Republicans plan to reverse progress made by the 1965 Voting Rights Act with racial based gerrymandering

Mapping Mississippi White published in The New York Review of Books by Jeffrey Toobin

Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.

When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bennie Thompson was just seventeen years old—short of the voting age—so his parents reaped its benefits before he did. The family lived in Bolton, Mississippi, a town of about five hundred people twenty miles west of Jackson. Thompson’s mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, an auto mechanic, had never been able to register and vote.

The VRA essentially put states with histories of racial discrimination into federal receivership to force them to comply with the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. As a first step, the federal government sent workers to the South to register Black citizens like Thompson’s parents. To assure further compliance, Section 5 of the act required those states to get approval from the Justice Department or a court before making any changes to their electoral systems. The federal registrars “created an opportunity to get registered without intimidation,” Thompson told me recently as we wandered through Bolton, where he still lives. “And the result was people like Bennie Thompson.”

Thompson discovered politics in the mid-Sixties as a student at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school and a civil rights hotbed in Jackson. He graduated in 1968 and, thanks to the new voters enfranchised by the VRA, won local office in Bolton the following year. (Prior to 1965, roughly 28,500 Black citizens in Mississippi—6.7 percent of those eligible—were registered to vote; within two years of the act’s passage, that number had soared to 264,000—59.8 percent.) Over the next two decades Thompson won a series of races for county-level positions in Mississippi and then, in 1993, a special election to Congress. He’s been reelected sixteen times. Thompson and Mike Espy, his predecessor in the seat, are the only Black people to be elected to Congress in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Thompson has been the chair and ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, but he came to broad national attention when then speaker Nancy Pelosi named him the chair of the special congressional committee charged with investigating the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In a series of televised hearings in 2022, Thompson’s committee laid out how a violent insurrection nearly upended the transfer of presidential power. “I named a lot of our most intelligent and skilled members to that committee,” Pelosi told me.

And you know how Congress is. They all thought they should be the chairman. But after it was over, they all came to me and said that Bennie was so fair and showed so much integrity and skill that they agreed that he was the right one to be the chair.

Thompson has lived his entire political life in the shadow—and, for a long time, under the protection—of the VRA. Throughout that period, Congress and the courts have wrestled with a central question about its meaning, one with fundamental implications for Thompson’s political career. Does the VRA protect Black voters and officeholders only from intentional discrimination by government officials, or does it also guarantee Black candidates a fair chance of victory at the polls? To put the question in voting rights shorthand, is it an “intent” law or a “results” law?

Earlier this year the Supreme Court appeared to settle the question. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6–3 majority in effect established that the VRA prohibited only intentional discrimination. Republican-dominated states throughout the country, including Mississippi, took the decision as an invitation to gerrymander the seats of Black officeholders so they would have virtually no chance of winning reelection. Just two weeks after Callais was decided, Tate Reeves, the Republican governor of Mississippi, announced his intention to redraw the lines of Thompson’s district. “Congressman Bennie G. Thompson’s reign of terror on MS-2 is over,” Reeves posted on social media. “It is not a matter of ‘IF…’ Just a matter of ‘WHEN!’” The governor’s inflammatory language is revealing, especially because Thompson has had a scandal-free career; the only “terror” about Thompson, it seems, is that he’s Black and in Congress. While Reeves and his Republican allies in the state legislature ultimately decided against a new round of gerrymandering before the 2026 midterms, they are united in their determination to redraw not only Thompson’s district, but also those of Black officeholders in state and local positions across the state.

If the governor does end Thompson’s congressional career, it will mark more than the conclusion of a single politician’s time in office. It will signal the end of a grand experiment: a joint undertaking of the federal government and the courts to rectify enduring injustices in the American electoral system. More than half a century ago, the nearly absolute power wielded by white politicians in the South created the need for the VRA. Now, as a result of Callais and other Supreme Court decisions, the heirs to those politicians are reclaiming that power.

Just to mention Mississippi, to cross the state line from Alabama and go there, it just created all types of problems in my own mind,” John Lewis once said, recalling his early days as a civil rights leader. “Alabama is bad; Alabama is hell. But to go to Mississippi at the time was worse than hell.”

In Mississippi in the 1960s, racist violence was a horrible constant. In 1963 Medgar Evers, the first field officer of the NAACP in the state, was shot dead in the driveway of his house in Jackson. The following year, when caravans of students and others came to register voters during the Freedom Summer, their buses were torched and the passengers beaten. Three of them—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were abducted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

This was the Mississippi where Bennie Thompson grew up. In the months after the VRA was passed, there were two cross burnings in Bolton. As he took me through its streets, Thompson showed me the United Methodist church he first went to as a child. “I’ve been in one physical church my whole life. Not just one religion, one physical church—which just happened to be right next door to the Head Start center that the Klan burned down,” he told me. “So that was kind of part of my introduction.”

The Supreme Court purported to end segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a decade later, Thompson was taught in what was still called the Bolton Colored School, which it was in fact if not in law. Most of Bolton’s white children eventually went to a private school called Central Hinds Academy just outside town. We took a drive to Central Hinds and happened on a football practice that featured, by my count, about two dozen white kids and one Black player. Thompson smiled and gestured at the lone figure: “He’s an athlete.”

A short distance from Bolton’s main drag, which has just a handful of storefronts, Thompson slowed down in front of a modest swimming pool. When he became mayor of Bolton in 1973, he learned that the town had donated $2,500 to the local nonprofit that had built the pool a few years earlier and then decreed that it was whites only. “My position was, the public money was donated, therefore, it’s a public pool,” he told me. “I closed the pool and said unless you make it a public pool, you can’t open.” In response, the nonprofit simply refunded the town’s $2,500: “They kept it all white.” (The pool is now in private hands.)

Meanwhile, the white politicians in charge of the Mississippi state government fought the VRA in every way they could. The local authorities could no longer stop Black citizens from registering, but the state had many other tools to preserve white rule. In 1966 the state legislature gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts so that Black voters in the Mississippi Delta region were split among three districts and were thus powerless to elect one of their own. (Then as now, Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state: about 40 percent then and about 37 percent now.) The state also rewrote the rules in many white-majority cities and towns so that officials were elected at-large rather than by neighborhood, which might have given Black candidates a chance. 

In eleven communities, Mississippi changed school superintendent positions from elected to appointed to prevent Black candidates from running and winning.

Some of those changes were challenged by the federal government. The early years of the VRA, when Thompson came of age, unfolded in a national political environment very different from today’s. The law enjoyed bipartisan support. Even though Richard Nixon embraced the “Southern Strategy,” playing to white racism in the South to win the presidency in 1968, he signed a reauthorization of the VRA in 1970; Gerald Ford did the same in 1975. During the administrations of these Republican presidents, the Justice Department used its authority under Section 5 of the VRA to veto some of the attempts by Mississippi and other states to thwart the intent of the law.

Still, progress for Black Mississippians often came slowly, including for Thompson. When the VRA was passed, Black residents were in the majority in two of the five supervisors’ districts in Hinds County, which includes Jackson. But county officials changed the election for supervisors to an at-large system. Black voters sued, and eventually, in 1977, the full Fifth Circuit declared that Hinds County violated the VRA. As Frank R. Parker, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, wrote in his book Black Votes Count (1990),

The board of supervisors was forced to adopt a new plan that contained two districts that were over 65 percent black. In the 1979 county elections—after eight years of litigation—two black county supervisors, Bennie G. Thompson and George Smith, were elected as the first black county supervisors in Hinds County since Reconstruction.

The Supreme Court offered an initial answer in City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980). According to the Court, it was not enough if Black voters failed to elect one of their own; they had to prove that the white majority intended to violate their voting rights. Civil rights supporters denounced the Mobile decision, asserting that in the modern era, white legislators knew better than to display racially discriminatory intent. Proving again the bipartisan support for voting rights at the time, Republicans and Democrats joined forces in 1982 to pass a twenty-five-year extension of the VRA that was revised to effectively overturn the Mobile decision. Conservative senators like Orrin Hatch and Robert Dole voted for the extension, and Ronald Reagan signed it into law. It established a “results” test: plaintiffs needed to show only that a state’s action produced discriminatory outcomes in order to win their cases.

Again, Thompson owed the next step in his career to the VRA. After the 1982 changes to the act, Black plaintiffs challenged the 1966 gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. Now they had to prove only that the creation of the districts led to discriminatory results, which they did. The courts compelled the state at last to establish a majority-Black congressional district, and Mike Espy won the seat in 1986. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed him secretary of agriculture. In the special election to fill the vacancy that year, Thompson won.

By this point, even though the makeup of the Supreme Court was almost the same, the justices had changed course on voting rights. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), they ratified—and strengthened—the results test established in the revision of the VRA by holding that states had to acknowledge when they had a history of “racially polarized voting.” In establishing district lines, they had to consider “whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” If white residents did vote that way, the states had to include enough Black voters to give a Black candidate a chance to win election. In other words, the Court recognized what Thompson told me about voters in Mississippi, and it thus ensured that districts like his would remain intact.

It’s now clear that the crucial event in the eventual demise of the VRA was President George W. Bush’s appointment in 2005, of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. In the early 1980s, after Roberts had completed his clerkship with then associate justice William H. Rehnquist, he took a number of junior positions in President Reagan’s White House and Justice Department. There, in a series of memos, Roberts expressed his opposition to what became the 1982, reauthorization of the VRA. In strong language for a young staffer, Roberts endorsed the Court’s decision in the Mobile case and voiced his passionate belief that the law should protect Black voters only from intentional discrimination, not from unfair results. For example, in a January 26, 1982, memo to Attorney General William French Smith, he wrote that adding a results test to the law would lead to a “quota system in electoral politics.”

Roberts lost that battle, but his appointment to the Supreme Court put him in a position to win the war, especially once he was joined by other conservative justices. To Roberts and the other conservatives, the VRA was another way the government sought to privilege Black citizens over others, much like affirmative action, which they also eventually outlawed. Combining a narrow reading of the rights of Black voters under the VRA with an expansive understanding of the rights of whites under the Constitution, the conservatives began chipping away at the act.

The first great blow came in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, in which Roberts’s opinion for the Court effectively overruled Sections 4 and 5. In both the original version of the VRA and in every subsequent reauthorization, Congress held investigatory hearings and, based on the results, established a formula for determining which states and localities had histories of discrimination and thus were subject to the act’s provisions. The theme of Roberts’s opinion, however, was that the nation had changed. He wrote that after the passage of the VRA, “voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.” The statutory formula did not, in his view, take these changes sufficiently into account, even though Congress had looked at the same facts and concluded otherwise. According to Roberts, the law violated “the tradition of equal sovereignty” among the states and was thus unconstitutional. Unless Congress changed the formula (which it was unlikely to do and never has), there would be no more jurisdictions subject to Section 5, which was now a dead letter.

Immediately after the Shelby County decision, several states formerly covered by Section 5, now freed from Justice Department oversight, changed their election laws to make it harder for Black people (and others) to vote. On the very day that the decision was announced, the Texas legislature announced that it would tighten the photo ID requirements for voting, which a court had earlier said burdened minorities. Mississippi and Alabama passed similar laws. North Carolina enacted a series of voter restriction measures, including a requirement of a government-issued ID, and a limitation on early voting. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, none of these changes had to be submitted to the Justice Department for preclearance. The southern states immediately showed that they had changed less than Roberts claimed they had.

In theory, Shelby County left open the kind of VRA lawsuits that made Thompson’s career possible. Under Section 2 of the law, individual plaintiffs, not just the federal government, could sue localities for violating the rights of Black voters. It was private Section 2 lawsuits during the Sixties and Seventies that forced Mississippi to reverse the gerrymandering that had ruled out Black candidates like Thompson for the Hinds County seats and his congressional district. But in the past few years the Supreme Court has shut down Section 2 lawsuits, too. And crucially the Court in 2019 allowed state legislatures to design districts that gave an advantage to a ruling party, holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” beyond the remit of federal courts. The decision gave Republican map drawers in the South the perfect way to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. They could eliminate the seats of Black officeholders on the grounds that they were targeting only Democrats.

The coup de grâce came earlier this year, when the Court decided Callais, which made Roberts’s memos from the early 1980s, the law of the land.

Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court said that its purpose was to “update the Gingles framework and realign it with the text of §2 and constitutional principles,” but the effect of the ruling was to overrule Gingles and invalidate the results test entirely. Citing Rucho, Alito said that henceforth “litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” But the truth was that he was inviting Republican state legislators to dress their racial gerrymandering in political garb, with likely fatal political consequences for Black officeholders like Thompson. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in her dissent, Callais was the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

In taking up the Supreme Court’s invitation in Callais, Governor Reeves and the Republican-dominated state legislature in Mississippi are proceeding in an orderly fashion. State legislative elections take place there in 2027, and the Republicans are moving first to gerrymander those seats to the advantage of Republican, and thus mostly white, candidates. According to an analysis of prospective maps by Fair Fight Action/Black Voters Matter, a liberal advocacy group, an aggressive post-Callais map by Republicans could eliminate twenty-nine—nearly half—of Mississippi’s Black-majority legislative districts. When that task is complete, Reeves and his colleagues will turn to congressional maps and the fate of Thompson’s district in 2028. Other longtime African American members of Congress, including Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri, James Clyburn in South Carolina, and Sanford Bishop in Georgia, are similarly at risk of losing their seats in 2028. In all, in the next two years, the Congressional Black Caucus, which began the current Congress with sixty-two members, could lose as many as nineteen because of the kind of redistricting now permitted by the Supreme Court.

In addition to his security responsibilities in Congress, Thompson also serves as a custodian of institutional memory of the civil rights movement. For the past twenty-seven years, he has hosted an annual Mississippi Policy Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, at which he introduces colleagues of all races and backgrounds to a part of the world they may not know and a history they may not remember. “I take folks and show them what cotton looks like growing in the field,” he told me. “I mean, some folks think cotton comes from Walmart.” The conference takes place in Tunica, which Robert Kennedy toured in 1967, when it was known as perhaps the poorest city in America. (The town’s fortunes have improved since the opening of a nearby casino.)

“I had never been to Mississippi before Bennie invited me to the conference,” Joe Neguse, a four-term congressman from Colorado, told me. Neguse, who is forty-two, belongs to a generation of Black politicians whose experiences differ greatly from Thompson’s. “It was one thing to read about what happened in Mississippi,” he said, “but it was another to go there and learn from Bennie and others who had to grapple with such obstacles.”

For now Thompson will campaign as usual in his so-far-unchanged district. He is cautiously optimistic about the future, too, pointing out to me that breaking up his district, which is roughly 64 percent Black, might involve some peril for the Republicans: “The $64,000 question for the Republican leadership in this state is, what are you going to do with the Black people? You gonna push them in the Mississippi River?”

To change Thompson’s district, the mapmakers would have to move its Black voters into the three other districts, which are all currently represented by white Republicans. That might give Democrats chances to win those seats: “So ultimately, you could create two purple districts and end up with two Democrats rather than one.” Republicans might not want to take that chance and thus might leave Thompson’s district more or less intact. (There’s also a chance that Thompson might not run again in 2028.)

Given the number of Black voters in Mississippi, it will not be easy for Republican state legislators to gerrymander every one of their districts into oblivion, but the party is clearly going to try. The tools to fight back are very different today from what they were in the first decades after the passage of the VRA. Even if the Justice Department were inclined to protect the gains of Black voters and officeholders (which it clearly is not under the Trump administration), the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Section 5 has made such an effort impossible. And the Court itself, which was at least sometimes an ally of the VRA, has turned into an implacable foe. As a result, there will soon be fewer Black elected officials, perhaps a lot fewer, than there have been in the recent past. Representative democracy will look, and be, less representative, which is the problem that gave rise to the VRA.

“The issue is not whether Bennie Thompson represents this district or not,” Thompson said. “It’s whether or not the people who live in this district have a shot at representing and electing the candidates of their choice.”

Whenever the subject of race and voting in Mississippi came up, Thompson always offered the same straightforward explanation: “If you look at the historical voting patterns, especially in the South, Black people vote for white and Black candidates, but for the most part, white voters still vote for white candidates.” To Thompson, enforcement of the VRA must take those facts into consideration or the law would have no meaning at all. If states are allowed to gerrymander legislative districts so that Black candidates have no chance of winning—regardless of what could be proved about the legislators’ racial intentions—then white domination of the political process would continue as before 1965. Still, in the early versions of the VRA, the text was ambiguous about whether it was an “intent” or a “results” law.

Republican super PAC negative ads throw money into elections without regard for truth. Too much campaign money saturates TV with this junk.

Unlawful, dangerous decisions. Stop listening to lies 🤥 in Republican AI generated ugly and expensive negative political ads❗

As a longtime conservative, I am terribly concerned over the direction many Republicans are willing to go to turn a blind eye to the unlawful and dangerous 💢 ⚠️decisions being made by the Donald Trump administration on a daily basis.

On a local level, I implore you, before you vote, to disregard the less than factual political attacks on David Jolly, which run constantly due to the super PAC GOP 💲money which* has poured into Byron Donalds’ campaign fund.

Billionaires pour money into this fund to guarantee tax breaks and favors presently handed to them. Notice, how Bryon Donalds has erased Donald Trump from his campaign. There is no mention of Donald Trump from his website.

Do not trust this distancing from Trump. Rest assured, Donalds will be back in lockstep with Trump’s evil policies if he is elected as governor of Florida.

From: Gwen Baker, in Marco Island, Florida

*Read this essay published in the free "The Conversation", about AI generated negative political ads.  "We've tracked 💲80 million of spending on almost 170 AI-generated ads this year- it's weird❗"

Republicans must reckon with how they abandoned the Constitutional responsibility to remove Donald Trump because he is a criminal

John M. Crisp: A third impeachment❓ What if there’s no choice❓
Holding the commander in chief accountable for constitutional violations isn’t optional for lawmakers. Echo opinion published in Mercury News, a California newspaper.

Nothing in this column is meant to suggest that if Democrats achieve a majority in the House in next week’s midterms, they should immediately impeach Donald Trump for a third time.

Republicans are already rejecting hasty calls for impeachment by some impulsive Democrats as unalloyed political payback, and in some cases, they’d be right. And an ugly third impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate might do more harm than good. In fact, America needs the spectacle and drama of another impeachment like it needs another forever war.

But here’s the problem: The Constitution provides not only the possibility of impeachment, it seems to impose an obligation, as well: It doesn’t say that a president “may be removed,” it says that a president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

In other words, the House and Senate have not only a right, but also a responsibility, to remove a president or other officers who have arguably committed “Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Here’s what the House could face in January: Trump has called our current involvement with Iran a “military operation,” a “mini-war,” a “little excursion” and a “little trip,” but, let’s face it: It’s a war. Only Congress has the power to declare war. The president is empowered to use military force in limited ways by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, but Trump has blown past those limitations with little more than a peep out of Congress. The war is in a precarious pause, but it’s likely that Trump, in a stunningly cynical calculation, will resume bombing after the midterms.

So how should a Democratic House majority deal with a president who is in violation of both the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution? Is there any higher crime than taking our nation to war in violation of the Constitution and the law❓ The House would have not only a right to act, but also an obligation.

Why does this matter❓ To prevent future presidents from committing the same offense, of course.

This principle is especially relevant in the case of Trump. In 2019, as the Trump administration held on to nearly 💲400 million in security aid for Ukraine that had already been approved by Congress, Trump conditioned its release on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s willingness to investigate one of Trump’s political opponents, Joe Biden. You remember: “I would like you to do us a favor, though…”

The House duly impeached Trump. The Republican Senate let him off the hook. And now Trump’s relationship with Ukraine is thoroughly transactional. He has no qualms about threatening Ukraine by withholding military support unless he gets what he wants, which is essentially a Ukrainian surrender.

It’s the same with Trump’s second impeachment: On January 13, 2021, the House impeached Trump for “incitement of insurrection” after the January 6 attack on the capitol. Again, the Senate gave Trump a pass, even though seven Senate Republicans voted to convict him.

Six years later Trump is showing signs of his willingness to use federal power to interfere with next week’s midterms. Last week he directed his Department of Justice (and it is “his”) to file a lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if his preferred Republican candidate doesn’t win.

Further, Trump loyalists and election deniers have been installed in positions that situate them to challenge and obstruct the results of the midterms. When asked about implementing the Insurrection Act in connection with the midterms, Trump said, “I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.”

It’s impossible to imagine that Trump will gracefully accept a midterm election that establishes a Democratic majority in the House and/or Senate. He’s already made one attempt to overturn a legitimate election without suffering consequences. If he tries to do it again, how can the Democrats avoid the responsibility — the obligation — of holding him to account with a third impeachment❓

Trump’s escape from his two impeachments have only emboldened him. He learned nothing from them. Have we❓

John M. Crisp is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. ©2026 Tribune Content Agency.

How did the Cheesecake Factory become a memorable metaphor about Donald Trump's gaudy White House?

 Obama’s Great Skewering of Trump published in The New Yorker by Susan Glasser.

Former President Barack Obama's clever riff on Saddam Hussein, the Cheesecake Factory, and our gold-besotted leader was not only funny but also politically brilliant.

Leave it to President Barack Obama to deliver the Democratic line of the midterms, a brilliant if slightly obscure riff on Donald Trump’s home-renovation obsession at a time when Americans wish he would spend more time on the price of groceries than on the amount of gold in the Oval Office. 

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former President joked during a rally over the weekend in newly competitive Ohio, where his party is hoping, five days from now, to win both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after losing the state to Trump by more than eleven points. After Trump and his allies spent days complaining about this supposedly élitist slur against one of Middle America’s favorite restaurant chains, Obama came back with what was arguably an even sharper disquisition on his successor’s misplaced priorities.

“I’m not making this up. He, the President of the United States, is spending time supergluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office,” Obama said at another rally on Wednesday, this time in suburban Atlanta, making an allusion to one of the more telling revelations in “Regime Change,” a recent best-selling book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. “He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices.”

As for the matter of Trump, Saddam, and the Cheesecake Factory, Obama replied with a nearly five-hundred-word skewering of the “whole-of-government response” to his joke. Rather than try to paraphrase its genius, I will merely quote it at length:

"That was the interesting thing about how the Administration responded to the speech I gave the other day. They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. Did not argue with that! They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families. They didn’t say anything about that! I accused this Administration based on the facts that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that! The President wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him! But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House."

"And they mobilized. I mean, it’s all crazy, but this was the really crazy part. They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke—not to inflation but to that joke! The White House even called the Secretary of the Treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy, the person who’s supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable, the guy who’s supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory. . . . And the Treasury Secretary, he happens to be a former hedge-fund manager worth half a billion dollars. And he was out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory, explaining how he ordered the delicious French-dip cheeseburger instead of the egg rolls. Now, look, this is not something I ever thought of. I inherited this major financial crisis. I never called my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and said, ‘Man, you’ve got to go to Arby’s, order roast beef. No cheese, though. That may look élitist.’"

"To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory."

"More than ten billion 💲dollars has already been spent on campaign advertising in this election cycle, which is projected to be the most expensive in American history. But, among the multitudes, it’s hard to imagine a single TV spot as simultaneously incisive, cutting, and funny as Obama managed to be the other night with this epic retort. Obama himself stopped at least a half dozen times to laugh at his own material. And yet it was also one of the most on-message speeches I’ve heard this fall, pulling together Trump’s unpopular war in the Middle East, rising prices at home, and the entitled indifference of our callous and corrupt rulers into one long, strange story about the Cheesecake Factory. Props to a professional. That is not easy to do."

As Obama was bringing down the house in Clayton County, Georgia, it happened that Trump was taking the stage in Chillicothe, Ohio, for a rally of his own. As if to underscore the split-screen reality of these midterm elections, one of the big questions going into Trump’s appearance was whether he would, as he has done repeatedly in recent days, talk about the impressive backside of Ohio’s Republican Senate candidate, the incumbent Jon Husted. (Trump did, first admitting to “looking at his ass, and it was strong as hell,” then blaming the “fake news” for making fun of him about it.) 

Another unknown was whether Donald Trump would take Obama’s bait, and spend yet more time reinforcing how out of touch with the American public he is by going on and on about his White House renovations. (He did this, too, explaining for a full five minutes why he had to fix the “half-broken” and “terrible”-looking executive mansion and how Obama “doesn’t understand cleanliness, doesn’t understand broken, cracked stone and sidewalk.”)

Perhaps Trump’s signature moment came twenty minutes later, after detours to discuss those (sad 😢) dastardly Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, why Vivek Ramaswamy was right to run what is now an infamous🤢 ad quoting his opponent’s estranged mother, and how he made the Venezuelans give him a million barrels of oil a day, “free of charge.” The subject❓His own cognitive abilities. Like Obama’s riff, it defies easy paraphrase. To wit:

"I’m a very high-I.Q. person. 🤥Don’t forget I’m the only President to pass without exception—I passed three cognitive tests. (💩💩💩- in fact it was a picture screening exam, given to him three times.) I’m the only President that agreed to take them. And they’re hard, you know❓Obama—Obama couldn’t have passed it. Biden we don’t even talk about. Republicans wouldn’t have passed them. I won’t mention names because I’m supposed to be a nice Republican. But I passed them. I got three of them all—and, by the way, you know what they do with the cognitive tests❓ The first one is easy. They have a lion, a bear, a snake, and a camel. They say, which one is the snake, O.K.? That’s question one.

Question two is a little bit—by the time you get up to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you gotta be freaking smart to answer. . . . But I passed them. So, no other Presidents agreed to take them. It’s a very powerful test, very highly respected test, very well-known test. Thirty questions, very hard, some of them. After you get to fifteen—oh, after you get to twenty, twenty-five, very few people. I’m one of the only persons. I passed it all three times. I aced it, zero mistakes, all three times. But, no, that’s—that’s the good news. So, I said to the doctor—I think one of the doctors is here tonight. They have a whole team of doctors standing there watching you. ‘Mr. President, take the number sixty-four, multiply it times seven, divide by three, add 1,019, subtract seventy-four, multiply by nine. Sir, what do you have❓’ Now, I know the number to that. Does anybody else know the number to that—it is❓ That was as you got to the end. And that wasn’t as hard as some of them. So—anyway, so I aced it all three times. . . ."

This, to be clear, is a shortened version of Donald Trump's lecture, which omits both a long explanation about how he came to decide to take the cognitive test in the first place and a discussion about his late uncle, the physicist John Trump, who was blessed with “athletic genetics” as well as “smart genetics” and “just got named the No. 1 professor in the history of M.I.T.”

By this point in the rally, Trump had been speaking for nearly an hour, without making any effort to address the issue that is driving this election—voter discontent across the political spectrum with the high prices that he promised to bring down on Day One of his Presidency but which continue to rise owing to the war that he promised not to start. When he did mention the economy, it was all golden-age-this and I’m-so-great-that. “We are making a fortune in this country,” Trump insisted, saying it with such conviction it sounded as though he was thinking of his own ballooning bank account. On a less upbeat note, he warned that if Democrats come back to power, America will be looking at a dim future of “open borders,” “transgender for everybody,” and a “1929-style economic depression.”

Obama, as a campaigner and as a President, always excelled as a teller of hard truths. Trump, in this as in so much else, remains his inverse. If reality is a problem, he’ll just create an alternative. “Now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” he told the cheering crowd in Ohio. The pitchman will never stop pitching.

Two Presidents, two Americas. For ten endless years, our politics has been all about the vast gap that separates these two men, and the near-impossible task of trying to understand how a country that elected Obama twice could, so soon after, do the same for Trump. Watching them both on Wednesday night, toggling between screens and alternate universes as they shot barbs at each other, was a reminder of how very long we’ve been stuck in this loop.

What’s different this time is a sense—and, until there are votes counted and races called, it’s just a sense—that real-world events have intervened to make this less of an intractably divided country and more of a place where at least some shared truths are still possible. Perhaps the biggest and most motivating truth is that prices are too damn high, which comes with the corollary that

Trump has no one to blame for this but himself. Headed into the midterms, America is not a fifty-fifty nation on these questions; it is a country where sixty per cent or more of the people disapprove of the President and do not support his policies.David Plouffe, the strategist who helped Obama win election to the White House in 2008, observed the other day that, when a big wave is building in American politics, it’s almost impossible for individual politicians to swim against it. “Voters just shut you out, and that’s what’s happening right now,” he said during an interview at The New Yorker Festival. “When you’re in a landslide scenario against you, your political money and political ads have no capability to compete with reality.”

He and other political handicappers believe that is what is happening to Trump and his Republicans right now. The idea has taken hold so firmly in Washington that much of the talk here is about the Democratic infighting that’s already broken out about how to run the Congress that everyone now assumes the Party will soon win. 

In the prediction markets, there’s currently a sixty-eight-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the Senate and a ninety-two-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the House.

We’ll know if the wave has in fact materialized, if voters in places such as Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio, which went for Obama before they went for Trump, have decided that enough is enough. 

But on Election Night and beyond, I’ll also be thinking about what then happens to Trump and those who’ve stayed with him in his reality-defying bubble, the folks who were cheering him in Chillicothe, and who’ve been with him the whole long, strange way. Just what is it we think will happen if and when the bubble bursts? ♦

Donald Trump is a cruel creature creating a culture of cruelty fueled by lies backed up my compliance from the MAGA cult

I’ve never seen a more vile and disgusting to watch ad.

Echo opinion by David French published in The New York Times.

By now, you almost certainly know the story. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, posted an ad featuring a malicious attack on Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. The ad starred Acton’s own mother, a woman named Donna Arthur.

The family story here is evil. Arthur married a man named Cledith Arthur, who became Acton’s stepfather. 

Cledith Arthur was indicted when Acton was 12 for raping her. He fled the jurisdiction rather than face charges.

Donna lost custody of her children, and — as Charles Hilu at National Review reported — she has her own criminal history. She was convicted of theft by deception in the 1990s, and accused of animal neglect in 2021.

It’s hard to imagine a more cruel and evil act than raping a child. There is no betrayal greater than the betrayal of a child by a parent. And then Ramaswamy compounded that betrayal by wielding that evil mother as a weapon against her own daughter.

I’m reminded of Sir Thomas More’s famous line in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales!”

But for Ohio, Vivek❓

Long ago we learned that there is no bottom for MAGA, and there is still no bottom to this scandal. If Ramaswamy had a molecule of decency, he would take the ad down and apologize. Instead, he attacked Acton. “It is an ad from our campaign,” he said. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me. She doesn’t allow cameras at her events.”

At a rally in Ohio, JD Vance, the former junior senator from Ohio and a former Marine Corps corporal (same rank as Adolf Hitler held during World War One) and the president of vice in the United States, weighed in, praising Ramaswamy. “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” he said. (JD Vance is a Roman Catholic convert❗ By the way, Adolf Hitler was also a Roman Catholic.))

Vance, of course, is no stranger to malicious lies. He trafficked in the slanderous “Haitians eating pets” stories during the 2024, presidential campaign. There was never any credible evidence supporting those claims, yet he spread them anyway — even as Haitians faced death threats as the rumors metastasized across the body politic.

At the time, Vance told CNN, “If I have to create stories, aka "lies" 🤥 so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” (By the way, to lie deliberately and to admit you are telling lies is a serious sin.)

After Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, denounced the Ramaswamy ad (though he did not withdraw his support for Ramaswamy), President Trump took to Truth Social, condemned DeWine as a “RINO,” and said: “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad❓ I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’ ”

At a rally, Trump said that he told Ramaswamy to “leave it up and look upstairs and say, ‘Thank you God very much, I appreciate it.’ ”

“I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody,” he said.

If there were a column hall of fame, Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic called “The Cruelty Is the Point” should hold a place of honor. Rarely has a single piece so completely captured the zeitgeist of a movement.

Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer wrote. “It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.”

Serwer wrote those words eight years ago, when cruelty was already central to the entire MAGA enterprise. Trump supporters delight in Trump’s cruelty, of course, but they also engage in their own vile speech and actions as a virtual initiation rite into the MAGA movement — it’s the way that they demonstrate that they have the courage necessary to take on the left.

Indeed, in a Truth Social post, Trump applauded the “courage” of Acton’s mother. Vance, as I said, praised the ad’s “audacity.” (In other word, the audacious lies🤥)

This perversion of the concept of courage is central to the MAGA ethos. In MAGA’s account of history, the Republican Party before Trump was a collection of cowards and quislings — people who knew the right thing to do but refused to do it because they were desperate for the approval of progressives.

That’s the origin of the famous (in conservative circles) “D.C. cocktail party” smear — the idea that conservative convictions crumble the instant that conservatives get access to elite institutions or the moment that they get the first taste of elite approval. I’ve faced this accusation for more than a decade, ever since I said I could never support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.

In other words, there are no genuine arguments about policy or morality; there are only two kinds of people: the strong and the weak. (Vance accused Republicans who condemned the ad as “whining.”) Or as Shane Vaughn, a Trump-supporting pastor, said in an online rant defending Ramaswamy: “Quit being soft. Quit being gay. Quit being spineless. Quit falling. We are in a war!” And one way to tell that you’re strong is if the left loathes you. The more the left hates you, the more righteous you are.

In fact, this is a less obvious reason for evangelicals’ continued support for Trump. From a young age, evangelicals are taught that they’ll be hated by the world. They’re taught to prepare for persecution, and when the secular left is angry at them, that’s treated as proof that they’re on the righteous path. It’s a message I heard for much of my life.



In the words of a common saying I’ve heard on the right, “If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.”

As a result, there is a powerful incentive to intentionally trigger outrage. That’s how you establish your credibility. There’s nothing new about this — The Daily Wire, a right-wing media company, has long sold a tumbler that says “LEFTIST TEARS” for example — but with every passing year it gets worse.

A cohort of far-right supporters of Vance, for example, are fond of using the acronym WAGTFKY, which stands for a cruder version of “we are going to kill you,” as a kind of in-group signaling of their own hatred and aggression. They’re living examples of Vance’s own morality. During his campaign for Senate, he made his values clear — “I think our people hate the right people,” he said. 💢😱🤢

And then he put his hatred into practice, in one of the most powerful offices in the land.

That behavior should be self-defeating, and as a potential blue wave looms in November, it might be. Many Republicans are growing very weary of Trump and — crucially — of Trump’s most aggressive supporters. 

One thing that was very clear when I traveled to Texas to report on the U.S. Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is that a meaningful number of Republicans were seething with anger and resentment toward MAGA. They were tired of being bullied. They were tired of MAGA’s corruption. Some were even open to voting for Democrats.

But they were also extremely reluctant to go on the record.

And that shows exactly how MAGA survives. Every act of resistance to MAGA carries a profound cost. The bullies are loud, the good people are often quiet, and when the good people do summon up the courage and decency to decry hatred on the right — as DeWine and many of my friends at National Review have done — they often face the wrath of the president of the United States. They will be the “RINO” in one of Trump’s vicious rants.

Given enough time, every institution takes on the character of its leader. Trump is a cruel creature, he leads a cruel movement, and only the total defeat of both can free the nation from their malign control.