and do insist that Comey’s prosecution is warranted given his actions. According to the federal indictment, Comey made false claims during congressional testimony. But legal observers from Lawfare to Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy view the charges as weak if not entirely contrived.

The way in which the indictment was obtained does little to counteract that perception. With the statute of limitations on Comey charges winding down, Trump publicly demanded that his attorney general move forward on targeting his opponents. A new acting U.S. attorney — someone who’d served as his personal counsel — was put in place and the indictment pushed forward. The official she replaced had declined to seek charges, almost certainly because of the weakness of the case.

What’s striking about the Comey indictment is that, even on its own terms, it is contrived. Trumpworld loathes Comey because it holds him responsible for the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, one of the central irritations of Trump’s political career. But this indictment doesn’t allege that Comey invented the Russia probe or anything even close to that. It is, at best, a multi-bumper bank shot, one that satisfies the right’s desire to see Comey in the crosshairs rather than its desire to prove Trump’s view of the Russia probe correct. (Trump and his allies have tried this before, with other targets. It didn’t work out.)

Instead, we have a pattern in which someone or some group of people is offered up by Trump as an enemy of the American people. This is credulously accepted by his base, in part because the pro-Trump media universe scrambles to dig up sketchy support for his claims in its eternal race for the right’s most valuable currency, attention. Trump’s presentations about the world rely on widespread incuriosity and accepting bad-faith actors at face value, but because those values have been so effectively inculcated on the right there’s little value for right-wing politicians or media personalities to contradict his claims.

The president said these were bad guys and so a third of Americans accept and celebrate that they are bad guys. The president says these people should be in jail so his administration works to put them in jail, to cheers from the base that he’s deceiving and the political allies who aren’t interested in disagreeing. And when it turns out that the presentation was wrong or that things weren’t quite as clear-cut as had been suggested, blame always falls somewhere outside of the Oval Office.

Trump’s us-vs.-them worldview will never run out of thems because what makes someone a them isn’t anything they’ve done — it’s simply that Trump has decided they are not an us.

Photo: FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledges applause during President Barack Obama’s remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House, June 21, 2013. (White House Photo by Pete Souza/Flickr)

Democracy depends on optimism.

This isn’t simply a pithy slogan; it’s an encapsulation of what it means to agree that power should be allocated by consensus. If you cast a vote for a candidate who loses, you need to be optimistic both that you will not be punished for your vote and that a candidate of your choosing can win in the future. While elections are generally zero-sum contests between two sides, democracy isn’t. It and the government it undergirds are fluid things, shifted subtly by changes in how power is allocated.

Or, at least, that’s usually been the case. The second presidency of Donald Trump is not approaching his accession as a temporary granting of power by the people. Instead, it’s treating Trump as the central executor of all federal decision-making, a treatment that is prompting very little pushback from Congress or the Supreme Court, the entities specifically designed to keep his power in check.

Americans don’t like what Trump is doing. His approval rating is underwater, with more than a 10-point gap between those who approve of his presidency and those who disapprove.

For those who disapprove, though, there’s no immediate consolation, no possibility that he will suddenly face condemnation from the Republican-controlled House and Senate. Even the idea that Democrats will retake control of the House in next year’s midterms isn’t a salve for the most concerned critics of the president. Democrats won the House in 2018, but it didn’t change the trajectory of Trump’s first presidency much. Not to mention that the president and his allies appear to be doing everything in their power to cement his control over the government, from creating new House maps that disadvantage Democrats to threatening to assume federal control over local elections.

In February, YouGov asked Americans to evaluate how important certain things were to American democracy and whether those things were actually present in our system. At that point — early in Trump’s effort to remake the country during his second term — about 9 in 10 respondents said that having open and fair elections was very or somewhat important to democracy. Only about three-quarters, though, said they strongly or somewhat agree that our national elections are open and fair.

Less than half of Americans strongly agree that national elections are fair. Among American adults under the age of 30, only about a third did. That’s a striking amount of pessimism about the system.

A few years ago, I spoke with Princeton University political scientist Corrine McConnaughy. She reinforced that the central aim of a democratically elected government is to “solve problems in ways that people feel represented enough, they feel their voice heard enough.” Participants in the system need to “understand that losing today is not losing tomorrow” — an optimism that depends on the idea that there’s a possibility of future victory.

It seems likely that one reason younger Americans are relatively pessimistic about national elections is that many of them have internalized pessimism about American systems. The candidate who was most effectively mobilizing young voters in the past decade was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), someone whose argument — as Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari once put it to me — is that “the system does not work for you.”

“And,” Azari added, “younger people were saying, ‘Yeah, that’s right. It doesn’t.’ “

There are lots of manifestations of this frustration among younger voters, including the backlash Joe Biden saw during his own presidency. Some of that centered on America’s role in Israel’s invasion of Gaza; much of it was a function of younger Americans being less engaged in party politics. A lot of it centered on rising prices, still the most obvious driver of Donald Trump’s reelection overall.

Younger Americans also have a pessimism about the country that extends beyond politics. Yes, past presentations of the economic status of millennial Americans in particular overstated how disadvantaged they have been relative to older generations. (With all due modesty, this is a point I made in my 2023 book.) But recent measures of economic confidence have seen sharp declines among young people. A poll conducted by NORC for the Wall Street Journal determined that 7 in 10 Americans think the American dream no longer holds true or never did.

That sentiment is encapsulated for many young people in the difficulty of purchasing a home — a milestone that is hampered by student loan debt, high interest rates and a graying U.S. population that bought homes decades ago in which they still live. Data from the American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau shows that millennials are less likely to own a home at this stage in their lives than were members of the baby boom generation or Gen X.

Why wouldn’t Americans who grew up experiencing the Great Recession and/or covid — and who saw politics dominated by older Americans and little responsiveness within the democratic system even before this second Trump administration — be pessimistic about the nation’s future? Why wouldn’t some fragile subset of that group collapse into cynicism and irony and toxic online communities where they can feel some sense of power?

I would argue that this is the reason that it’s important for Trump’s political opponents to demonstrate that they are challenging him if they hope to gain power. The president is not simply a political opponent, he is the manifestation of the system and someone who is actively trying to reshape the system so that it excludes those with whom he disagrees. Compromise is valuable in a democracy, but in the moment any talk of compromising with Trump shows a willingness from Democratic leaders to maintain the system that’s triggering so much pessimism. Two of the people that have energized the left the most in the past few years are Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Zohran Mamdani — politicians who are not part of the traditional Democratic Party and who present their politics through an optimistic lens. They are young; they argue that change is possible, if not inevitable.

Over the short term, presenting a credible, optimistic vision of the future will help disarm doomers who foresee nothing but collapse. Over the long term, reinforcing optimism — where- and however possible — is essential for maintaining democracy itself.

How that’s done, of course, is the challenge.

Photo: B-17s flying over Germany in World War II. (National Archives)

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Since I left The Post, I’ve had more time to ensure that I am attending to other important parts of my life, like not missing days doing the Wordle.

One thing I like about the game is that it includes data, measures of one’s own performance and comparisons against both other players and the Wordle Bot — a sniffy, perfect implementation of a Wordle player who is always happy to attribute one’s best performances to luck rather than skill.

I am happy to report that I have beaten Wordle Bot to the answer three times in the past two weeks. (Wordle Bot, true to form, puts scare quotes around the word “beaten” when reporting this fact.) I have tied with the robotic manifestation of Wordle perfection seven times.

I am also outpacing the actual humans who play. Ever since Aug. 13, when the word was the execrable KEFIR, I’ve found the answer in two guesses three times and in six guesses only twice. For the uninitiated, this is pretty good. In fact, I’ve beaten the average score of human players 23 times and taken more guesses than the humans on only 17.

Naturally, I charted this. On the graph below, a lower number is better, indicating fewer guesses.

All the times the blue line is under the pink one, that’s when I outperformed the average player. Or, to show that difference another way, see the chart below. (If you haven’t done today’s Wordle and plan to, note that the answer is revealed.)

On average, I’ve beaten the average player by about 0.1 guesses since Aug. 13. My average number of guesses over that period is 3.74; theirs is 3.83.

It is true, of course, that luck does play a role in determining how successful you are. There’s a metaphysical point to be made about all of this, about how a perfectly constructed computer player will still lose to someone who’s taking an ill-advised chance. But I’ll leave the philosophy to others. I’ll just stick to making charts.

I remember being in Des Moines in August 2015 when Donald Trump made one of the first major appearances of his 2016 presidential bid: A stop at the Iowa State Fair. He emerged from a Trump-branded helicopter in a nearby parking lot, talking to reporters and meeting fans. One woman gave him a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” asking him to sign it. He did so, telling her it was “the second-best book ever.” The best, of course, was the Bible.

At the time, this just seemed like an obvious bit of pandering. But it was pandering that became a central element of his politics. Despite his … let’s say, sinful background, he positioned himself as the candidate of the religious right and, in short order, they welcomed him as their champion.

When Charlie Kirk was killed earlier this month, it was inevitable that the moment would become a rallying point for the political right. What’s been striking about that energy, though, is that it has flowed both to Donald Trump and to Christianity itself — a reflection of Kirk’s own embrace of the religion. There’s no reason to think that Kirk’s religiosity was insincere or calculating in the way that Trump seems to have been. But it’s probably the case that Kirk could not have become the force in right-wing politics that he was without it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about recent Gallup polling showing that Americans had shifted to the right on a number of moral issues over the past few years. That article included a version of the chart below, showing the relatively rapid erosion of self-identified Christians in the U.S. over the past few decades — an erosion that seems to have stalled since the pandemic.

The decline has served as a political catalyst much as rumblings about the decline in the density of Whites in the U.S. population have. The result has been a bunker mentality. In June, YouGov asked Americans how much discrimination different groups faced. Republicans said White Americans face more discrimination than Black or Hispanic Americans — and that Christians face far more discrimination than either of those groups as well.

Yet it remains the case that most Americans are Christian — as were most voters in the 2024 election. Not all of them are Trump’s preferred flavor of Christian (White evangelical) but there are far more evangelical Christians than members of non-Christian faiths.

As you would expect, this varies by region. The Midwest and Deep South are heavily Christian; the West Coast and Northeast, less so. (The county-level data below are from PRRI and only show counties for which I also had reliable 2024 election data.)

Displaying the map like that, of course, distorts what that means in terms of population. Scaling county symbols to population shows that many urban areas are much less densely Christian.

If we compare the density of each county’s Christian population to the results of the 2024 presidential election, you can see a loose correlation: more Christians generally means more support for Trump.

Obviously, the inverse holds true: a smaller percentage of Christians generally meant less net support for Trump.

In both cases, many of the outliers are places with large Black, heavily Christian populations, including a number of counties in the Deep South. In 2020, PRRI estimated the percentage of White Christians in each county. If we compare that figure to the 2024 results, the correlation is much sharper.

There is a subset of Trump’s support that explicitly combines race and religion, the Christian nationalist movement. Other PRRI analysis shows a close correlation between support for Christian nationalism — that is, support for American being an explicitly Christian nation. The percentage of people in each state who support or are sympathetic to that idea correlates to Trump support in 2024. The percentage of Whites who fall into that category correlates even more robustly.

Pew Research Center’s analysis of the 2024 electorate shows just how important Christians were to Trump’s victory: more than three-quarters of his voters were Christian. Only about half of Kamala Harris’s were; about 4 in 10 of her voters were unaffiliated with a religious tradition, including atheists and agnostics.

Those voters who wanted to see Trump advocate an explicit Christian identity for the United States are starting to see their investment bear returns. The assassination attempt on Trump’s life last year accelerated his and his movement‘s embrace of the idea that Trump was chosen by God to serve as president. (More than half of Republicans viewed Trump’s win as part of God’s plan or as a reflection of God’s support for his policies according to recent Pew polling.) Trump’s second term in office deviates from his first in many ways; his and its embrace of explicit religious language since January is a notable one.

Without borders, law and order, and religion, you don't have a country.

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 22, 2025

You would have been forgiven for assuming, back in Des Moines in 2015, that thrice-married playboy Donald J. Trump would not become the avatar for a White Christian resurgence of right-wing politics in the U.S. But Trump gave it a shot, and it worked.

Photo: North Christian Church, Columbus, Ind., 1973. (National Archives)

Between 2012 and 2016, Americans got a lot more cynical about the government.

To be specific — and to indicate that your likely immediate reaction to that bit of data was accurate — this increase was measured at the time of each year’s presidential election. In 2012, an already-high 6 in 10 Americans thought that at least half of those working in government were corrupt. By 2016, 7 in 10 did.

The biggest jump in this sentiment, measured in the American National Election Studies poll conducted around the election, was among Republicans. Overall, the assumption of corruption rose 9 percentage points. Among Republicans, it jumped 13 points.

(As used here, “leaners” are independents who say they generally vote with the indicated party.)

It is impossible to assume that this shift is unrelated to the emergence of Donald Trump in national politics. Trump’s first bid for the presidency, after all, was heavily centered on elevating cynicism about the system, excoriating legislators as corrupted by money — something that he insisted he’d seen firsthand. That he ended up running against someone deeply enmeshed in the political system worked to his advantage: he was the outsider who’d clean things up, which Hillary Clinton (in his presentation) was part of the problem.

In the years since, the assumption that government officials are corrupt has held relatively steady. It is higher among political independents (as you might assume) and among those who don’t have a college degree.

Notice, though, how partisan views shifted in 2020. Below, you can see the percentage of each group (by party and education) that thinks most or all members of government are corrupt. The year 2020 is indicated with a vertical line; notice where the percentage jumps or sinks that year.

Relative to 2016, Republicans (and leaners) and independents were less likely to see members of government as corrupt; among Democrats (and leaners), the percentage increased another 6 percentage points. In 2020, Democrats (and leaners) were as likely to view half of the government as corrupt as were Republicans.

What changed? The person in charge of the government.

Last month, YouGov dug into the question of corruption more specifically. If offered a bribe, they asked U.S. adults, how likely would various political actors be to accept? Mayors and members of Congress were most likely to be viewed as likely to take a bribe. Supreme Court justices and the president were least likely to.

There was a wide partisan divide on those last two, however, as you can see above. And the relative skepticism about a president taking a bribe diverged slightly when YouGov asked about a specific president: Trump.

When asking a similar question in January (just before inauguration), YouGov found that about 45 percent of Americans thought it was very or somewhat likely that Joe Biden would take a bribe, about equal to the percentage who said Donald Trump would. Partisans rejected the idea that their own party’s president would take a bribe while independents were more likely to think that Trump would.

In August, the percentage of Americans who thought Trump was at least somewhat likely to take a bribe jumped over the 50 percent mark. While the percentage of Democrats and independents who thought he would jumped, the percentage of Republicans did held steady.

The effect is not only that Republicans view Trump as less likely than any other group or listed individual as likely to accept a bribe, it’s that they purport to view him as less likely than any theoretical president to do so. Seven in 10 Republicans say it is not at all likely that Trump would take a bribe, compared to only a quarter who say the same of presidents in general. They see Trump as more resistant than other presidents to the temptations of bribery.

Some of this is simply partisanship, obviously. When a prominent conservative podcaster declares “we DO NOT CARE” about a credible report of a prominent administration official taking a bag of cash, it’s a reflection, in part, of rejecting attacks on members of one’s own team.

But there is evidence in the numbers above that there’s space for Democrats to run as anti-corruption candidates, as political scientist Adam Bonica argued over the weekend. There are a lot of people who see rampant corruption in government, including a lot of people who aren’t already Democrats. Whether it’s possible for the Democratic Party to reinvent itself as that — given the inherent skepticism independents have about the parties — is another question entirely.

Photo: Apple CEO Tim Cook sets up an engraved glass Apple disc on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Aug. 6, 2025. (White House/Flickr)

The story of this era is that institutions with power aren’t using it or are only using it in their own (often misguided) defense. That leaves the fight for democracy to regular people, to aggregated individual power that is joined on a largely ad hoc basis rather than on an institutional one. 

It’s fair to ask why. Why are media outlets and elected officials and businesses so unwilling to use what they’ve accrued or inherited for the country’s collective defense? Is it a failure to recognize that defense is needed? Is it some sort of perceived or actual mismatch between the power they’ve built and the power that’s demanded? Is it just weakness or self-interest or greed?

It may be that anti-democratic actors understand how to muffle that kind of institutional power. Doing so has been a decades-long project, after all, one that has seen a lot of success. My last column at The Post centered on the long-term erosion of institutional power and the opportunity that provided Donald Trump.

But that idea wobbles when considering where institutional pushback has been effective. Power is power, and it matters more that it is expended than how. 

Luckily, aggregated individual power — and even just individual power — is also effective. The utility of ad hoc, internet-enabled groups has been obvious for at least 15 years. When I was writing my book, which looks at trends in power over time, I noted that these efforts are hindered in the long term by being ad hoc and not building the sort of organization that can let power accrue, to build metaphorical interest. 

To some extent, though, they did. The No Kings protests were organized, in part, by Indivisible, which grew out of ad hoc organization. But the long term doesn’t matter in the immediate term. Building power over the long term doesn’t matter if the long term itself is under threat. 

So we see people self-organizing in effective ways, in and for novel institutions. It is true that existing, expansive institutional power applied aggressively could shift the political terrain in the U.S. more rapidly; congressional Republicans could effect constraints on the president tomorrow, if they chose to. 

In lieu of that, though, there isn’t nothing. There are a lot of regular people doing relatively small things, making the implementation of an autocratic state that much more difficult. Past generations of Americans collectively built big, weighty institutions that have proved to often be honeypots for abuse. Without many of those tools at their disposal, Americans today are building new arsenals from scratch. 

When the monarchists are on the march, sometimes it falls to a random group of farmers to stand in their way. 

Photo: A picture I took as I realized I needed a picture.

I am not revealing any trade secrets by telling you that Elon Musk’s public persona is unserious. He obviously has some business acumen; he remains in control of a number of corporations that are not at risk of imminent collapse. But politics? Woof. The lack of sophistication that was obvious during his brief stint in Donald Trump’s administration remains readily apparent — as does his willingness to amplify any fringe-right claim that pops up in his social media feed.

Yesterday, that meant sharing an idiotic graph from one of his ideological allies, appending only his trademark “Wow”. (He has also presumably trademarked 😂, but that’s beside the immediate point.)

Wow https://t.co/K9jITWFb3K

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 18, 2025

The chart from podcaster (and former recipient of income from the Russian government) Tim Pool purports to show “what violence rates look like depending on political party.” It is offered, he explains, as a counterpoint to various analyses showing that violence is far more common on the political right than the left. Aha!, exclaims Pool: but the “combined violence rates” for “Democrat” are 21,765 compared to 858 for “Republican”!

Perhaps you find yourself slightly befuddled, unclear on what exactly Pool is talking about. Allow me to reassure you: This is not because you are stupid. It’s because the chart is stupid.

What Pool appears to be doing (but, honestly, who the hell knows) is taking violent crime rates from different cities and adding them together depending on whether the city is run by a Democrat or a Republican.

Even so, the numbers don’t make sense. What cities is he picking? How many? What is his source for the crime rates? When I took the list of the 100 largest cities, extracted the party of their mayors (now, mind you, and not in 2023) and overlapped that with Wikipedia’s violent-crime-rate data, I got very different numbers. (I would not normally use Wikipedia’s aggregated data, but I am very confident that Pool’s analysis, such as it is, did not rely on more sophisticated assessments of crime patterns.) Excluding two GOP-run cities for which data wasn’t immediately available, my totals are about 276,000 versus 54,000 (with another 32,000 for cities run by non-partisan mayors).

The specific figures don’t matter, though, because this is a very, very stupid metric.

Allow me to use a baseball analogy. What Pool is doing, in essence, is not looking at which team has more hits but, instead, comparing the cumulative batting averages of players on the New York Mets with players on the Chicago White Sox. That’s … not how batting averages work!

Even worse, though, is that he’s comparing different numbers of players. It’s as though he’s adding together the batting averages on each team, but only including players who live in or around New York City. There’s a lot more of them on one team!

In the case of the 100 most populous cities, there are about three Democratic mayors for every Republican. Even if those cities had violent crime rates that were half the value of Republican-led cities, the cumulative total would still be higher.

Again, though, that’s granting Pool the grace of assuming that his chart is based on anything at all. That grace is not deserved. The Republican-led city with the lowest violent crime rate in the Wikipedia data is Gilbert, Ariz., where there were more than 1,100 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2023. In other words, even if Pool only included one Republican-led city and that city was Gilbert, the “cumulative violent crime rate” would still be higher than his “858.”

Setting aside the ridiculousness of the data, it’s worth pointing out that, even if the figures were real and useful, there’s no actual connection to the debate at hand. Democrat-run cities among the 100 most-populous do have higher average violent-crime rates, but there are plenty of smaller cities run by Republicans where violent crime rates are higher still. But a city being run by a Democrat does not mean that the crime in that city is being done by Democrats, any more than having a Republican president means that crimes committed today are necessarily committed by Republicans. In fact, there’s research to show that mayoral partisanship isn’t correlated to crime rates.

Pool’s chart is just winking, leveraging the right’s core belief in the violent, criminal nature of ✨ People From Urban Areas ✨ to backstop the false claim that the left is more likely to engage in acts of political violence. It’s sort of useful, honestly, because it reinforces the extent to which all of the “it’s the left that’s violent” rhetoric is often simply about perceptions of who constitutes “the left.”

Allow me to now summarize my assessment of Pool’s chart and Musk’s response: 😂.

Thanks to Kevin Korb for elevating the research about mayors and crime.

Photo: People doing data stuff in 1990. (National Archives)

The debate over the shelving of Jimmy Kimmel’s show isn’t really a debate, as such.

Kimmel has been a target of Donald Trump’s for years, with the president predicting in July that the ABC host’s show would be next to be shut down after CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert. Last week, Kimmel made a joke about Republican eagerness to pin the Charlie Kirk assassination on the left, a joke that suggested obliquely that the shooter was a Trump supporter. The head of the FCC suggested that ABC should face sanction for the comments. A conglomerate that owns a number of local ABC stations — and is seeking a merger that requires FCC approval — announced that it would not air Kimmel’s show. ABC itself quickly followed suit.

In other words, Trump got his desired outcome. And Trump desired that outcome because he pays far more attention to television personalities and ratings than nearly anyone else in America.

Analysis from the Hollywood Reporter published last year found that ABC had a median primetime viewership age a bit lower than CBS in 2024 — 65.6 years versus 67.8. The youngest audience that tuned into ABC’s primetime lineup was for “NBA Primetime,” which enjoyed a youthful median age of 57.1 years.

If you’re curious, as I was, three-quarters of the U.S. population were younger than 57.1 years old in 2024.

After poking around a bit, I couldn’t find current estimates of the median age of Kimmel’s viewership. But that’s OK, since I mostly wanted to talk about the news.

Last month, Pew Research Center published its most recent analysis of the audiences of different news organizations. It included estimates of the median ages of people who cite specific sources as regular sources of news.

You’ll notice that two of the news sources with the youngest audiences are Spanish-language and targeting a Hispanic audience. That is almost certainly not unrelated to the fact that Hispanics are generally younger than Americans overall — and substantially younger than White Americans.

You may also have noticed on the original chart that the two oldest audiences were for right-wing outlets: Breitbart and Newsmax. This, too, is related to the racial demographics above.

But let’s consider those numbers in the context I offered for “NBA Primetime.” Univision has the youngest median audience, landing right at the median age of Americans overall. Every other news source skews older, with a larger percentage of the population younger than its median age than older. (According to Pew’s calculations, that is.)

It’s also true that most of these news sources have audiences that skew older than the voter pool in the U.S. That pool of people is older than the population overall, since you have to be 18 in order to vote. Using Census Bureau estimates of the voting-age population, we see that most of the news sources still skew older than the universe we’re looking at.

The point here is simple: These audiences are not particularly representative of the population. And that’s even before we consider actual viewership, which is a small subset of any particular age group. Kimmel averaged 1.7 million viewers last year, one-half of one percent of the U.S. population.

Targeting Kimmel shouldn’t really be viewed about sending him a message to constrain his dangerous, popular commentary. It is instead about sending a message to the rest of us.

Photo: Something that is unidentifiable to anyone under the age of 40. (National Archives)

My eight year-old and I were waiting for the school bus this morning when I commented on his t-shirt, which was from the West Coast fast-food chain In-N-Out burger. It is a particularly popular chain, appreciated by its fans for its fresh ingredients — burgers so good that customers overlook the weird, soggy fries.

I told him that, when I was in Houston last week, I’d gotten In-N-Out. His response was to briefly express jealousy before asking a valid question: There’s In-N-Out in Texas?

I’ll admit that I hadn’t known that either until I was there. In-N-Out’s restaurants are usually clustered, anecdotally because it assures access to those fresh ingredients. Maybe that’s not why; that’s not the point. The point is that I suddenly realized that I didn’t know exactly where In-N-Out could be found. And then I had an interesting thought, given Houston’s location in Texas: Had I eaten at the furthest-east In-N-Out Burger? More intriguingly, had I eaten at the In-N-Out closest to my house?

This was a job for a guy who is good with data. Happily, I know one.

First thing was to find a list of restaurant locations (which the chain publishes online) and then to geolocate them (easy enough with Geocod.io). And, just like that, I could produce a map.

As it turns out, I had not eaten at the easternmost In-N-Out. The restaurant at The Woodlands (in yellow on the map above) is only the second easternmost franchise. The easternmost is in Webster, Texas. The most western, meanwhile, is in Eureka, Calif., in the upper left corner of the state.

(For the sake of completion, the furthest north and south are in Ridgefield, Wash. and San Antonio, respectively.)

The In-N-Out I’d gone to was also not the closest to my house in New York. That honor — and it is an honor — goes to the restaurant in Rockwall, Texas. (It’s also in yellow above.) This is as-the-crow-flies, mind you, not if I wanted to drive or fly to get a burger in an airplane. It is simply the closest I am to an In-N-Out grilled cheese on any given day, the place where its food has the strongest gravitational pull on me.

Perhaps you’d like to know where your closest In-N-Out is? Well, sure; who wouldn’t. Since I had the data in hand, I made a little tool that will allow you to locate it.

Is this useful? Yes. You’re welcome.

Anyway, that’s what I was talking to my son about as he was getting on the bus.

This article was updated upon learning that a location just opened in Washington.

Photo: A picture I took at an In-N-Out in 2010. I assume the prices have gone up.

The New York Times’ Reid Epstein reports on the emergence of a new center-left think tank dubbed the Searchlight Institute. Its aim, he explains, is to help Democrats find “their way out of the political wilderness” by fixing where the party has gone wrong. To wit, having placed “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”

This idea has been rumbling around in Democratic circles for a while, centered on the idea that advocacy groups (“the groups”) had pressured Democratic legislators to espouse unpopular opinions that hurt them with the electorate. Searchlight, Epstein reports, will “conduct its own polling and serve as an ideas generator in the service of winning with margins big enough to advance meaningful policy in Congress.”

Fine. Except that climate change and the party’s approach to LGBTQ issues are already two of its biggest strengths.

May polling from CNN presented Americans with 13 different policy areas. Climate and LGBTQ issues were two of the three where Democrats had the biggest advantage.

Climate change in particular offered Democrats the biggest advantage among independents as well. It was the second biggest advantage among younger voters — a core constituency for the party — behind abortion. This isn’t a new development, mind you; the challenge for Democrats has largely centered on the fact that voters prioritize other issues over climate change when casting ballots.

The question of how the party emerges from this metaphorical wilderness has in recent months centered on a related question: Should the Democratic Party try to show centrist and independent voters that its priorities are the ones those voters already have, or should it instead try to shift voters’ views of issues where Democrats have more existing strength?

The Searchlight idea, it seems, is to abandon a focus on two strengths, presumably in large part because they are polarizing. But it’s also because those issues are often more nuanced or complicated than the party’s position on abortion, leading to internal debates that Democratic politicians might find grating. The groups advocating for a particular position on abortion won, so they don’t offer the same sort of agitation that climate or LGBTQ groups do.

I will not be so presumptuous as to assume that I know what would or wouldn’t work for the party. But I am not sure that walking away from or downplaying existing strengths will fix the party’s problems with its disaffected and shrinking membership.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) appeared on CNN Tuesday night, unwittingly offering a useful distillation of the right’s consideration of political violence.

“You need to get your facts right,” Cruz told host Kaitlan Collins after she brought up the killing of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman. “The assassin there was not a right-wing assassin, acting on a political motive. The assassin there was someone who had been an appointee of Tim Walz, and he was a deranged lunatic.”

“Yes,” he continued, “there are deranged lunatics who attack people, both right and left. But if you look at murders carried out for political agendas, they are overwhelmingly on the left.” In addition to the killing of Charlie Kirk (the incident that prompted Cruz’s appearance), the senator cited the attempts on Donald Trump’s life in 2024 and the “assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh,” in which a plotter turned himself in before committing any act of violence.

Cruz’s description of Vance Boelter — the man accused of killing Hortman, her husband and shot another Democratic legislator — is false. He attempts to tie Boelter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz by describing him as an “appointee,” but Walz merely extended Boelter’s term on a state board as he did scores of other prior appointees. Boelter is a Trump supporter who engaged in “targeted political assassinations” according to a Justice Department official.

But this is the play. In order to rebut the abundant evidence that extremist murders are more likely to be driven by members of the political right (including two deaths that occurred on the same day as Kirk’s), those murders are downplayed in significance or dismissed as the work of isolated, mentally ill actors. Murders committed by people driven by left-wing ideologies (as appears to be the case with the Kirk killing) are presented as part of a concentrated political project.

This is why accusations against the left so often focus on the word “they.” If these acts of violence are downstream from left-wing politics, there’s an implied chain of influence that often proves impossible to define clearly. So instead it’s left as nebulous: They did this, through whatever means the right seeks to cast as unacceptable.

It is true that public attention can drive targeted violence as we’ve seen repeatedly in recent years. But that’s different than arguing that violence is the desired outcome of that attention, much less that this is primarily an issue on the left.

The emergence (re-emergence, really) of this idea that the left is engaged in a coordinated project to destroy the right by whatever means it can reminded me of research I wrote about in my 2023 book, “The Aftermath.” (You should probably buy the book. The bit below is in chapter four.)

Here’s what I wrote:

America’s non-White population is now mostly not Black. This makes it facially odd to assume that a theoretical erosion of White power will benefit a conglomerated group of non-Whites, as though the zero-sum calculus of politics will reward “non-Whites” as a group. Finding this idea puzzling, a group of researchers including New York University’s Eric Knowles examined precisely that assumption — and found clear evidence that it was one being made particularly by White Republicans.

“When you think about it, what does it mean for White Americans to become a minority? Well, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to not be the largest single group anymore — unless you sort of lump everybody else together,” he said when we spoke by phone. (Indeed, even in the Census Bureau’s projection for the population in 2060, Whites still outnumber Black and Hispanic U.S. residents combined.) “So there’s ‘us’, and then there’s ‘everyone else’, and that ‘everyone else’ forms some sort of coherent whole. That would be, it seems to us, kind of a prerequisite to feeling that sense of threat. If you think that you’re still the largest player in the game, and it’s just that there are a lot of other, smaller players, it’s not logical to feel all that threatened by it.”

Knowles and his colleagues conceived of a way to measure what they dubbed the sense of “minority collusion,” the idea that non-White Americans have a shared dislike and jealousy of Whites and that they work together to peel away power and resources to which Whites are entitled. They surveyed a nationally representative pool of White people multiple times from 2015 to 2018, asking them to respond to statements like “minorities may disagree about some things, but one thing they agree on is that they don’t like White people” or “different minority groups are willing to cooperate with each other in order to take power away from White people.” The research team also offered statements explicitly endorsing White identity politics like “Blacks, Latinos, and Asians often vote for politicians from their same racial group because that’s who has their best interests in mind; Whites should not be criticized for doing the same thing.” 

“What we ended up finding,” Knowles said, “was that there was a marked increase in agreement with the idea that minority collusion is happening over the course of the survey.” But, importantly, that increase “was driven only by an increase in this minority collusion belief among White Republicans.”

Knowles’ research looked at a specific us-versus-them framing. But you can see the parallel: If they are not us, they must be part of a them that is out to get us. Even when it doesn’t make sense to assume that disparate elements of the opposition are working together, because they are perceived as the opposition they are assumed to be acting in concert.

Earlier in his conversation with Collins, Cruz alleged that moneyed interests were behind the left-wing violence they were committing.

“The Black Lives Matter and antifa riots all over the country, there was real money behind that,” he said. “The anti-Israel, antisemitic riots on college campuses, there was real money behind that. The open border riots we saw in L.A., and across the country, there’s real money behind that. I’m not the only person who noticed that at the antisemitic protests, on college campuses, many of the tents all matched. And so, what I’m urging the Department of Justice to do is look at who’s funding it.”

The “antifa riots”? OK.

It’s helpful that he mentioned the tents thing because it was nonsense that was seized upon by the right in its effort to imply a coordination that simply didn’t exist. The “real money” he describes almost invariably gets traced back to contributions from donors to organizations that supported often completely non-violent protests. But he and his allies work backward to construct a conspiracy where none otherwise exists because it allows them to impugn their political opponents. Drawing attention that, in the past, has led to right-wing political violence.

Except that political violence isn’t something done by us. It’s just something they foment and celebrate as part of their left-wing collusion and conspiracy. Right, senator?

Photo: The most powerful person in America, holding court with allies and aides. (White House/Flickr)

One of the things I’m curious about in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk is whether the political views of young people will shift. This was Kirk’s wheelhouse, we are told: engaging young people in politics to Republicans’ and Trump’s benefit.

I am personally skeptical about claims that Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, had a major influence on the rightward shift of young people in recent years and I am very skeptical of the (now frequent) claims that he and his organization had a significant effect on the 2024 election outcome. But if he was an outsized force among young people, we might expect to see some movement in views of Trump, on whose behalf Kirk’s efforts were primarily deployed.

So I figured I’d measure the current baseline. In YouGov’s regular polling on Trump’s approval rating, there was a jump in the views of Americans under the age of 30 this week. But that number is often volatile, given that it is a measurement of a relatively small subset of the population.

While Americans aged 18 to 29 were about as likely to approve of Trump’s performance as president back in March, that approval has since collapsed. The recent uptick still has Trump’s approval among young people below where it was in early August.

When Trump won in November, his favorability rating surged among Americans under the age of 45. But here, too, that positive sentiment collapsed. Now, only about a third of young people view Trump favorably (looking at a three-week average, mostly to smooth out some of the aforementioned volatility).

On both approval and favorability, Trump’s seen the biggest declines among young Americans since mid-February.

So that’s where we are, in polling conducted in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. We will see where we stand in a month or two.

Photo: The president dances, in his way. (White House/Flickr)