Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) isn’t planning to run for reelection. Among the reasons he offered the New York Times was that “[w]atching the Biden thing” — presumably meaning the focus placed on the former president’s age and capacity — “really said something about the necessity for generational change in the party, and I think I want to respect that.”

OK, sure. But, meaning no disrespect to Nadler, come on.

Nadler has been in the House for more than three decades. He was of traditional retirement age before “Frozen” was released. It’s a bit hard to believe that his retirement now is centrally about meeting the needs of the Democratic base when the visible demand for generational change within the party is itself years old. I mean, Biden in 2020 called himself a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic politicians!

My book about the generational divide in the U.S. came out more than two years ago, but I started writing it more than two years before that. While the Biden presidency issue served as the most acute example of generational tension, the tension both preceded and followed that period.

Data from VoteView suggests that, at the end of the current, 119th Congress, the average age of those who served in the House in 2025 and 2026 will be 59.1 years. That’s slightly higher than a decade ago and nearly two years higher than the average 20 years ago.

You can see that the average age in the House began to swing upward in about 1996 (indicated by the vertical line). On the Senate side, the upward push began earlier, in 1982. The average age of those who served in the 119th Senate will be 65.2 years at the end of next year — right at the traditional retirement age.

This upward push mirrors the aging of the population overall. Members of the baby boom (generally defined as those born from 1946 to 1964) are aged 61 to 79. They pushed average ages downward in the 1980s and 1990s as they got elected to Congress. They’ve been a central part of why those ages have increased steadily since.

In the House in particular, there’s been a big difference in the average ages of Democrats and Republicans. In the Senate, those averages have moved in concert over the past few decades. In the House, a big gap emerged beginning in the Tea Party era.

For the congress that ended 2012, the average age of Democrats who’d served was more than five years higher than the average for House Republicans. (Nadler, at the time, had just turned 65.) It has since gotten better, but House (and Senate) Democrats are still older on average than Republicans.

This is particularly a problem for them because the Democratic Party is more dependent on votes from younger Americans. Those younger Americans are also less likely to be members of either political party than are older people; it is not hard to imagine that a lack of national representation of young people is helping drive indifference to the party as an institution.

Even today, more than 4 in 10 members of the House — and nearly two-thirds of the Senate! — are members of the baby boom generation or older. About 1 in 6 House Democrats are millennials or younger (using Pew Research Center’s definitions).

Only a handful of senators from either party are millennials or younger, a generational group that included more than half of the population in 2024. Maybe they should have some representation!

Nadler, incidentally, is not a baby boomer. He’s a member of the silent generation, the generation that preceded the boom.

Photo: The first baby born in 1959, supposedly. (National Archives)

It remains the case that President Trump doesn’t particularly seem to like the White House.

During his first time in office, there was reporting to this effect; in 2017, he allegedly told members of his New Jersey golf club that the building was a “dump.” Trump denied this, for that’s worth. During his second term in office, though, it’s become harder to do so. Trump has invested an enormous amount of time and an increasing amount of money on remaking the building in the image of one of his privately owned venues, from the gilded Oval Office tchotchkes to the Mar-a-Lago-esque patio-ification of the Rose Garden.

And yet he still spends a lot of time in other places. During his first administration, I tracked the number of times he left the executive mansion to visit (almost invariably) one of the golf courses or clubs owned by the Trump Organization. He did so a lot, likely playing 45 rounds of golf and visiting a Trump-owned property on all or part of 75 days through Aug. 31, 2017.

As of the end of this August, he’s spent all or part of 86 days during his second term at Trump Organization properties, likely including 60 rounds of golf. See, I’m tracking these numbers during his second term, too, as you can see on the (regularly updated) interactive below.

This now lives at pbump.com.

If you mouseover (or, on a phone, click) any date above, it will show you where Trump went (if anywhere). Visits are color-coded by region mostly to give you a sense of where he’s headed: green for Florida, yellow for New York-New Jersey, pink for his club near D.C. I also slightly rounded weekend days so that they stood out more obviously. The data centrally comes from the Roll Call database of Trump’s schedule and White House pool reports, with some golf outings confirmed separately.

One important note: I use the term “likely played golf” because we don’t always know whether Trump actually did. During the Obama administration — a period during which Trump regularly inveighed against the president’s golf habit — the public was informed about Obama’s playing partners (almost always on public or government-owned courses). Trump has never been similarly transparent so we are often left to speculate on whether he actually played. History has shown, though, that assuming he did is often the safest bet.

Defenders of the president will ask why this matters. There’s the issue of cost, of course; flying to Mar-a-Lago should be more of an affront to the purportedly cost-savings-focused president than staying in the house taxpayers already fund. But the more distinctive issue is that Trump’s visits to Trump properties are free advertising for his private business, hinting at and often explicitly offering the chance to speak with and influence the country’s chief executive. At one point, you will recall, the president openly sold the opportunity to come dine with him at one of his private clubs.

This tracker will always be available at pbump.net/outofoffice/. If there are particular metrics you’d like me to track, please let me know. And if you’d like to see your company exempt from tariffs? Well, maybe try becoming a member of a Trump Organization club.

Photo: Bryson DeChambeau hits balls on the South Lawn of the White House for some reason, June 2, 2025. (White House Photo/Joyce N. Boghosian)

I had a dream last night in which my daughter (I do not have a daughter) was in an apartment as ICE moved in. She escaped to the daycare across the street, where she was taking refuge in a piece of luggage, which is where, after a quick, panicked search, I found her. Then I had the privilege of waking up.

I suspect that the dream was a function of having seen the clip below, at some point after my family arrived home yesterday after spending a few days in Canada. It’s not entirely clear what happened in the recorded incident, but the description seems likely: a father bringing his daughter to school was stopped and detained by immigration officers. The girl was disconsolate; the community, furious — and there was nothing anyone can do about it.

On way 1st day teaching journalism course on covering immigration, met by ICE in Mt.Pleasant at Lamont – agents appear to take father driving young daughter, likely to school. Agents shoving bystanders, daughter sobs it’s her fault-she’d seen car parked for 2hrs. Trump’s America pic.twitter.com/ETSc3BbaK0

— Molly O'Toole (@mollymotoole) August 28, 2025

I would never argue that people who aren’t parents cannot be sympathetic to pain felt by children or understand the drenching terror parents experience when thinking about being separated from their kids. But I can say that, until I had kids, I myself didn’t fully appreciate those things. Just as I can’t fully appreciate the panic felt by the father and daughter in that video, no matter how fast my heart might have been racing as my subconscious imagined a similar scenario. That particular terror is one from which my family and I are almost certainly exempt.

It was strange being in Canada this week, a week in which President Trump’s implementation of authoritarianism matured to the point that not one but two observers of history declared his efforts successful. While Trump’s Cabinet was competing to slather him with the most effusive praise, we were taking a cab to the Royal Ontario Museum and discussing with the driver his journey from India to Toronto. Vacations are meant to be escapes; this one offered a flavor of escape that would have seemed unlikely a year ago.

I was curious what would happen when we tried to reenter the country. I am not an important person, but I am someone who has been at odds with the administration and the Department of Homeland Security particularly. Depending on the extent of the government’s pettiness, some difficulty or delays didn’t seem impossible.

Here, too, I imagined a much worse scenario than would manifest. We pulled up to a checkpoint on a rural road south of Montreal and had a pleasant conversation with the agent in the booth. There was no hostility save for a comment about the Toronto Blue Jays cap on the dashboard. He gave my sons little sew-on patches identifying them as Customs and Border Protection officers. The agent welcomed us back to the U.S. and sent us on our way.

This is precisely the challenge during this phase of Trump’s revolution. Is normalcy the norm or the exception? Are exceptional events exceptions or the emerging norm? Are my dreams and fears a reflection of my own derangements or of rational consideration of what’s happening?

Or are they just a function of me? We can draw a clear line between what’s happening to me and people like me — primarily meaning White people — and what’s happening to others. I spent a full chapter of my book, an assessment of shifting power in the wake of the Baby Boom, considering the question of Hispanic identity in the U.S., recognizing that immigration and diversity are central elements of right-wing rhetoric but heavily depend on a simplistic understanding of race and ethnicity. My sons have a Mexican great-grandparent and a Native American great-grandparent; if they and I looked more like my wife’s grandmother would our return to the U.S. have been different? It seems clear that our day to day lives would be.

It seems almost certain that this era will substantially shift America’s measurement of its population. When the government that’s hyperactively rounding up Hispanic people in particular knocks on your door and asks someone their race, there will be a natural tendency for more people to self-identify as White. America had gotten better about recognizing the malleability of these designators. The second Trump era will probably reverse that trend dramatically.

For other Americans, normalcy will remain the norm, helping them maintain sense of distance from what’s happening everywhere else. Their kids will get toy CBP badges. Other people will be separated from their kids by people not wearing any badges at all. America is both of those things now, a place where the vacation is ongoing and a place where it has suddenly ended.

Photo: One of the patches given to my sons.

There was an article posted recently that walked well-worn terrain, arguing for people not to abandon Twitter but, instead, to engage with it. There’s not much point in rehashing the details; the piece was explicitly meant to drive engagement for a new center-left publication (using that latter term in its new, expansive sense). It was, like so much else, a form of advertising.

Nor was it compelling. The central argument was that Twitter — which is no longer the Twitter of five or ten years ago both literally and figuratively — is an important element of the national conversation and that leaving it to the fringe-right and to trolls was ceding important terrain. But this idea that others could swoop in and collectively shift the conversation, beyond imposing an odd job requirement on all of us, misunderstands the nature of the change from Twitter to X. It is owned and directed by a far-right actor who bought it specifically to elevate and amplify right-wing messaging. You might as well argue that people should join the Republican Party in order to redirect it to less extreme terrain; that ship sailed a long time ago and you’re going to encounter some systemic obstacles that are beyond your persuasive powers.

In fact, it is useful and important to look at this question not through the lens of persuasion but the lens of power. Your engagement and your work, not unlike your vote, is a form of power, something you can choose to grant to others. Those others, particularly organizations and companies, accrue that power to use as they see fit.

The immediate question isn’t, say, where you can change zoning laws. It is, instead, building power, even if only incrementally.

Since I left The Washington Post, this question has guided my discussions with people interested in my writing for them. I’ve had numerous offers to write that I have (hopefully respectfully) declined. I’ve done so largely because I am trying to be conscientious about the prior question, to work with and for institutions that are directing their accrued power responsibly. (At the same time, I’m preserving my own power by not simply handing it out willy-nilly but publishing analysis and thoughts on my own website.)

With respect to a friend who works there, this is why I am not publishing on Substack. I’ve had a number of people ask why I don’t simply publish there, letting my pieces pop up in their inboxes and allowing me to potentially generate income. The central answer is that I don’t think Substack uses its power responsibly.

The company has done a good job creating tools that make it easy to publish. A number of well-regarded journalists use those tools and have built their personal brands by doing so. I certainly don’t begrudge them doing so. But they have done so while sharing that growth with Substack, a company that intentionally provides a voice to white nationalist and Nazi propaganda. They have transferred their power to a company that has used it to promote toxic rhetoric in the guise of “having a debate.”

For me, the issue goes beyond that. I spent more than a decade engaging on social media as a representative of The Post, explaining the news and presenting my perspective. I was there as Twitter collapsed into X (he offered with the affected world-weariness of a combat veteran) but even before that — even before Elon Musk’s accelerations — saw how toxicity poisoned efforts at discussion. There’s value to debate and conversation, of course, but that isn’t what’s fostered on Twitter or (in my limited experience) on Substack. Instead, conversation occasionally glimmers through a waterfall of bad-faith, uninformed trolls and attacks. It’s an effort to play a college football game after the crowd has stormed the field.

Even if they worked perfectly, Substack and Twitter/X only accrue power over the long term for Substack and X. If one of Substack’s most popular authors were to be abducted by aliens tomorrow, Substack retains the value she created on the company’s behalf. It benefits institutionally from her using the platform. She helped build its institutional power — which it currently uses, in small part, to ensure Nazis a voice in the discussion.

My intent remains to take a job with an established institution, rather than simply to write for myself. There is value in working for an institution: shared protection from attack; responsibility for others that can prompt caution or useful self-reflection. And while my most recent tenure working for an institution showed how accrued power can be redirected unexpectedly, I still think there is value in helping institutions that are doing good, important work to build their power.

(This question of institutional power is why it’s urgently important for the Democratic Party to convince young people not to register as political independents, but I digress.)

We’ll see how my plan shakes out. Having detailed knowledge of how American politics worked as recently as Jan. 19 seems less useful than it once did, but I’m confident that there’s still some value to it. (Or at least in being able to make charts.) In the meantime, though, I plan to continue to be careful about how the small bit of power I have at my disposal is deployed. If that means that people who are interested in my thoughts have to visit my website or remember how to use an RSS feed, so be it.

Photo: Chevilly Power Station, 1950s. (National Archives)

In my younger days, I came up with a theory of human behavior that (while probably too cute for its own good) serves as a useful frame for understanding part of the world.

I called it “resizing the pond.” The idea is that many people like to feel like the big fish in a small pond but operate in ponds that are far too big for that to be possible. So they resize the pond, convincing themselves that a much smaller universe is the important one, one in which they can be the big fish.

You know the type. The person in a small office who sets arbitrary rules and systems and insists that everyone else adhere to them on pain of excoriation. They are the big fish in that little pond — and they have convinced themselves that that pond is both important and significant. This gives them comfort.

This frame is a way of understanding the motivations of all of the little tyrants we encounter on a day-to-day basis. It is also understandable as something to which many of us often fall prey, obsessing about the importance of the thing we need to do. That is, after all, an incentive to do it.

This long-lost bit of pseudowisdom came to mind this week as my family and I have been on vacation in western New York. The area is mostly rural and, as is often correlated, frequently impoverished. What also struck me, though, is the extent to which it is an archipelago of small towns and local shops. There is a town of a thousand people separated from a town of 1,500 by five minutes of driving through farmland. Occasionally these stretches are interrupted by hardware stores or mechanics usually named after their owners.

It’s a lot of little ponds. Literally, sure, but also in the figurative sense. A town where you can be an elected official or on the school board. A place where people know your shop and your family. Places where significance and familiarity are accessible.

It strikes me that this is rarer than it used to be.

This is in part because people have moved out of small towns and into larger urban areas. There are still small ponds in big places; institutional D.C. excels at creating groups and systems in which one can be a chairperson or founder for résumé-related reasons. Pond-building. The nature of a big city, though, is that you can’t know everyone or be known by everyone.

The other reason this is rarer is that everything is nationalized, flattened. Anyone can become a national or international celebrity overnight thanks to social media and the internet. The collapse of local-specific information universes (newspapers, etc.) means that national issues and individuals comprise most of what we see. Here, too, there are still little ponds — lots of people have millions of social-media followers by focusing on specific niches — but this is neither a familiar nor particularly accessible means of becoming a big fish. Keeping up with the Kardashians instead of the neighboring Joneses.

This pond metaphor is generally a proxy for status anxiety, I admit. People want recognition that they find elusive.

But I also think this does a better job of capturing the desire for dominance that seems hard to escape in the moment. It’s not just recognition; it’s wanting to be the big man, the boss. There’s an obvious element of subjugation to big-fish syndrome, the ability to devour the lesser creatures that are swimming around you.

Then we extend the idea. If you feel as though you should be dominant but aren’t, if you see others treated as big fish in your stead, you might understandably be drawn to someone who promises to wreak havoc on those standing in your way. If you can’t be the shark, you might as well be the remora.

There are too many tidy solutions offered for the moment, and this one qualifies. It strikes me, though, that retaining more opportunities to be a big fish might have reduced the number of people to see the social order be devoured.

Photo: A house in Johnstown, Pa. in 2023.