“For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I want to just thank my people; I took a lot of my me(n) — I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were — they had no hesitation — everybody went down with me. We went down, it was a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest — it was, you know, it was raw, and nobody’s seen anything like it, ever.

We had other buildings; the United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down; the truth is it creaked a lot, it creaked. It still creaks. But it never came down, and I re(member) — I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen — big, strong guys — and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arms, said, ‘Gotta get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down; it didn’t come down. US Steel.”

One Liberty Plaza — formerly known as the U.S. Steel Building — is located at 165 Broadway, across from the site of where the Twin Towers once stood. It reopened about a month and a half after the attack, after its owner Brookfield Properties announced that a preliminary review by independent structural engineers had found no damage to the building’s structure. Aside from some damage to the building’s facade (they replaced hundreds of windows on the west side of the building), it was completely fine. Trump’s claim that “it still creaks” is odd, as people have been going to work in the building every weekday for the past 25 years without incident.

CNN’s Daniel Dale fact checked Trump’s claim, finding there to be “no basis“ for it. No, Trump wasn’t close to the World Trade Center on the day of the attack. No, there’s no evidence that Trump was in the U.S. Steel Building in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, either. While there was some initial worry that the U.S. Steel Building might have structural damage in the days after the attacks, there’s no evidence that Trump was there.

He’s been building on this story for a quarter century

On September 13, 2001, in an interview with NBC, Trump shared the first iteration of the tale:

“Well, not only is it devastation, but it’s very dangerous. Because every few minutes, a whistle will go off and everybody would just run, because you have all the buildings around it, which are in such a weakened state, that people just don’t know.

And so, they just have to take off, and then they come back, and they’re working under 50-story buildings that you don’t know if... if they’re going to fall down. So, it’s a terrible thing for the workers and it’s a terrible thing for the world, really.”

In the interview, Trump says that he has “hundreds of men inside working right now, and we’re bringing down another 125 in a little while.” Asked how his men were holding up, he talked about the rescue effort finding survivors — “like the five firemen that they just found a little while ago” — without ever saying his own crew was the one doing the finding. While Trump has bragged about having men at the scene, there is no evidence that this actually happened.

But what’s interesting about this quote isn’t the lie about him having a crew down there, but the fact that he described the chaos in buildings near ground zero as happening to other people, not him. “Everybody would just run, because you have all the buildings around it, which are in such a weakened state that people just don’t know.” Everybody runs, but he’s not one of them. Later in the same interview, describing the men digging through the rubble: “And above them you have 55-story buildings that are very possibly going to be pouring down on them any minute.” On them.

Then, fourteen years later during a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Trump shared a slightly different version of the story. Now he was a part of it.

“And I was there when we actually thought the U.S. Steel Building was coming down and I’ll never forget that I was standing next to these two massive wonderful firemen and we heard a screech, like a screech, steel on steel and it was a couple of days after the buildings and I was down there with the — we had a crew of people that, you know, to help.

I mean it’s — they needed a lot of help. I’ve never seen anything like I saw, and they heard a screech, and everybody thought that the U.S. Steel Building was coming down and it was not so far from us. And these two guys there were massive guys, two really big — because I’m a big guy and they grabbed me. I must tell you honestly, I never knew I could run that fast. I — but they were running just as fast and they had my arms and they were and we were just running.”

It’s evolved. He’s now at the scene with his crew, and here’s the first appearance of the two firemen. But look at what he says they actually did. They grabbed his arms, and he ran — so fast that he surprised himself. He also gives you a date, “a couple of days after the buildings,” and a location: “not so far from us.” He’s outside the building.

Five years after that, on Newsmax, the story changes again.

“I was down there right after the event, and I brought a big crew of people down. And I helped. A lot of other people helped. Those first responders are very brave. And I’m telling you, we were hearing creaks — I’ve never forgotten it. There was, I think, the United States Steel Building, it was called at the time, and it’s 50 stories tall. And we heard creaks. I said, ‘that building is going to come down,’ and two big firemen grabbed me, grabbed other people. It never came down, but I never heard a noise like that. It was a scary situation.”

Okay. Sure. But then, by Tuesday, the qualifiers were gone. No date. No “not so far from us.” Nobody else getting grabbed. And Trump wasn’t running anymore — he was being carried.

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He can’t stop lying about 9/11

Hours after the towers fell on 9/11, Trump called in to WWOR-TV. Someone asked him about the condition of one of his buildings, 40 Wall Street. He said this:

“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest — and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

Now, this might seem like a really callous thing to brag about on 9/11, but what makes it even more bizarre is the fact that 40 Wall Street was not actually the tallest building in lower Manhattan. 70 Pine was still 25 feet taller than 40 Wall Street. And while that seems like a trivial thing to take issue with, I think it’s indicative of Trump’s tendency to make things up.

In November 2015, Trump said during a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, that he personally witnessed people jump out of the towers on 9/11, watching from his apartment:

“Many people jumped and I witnessed it, I watched that. I have a view — a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center. And I watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit ... I saw the second plane hit the building and I said, ‘Wow that’s unbelievable.’”

Two days earlier, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump told the audience that he “watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” He doubled down on the line during an interview with ABC News’ This Week. There is no evidence that there were “thousands and thousands of people” cheering the 9/11 attacks.

In Buffalo in April 2016, Trump publicly claimed that he was personally at ground zero clearing rubble (this is the same speech where he accidentally referred to it as 7-Eleven instead of 9/11):

“These people were going through terror and you know what happened. Everyone who helped clear the rubble. And I was there and I watched and I helped a little bit. But I want to tell you, those people were amazing. Clearing the rubble, trying to find additional lives. You didn’t know what was gonna come down on all of us and they handled it. Every small act of kindness, every great act of courage, those are New York values, OK? So when a guy like lying Ted Cruz talks about, talks about New York values folks, those are the values that we want to talk about.”

On July 29, 2019, during an event permanently authorizing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, speaking to a crowd of first responders, Trump made sure to say that while he doesn’t consider himself a first responder, he was totally there.

“In a few moments, I will sign the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. This law makes permanent the financial support for families who lost precious loved ones as a result of September 11th attacks. It also provides pensions for those who are suffering from cancer and other illnesses stemming from the toxic debris they were exposed to in the aftermath of the attacks. Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. And I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

The next day, Richard Alles, who was an FDNY battalion chief on September 11 and spent months on the site in its aftermath, spoke with PolitiFact, telling them, “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there.” And if Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers, “there would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services. Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.” Alles, who is now director of 9/11 community affairs at the law firm Barasch and McGarry, which represents people filing Victim Compensation Fund claims, also told PolitiFact that Trump’s line about being at ground zero was not on the Teleprompter.

While speaking at the Pentagon on the 18th anniversary of 9/11, Trump said:

“I was sitting at home watching a major business television show early that morning. Jack Welch, the legendary head of General Electric, was about to be interviewed when all of the sudden they cut away. At first there were different reports. ‘It was a boiler fire.’ But I knew that boilers aren’t at the top of a building. ‘It was a kitchen explosion in Windows of the World.’ Nobody really knew what happened. There was great confusion.

I was looking out from a building in midtown Manhattan directly at the World Trade Center when I saw a second plane, at a tremendous speed, go into the second tower.

Soon after, I went down to ground zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could. We were not alone. So many others were scattered around trying to do the same, they were all trying to help.”

Trump Tower is more than 4 miles away from ground zero. He almost certainly could not see people jumping from the towers with the naked eye. It’s possible he’s confusing this with TV coverage he watched.

And then just this past Sunday, Trump appeared on Fox News:

“I had an apartment where I’m viewing the World Trade Center from midtown. I was downtown, but it’s not very far when the building is 115 stories tall. And I’m viewing this thing happen, and I’m saying, ‘That’s crazy. Couldn’t be a plane. Maybe it was a missile.’

And then I saw the second plane hit, and you saw that coming, and you’re watching it and it’s — because I watched the air patterns for years, and you know where the planes are, they go right up the Hudson River. This thing was coming right into the second building. And I said, ‘Wow!’ So I watched that happen, and I said ‘Wow, we are now in a different time.’ So I saw it and I said ‘The world has just changed.’ And I went down. I was building a building in New York and I had a lot of construction workers, and I went shortly after, the following day. You couldn’t go down the same day. But, like the following day. Very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard.”

That’s a lot of bullshit from just one guy.

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Now, you may be asking what El-Sayed, who was a high schooler at the time, has to do with 9/11. Here’s what the article gives us:

1. In an April 2020 tweet, El-Sayed “compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation’s post-9/11 mobilization.”

2. Another COVID-related tweet: “El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped ‘that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty … like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.’”

3. In a tweet posted on September 11, 2021, marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, El-Sayed wrote, “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, and…?” Those are all perfectly reasonable statements. Yes, the fact that the U.S. was experiencing the equivalent of multiple 9/11s per week at certain points in the pandemic was pretty widely acknowledged. And hey, maybe it would have been nice if we’d have responded to pandemic deaths with the same urgency as we did the 9/11 attacks (but by addressing global health vs. starting what became not-so-lovingly referred to as “forever wars”). And the other comment there acknowledged the devastation of both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the decades of destruction the U.S. waged on the Middle East in response. There’s absolutely nothing offensive or dismissive about acknowledging that, and the fact that this is at all controversial goes to show just how we’ve really failed as a country to learn any lessons from our disastrous start to the century.

The article was tagged “First on CBS,” but the piece pulls pretty heavily from a December 2025 article from the right-wing Washington Free Beacon, which tried (and failed) to whip up a scandal over the “Today, I mourn…” tweet.

Naturally, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a press release with the CBS News story, celebrating it.

By early afternoon, CBS had tweaked the headline to focus specifically on the tweets (”Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks”), but the story had already served its purpose of trying to make it sound as though El-Sayed, who is Muslim, was at best ambivalent about the 9/11 attacks.

Everyone made the same comparison in 2020, including CBS News

On April 1, 2020, three weeks before El-Sayed’s tweet that “argued for a response commensurate with the nation’s post-9/11 mobilization,” CBS News political reporter Grace Segers published a story about Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS)’s call to create a bipartisan commission to look into the government response, modeled after the 9/11 commission.

“More Americans have now died from COVID-19 than were killed in the 9/11 attacks,” reads the second sentence of the story. Oh wow! How offensive to note this reality, I guess?

And it’s an obvious comparison to make. On Fox News, Neil Cavuto made it, saying “Yesterday, we had a record number of deaths in this country, more than died on 9/11.” Trump’s hand-picked Surgeon General Jerome Adams said that the COVID pandemic “is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment,” adding, “Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.” In May 2020, Donald Trump himself said that the virus was “worse than Pearl Harbor. This is worse than the World Trade Center.”

I don’t think there were many people who looked at those statements and went after Cavuto, Adams, or Trump for supposedly not showing enough respect for the lives lost on 9/11 or anything like that. Why? Well, for one, because these aren’t disrespectful things to say! Just as there was nothing disrespectful in El-Sayed’s tweets.

The truth is that COVID was a big deal. I get that it’s currently in fashion to pretend that, if anything, we took it too seriously, but it’s just not true. Nearly a million Americans died from COVID in the first two years of the pandemic; the total is now more than 1.2 million. It was the deadliest pandemic in American history. At the very worst of it, more than 4,000 Americans died from COVID in a single day, surpassing the 9/11 death toll of 2,977 victims. We did not mobilize. We did not rebuild. We did not do the work to make sure the next pandemic would hurt us less. Yes, Operation Warp Speed helped get us a vaccine, but it was then undermined by Trump and Fox News once Biden won the 2020 election. We argued about masks. We complained about “lockdowns.” And then we mostly stopped talking about COVID at all. Now, if it comes up, it’s usually in the context of someone arguing we did too much during the pandemic, or rehashing the virus’ origins.

COVID was a global tragedy, yes; it was also a national tragedy. And if it was a national tragedy when three thousand Americans died on 9/11 — and it was — you really don’t get to shrug at the fact that 1.2 million people died from a pandemic that could have been much better handled.

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“Tomorrow, I’ll mourn”

The other deleted post, the one the Free Beacon dug up in December, was posted by El-Sayed on September 11, 2021:

Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith.

Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.

Again, I do not understand the objection here. Here he was, lamenting actions that were taken in his faith (Islam) and his country (the U.S.). The objection people seemed to have is basically that whatever you make of the sentiment, you don’t say it on 9/11. But 1.) that’s a pretty arbitrary rule that doesn’t actually make a ton of sense, and 2.) he specifically said that “today” was for mourning the victims of the terrorist attacks and “tomorrow” was for mourning everyone else.

It’s not in any way disrespectful to reflect on the serious mistakes the U.S. made after 9/11. The government used the attacks to justify attacking our civil liberties. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq (a country that truly had nothing to do with 9/11). Our actions in the Middle East contributed in a huge way to the rise of ISIS. It’s not offensive to care about what was lost in the wake of that awful day.

And it’s not like El-Sayed made up that “million” number, either. Ten days before El-Sayed’s tweet, Brown University’s Costs of War project published an updated breakdown of the financial and human costs of the post-9/11 wars. Their estimates: more than 900,000 deaths and $8 trillion.

This is such a normal thing to note that the day before El-Sayed’s post, Audie Cornish on an episode of NPR’s All Things Considered referenced the Brown numbers:

Seven thousand U.S. service members is just a fraction of the human cost of America’s post-9/11 wars. There are also national and military police in other countries, opposition fighters, allied troops, civilians, contractors, humanitarian workers, journalists. Altogether, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates around 900,000 people have died in major war zones since 9/11. Now, one figure not included in that count - suicides among American active duty personnel and veterans of those conflicts. By one estimate, since 9/11, more than 30,000 have died by suicide. And that’s more than four times as many than have died in military operations.

Similarly, a couple of years later, 11 days after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, then-President Joe Biden traveled to Tel Aviv. There, he offered condolences, promises of U.S. support, but also a word of caution:

But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.

After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.

I’m the first U.S. president to visit Israel in time of war.

I’ve made wartime decisions. I know the choices are never clear or easy for the leadership. There’s always costs.

But it requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.

The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.

Worth noting what Biden said a few lines earlier in that same speech: “we have seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s.”

That same day, Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an article in the New York Review of Books urging Israel to avoid making the same “fearful and vengeful” mistakes the U.S. did after 9/11.

The immediate comparisons to the September 11 attacks felt apt to me not only because of the shock of violence on such a scale but also because of the emotional response that followed. I remember standing on the Brooklyn waterfront that day and watching as the first tower crumbled to the ground. As a twenty-three-year-old American who had to that point been insulated from the wider world, I found myself longing for vengeance as a path to security. I felt a sense of clarity about good and evil that made it difficult to scrutinize the actions that my own government soon began to take. I felt anger toward people who even flirted with discussing the political context of the attacks, whether it was American support in the 1980s for the mujahideen who evolved into the Taliban or our partnership with an oil-rich and autocratic Saudi Arabia—the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and most of the hijackers, and an incubator of the extremist ideologies they embraced.

Human beings react unconsciously in the face of threats, rarely stopping to consider the potential consequences before we respond to violence with greater violence. This is particularly true when you are the stronger party—as the US was relative to al-Qaeda and the Taliban after September 11, and as Israelis are now relative to Hamas. What was the result of America’s response to a traumatizing terrorist attack? Yes, the “Global War on Terrorism” launched under President George W. Bush and refined under President Obama disrupted terrorist networks and destroyed the version of al-Qaeda that attacked us; in the past two decades, the US has not faced an attack at home anywhere near the scale of September 11.

But imagine if you were told on September 12, 2001, about the unintended consequences of our fearful and vengeful reaction. That we would launch an illogical war in Iraq that would kill hundreds of thousands of people, fuel sectarian hatred in the Middle East, empower Iran, and discredit American leadership and democracy itself. That we would find ourselves facing an ever-shifting threat from new iterations of al-Qaeda and from groups, like ISIS, that on September 11 did not yet exist. That we would squander our moment of global predominance fighting a war on terror rather than focusing on the climate’s tipping point, a revanchist Russia under Vladimir Putin, or the destabilizing effects of rampant inequality and unregulated technologies. That our commitment to global norms and international law would be cast aside in ways that would be expropriated by all manner of autocrats who claimed that they, too, were fighting terror. That a war in Afghanistan, which seemed so justified at the outset, would end in the chaotic evacuation of desperate Afghans, including women and girls who believed the story we told them about securing their future.

This accounting does not begin to encompass the effects of America’s renewed militarized nationalism, jingoism, and xenophobia on our own society after September 11, which ultimately turned inward. While it is far from the only factor, the US response to September 11 bears a large share of the blame for the dismal and divisive state of our politics, and the collapse of Americans’ confidence in our own institutions and one another. If someone painted that picture for you on September 12, wouldn’t you have thought twice about what we were about to do?

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You know, normal president stuff.

Minutes earlier, Trump had posted an all-caps screed claiming that the FCC was going to do something about “the fake polls used by our crooked media.”

I’m already exhausted. And not that it really matters, but let’s look at what Welker actually said. It wasn’t actually part of the Meet the Press broadcast on Sunday, but during a promo for the show on WRC-TV, the NBC-owned station in DC. Welker said this:

He’s going to loom large over these midterms. There’s no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results, but most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle, so now she takes on Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina.

Three words set him off: “Some mixed results.” Okay, then. And while I’m wary of even dignifying Trump’s nonsense complaint as worth engaging with, I’d like to note that it’s probably fair to say that there have been “mixed results” when it comes to Trump’s primary endorsements. Like… yes, he has successfully endorsed the winning candidate 96% of the time during the 2026 primaries because he made 313 primary picks, which included a bunch of incumbents who didn’t have a serious primary challenger.

His misses have been pretty rough. Trump’s fourteen misses include the endorsement of Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) after serious allegations of sexual misconduct and violence arose. Mills lost. Similarly, My Pillow lunatic and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell lost his primary for governor in Minnesota. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), who famously posted that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” earlier this year, lost his primary for re-election. The most embarrassing loss for Trump probably has to be Amir Hassan (R-MI)‘s failed attempt to get the nomination as the Republican candidate in Michigan’s 8th district. Hassan’s opponent Thomas Smith suspended his campaign a few weeks before the primary, but somehow came away victorious over Hassan. Add in that his picks for governor in Iowa and Georgia both face planted, and you can see how this might be described as “some mixed results.”

But none of this matters. None of this justifies Trump’s calls to sic the FCC on NBC because he didn’t like something the host of Meet the Press said or for publishing polls that correctly note that he is just… wildly unpopular right now. Even if Trump had a perfect score when it came to endorsements, it’s beyond inappropriate for him to be using the FCC like a weapon the way he’s done throughout his second term.

I really, truly don’t want to have to be writing about this. It’s an extraordinarily dumb story — the president got upset because a local TV promo included language he didn’t like, and demanded that the power of the federal government be used to crush her — but I feel like I have to write it up, because as people have been saying for the past decade or so, this isn’t normal.

Let’s take the post in pieces. I really want it to sink in how unhinged this all is.

“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?”

Allowed. By him, I suppose.

“Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment. Unfortunately, she is not the only one.”

So who else is on the FCC naughty list for saying things the president doesn’t like?

“In actuality, it is, without question, the strongest Endorsement in the History of Politics. If it were not, I would be the first to admit it.”

Irrelevant, but I do not think he would, in fact, be the first to admit it.

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He’s been doing this the whole time

That question about who else is on the list isn’t rhetorical. Before Trump retook office in January 2025, he was already leading a crackdown on free speech. In December 2024, weeks before he was sworn in, he sued a pollster — Ann Selzer, along with the Des Moines Register — over a poll he didn’t like. And as soon as he took office, he started putting the government to work doing the same.

Just two days into the second Trump administration, FCC chairman Brendan Carr revived three complaints — against ABC, CBS, and NBC — that had been dismissed as “at odds with the First Amendment.”

The CBS complaint was about the editing of the infamous 2024 60 Minutes interview they aired with Kamala Harris. In February 2025, the FCC released the raw transcript and pushed on in its investigation. As it became clear that Skydance was going to acquire the network, the company started taking action to please the administration. 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens resigned in April 2025, telling staff that “I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it.” The next month, CBS News president Wendy McMahon was out, saying only that she and the company “do not agree on the path forward.”

On July 1, 2025, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the 60 Minutes interview. Two weeks later, Stephen Colbert went on the air and called it a “big fat bribe.” Three days after that, CBS canceled The Late Show, a show that had been critical of Trump, with its final episode airing this past May. CBS said the cancellation was “purely a financial decision.” A week after that, the FCC approved Paramount’s merger with Skydance, after the buyer promised to install an ombudsman to field complaints about anti-conservative bias in CBS News coverage and to end the company’s DEI policies.

Notice that the FCC didn’t ever have to actually rule on the complaint in order to get a bunch of concessions for Trump.

In September 2025, Carr went on a right-wing podcast where he threatened ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel Live segment the administration didn’t like. From the audio: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Kimmel was briefly taken off the air, but returned days later.

By April 2026, Trump was on Truth Social ranting about Kimmel again, writing that “Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC” over a joke made at Trump’s expense. The very next day, the FCC ordered all eight ABC-owned stations to file for early license renewal in an attempted shakedown. Disney and ABC are at least pushing back on this, however. Two weeks ago, the company sued the FCC over the license renewal demand, calling it a “retaliatory campaign.” A judge hears arguments in October.

Meanwhile, at NBC, Comcast has been under an FCC investigation since February 2025 over the company’s “invidious forms of DEI“ policies that “do not comply with FCC regulations & civil rights laws.” That one’s still up in the air.

In 19 months, the FCC hasn’t revoked a single broadcast license. And it hasn’t ruled against a single station on a “news distortion” complaint. Why? Because with the exception of ABC and Disney, which seemed to grow a spine after the second time they got targeted by the administration, the FCC hasn’t actually had to. They’ve just gotten whatever they’ve wanted. Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat at the FCC, walked through how it works in a May letter to Disney’s CEO, using the ABC complaint as her example:

In late 2024, a politically motivated outside organization filed a complaint with the FCC alleging that ABC violated the FCC’s news distortion policy in its coverage of the presidential campaign, specifically the presidential debate ABC journalists moderated. Agency staff reviewed that complaint and dismissed it in January 2025, finding it contrary to the First Amendment and that it failed to even assert a set of facts that, if true, would violate FCC rules. This FCC revived it anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits and everything to do with politics. It is unclear to what degree this FCC has even seriously pursued that complaint, and I suspect there will be no end in sight for that investigation because the process is the punishment and keeping it open serves that goal.

This isn’t just some fringe-left read of what’s happening, either. Even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, criticized Carr for his “easy way or the hard way” comments about Kimmel, saying that the language was “right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.” He called the attitude “dangerous as hell.” In July, 13 former FCC officials of both parties — including Mark Fowler and Dennis Patrick, the two men Ronald Reagan put in charge of the agency — asked the commission to drop the ABC investigation, calling it “an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process.”

This is not normal. I guess it’s worth saying again.

“I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have and if you’re a minor, it’s between you and your doctor and your parents,” he said. “You want to put government inside a clinic or a hospital selectively.”

That’s the answer, and it’s a good one, too. It’s consistent with principles championed by Democrats and Republicans alike (though often at different times for different reasons) that the government shouldn’t interfere in people’s health care decisions. Hell, you could even frame this as a “parental rights” argument, something Republicans really like to bring up whenever it suits them. But in any case, the answer El-Sayed gave to Watters pretty closely mirrors what he has written on his campaign website: “Healthcare decisions should be made by a patient (and their parents if they are a minor) and their doctor–no one else.”

This is a perfectly normal position, and I think it’s the exact one that Democrats who are unsure how to respond to these questions should copy. It’s simple, it’s defensible, and it forces people to understand that the reality of what Republicans are trying to do is to make medical decisions for other people and their children.

Still, Fox was going to try to frame the answer as outrageous. Naturally.

By the next night, over a chyron that read “DEMOCRATS EMBARRASS THEMSELVES,” Sean Hannity said, “One of the issues that seems to bring almost all Democrats together is a dangerous obsession with trans kids.” On screen: images of El-Sayed, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

And sure, I get that’s the message that Fox wants (nay, needs) the public to believe. They need any opposition to GOP bills targeting trans people with new restrictions on how we’re able to live our lives and participate in society to be seen as them having a “dangerous obsession with trans kids.”

The “dangerous obsession” is a Democrat saying the government doesn’t belong in the exam room? Really? It’s not the people trying to place new restrictions on trans people?

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The Watters interview did take some odd turns

In response to El-Sayed’s answer to a question that was basically about whether or not he’d join in with GOP efforts to place new restrictions on health care, Watters blurted out, “So you think it’s okay for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”

*groan*

I get that this makes for a fun talking point to try to make people who oppose new restrictions on health care seem like weird freaks, but it’s just not an accurate reflection of what this debate is about. We know that it’s extraordinarily rare for trans teens to have any sort of transition-related surgery before they turn 18. Like, yeah, maybe you’ll find the stray story of some trans girl who had a vaginoplasty when she was 17.5 because she wanted to be able to have a fresh start at college or whatever, but this image of “slashing a kid’s ding-a-ling off” just doesn’t hold up.

El-Sayed tried to flip this on Watters, asking the Fox News host if he was circumcised.

Watters said he was. “Then you probably want to move on,” said El-Sayed.

“Yeah, but, I mean, that’s a personal question, doctor.”

Yes! It is.

“Circumcision’s different than castration,” Watters added.

Sure! And a puberty blocker is different from both. And so is hormone replacement therapy. And so is social transition. And those are all things that are targeted by these GOP bills. I understand that it’s to Watters’ advantage to frame this as Republicans tend to do, around surgery, even though they’re trying to go way beyond that. But it’s just wildly dishonest in the same way that Republican claims about “abortions up to the moment of birth” and “post-birth abortions” are dishonest.

Because the surgery thing was never really the point. The truth is that people on the anti-trans side of things just… don’t want trans people to be able to exist and live our lives as we have been. They don’t want trans women to be recognized in any official or unofficial capacity as women. They don’t want trans men to be recognized in any official or unofficial capacity as men. They want to take away medically necessary health care for trans people of all ages (not just kids). They want discrimination against trans people to be codified in law. So there’s no amount of, “Well, actually, the number of surgeries is really low…” or statistics about low regret rates or testimonies from people like Hunter Schafer or Kim Petras about how being able to medically transition as a minor made their lives better or anything that will win them over.

The number of acceptable trans people for them is zero. It’s why guys like Michael Knowles will openly say “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” to cheers on the CPAC stage, and then add, in case anyone missed it, “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing.” It’s why the Trump White House cheered a Supreme Court decision ostensibly about youth sports for helping the administration in its goal to “eliminate transgender insanity.”

So let’s end this charade where the right cites some “reasonable concern,” but then uses that to advance their project of a wholesale elimination of the very concept of trans people.

Government overreach

In April 2021, Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed Arkansas’s ban on transition-related health care for minors, calling it “vast government overreach” that would set “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters involving young people.” He decried the bill as “a product of the cultural war in America.”

And he was right! Unfortunately, the state legislature overrode his veto the next day.

And in December 2023, Republican Governor Mike DeWine vetoed Ohio’s ban on transition-related health care for minors. He said his veto was “about protecting human life.” He also said, “These are gut-wrenching decisions that should be made [by] parents and should be informed by teams of doctors who are advising them. These are parents who have watched their children suffer for years, and have real concerns their children would not survive without it… Families are basing their decisions on the best medical advice they can get.”

Later, at a press conference, DeWine said that he believed decisions about health care “should be made by the people who love these kids the most, the parents.” The next month, the state legislature would override his veto.

Two Republican governors looked at these bills and landed exactly where El-Sayed did: government out of the exam room, parents making the call. Their own legislatures overrode them both.

The extreme position here was the bill, which took away parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children. It took decisions away from doctors, patients, their parents, and medical organizations, and put it in the hands of politicians. Entirely. Extreme. And again, this wasn’t just a ban on surgery. It banned surgery and hormone therapy. Oh, and just for good measure, to prove how this is totally just about health care, the bill also included a ban on trans girls playing on girls sports teams. Because sure, why not?

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Oh! And did I mention that despite the fact that the bill DeWine vetoed was supposed to be about banning medical treatment for minors, when the state went to implement the law, it tried to throw in some restrictions on health care for adults, too? It’s absolutely relentless, and again, dare I say “extreme.”

And unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s United States v. Skrmetti decision gave states the green light to pass these types of laws, which I think is horrific. Twenty-some states have. And this past December, the House passed a national version, 216–211, which would put a doctor in federal prison for up to ten years. It’s sitting in the Senate.

They’re trying to strong-arm Democrats into joining the crusade, and betting that the press will hand out credit for “moderating.” Democrats should say what El-Sayed said. Maybe skip the circumcision part.

And it’s important that the press understand what’s happening here, too. They want you to help them convince the public that it’d actually be radical to not enact sweeping new legislation.

Which brings me back to Monday night. Truly, there’s not much El-Sayed could have said that would have gotten a different result. Nothing short of endorsing the whole project would have satisfied them. He could have hedged, or split the difference, or said he wanted to look at the research, or any of the other things Democrats do when they’re scared of a question. Same “Dangerous obsession with trans kids” from Hannity.

So you may as well say what you believe: that the government needs to stay out of healthcare decisions.

“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “He golfs and trades stocks. He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

“Natalie” refers to Natalie Harp, a 35-year-old White House aide. In 2020, Harp spoke at the Republican National Convention, sharing a story about her battle with bone cancer. Harp credited Trump with saving her life, citing a 2018 “right to try” law, something that was immediately disputed. She went on to host a show at One America News before leaving to work for Trump in 2022. She is a constant presence at his side, and seems to be (for more than a few reasons) a bit of a weirdo.

Did Ossoff insult Harp? No. Did Ossoff imply that there was anything sexual going on between Trump and Harp? No. Who was this an attack on? Donald Trump, for leaving his Secretary of State, his Treasury Secretary, and the entire White House press pool on a decoy plane so that Harp could ride with him on the safe one.

A closer look at the outrage

The “Trump saved her life” story got a lot of early traction despite the fact that Ossoff never mentioned Harp’s health. Not her cancer, not her treatment, not the 2018 law she touts. All he said was that she travels with the president. But it didn’t matter.

Right-wing accounts like Scott Jennings, @johnnymaga, Robby Starbuck, Katie Pavlich, Laura Loomer, and Rep. Brandon Gill all invoked her health in posts pushing back on Ossoff.

The second type of post was a claim that Ossoff was being sexist, which involved at least a small leap from what he actually said to what they think he meant. And look, I can get there. Maybe there’s a bit of innuendo there. But the leaps these right-wing critics took were a bit ridiculous.

CJ Pearson accused Ossoff of “implying Natalie Harp, a devoted, disciplined aide to President Trump, slept her way to the top.” Greg Price echoed that interpretation. Scott Jennings made multiple posts along these lines. Former White House communications staffer Abigail Jackson accused Ossoff of making “a misogynistic attack.” Mercedes Schlapp called it a “sexist remark.”

And finally, there’s the funniest group of all: people pretending that Harp is just some random woman and not a longtime aide to the president of the United States. Mark Levin, Larry O’Connor, Lee Zeldin, Bill Stepien, Colton Snedecor, and Josh McKoon all acted incredulous.

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The flop

None of these people are actually upset.

I know that’s a claim about the inside of someone’s head, so let me put it this way: no, I do not believe that the people who spend their days defending Donald “Quiet, Piggy“ Trump care about sexism or personal insults or looking out for women or anything like that. Sorry, I just don’t. I don’t believe that the people who defend the administration that turns deportation flights into TikTok content actually care about leaving people alone. So what’s it for?

Media coverage, mostly. A chance to accuse Democrats of being sexist or something like that. If enough people say a thing loudly enough, journalists will start putting out stories about how Ossoff’s comment “sparked backlash” or “accusations of sexism,” and now there’s suddenly a controversy that the press can ask other politicians about.

And it’s really, truly, genuinely funny to watch Scott Jennings and Mark Levin lecture anybody about how to talk about women, or to watch Newt Gingrich announce that Ossoff “owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her.” Newt Gingrich, ffs!

But you’ve seen this before, just in a different kind of arena.

Where’s the first place the guys in those videos look as soon as they hit the ground? To the refs. Not at the players who “fouled” them. They’re trying to sell the ref on a version of reality that isn’t quite real. Sure, the player got bumped, but were they fouled? Meh. Maybe?

And once enough people agree that a foul happened, “Ossoff’s sexist remark about Natalie Harp” just becomes reality in a lot of spheres. Maybe it’ll stick. Maybe it won’t. One way to help these narratives stick is for Democrats to take the right-wing framing at face value, denouncing their own side as a show that they’re not just some sort of partisan. And that’s exactly what David Axelrod did. He called the speech “a brutal takedown,” and then handed them the thing they’d spent three days digging for: “But two words in it, ‘with Natalie’ seemed gratuitous and unnecessary.”

Gah!

And, I guess… just… duh. Obviously.

“Engagement is easy to measure, so the platforms use it as the primary metric to assess user interest in the content,” said paper co-author Ziv Epstein in a press release published by Stanford. “They are saying, in effect, engagement equals values, but it’s not that simple.”

And yes, Elon Musk is almost certainly doing things with the X algorithm to try to push the public towards his views. The pushing part is just a fact: an experiment published in Nature in February put nearly 5,000 people on either the “For You” algorithmic feed or the reverse-chronological one of just the accounts they followed for seven weeks. Those on the algorithmic feed drifted rightward on policy priorities, on Trump’s prosecutions, on Ukraine, and other issues. That same feed also ran 58% fewer posts from actual news organizations. Yikes!

But as it turns out, some of this is on us, too, and on how we interact on social media.

“The message we take away is that the values that we hold – what we really care about – should be just as informative to the platforms as engagement,” paper co-author Michael Bernstein said. “Right now, we engage with all sorts of content – sometimes because we agree with it, and sometimes because we’re angry at it – but the platforms misinterpret it all as a kind of desire for more of that kind of content.”

This got me thinking about how much of my own feed I’ve built by hand, one angry reply at a time.

Who are these replies even for?

A week or two ago, on Threads, I replied to an anti-trans post about the WNBA.

I knew better. I have known better for years. But it was one of those posts about women’s basketball being under siege from a trans player, and I did the thing I always do, which is write something back saying that trans people actually had nothing to do with the manufactured outrage being stoked by the right.

And then my feed was that. Just that. Only that. Literally nothing but posts about how trans people are ruining the WNBA, bathrooms, sports, and locker rooms.

For days I opened the app to a flood of people I’d never seen before explaining that people like me are “men.” There wasn’t much actually about sports policy. Mostly misgendering, AI-generated slop images of burly men with pigtails dunking on women, over and over, in a scroll-friendly format. It was the most miserable my phone has been in a bit, and I did it to myself. (There has never been a trans woman in the WNBA. Fox News has spent more than thirteen hours on the league since late June anyway, hours of it on trans athletes. I hate being at the center of a culture war! I’ll probably write something about all this soon.)

In any case, between my experience on Threads and this story about the X algorithm, I’ve been thinking a little bit about who I’m replying to and why I’m doing it. I’ve always kind of thought of my replies as not being for the benefit of the post’s author, but for others reading the comments. But isn’t that a little silly? It’s been like 15 years of this stuff. Have replies to posts about things that I disagree with actually changed anything in this world? Doubtful.

What I have done is told these various social algorithms to feed me more nonsense that enrages me, that this content is good and should be promoted into more people’s feeds. I’m basically helping to spread a virus.

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Knowing all of this has not stopped me and probably won’t

“Don’t feed the trolls“ is old-school social media advice, and contested advice at that, for reasons mostly having to do with the fact that harassers don’t actually stop when you ignore them. Well-meaning people have given me this advice hundreds of times, and I’ve given it to others a hundred more. Why is it that I can’t just… do it?

I think some of it has to do with the fact that ignoring, muting, and blocking are invisible actions. And scrolling past ragebait can feel weirdly like conceding the point or argument. Replying is the only thing that actually feels like doing something, even if what I’m doing is ultimately unproductive.

I do find it a lot easier to ignore posts I disagree with when they have to do with topics I’m not super passionate about. Like, oh, cool, you didn’t like The Odyssey? Neat. No biggie. But it’s a much harder sell when the person you’re tempted to reply to is saying something about whether people like me should be allowed to use public restrooms, get called by the names we want to be called, and protected from discrimination. And it’s harder still when I can see that most of the replies agree with the original post. Letting it go is difficult, so I don’t let it go.

I’m going to make a point of trying to reply to things I actually want more of on the internet, and of not handing those replies to people whose entire job is winding me up. I doubt I’ll be any good at it.

For the uninitiated, Jubilee is a media company that markets itself as being about empathy and bridging divides, though it largely profits from manufactured conflict. There’s no shortage of incisive criticism of the company’s formats, and it’s worth checking some of it out; for my part, I find most of the Jubilee catalog grating.

But back to Tim Pool: moderate.

If you don’t know who Pool is, the short version is that he’s the host of Timcast IRL, a show on the right-wing video platform Rumble. He made a name for himself livestreaming the Occupy Wall Street protests from his phone, then worked at Vice for a bit before going off and doing his own thing. For years he pitched himself as a guy the left had abandoned, a Bernie voter and self-described “disaffected liberal” who couldn’t recognize his own side anymore. The drift started around 2016 and never really stopped. By August 2020 he was publicly backing Trump, and he’s been a superfan since. In September 2024, it came out that Pool was being paid $100,000 per episode by the Russian government to produce pro-Russia video content ahead of that year’s election. Pool didn’t know who was funding the project at the time. Here’s a Daily Show clip containing some of Pool’s “greatest hits”

And look, he says a lot of really extreme stuff on his show.

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“Well, the whole thing is a multiple vehicle pile-up. Let me start with the president. The president says it was caused by vandals. I don’t know whether he really believes that, or it’s part of his political messaging, or he’s just thinking out loud. You and I both know the president well. He exists loudly, and he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought. I’m not saying he doesn’t really believe it, I just don’t know. Now, the stakes are a lot higher for U.S. Attorney Pirro. You can’t lie to a federal judge. If she can’t prove her case, she was right to pull back. Because if you fool around with a federal judge, you will find out. When I was in private practice, one time I put my briefcase on a brand new conference table bought by a federal judge. And he got so mad, I’ll never forget, I thought I was going to get to spend overnight with Bubba in central lockup. Federal judges will not tolerate. And so I don’t know why she filed the suit without having a — doing a full investigation. She says she relied on the Department of Interior. But she was smart to pull it back.”

Excuse me? He doesn’t know whether Trump actually believes what he’s saying, “or if it’s part of his political messaging”?

A GOP senator sat on Meet the Press and said he’s just not sure if the president actually believes that Hearn committed a crime despite there being no evidence that anyone vandalized the pool at all (which should worry us about Trump’s connection to reality), or if it’s just part of Trump’s political messaging (which should worry us about the fact that Trump would then knowingly be trying to throw this random guy behind bars for a decade for absolutely no reason). Neither is comforting, and both are pretty gigantic scandals that should be setting off alarms all over the country.

Welker’s only follow-up question was whether Kennedy believes grand jury records in Hearn’s case should be made public. Kennedy said yes.

But is the press really just going to move on from this story? Is there really so much going on in the world that stuff like this happens and we just sort of shrug it off and move on? I know that the reflecting pool saga is probably pretty low on most people’s lists of times Trump has acted like a mad king during his second term in office, but I guess I’m just having a hard time letting go of the fact that Trump is still trying to put Hearn, a man who was part of Team USA at the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Olympics, in prison for a decade despite the fact that even Pirro, a total Trump loyalist, has admitted in court that he didn’t commit any crime. That is completely nuts to me.

You don’t actually have to pick one

Kennedy gives us a few options for what’s going on with Trump, and none of them are good. It doesn’t really matter which one is right, because it’s all the same to Hearn.

If Trump actually believes what he’s saying, then the president of the United States is detached from reality, instructing the Justice Department to pursue charges based on whatever’s going on in his head. If he doesn’t believe it, then he’s spent seven weeks demanding a decade in prison for a man he knows is innocent.

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That’s David Ellison in the New York Times on Tuesday, arguing that the man who wants to buy CNN can be trusted with it. He won’t have to, though. An owner who wants coverage moved doesn’t sit in the control room rewriting chyrons and personally spiking stories. He hires an editor who shares his ideological vision, and the editor hires the correspondents. Then those ideologically-aligned employees do all the things that determine which segments run, which stories never get reported out, which guests get booked, and how reality gets described to the public. All the while, the owner gets to spend the rest of his life accurately saying that he never put a finger on the scale — a phrase Ellison uses himself as his reason for having stayed quiet while a dozen state attorneys general and the Writers Guild sued to stop his $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Whether technically true or not, nobody has to take Ellison’s promise on faith, because he’s made the same promise before about a different newsroom (and we’re currently seeing how that’s been working out). Notably, there are two names that never appear in his op-ed. One is Bari Weiss. The other is Donald Trump, the president whose FCC approved Ellison’s last merger, and who said in December that it was “imperative that CNN be sold.”

So how should we look at Ellison’s op-ed? Let’s look at his record.

Everything he’s promising CNN, he already promised CBS News

When the FCC signed off on Ellison’s merger of Skydance with Paramount last July, it cited Skydance’s written commitment that CBS News’ reporting would be “fair, unbiased, and fact-based,” and that the company would hire an ombudsman to “evaluate complaints of bias.” Yes, the goal for reporting should be for it to be fair, unbiased, and fact-based. Of course. And hiring an ombudsman or public editor is a fine idea. But it quickly became clear what was really happening.

Kenneth Weinstein got the ombudsman job that September. From 2011 to 2020, he ran a neoconservative think tank called the Hudson Institute. In 2020, he was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Japan, though the Senate never acted on his nomination. And in 2024, he gave $6,600 to Trump, $5,000 to the pro-Trump Save America PAC and $10,900 to the Republican National Committee, along with donations over the years to a number of individual Republicans.

But unlike a traditional ombudsman, who typically provides reporting to the public about the goings-on in the newsroom, story selection, how it’s being reported out, and so on, Weinstein doesn’t have a public-facing role. Instead, he is there to evaluate claims of bias and raise his concerns with Paramount’s president and television head, who will then take them to the president of CBS News. Basically, Weinstein’s role is making sure that CBS News remains sufficiently pro-Trump for the president’s liking. Cool.

In October, Ellison brought on Bari Weiss, naming her the editor-in-chief of CBS News, after Paramount bought her Free Press media company for a reported $150 million. Sure, with zero TV news experience under her belt, she was unbelievably unqualified for this new role that had been created specifically for her. But she seems to have been brought on to remake CBS News in the image of her “anti-woke” Free Press more than to actually run a successful news company. When announcing her hire, Ellison said something that he’d echo in this op-ed 10 months later: “We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.”

In May, magazine writer and documentary producer with no TV news experience Nick Bilton was hired to be the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. By the end of the month, longtime 60 Minutes correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were gone, and Scott Pelley a week or so after that, fired for telling Bilton he was “murdering” the program. Upon his exit, Pelley shared a note to Instagram:

“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.

Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how honest journalism is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to ‘keep up the good fight.’ Most of my colleagues at CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.”

Pelley told the New York Times that in the wake of Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s killings, Weiss emailed then-60 Minutes Executive Producer Tanya Simon, instructing her to make protesters look more violent in the story and to describe Good as driving toward the officer who shot her. This was all despite the fact that Pelley and his team had already taken steps to “identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive,” to “find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively.” He was already taking steps to both sides the extrajudicial murder of American citizens. It still wasn’t enough for Weiss. “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before,” said Pelley in the Times piece.

Vega shared her own thoughts on the ideological takeover of 60 Minutes in a note shared with the New York Times:

“I was fired today. My contract as a correspondent for 60 Minutes was not set to expire until March 2027.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for my colleagues at 60 Minutes and the stories that air every Sunday. But I very much fear what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.

In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.

Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.

I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience, a phrase I borrow from a colleague who has also fought to keep questionable editorial suggestions away from the facts. I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity. I am far from the only 60 Minutes correspondent who has asked herself, “What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?”

I am proud of the work I did for 60 Minutes. This season alone I was part of teams that won two of the highest honors in our profession — a George Polk award and a duPont-Columbia award for our coverage of Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s Cecot prison. And not for nothing, I climbed to Mount Everest.

I also walk away with an honor no one can take from me: I was the first Latina correspondent to ever be on 60 Minutes.

Today I lost an amazing job. But I still have my integrity.

To my former colleagues, continue to hold the line.

In June, Writers Guild of America East president Tom Fontana issued a statement:

“Like many of you, I have been alarmed by recent developments at CBS News. In the past year, CBS has enacted cruel and needless layoffs across the organization and shuttered CBS News Radio. In addition, based on a string of public reporting and confidential reports from WGAE members, it is clear that CBS brass is engaged in a near-constant level of editorial interference that would have previously been unthinkable.

Over the course of the last few weeks, CBS has laid off or fired multiple newsroom workers and journalists, most recently Scott Pelley; CBS management is apparently too thin-skinned to handle the honest scrutiny of their own journalists.”

Vega, on stage at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference in New Orleans last month, described being pushed by management to falsely report that the mayor of Minneapolis had directed his police to confront federal immigration agents. She’d also been told to find footage of protesters attacking undercover ICE agents. Her team went looking, but again, this wasn’t a thing. In 25 years of journalism, she said that “never in my career, until now, have I felt that those edits, that those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics.”

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You probably already know about the CECOT segment, which Weiss pulled just hours before broadcast, airing a month later but only after it had leaked online. And Pelley talked about the meddling in the Good and Pretti stories. But just this week, we learned about a new example of editorial interference. Apparently, before her firing, Alfonsi had been working on a story for 60 Minutes about an investigation being led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) into Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to a number of banks. It was spiked by Weiss.

From a piece in The American Prospect:

“Wyden’s report also details multiple instances in which powerful figures used their positions to obstruct his investigation. In one glaring example, he described CBS suppressing an interview he did with former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi in March. That was five months after David Ellison, a Trump ally and child of billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS through its parent company Paramount and appointed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss to run the network.

Wyden discussed his [suspicious activity reports] investigation with Alfonsi, and possible consequences for banks, as part of a larger segment on the conduct of Wall Street bankers and the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands. But Weiss fired Alfonsi once Ellison took over. “David Ellison’s handpicked partisan lieutenant killed the segment and fired the lead reporter on the piece,” Wyden told the Prospect.

The experience gave Wyden ‘a first-hand view of how the far-right takeover of corporate media is protecting predators and standing in the way of justice … Blocking corporate media consolidation and supporting independent media is absolutely vital to defending our democracy and getting justice for ultra-wealthy criminals.’”

CBS says it’s “proud of our aggressive and extensive reporting on the Epstein scandal,” that it is continuing its reporting, and called Wyden’s claims “categorically false.” Okay, sure.

Luckily for Ellison, Weiss, and the rest of the management over at CBS News (and possibly CNN before long), the supply of these types of embarrassing stories will eventually run dry. As Vega explained in her exit note, teams had “held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.” That’s a big part of how censorship works. It’s about what stories we don’t tell as much as the ones we do. Eventually, anyone truly bothered by the censorship will leave and be replaced by someone who fits the ideological mold.

We’re watching the installation of the right-wing apparatus. It’s loud. It’s clumsy. It leaks. But over time, it’ll become quiet, where the meddling is invisible because it’s built in. CBS News is in the process of being irrevocably corrupted, and CNN could be next.

Back on June 21, the paper ran a column by Rob Henderson, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, under the headline, “The latest data on baby names reveals a progressive paradox.” A week later, the Post Opinions account put out a video version with Henderson delivering the argument to camera. That’s when it ended up on my radar. Here’s how it opens:

“The most progressive parents in the United States are giving their children the most traditional names. The latest baby name data from Washington, D.C., reads like a roll call of 19th-century senators and their wives. Lucy, Eleanor and Caroline for girls. Charles, John and George for boys. These are not the names you might expect from one of the most progressive cities in the country.”

Not the names you might expect? From whom, though? Based on what? Weirdly, the column never gives coherent answers to those questions.

The liberal in this column doesn’t exist, and neither does the belief she’s supposedly betraying

Henderson constructs a bit of a straw man, ascribing beliefs to liberals and progressives that they don’t actually hold… based on beliefs on related issues that they do hold? It’s weird.

“Upper-middle-class professionals often talk a big game about openness, inclusion and social experimentation. They tend to say that people should be free to invent themselves,” writes Henderson.

Okay?

“They are wary of old rules and outdated hierarchies. Baby name experts told NBC News that ridiculing an unusual name can reveal ‘uncomfortable classism.’ The unease suggests that even those who preach against the judgment know it is real,” he continues.1

Yes. And?

He goes on to highlight the fact that people with unique names often face social and professional penalties. I guess the point he’s trying to make here is that… if liberals don’t think someone should be discriminated against or mocked for having a strange name, they have an obligation to give their kids odd names? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Actually, strike that; it makes no sense at all.

Henderson’s (extremely questionable) framework is “luxury beliefs,” his own coinage, which he defines as ideas that “confer status on members of the upper class at little cost while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes.” (It’s similar to “virtue signaling” in how it gets used.) As it applies to names: rich progressives loudly insist that weird names are great, give their own kids something boring, and the poorer parents who took them at their word about how awesome odd names are get their kid’s resume thrown in the trash.

If this is hypocrisy, there needs to be someone actually doing this. Is there? Here is the closest the column comes to producing one:

“An educated professional in a blue city may say that all names are equally valid. Or she might go one step further and say that unconventional names should be celebrated. She might even go so far as to suggest that giving your child a traditional name is a sign of unoriginality or narrow-mindedness.”

“May.” “Might.” “Might even go so far as to.”

No name, quote, tweet, book, survey, or study. There’s not even an anecdote from a dinner party. This liberal is made out of a handful of hypotheticals and a guess about what people like her think and do. Henderson’s entire argument rests on this hypothetical woman’s shoulders.

It’s another entry into the category of “making up a guy to get mad at,” a favorite genre of mine. The formula never changes: Liberals claim to be fine with [weird but harmless thing]. And yet liberals do not personally do [weird but harmless thing]. Checkmate.

Yes! That’s how tolerance works.

Nobody holds the belief that “everyone should give their kids unusual names.” That’s a strawman that Henderson seems to have invented from whole cloth so that he can then accuse them of hypocrisy. Liberals’ actual position is that you shouldn’t hold a person’s name against them, which is about how you treat other people, not a set of instructions for filling out your own kid’s birth certificate. Thinking a kid named Nevaeh deserves the same callback as a kid named Charles does not obligate someone to name anyone Nevaeh. There’s no hypocrisy here.

And one of the reasons liberals hold that position, in case anyone wants to check, is that the discrimination in hiring is real and it’s been measured, especially when it comes to names coded as Black.

The belief is that employers shouldn’t be doing this, not that parents owe their kids something unusual. Henderson took a claim about how hiring managers behave, invented something that liberals supposedly believe (that kids should have unique names), saw that the most common names in a solidly liberal city were, well, common, and called it hypocrisy.

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A list of the 10 most popular names is always going to be a list of popular names

There’s a second problem, and it’s the kind that should have been caught by an editor.

Henderson’s evidence is a top-10 list. A top-10 list of baby names is, by definition, a list of names that lots of people picked. That’s how names get on the list. A name cannot chart unless thousands of strangers independently landed on the same one. You could not build a top-10 list out of unusual names if you tried. The unusual ones are unusual. That’s the whole deal.

So Henderson went and looked at the most popular names in Washington and found that they were... popular. Yeah, man! That’s how it works. You’re never going to see some wild, obscure name atop the list of popular baby names. Ever. And it doesn’t say something about society or whatever. It just says

One researcher he cites found close to the opposite of what he says they found

Henderson writes: “J. Eric Oliver, a political scientist, has studied naming patterns and found that educated mothers tend to favor common, conventional names.”

The paper he links is Oliver, Wood and Bass in Political Behavior. Here’s the sentence from the abstract (bolded emphasis mine):

“Although higher status mothers of all races favor more popular birth names, higher status, white liberal mothers more often choose uncommon, culturally obscure birth names.”

This marks the second time in his column where he cut off the back half of a sentence that contradicts his point. He used the first half of that sentence, sure. But the second half is the finding that high-status liberal mothers are the exception, which is to say the group his entire column is about, doing the thing he says they don’t do. It’s in the same sentence he took the first half from. Groan…

So what are we even doing here? What’s the point of this column?

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion section would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” It’s shifted hard to the right, leaning into “owning the libs.”

“Luxury beliefs” is a very good tool for this. Feed it anything and it hands back the same answer: the real problem is liberals and the left. Is it factual? Who cares! Checking the numbers underneath is somebody else’s job, and evidently nobody’s.

Once the replies started coming in, Henderson went back to promote the video anyway, with a note: “The very calm and very sane replies indicate that maybe I’m onto something.”

Sure. Once being wrong counts as evidence that you’re right, there’s nothing left in the world that could talk you out of it.

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At one point during his speech, Trump got around to Kaitlan Collins, who had just accepted the WHCA’s award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure from Wolf Blitzer, which she earned covering the Oval Office Zelensky blowup last year. Trump congratulated her, sort of: the award was fake, he told the room, and she shouldn’t have won it. She never smiles, he went on, and she really should, considering what a nice position she has over at CNN, which he reminded everyone is fake news. “So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.” (He ran the same routine on her in the Oval Office in February, mid-question about Epstein’s survivors.)

Then the bit. He’d heard Collins had landed a big sponsorship, except “it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.” Mulvaney, he claimed, cost Bud Light “$35 billion in market cap.” And he closed with a line about how he’d never want to give her a job.

On Sunday morning he posted a follow-up to his personal Truth Social account: an AI-edited image of Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body, lifted from the 2023 Bud Light video.

And look at what that image actually shows. A smiling woman in a black dress and gloves, holding a beer, a few more cans lined up on the table. That’s the entire picture. The insult is something the viewer has to supply.

Everybody supplied it. That’s what I keep coming back to. The bit bombed, sure. But nobody in that ballroom needed the joke explained, and nobody leaned over to ask what he meant. Neither did anyone who read about it the next morning. The joke has exactly one moving part, the assumption that being compared to a trans woman is a step down, and that assumption is so widely shared in 2026 that the president of the United States can build a punchline on it, on live television, without ever saying it out loud.

Then came the objections. They ran on the same assumption.

“Apologize to Kaitlan, specifically”

The most instructive objection came from Rahm Emanuel, 2028-curious and on CNN’s payroll as a contributor. Trump, he told the Washington Examiner, “should apologize to Kaitlan Collins specifically,” and to all the journalists he insults. Mulvaney’s name doesn’t come up. This is the same guy who gave Megyn Kelly a flat “Can a man become a woman? No,” then stood by it for months, and who told NPR “That’s not what I said” when asked whether that denies trans people exist. (He does.) (I’ve written about Rahm before.)

CNN stood behind its anchor, calling her “an exceptional, trusted journalist.” Every word of it earned. But every word of it about Collins.

To be clear: Collins deserved defending. What Trump does to her (trashing her work, grading her face, ordering her to smile) is its own familiar ugliness, and I’m glad people pushed back. But I’m a little saddened by how few people seemed to realize that Mulvaney was being insulted here (repeatedly), too.

Her little musicals

On Sunday evening, Mulvaney posted a four-minute video to TikTok and Instagram. I’m going to give you the whole thing, because it deserves to be read whole.

Hi, is this a good time? Well, it’s definitely an interesting time, because my name is Dylan Mulvaney, and the president of the United States said my name in his speech four times on Friday night. I couldn’t respond right away, because yesterday I had tickets to see Meg Stalter in Oh, Mary!, but now I think I’d like to say a little something.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on her award and tell her that I’m incredibly honored to be compared to her in any way. And I hope that she keeps doing all the great work.

Now, the president also brought up a video I did over three years ago. And mind you, I’ve been kind of flying under the radar, keeping up a pretty low profile, just doing my little musicals, singing, dancing, and yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later. And it seems to me that I might be the one that got away for these men. I am permanently burned into their retinas. I am microchipped into their minds.

And when I first heard that the president put me on his diss track, I was like, well, that’s not good. Now, a few weeks ago, I would have probably been more upset about this. But luckily, I was ghosted last month by a hookup who I really liked. And what I realized from that experience was that I shouldn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t really want to be with me. So maybe I shouldn’t want to be professionally supported by an administration that doesn’t personally support me, or so many others in this country. Food for thought.

In fact, maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually the greatest compliment of all, because it puts me in the company of some of the most brilliant, empathetic people in our world today.

But I do still wonder: why is it so important to them that I don’t find success? What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.

So now I have some action items for us. Are you ready?

Number one: Support trans and nonbinary people. This is the time. I am sounding the alarm. We need you to stand up for us, vote for us, donate to our causes, hire us, and support the businesses who hire us. But most importantly, love us. That is what we need more than anything right now, publicly and proudly.

Number two: If a young person is seeking acceptance, we are going to love them. And if you are a young person watching this, I need you to hold onto every piece of yourself tightly, especially the parts that they are trying to make you feel guilty about, or trying to scare you into abandoning. And I need you to find people who will help you carry those pieces into a kinder day, okay?

Okay. And number three: When they try to judge you for your support of us, take that as the greatest compliment. Ladies, when they tell you that you look like a trans woman, wear it like a medal. Men, when they tell you that being attracted to trans women makes you gay, I want you to Hilary Duff PSA their ass so hard that they don’t even know what just happened. And to the dolls: let’s have each other’s backs.

And lastly, to the president: thank you for reminding me that I am more powerful than I even knew. And to quote my favorite recording artist, Shea Diamond: I am America.

Love you.

We’ve now spent a solid decade fighting about cancel culture, about whether anyone should be ruined over an old tweet or a resurfaced college photo. Okay. Run that framework on Dylan Mulvaney and look for the offense. The complete inventory: one sponsored Instagram video promoting a March Madness contest, and a novelty can the company mailed her with her face on it. That’s the whole file. No statement to disavow, no scandal to relitigate, no victim anywhere in it. A beer ad.

And I’ll be honest: I’ve found plenty of Mulvaney’s content reductive over the years. Cringe, even. It could not matter less. Her content has never been the thing on trial. If her posts aren’t for you, the technology for not watching them is free and works great.

So here’s who we’re actually talking about. A musical theater kid who documented her transition online, did one sponsored post for a beer company, and has been screamed at ever since. Nobody has ever said what would end it, because nothing would. The problem is not something she says or does, but who she is. And that’s just bigotry.

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Bud Light got to come back, but not Dylan

“I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan any time soon,” said Trump on Friday. This has always been the point. When the boycott was at full boil in 2023, I wrote that its real goal was making companies think twice about hiring a trans person for anything, at any level. Mulvaney said something similar that fall: a company that hires a trans person and then goes quiet “gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want.”

The company’s rehabilitation went fine. In October 2023, with the boycott still going, Bud Light became the official beer of the UFC, in what was reported as the biggest sponsorship deal in the promotion’s history. And that deal is how, this June, Bud Light’s logo ended up printed on the Octagon on the White House South Lawn, at the UFC event Trump spent part of Friday’s speech bragging about. (I wrote about that spectacle when it happened.)

The company’s offense was proximity to a trans woman, and proximity can be worked off. You reorganize the marketing department, you sponsor the right fights, you put your logo where the president parties, and all is forgiven. Her offense was being the trans woman. And there’s no working that off.

About all that power we supposedly have

She can’t come back, because she’s needed right where she is. For any of this to look like a fair fight, Dylan Mulvaney has to be enormous.

The whole genre of “super powerful trans people” runs on an imaginary trans person: the one shrieking “did you just assume my gender!?” at strangers, the one demanding you memorize neopronouns. (I’ve been out as trans for fourteen years. I’ve never met a single person who goes by “xir.” I’m sure such people exist, but they are nowhere near common enough for this to be something you spend any amount of time thinking about.) The imaginary trans person is everywhere, powerful, hair-trigger, coming for your kid’s locker room.

Here’s how the people with actual power spent last month. The White House published a press release titled “Supreme Court Bolsters President Trump’s Push to Eliminate Transgender Insanity.” That’s the real name of a real document on whitehouse.gov, posted in the middle of Pride Month, listing the administration’s moves against trans people as a stack of wins. That’s pretty scary, and it goes beyond “reasonable concerns” that people claim to have about sports and youth medicine and whatnot.

Same government that, since the Supreme Court cleared the policy in November, now only issues passports showing your sex assigned at birth. Renew yours, and the letter reverts, no matter what your license, your doctors, your birth certificate, or your entire life says. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent warned that the policy exposes trans people to “increased violence, harassment, and discrimination.”

And the opposition party? Three weeks ago, days after that Supreme Court ruling, Amy Acton, the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, told the Toledo Blade: “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Boys. Her word. She’s got company: Gavin Newsom opened his podcast in 2025 by agreeing with Charlie Kirk about trans athletes. Some Democrats have pushed back; Tim Walz called the party’s retreat a mistake. But with the exception of J.B. Pritzker, the defense almost never comes from anyone who wants to be president, which really worries me about where things are headed.

The butt of the joke

I said at the top that I wanted to sit with this. Here’s where it landed.

The most powerful man alive stood in front of the American press corps and used a cheerful musical theater performer as the worst thing he could think to call a woman. Everyone understood him. The room understood, the headlines understood, the apology demand understood: it is an insult to be compared to a trans woman, as society tends to view us as weird little goblins. The one person who seemed to reject the premise was Mulvaney.

And Mulvaney had to be lovely about it. Again. In 2023 she spent months “scared to leave my house.” Last year she told People she finally felt “a thousand times stronger,” healed, in a good place. Then the president picked at the scab from a podium, and her job was to answer with grace. She did. Everyone spent Monday admiring it. Nobody should need this much of it.

You’ve probably read the rest: Trump’s speech was an hour of insults, and it flopped. CNN’s Brian Stelter says Trump “bombed” so thoroughly that he accidentally proved the dinner’s point. The Daily Beast went with “Humiliated.” And sure. The jokes were terrible. But I think these reviews are grading the wrong performance.

I wrote in April, after a gunman ended the first attempt at this dinner, that the correspondents’ association should let the whole thing end. They rescheduled it instead.

A performer bombs when he wants a room’s approval and can’t get it, and approval was never what Trump was there to collect. He already had what he needed from the press corps: attendance, a captive audience. It rescheduled its biggest night around him and sat him at the head table. What he wanted was the rest of it: the chance to stand in front of a profession he’s spent a year and a half suing, subpoenaing, banning, and defunding, insult it to its face for an hour on live television, and watch it hold still. He was there specifically for the silence.

Resist?

This is what standing up to Trump looked like on Friday night, according to the people who will defend the dinner.

The WHCA played a video featuring a computer-generated James Madison, who appeared onscreen to inform the room that “The government doesn’t get to shut the press up.” A living journalist saying that sentence into the microphone, to the president’s face, might have been a risk. A cartoon of a man who died in 1836 saying it is weak slop. AI-resurrected founders are usually a PragerU and Glenn Beck genre, the kind of thing I cover as right-wing propaganda. The press corps has now adopted the right’s format in its own defense. That’s roughly where we are.

There were awards, like the one Blitzer presented.

And there was Weijia Jiang, the outgoing WHCA president, opening the night with “We are back. We will not be intimidated.” She meant the gunman from April. But the man who intimidates the American press for a living? Sat beside her on the dais as her guest.

The genre’s well established by now. When Trump banned the AP from the Oval Office last year, the WHCA passed out “First Amendment” pins. At the April dinner, Jiang promised the press would keep covering this administration “whether you like it or not.” Pins and cartoons and toasts: okay.

When Trump announced in March that he’d attend, he posted that the correspondents had asked him to be “the Honoree” at their own dinner. They didn’t technically “honor” him, but if the association ever corrected him on that, I can’t find it. The right spent the weekend running its usual bit about how the press can dish it out but can’t take it. The truth is that taking it was all the press did. Politely, even.

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Don’t say they weren’t warned

Days before the dinner, more than 500 retired and former journalists joined eight press freedom groups, the Committee to Protect Journalists among them, in an open letter telling the WHCA that celebrating the First Amendment “in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it” is hypocrisy.

Ten days before the dinner, Trump’s Justice Department was holding grand jury subpoenas over four New York Times reporters for their coverage of the Qatari jet, demanding testimony and phone records, including records belonging to their family members. The department pulled the subpoenas the day before the dinner, once a federal judge started asking whether the application contained perjury. The week before the dinner, Trump publicly called for revoking NBC’s and ABC’s broadcast licenses after they declined to carry his recent primetime address live. And back in November, the president declared that elected officials urging troops to refuse illegal orders had committed “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Does this sound like a man who respects the First Amendment?

And there’s no clean modern precedent for it. However, you can argue that John Adams jailing editors under the Sedition Act or Woodrow Wilson imprisoning dissenters under the Espionage Act are just as bad but different. The current attack on the press pulls every lever at once (the regulators, the courts, the licenses, the owners, the platforms, the money), and it’s how the United States just fell to 64th in the world on press freedom, its lowest ranking ever, in an index citing the defunded public broadcasters, the gutted Voice of America, and the detention and deportation of journalist Mario Guevara. Clayton Weimers, who runs Reporters Without Borders’ US office, skips the hedging entirely: Trump is “the single biggest threat to American press freedom today.”

The correspondents’ association read the letter and answered with a statement:

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner exists because the First Amendment matters most when it’s under pressure... our choice to gather as journalists, newsmakers and the president in the same room is a reminder of what a free press means to this country.

But gathering in that particular room was never the only option. The New York Times hasn’t bought a ticket to this thing since 2008, for reasons its former executive editor Dean Baquet once summed up: the dinner tells readers “we are all in it together and it is all a game.” The WHCA could have done any number of other things here. There was the awards-without-the-gala option, the no-invitation option, the no-thank-yous option. But no.

The letter called all this hypocritical. But Hypocrisy is a values problem. What the news business has with this president is an accounting problem.

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The price of a not-so-free press

So let’s do the books.

In December 2024, Disney paid Trump $15 million, plus another million in legal fees, over one sentence George Stephanopoulos said on the air. Meta paid $25 million to settle his deplatforming suit; X paid about $10 million for the same. Paramount paid $16 million over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview, and the FCC approved the company’s sale to Skydance just weeks later.

Then there’s YouTube. Google paid $24.5 million in September, and $22 million of it is earmarked for the White House ballroom. The fortified ballroom Trump spent part of Friday’s speech advertising, the one he suggested could host this dinner next year, is being built partly out of money a media company paid him to drop a lawsuit.

Paul Farhi ran the tally earlier this month: roughly $86 million from media and tech companies so far, spread across more than 30 defamation suits, exactly none of which Trump has ever won in court. He doesn’t need to win them. The filing of the lawsuits are themselves a show of force.

On the other hand, I’ve already explained what happens to journalists who publish stories Trump doesn’t like. That’s the menu every institution with a table at the Waldorf last Friday lives under: pay him, or bleed. Most of the owners paid.

IMAX 70mm tickets went on sale a full year ahead of release, presales crashed ticketing servers when they opened wide in June, and Variety found fans planning cross-country trips around 70mm screenings, including a couple who were reportedly delaying pregnancies over seat availability.

The movie finally opened on July 17, and it made $124.5 million in North America and $264.1 million worldwide, the biggest global opening Nolan has ever had. The record it broke belonged to The Dark Knight Rises and had stood since 2012. Reviews came in at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, the best of his career, opening-night crowds gave it an A on CinemaScore, and the verified audience score (the Rotten Tomatoes number you can only vote in if you actually bought a ticket) sits at 97 percent as of this writing.

So sure, there’s an easy piece to be written about how everyone who swore this movie would bomb turned out to be wrong, and plenty of people have already written it. I keep getting stuck on a different number, though, one that has nothing to do with ticket sales. Over opening weekend, July 17 through 20, The Economist and YouGov asked 1,602 American adults whether it was appropriate or inappropriate “for Black actress Lupita Nyong’o to portray Helen of Troy” in the film. Thirty percent said inappropriate.

Thirty percent! Over a casting choice in a movie based on a 2,700-year-old poem.

And that opinion is brand new, which is the part I can’t get past. Nobody held it a year ago, because there was nothing to hold it about; the roles hadn’t even been announced yet. Somebody had to go build it, and the building took roughly six months and happened mostly on one website. The campaign against The Odyssey failed as a boycott but worked as a proof of concept, and this piece is about both halves.

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And because this is the same Pete Hegseth who spent his first weeks in office moving to purge trans people from the military and cut off their hormone therapy, you already know what happened next. Rep. Pramila Jayapal declared the program gender-affirming care and said it “completely debunks all of Republicans’ attacks on trans people.” Tammy Duckworth, my own senator here in Illinois, said it sounded “like gender-affirming care to me.” One viral post cracked, “Babe wake up, they’re transmascing the military.” Common Dreams ran a whole roundup of the dunks under the headline “’Literally Gender Affirming Care’: Hegseth Mocked for Plan to Offer US Soldiers Testosterone.” Within hours, “Hegseth is doing gender-affirming care” was the take.

I get the impulse. I really do.

And I wish everyone would knock it off.

A few disclaimers before anybody gets mad at me. I’m speaking for myself here, one trans woman with a newsletter, and I don’t claim to represent anyone else. I know these jokes come from allies. I know the point is to call out the cruelty of banning care for one group while handing it out to another. I know plenty of trans people make the same joke, and I’m not interested in running a purity test. But I wince every single time I see it, and I want to explain why. Again, I am just speaking for myself here.

Two things happen whenever somebody fires off this particular gotcha. The first is that healthcare I spent years fighting to get becomes a punchline. The second is that a political movement with a perfectly coherent plan for people like me gets talked about as if it simply made a logic error. Both are bad. The second one might be worse.

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The punchline is my healthcare

Start with the healthcare. Gender-affirming care is the medical treatment for gender dysphoria: hormone therapy, sometimes surgery, prescribed under clinical guidelines built over decades and recognized as medically necessary by dozens of major medical organizations, including the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics. If you’ve never felt dysphoria, I can only tell you how it felt to me: wrong, all the time, in a way I couldn’t reason my way out of. A depression with no obvious floor. Sick at the sight of my own reflection. A flinch at every “he.” This care is what helped make that stop. For a lot of us, it’s the thing that made everything else in life possible.

Getting it is a whole other story. I’ve been through the gatekeeping myself. Separate letters from separate providers certifying that I was who I said I was. A years-long waitlist. Insurance fights over care that the people writing the checks would clearly rather not pay for. It’s grueling.

Now picture the 42-year-old staff sergeant whose bloodwork comes back a little low on testosterone next spring. Nobody’s asking him for evaluation letters from therapists. There’s no legislature holding hearings about his prescription, no lawsuit trying to stop his refills. Under Hegseth’s program, he won’t even have to ask. The Pentagon is coming to him.

So when a member of Congress looks at that program and declares it the same thing I went through the wringer for, I understand the point she thinks she’s making. But here’s the message a casual reader actually takes away: transition care belongs in the same drawer as testosterone boosters, Botox, and Elon Musk’s hair plugs. And once it’s in that drawer, it’s about as “medically necessary” as anything else in there. Which is to say: completely optional.

That phrase, medically necessary, is doing far more work than it gets credit for. It’s the standard insurers use to decide what they’ll cover and what they’ll wave off as cosmetic, and “cosmetic” is already their favorite exit ramp when a trans patient’s claim hits the desk. It’s the finding those dozens of medical organizations put their names behind. It’s the thing my three letters existed to establish in the first place. The entire miserable apparatus I climbed through exists because this care has to keep proving, over and over, to skeptical people holding checkbooks, that it’s necessary. The joke hands that hard-won word away for free.

I’m far from the first trans person to notice this. Back in January, after a publication described Karoline Leavitt’s lip filler as gender-affirming care, Woodlief McCabe wrote in Autostraddle about how insulting the comparison feels from the receiving end, and where the logic ends up if you follow it: “If everything is gender affirming care, then nothing is.” He’s right. A category that stretches to cover lip filler and hair plugs is a category insurers and legislators will be delighted to treat like lip filler and hair plugs. They’ve been trying to file us under “cosmetic” for years. The gotcha does the paperwork for them.

There’s no contradiction to catch

The assumption buried inside every one of these dunks is that Republicans oppose gender-affirming care because they think hormones are dangerous, or because they think the government shouldn’t be in the hormone business. Catch them handing out testosterone to soldiers and you’ve caught them breaking their own rule.

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The topic leaked out within hours anyway. Two White House officials told MS NOW (the channel you knew as MSNBC) that Trump plans to use the address to claim that newly declassified intelligence reports show a foreign government plotted to interfere in the 2020 election.

As I write this, none of the broadcast networks has said whether it’ll carry the speech live. But they shouldn’t.

Trump’s track record alone should be enough to justify that call, because every live primetime address this man has given has come with documented falsehoods attached, and I’ll walk you through the list below. But this speech is worse than the usual primetime lying because this one serves a specific purpose. The people behind it have spent the past month describing that purpose out loud, on podcasts and in news reports: wave declassified documents around as proof that 2020 was stolen from him, declare a national emergency over it, and use that emergency to grab control over this fall’s midterms that Congress and the courts keep refusing to hand him.

So here’s the plan

Media Matters’ John Knefel has a great piece detailing some of the public facing groundwork being laid to support Trump’s midterm takeover. The full version names a preferred villain (China, in most tellings) and an endgame: with supposed proof in hand and an emergency declared, Trump could impose the SAVE America Act’s proof-of-citizenship voting rules by executive order, skipping the Congress that keeps declining to pass the actual bill. Knefel hedged, appropriately, that the details are fuzzy and the whole thing could still collapse. But now that he’s planning a primetime address, this reporting becomes a whole lot more interesting.

On June 20, Steve Bannon told his War Room audience that Bill Pulte’s job at ODNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Pulte has no intelligence background at all and still runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency while nominally overseeing all 18 spy agencies (a part-time gig, apparently). On June 29, Bannon said the White House’s document effort and Pulte would together supply the predicate, his word, for an emergency declaration. The next day, his Real America’s Voice colleague Wayne Allyn Root argued on air that an emergency order should simply contain everything in the SAVE Act, plus whatever else they can cram in.

NBC News reported on June 30 that a White House task force is pulling thousands of pages from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Pulte’s ODNI, with plans to declassify a chunk of it. Running it is John Solomon, the Just the News founder whose Biden-Ukraine misinformation earned him 2019 Misinformer of the Year from my old colleagues at Media Matters, alongside Derek Harvey, a first-term Trump national security aide. And per NBC’s sources, members have been urged to keep redactions light, even where that means leaving in the names of officials and private citizens. The only reasons to publish private citizens’ names in declassified intelligence files are political ones.

And Trump keeps leaving fingerprints. On July 1, he told reporters that Pulte has free rein to declassify whatever he wants, 2020 records included, while noting Pulte would only be around another month or two. That same week he posted about meeting Tina Peters, the former Colorado clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines in service of his stolen-election claims, and in late June he torched a bipartisan housing bill’s signing ceremony to squeeze Congress on the SAVE America Act, which he’s taken to calling a national emergency in itself.

The one thing this plan still needs, besides a president willing to deliver it on camera, is an audience that hasn’t seen the actual record.

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We already know what happened in 2020

Here’s what Thursday’s staging is built to make you forget: the question of foreign involvement in the 2020 election was investigated to death, in real time, by Donald Trump’s own government, under rules Donald Trump signed. His September 2018 executive order requires the intelligence community to formally assess foreign interference after every federal election. The assessment for 2020, declassified in March 2021, found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect” of the voting process. Registration, ballot casting, tabulation, reporting: all clean. A companion review by the Justice Department and DHS, with the FBI and CISA doing the digging, hit the same dead end: no evidence any foreign government-linked actor blocked anyone from voting, changed a vote, disrupted a count, or compromised registration data or ballots.

Foreign governments did run operations around that election. They aimed at voters’ heads, which is a different thing from touching the vote, and that difference is important. Russia pushed narratives trashing Biden through cutouts the Treasury Department later sanctioned by name. Iran probed state voter websites, scraped data on more than 100,000 Alaska voters through a badly configured registration site (they saw data; they changed none), and sent threatening emails to Democratic voters while posing as the Proud Boys, which got two Iranians indicted. All of it was aimed at perception and trust. The Thursday production depends on you hearing “foreign activity” and filling in “changed votes” yourself.

And the specific fantasy Trump has spent five years selling, the one where Venezuela or Cuba or China rigs the voting machines? DOJ and DHS, with the FBI and CISA, took it on directly:

“The Departments investigated multiple public claims that one or more foreign governments owned, directed, or controlled election infrastructure used in the 2020 federal elections; implemented a scheme to manipulate election infrastructure; or tallied, changed, or otherwise manipulated vote counts. The Departments found that those claims were not credible.”

That’s the federal government’s verdict on the exact genre of claim Thursday’s speech is reportedly built around.

Bill Barr, then Trump’s own attorney general, said in December 2020 that the department found no outcome-flipping fraud. Courts tossed the lawsuits by the dozen. Georgia counted its ballots three times, once by hand; Biden won every count. On China, where this push keeps pointing: the intelligence community assessed with high confidence that Beijing considered getting involved and decided it wasn’t worth it.

As for Thursday’s declassified props, the likely seed material is already public, and it’s embarrassing. In June 2025, Kash Patel declassified an anonymous tip from August 2020 claiming China had manufactured fake driver’s licenses, built on TikTok data, to flood the mail with fraudulent Biden ballots. The FBI’s own files describe the tip as recalled and never fully pursued, and it falls apart on contact: TikTok accounts had no address field, so the scheme’s fake voters have no addresses; registration checks and ballot signature matching would catch it at any scale; it would require armies of noncitizens to commit a deportable felony officials and courts keep finding vanishingly rare; and when Customs did seize counterfeit licenses at O’Hare in 2020, the government found no link to voting.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, anticipating this exact moment back in March, laid out the bar for any new 2020 claim: genuinely new intelligence, an accounting of how it differs from what the spy agencies, DOJ, and DHS already reviewed, and a reason the original conclusions were wrong. Watch Thursday with that checklist in hand.

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And it seems like he had plenty of company. A woman in Los Angeles County photographed her ballot and flat out asked Claude who to vote for. A man in Baltimore told the Times that researching his last ballot ate up something like 20 hours of his life; with Claude summarizing every candidate for him, this one took an hour. Medina’s read is that 2026 might be the first cycle where enough voters do this for it to matter, and honestly, that feels conservative to me.

Now… the part the Times didn’t get into.

Three days before that story ran, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a policy declaring that AI companies that steer their chatbots toward “undisclosed ideological objectives” may be committing consumer fraud (the public can comment through July 31). Which sounds reasonable! Nobody wants a secretly ideological chatbot. But then there’s the obvious follow-up: who decides what “ideological” means? Right now, that would be the Trump administration. The same administration that has spent the past year attacking AI companies as woke, that cut the entire federal government off from the one AI company that told the Pentagon no, and that handed the cheapest deal in its AI purchasing program to the company whose chatbot had spent the better part of a day praising Hitler a couple of months earlier.

Americans started trusting chatbots with their ballots at the exact moment the federal government finished building the machinery to control what those chatbots say. I think that’s a pretty big story! The right ran this pressure campaign against newspapers for decades, then against Facebook and Twitter. The chatbots are the next phase in a familiar playbook.

You’ve seen this before… over and over and over

Back during the 1992 campaign, Republican Party chair Rich Bond explained to the Washington Post why the right complained so relentlessly about the “liberal media,” and his answer was disarmingly honest: it’s the same thing coaches do to officials, where “what they try to do is ‘work the refs’” in hopes of friendlier calls later. Complain loudly enough, long enough, and the calls start going your way.

The social media sequel ran for most of a decade, which I wrote about back at Media Matters in 2020. Years of shadowban panic and congressional hearings about Silicon Valley silencing conservatives, all of it building to Trump signing an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship” in May 2020, days after Twitter had the nerve to fact-check his mail-in ballot lies. Tucked inside that order was a legal theory worth remembering: if a platform moderates content in ways that contradict what it promises the public, the FTC could treat that as an “unfair or deceptive” business practice.

None of this ever required the underlying claim to be true. When NYU’s Stern Center went looking for evidence in 2021, it concluded that the anti-conservative censorship charge was “itself a form of disinformation,” and that the platforms’ algorithms often handed right-wing content extra reach. Didn’t matter. In 2025, Meta killed its US fact-checking program anyway, with Zuckerberg echoing the censorship complaints himself and shipping his moderation team off to Texas to reassure people worried about its bias.

And the AI version of the surrender was already underway before most people noticed there was a fight. When Meta released Llama 4 in April 2025, the announcement claimed the big AI models all lean left and bragged that the new model’s tilt was “comparable to Grok”, Elon Musk’s chatbot. I wrote about it at the time. A tech giant advertising that its AI now leans like Musk’s is what winning this play looks like.

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In steps the government

A year ago this month, Trump signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which bars federal agencies from buying AI models that fail the administration’s test for “ideological neutrality.” The president explained at the signing: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.”

That same month, then-Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sent formal demand letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta because their chatbots, asked to rank recent presidents on antisemitism, had put Trump last. His theory was that an AI giving unflattering answers about the president might amount to consumer fraud under Missouri law.

The escalation from there moved fast. It’s like I recently wrote: consumer-outrage campaigns picking up state muscle. In December, Trump signed a second executive order creating a Justice Department task force with one job: suing states over their AI laws. The order also held tens of billions of dollars in broadband money over the heads of states that regulate AI, and it directed the FTC to explain when state AI laws amount to forcing companies to deceive their customers.

And when xAI sued Colorado over its AI anti-discrimination law this spring, the Justice Department intervened on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has gone to court to kill a state AI law. Colorado didn’t wait around to lose. In May, its legislature gutted the law on its own, swapping the discrimination protections for disclosure requirements.

The FTC’s proposed policy statement from this month runs on the legal theory from the 2020 Twitter order: AI companies market their products as accurate, so steering outputs in ways users wouldn’t expect can be deception under federal law. Chair Andrew Ferguson is inviting the public to tell him about “the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends.”

The lawyers, for what it’s worth, doubt much of this survives contact with a courtroom. TechFreedom’s Andy Jung walked through why the preemption theory fails, concluding that “a policy statement simply will not suffice.” And when Judge Rita Lin got a look at the administration’s treatment of Anthropic, she called it “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation”, though the administration and Anthropic would later come to an agreement.

But the weapon was never really built for a courtroom. The Brennan Center called this last August when the woke AI order dropped: a standard that vague works as a standing threat, and companies over-comply rather than find out what it means. Which, to no one’s surprise, is exactly what’s been happening.

And if you want proof the administration was never actually worried about chatbots picking sides, you only need to read the FTC’s own footnotes.

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The conceit is that Trump, bragging in the first person, wants you to understand there will be no getting away from him. Not during your morning coffee, not while you stare at a sunset. “I am inescapable,” the fake Trump gloats, before running through the aspects of American life he’s already wrecked and promising to get around to the rest. The piece closes with a list of everything he might poison that particular week: the World Series, Halloween, rollercoasters, Christmas trees, birthday cake, the new iPhone. You get the idea.

The article gets passed around again every few months because it keeps being right. But I think the joke has aged in a way that nobody at The Onion could have predicted, and “satire became reality” doesn’t quite cover what happened to it.

Here’s what I mean.

He spent this past week inserting himself into the men’s World Cup, of all things. An American player got suspended over a red card, the White House decided that wouldn’t do, and after days of pressure, FIFA let him play. Half the soccer world is still furious about it.

A red card. At the World Cup. The machinery of the United States government cranked up because a soccer player was told to sit out one game.

The 2017 version of this bit was about our attention. The Onion’s Trump ruined the World Series by showing up in your head while you tried to watch it. He was an intrusive thought, a name you couldn’t stop hearing. Today’s version involves him actually inserting himself into stories. He calls the president of FIFA to strongarm the organization for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s benefit. He hosts the Kennedy Center Honors. He headlines the country’s birthday party. He puts his face on the money and his name on your kid’s savings account.

Trying to tune him out was a you problem in 2017. In 2026, he really is inescapable.

So. About that red card.

“I didn’t know what the hell a red card was”

Last Wednesday night, during the 2-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina that pushed the US men’s national team into the knockout round, striker Folarin Balogun got tangled up with a defender while chasing a ball and came down on the back of the guy’s leg. The referee saw it happen and let play continue. Then the video review officials stepped in, the referee got sent to a monitor to watch the collision again in slow motion, and out came a red card. FIFA’s rulebook is blunt on this point: a red card brings an automatic one-game suspension. Balogun, the team’s leading scorer, would sit out the round of 16 against Belgium. It was a huge blow to Team USA’s chances in the tournament.

That wouldn’t last.

Andrew Giuliani (yes, Rudy’s son, and yes, he runs the White House’s World Cup task force) told ESPN that conversations about rescuing Balogun’s eligibility started immediately after the ejection. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who’d watched the game from a seat next to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, got on the phone that night to find out what could be done. A senior US official told the AP that the debate over the card ate up the entire flight from Santa Clara back to Washington. And NBC News reported that the days after that were spent in strategy sessions about how the federal government could help U.S. Soccer’s lawyers put together their argument.

On Thursday, Trump called Infantino personally. Back in December, FIFA handed Trump its inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” at the World Cup draw, a ceremony held at the Kennedy Center (more on that building in a bit), and Infantino gave him $15,000 worth of tickets, part of the nearly $120,000 in free sports tickets from executives, owners, and allies that showed up on Trump’s most recent financial disclosure. After news of the call broke, Infantino put out a statement confirming it, noting that he hears from heads of state all the time, and insisting the case sat with FIFA’s independent judicial bodies. Sure, sure, sure.

On Sunday, those independent judicial bodies set the suspension aside, citing a provision that lets FIFA’s disciplinary committee pause a punishment and put a player on probation instead.

The rest of the soccer world reacted about how you’d expect. UEFA, Europe’s governing body, expressed its disbelief at a decision it called “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable” and warned that a competition loses its credibility when the people guarding the rules stop enforcing them. Belgium’s federation said it was astonished, demanded to see the reasoning, and had its appeal tossed on the grounds that it had no standing to file one. Belgium’s coach, Rudi Garcia, told reporters he’d learned that at this World Cup, “the 5th of July is actually the first of April. It’s April Fools.” Wayne Rooney went on the BBC and called the whole thing a disgrace that Infantino ought to be ashamed of. And Herculez Gomez, the former USMNT player turned ESPN analyst, said what everybody watching already suspected: “It feels like the host nation is gaining a favor here.”

Trump spent Monday explaining himself, sort of. He’d asked Infantino for a review, he told reporters, because he’d watched the play and decided no foul had occurred, and he admitted he had no idea what a red card even was until someone explained the suspension that came with it. He described the play as “two great athletes that crashed into each other.” He insisted, repeatedly, that he never told Infantino what to do and that a committee made the call. And then he pronounced the referee “a little bit suspect” and encouraged the assembled press to go dig through the man’s record.

Nobody has produced evidence that Trump’s call is what flipped FIFA’s decision, and to be clear, I’m not claiming it did. But oh boy, this sure is a great example of him inserting himself into the story.

And then the US lost to Belgium 4-1 and crashed out of its own World Cup.

All of it for nothing.

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He found a way to ruin the Knicks, too

The World Cup episode stands out because he changed the conditions of the competition itself. Most of the time, showing up is enough.

On June 8, Trump accepted an invitation from James Dolan, his longtime friend and the owner of the Knicks, and went to Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. No sitting president had ever attended an NBA Finals game. And the Knicks hadn’t hosted one in 27 years, so that night should’ve belonged to the most famously starved fan base in basketball. Instead, the neighborhood got a 12-block security perimeter staffed by hundreds of NYPD officers. It shut out anyone without a ticket, killed the street watch parties that had formed outside the Garden for Games 1 and 2, and left the vendors selling Knicks gear on the sidewalk wondering where everyone went.

Inside, Trump watched from a suite fitted with bulletproof glass, next to Dolan. When his face appeared on the big screens during the anthem and stayed up for close to eight seconds, the crowd booed him so hard that the reception for the visiting Spurs sounded warm by comparison. Asked about it afterward, he told reporters: “It was, I think, mostly cheers.” Sure, sure.

The Knicks lost, by the way. They hadn’t lost a game in 46 days.

Before Game 4, fans gathered outside the Garden to burn sage, hoping to clear out whatever he’d left behind. One of them walked Variety through the evidence: he picked the Chiefs to win, and they lost. He went to a Mets game, and they lost. He came to the Garden, and the Knicks lost. “He’s a curse to every team that he picks.” The Onion’s Trump bragged about finding a way to ruin Twix bars. The real one has New Yorkers performing smoke rituals outside a basketball arena.

And the Garden was one stop on a tour. In his first eight months back in office, he hit the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, UFC cards in Miami and Newark, the NCAA wrestling championships, the Club World Cup final, and the US Open men’s final, getting booed at the last two. Every one of these visits works the same way. The streets close, the perimeter goes up, the anthem plays, the cameras find him, and whatever you actually came to watch runs second.

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The party, the buildings, the money, the babies

Sports are the small version of this. The country’s actual birthday got the full treatment.

Trump billed his Fourth of July speech on the National Mall, the centerpiece of America’s 250th anniversary, as a “TRUMP RALLY”, and he delivered one, pushing his election overhaul bill and warning that communists were on the march. Congress created a nonpartisan commission back in 2016 to plan the semiquincentennial; his Freedom 250 operation largely shoved that body aside and fenced off much of the Mall. And when the musical acts booked for Freedom 250’s kickoff event backed out en masse rather than be associated with him, he fixed it by announcing he’d headline the thing himself. The entertainment canceled, so he became the entertainment.

And the Kennedy Center, where FIFA staged its Peace Prize ceremony? Trump fired its trustees in 2025, and the replacements he picked elected him chairman and voted his name onto the building, a renaming a federal judge has since ruled illegal. He hosted the Kennedy Center Honors in December, drawing the lowest TV ratings in the show’s history, while ticket sales fell and performers kept canceling.

The physical city is getting the same treatment. He tore down the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom, his name or image has gone up on the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Justice Department’s headquarters, and he’s pushing a triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. On the Fourth itself, his Domestic Policy Council released a report declaring that the people who run the Smithsonian “can’t be trusted”.

Then there’s the money. Treasury drafted a $1 anniversary coin with Trump’s profile on the front and, on the back, Trump raising his fist over the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT”. Federal law bars living presidents from US currency, a practice that exists, per the San Francisco Fed, to keep the country from resembling a monarchy. Nine Democratic senators have urged Treasury to reject it, warning against the appearance of a “cult of personality.” But in March, the federal arts commission he stacked with his own appointees approved a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing his image, with the Treasury secretary using his authority over gold coinage to route around that law. The commission was told the president had personally selected the design.

And then there are the babies. This week, the White House held an event promoting newborn savings accounts that are called, officially, Trump Accounts. They launched over the holiday weekend, timed to the 250th, with a $1,000 government contribution for eligible babies born during his term. He rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange to promote them Monday morning. The Onion’s list of things he might taint topped out at Christmas trees and birthday cake. Reality reached the maternity ward and beyond.

People have noticed. There’s data. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans think the 250th anniversary events have become too political, including three-quarters of Democrats and half of Republicans. And the Reuters Institute’s global survey found that 40% of people now say they sometimes or often avoid the news, tied for the highest share ever recorded. In 2017, the year The Onion ran its piece, it was 29%. Record numbers of people are trying to look away. The trouble is where they look: the game, the holiday, the arena, their kid’s bank account. He is everywhere.

On July 19, somebody is going to win the World Cup. The final is at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and whichever team survives to reach it, its captain will climb the podium at the end of the night to lift the most famous trophy in sports. Trump plans to be up there too. Infantino confirmed it last month: the two of them will watch the final side by side and be “handing the trophy to the winner – of course, together.” He ran the dress rehearsal last summer, awkwardly planting himself in the middle of Chelsea’s celebration at the Club World Cup final and staying put while the players hoisted the trophy around him.

It’s going to be a long… [checks calendar]… two and a half years more of this.

“New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool. Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can. Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings, dimming/turning off our lights during peak electricity demand, asking private partners to do the same, and powering down non-essential equipment. A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved. Let’s ease demand — and get through the heat — together.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A request. “The City is asking every business and every New Yorker to do their part,” is how the mayor’s press office put it to Newsweek. Asking. Con Edison, the utility company, made the same plea to its customers. There’s no mandate here, no fine, no inspector coming to look at your thermostat. You can read that post, mutter “absolutely not,” crank your AC to 65, and nothing will happen to you.

You wouldn’t know any of that from the reaction on the right.

“78 degrees??? Welcome to communism people! Hope you enjoy!” wrote Barstool’s Dave Portnoy. Sen. Rand Paul declared the post “Proof that communism is (unfortunately) alive and well,” while Sen. Lindsey Graham warned, “This is the future that WOKE Democrats want not just for NYC but for South Carolina too!” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went with “Is this what was meant by the warmth of collectivism?” (all three via The Hill). The post has been viewed more than 58.4 million times as of this writing, and seemingly every Republican with a working phone showed up to explain that a suggestion about air conditioning is what the breadlines were like.

Full disclosure: my thermostat is not set to 78. If I lived in New York, I’d probably read the mayor’s post, feel vaguely guilty for a minute, and go right on ignoring it. (I like being cold in the summer. Sue me.) But whether the request is annoying has nothing to do with whether it’s authoritarian. It’s a suggestion. A suggestion is the thing you’re allowed to ignore. That’s the entire concept.

And that’s what makes this freakout so exhausting: they know. Of course they know. The federal government’s own energy guidance recommended this exact thermostat range until, oh, roughly yesterday (more on that later). Their own states make the same request, during every heat wave, year after year. Nobody quoted above is confused about what a voluntary conservation notice is. They’re doing a bit. And we’re all expected to sit through the bit every single time a Democrat suggests anything, delivered by people who treat playing dumb like a full-time job with a quota to hit.

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Their own states say the same thing

Start close to home. In July 2025, with a heat advisory in effect, then-Mayor Eric Adams told New Yorkers to set their air conditioners to, you guessed it, 78 degrees. City Hall says the practice goes back a lot further than that. A Mamdani spokesperson told TMZ the city was following utility recommendations that had been “implemented under previous Mayors, including Adams, De Blasio, Bloomberg, and Giuliani”.

Then there’s the federal government. Like I said, until this week, the Department of Energy’s home cooling guidance told Americans to “Start with an indoor temperature between 75-78°F during the day.” The standing recommendation of a federal agency that answers to Donald Trump sat right there on a government website while the president’s allies spent two days calling the same number communism. Apparently, the page was deleted some time after Bulwark reporter Sam Stein posted about the Trump government’s guidance being the same as the NYC guidance being torn to shreds by the right on Thursday morning.

And then there’s Texas. ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, asked Texans to raise their thermostats to 78 over and over through the brutal summer of 2022, and raising your thermostat during peak demand remains standing guidance on ERCOT’s website today. Back in 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott personally appealed to Texans to “set air conditioning thermostats to 78 degrees or higher.”

Which brings us to Ted Cruz, who fired off “In a first-world country, you could turn on the A/C.” This is the senator from the state whose grid failed so completely in February 2021 that Texans froze to death waiting for the power to come back, and whose grid operator has spent every summer since asking residents to do precisely what Mamdani asked. Cruz’s post promptly got hit with a community note laying all of this out.

It changed nothing. It never does.

DeSantis’s “warmth of collectivism” quip ran into the same problem: the Florida Public Service Commission, whose members he hand-picked, issued the identical 78-degree recommendation as recently as June. Of this year. The one we’re currently in.

And the number itself? The 78-degree standard traces back to Jimmy Carter, who ordered federal buildings kept at 78 in the summer during the 1979 energy crisis, and utilities have pushed it for decades for the deeply boring reason that every degree above 78 shaves roughly 2 percent off cooling costs. It’s the HVAC equivalent of “drink more water.”

They run this exact play over and over

The thermostat freakout isn’t even original. We’ve sat through this routine before, and it’s worth remembering how it goes.

In April 2021, Joe Biden announced a target of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030. There was nothing in his speeches or his policy papers about anyone’s diet. The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, filled in the blank itself, publishing a piece speculating that the plan “could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH” based on a 2020 University of Michigan study that had no connection to Biden1 or his plan whatsoever. Fox News converted the tabloid’s guesswork into an on-screen graphic presenting “cut 90% of red meat from diet” and “max 4 lbs per year” as “Biden’s climate requirements”, and from there it went straight into the mouths of elected officials. “Joe Biden’s climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030,” tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert. “They want to limit us to about four pounds a year. Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?”

And here’s Abbott, right on schedule. The governor of Texas tweeted out the fake Fox graphic with the caption “Not gonna happen in Texas!” Greg Abbott, 2021: outraged over a meat restriction that did not exist. Greg Abbott, 2015: personally asking Texans to turn their thermostats up to 78. The same man, working both sides of the same con, six years apart. Fox eventually walked the whole thing back, with anchor John Roberts acknowledging on air that a graphic and script “incorrectly implied” the study was part of Biden’s plan (”That is not the case”). By then the story had done its job.

The 2023 gas stove panic ran a slightly different version. This was slighly more justified… at first. A Consumer Product Safety Commission member, Richard Trumka Jr., really did call gas stoves “a hidden hazard” and really did tell Bloomberg that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” A real quote, from a real official, and if the outrage had ended when the facts came in, fair enough. It didn’t! Big surprise. Trumka clarified within days that “CPSC isn’t coming for anyone’s gas stoves,” and the commission’s chair stated flatly: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Two days after that clarification, Rep. Ronny Jackson was fundraising off “Biden and Democrats want to BAN gas stoves in EVERY home! INCLUDING YOURS!” A year and a half later, with no ban, no proposed ban, no regulatory action of any kind, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was still describing the episode as “a backdoor attempt to advance the current administration’s radical green agenda.” The facts had been settled for eighteen months. The show stayed on the road anyway.

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And you remember the pandemic. Every ask, no matter how mild or voluntary or obviously sensible, went through the same machine: a recommendation became a mandate became tyranny became a whole personality. The people loudly refusing understood exactly what “recommended” meant. Refusing was the point.

Which is why the replies to Mamdani were so predictable. “As a New Yorker I’ll be setting my AC to 62 degrees for the foreseeable future as a direct retaliation to your authority,” wrote one reply guy, apparently prepared to detonate his own Con Ed bill to own the mayor. Normally, that kind of oppositional defiance nonsense is just sad. This week it might have stakes. The premise of the request is that the grid is strained, and that’s not hypothetical: New York’s grid operator issued an early energy warning Thursday over declining operating reserves. If enough people crank their ACs as a political statement and the grid buckles, the air conditioning could go off for everybody, in 100-degree heat, and people could die. Will the health of the grid hinge on whether or not people who see the mayor’s post set their thermostats at 78 degrees? Probably not. But hey, it doesn’t hurt for the government to ask, as part of a larger strategy for handling the heatwave. It’s fine. Just ignore it if that’s what you want to do. That was the entire content of the mayor’s post. They’re all pretending not to understand it.

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There are real criticisms. Make them.

And the truly maddening part of all this is that none of it was necessary, because Mamdani isn’t above criticism. No politician is, and this one happens to be attempting some of the most ambitious and most contested municipal policy in the country.

If you want to come after the mayor over this week specifically, there’s material. Start with the grid. The premise of the whole request is that New York’s power system gets shaky when every air conditioner in the city runs at once. Okay: why? Why does the largest city in the wealthiest country on Earth have a grid that needs coaxing through a predictable summer? What’s the plan to fix it, on what timeline, at what cost? Those are real questions, a serious opposition would be asking them loudly, and I’d honestly like to hear the answers myself.

Or push on fairness. Asking people in sweltering walkups to conserve while Midtown blazes all night and Taylor Swift holds her wedding at Madison Square Garden is a genuinely uncomfortable look, and plenty of New Yorkers said exactly that. The city has an answer: Con Edison says the Times Square billboards run on separate distribution networks, so darkening them wouldn’t free up power anywhere else, and the Times Square Alliance asked screen operators to dim their displays anyway. Maybe that answer holds up. Maybe it doesn’t! A critic’s job would be to stress-test it instead of tweeting through the feeling.

Nobody did that. Not one of the senators or governors quoted at the top of this piece asked a single question about grid capacity, energy policy, or who carries the burden of conservation. They do not actually care about any of this, just like they didn’t care about Peanut the Squirrel when the right rallied around its owner in 2024. They just want material to attack their political opponents with.

Do we really have to do this with every single thing? You have actual disagreements with this mayor. Some of them are even interesting! His agenda (rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, fare-free buses) is full of substantive debates, with tradeoffs serious people can argue about in good faith. Yelling about a thermostat suggestion your own states make every summer contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone doing it knows that. It’s intellectually bankrupt work: performing confusion for an audience you’ve decided is too dumb to check.

The vote was 6 to 3, sort of. Six justices decided the bans don’t violate the Constitution. But on the separate question of whether they violate Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination in schools, all nine agreed the answer was no. Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, and the takeaway is that a state can decide who gets to play on a girls’ team based on what he called “biological sex.”

Then there’s the part where you can hear them straining to sound kind about it. Kavanaugh closed by assuring trans kids that their “desire to compete warrants respect” and that none of them should be “ostracized or vilified.” Clarence Thomas, in a concurrence, skipped the bedside manner. Trans girls, he wrote, “are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.”

The West Virginia half of the case was about a girl named Becky Pepper-Jackson. She’s 16. She throws shot put and discus, she’s been on puberty blockers and estrogen since before her teens, and she never went through the testosterone-driven puberty these laws claim to be built around. She’s also, as best anyone’s been able to determine, the only person West Virginia’s ban has ever applied to.

The ruling clears the way for laws like the one aimed at her, already on the books in 29 states.

You already know how this gets covered: as a sports story. Kavanaugh the girls’ basketball coach, sounding a little sorry. A respectful nod to how decent people can disagree. A debate about fairness and biology, pre-booked for the Sunday panels.

I’ve written about trans athletes for more than a decade, and I’ll say up front that the sports question has some real complications (more on that shortly). But the people who spent years drafting these bills have said, out loud and in print, that they picked sports and kids because it was the easiest place to begin, and that they mean to go a great deal further.

So while everyone else argues about the shot put, I want to talk to a different group. For years, a certain kind of person has told me, and told themselves, that they aren’t “anti-trans.” They just have some “reasonable concerns.” Concerns about sports. Concerns about teenagers and medicine. And plenty of them treated those concerns as a reason to stay quiet while the restrictions piled up, on the assumption that this would all stop somewhere sensible.

This ruling is where that assumption comes due. The people who kept warning where this was going got called hysterical for it. And I’d like to know, from everyone who promised me their concerns were reasonable, whether they ever intend to say enough is enough, or whether the people they dismissed have been right the whole time.

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Where I land on the sports question

Before I get to those people, I owe the sports question an honest answer of my own, because I’ve never been able to pretend it’s simple. So here’s the version that doesn’t fit on a chyron. Does a trans girl have some physical advantage over the other girls on the team? Sometimes. It depends on the sport, on whether she went through puberty on testosterone or blocked it early, on how long she’s been on estrogen, on a dozen things that vary from one kid to the next. At the top levels of competition, that’s a real conversation, and the bodies that run elite sports, the NCAA and the IOC and the rest, are a legitimate place to have it. I’ve said as much for years. And for what it’s worth, I think both of them folded to political pressure when they moved to shut trans women out, because nothing on the field had changed to make them. But that’s between me and the people who run sports.

This case was never about that.

By the time it got to the Supreme Court, the result was close to a formality. A year ago, in Skrmetti, the same six justices ruled that laws restricting this kind of care for trans kids only have to clear the lowest bar the law sets, the one almost nothing fails. Once that was the standard, a sports case built on the same constitutional claim was going to fall the same way. The Title IX claim was weak enough that even the court’s liberals rejected it. The court is hostile, sure. But this one was weak on its own terms, and it would have been a heavy lift in front of almost any bench. I’m not going to pretend a friendlier court would have saved it.

I can lose that argument and still tell you, flatly, that the court got it wrong. Both things are true at the same time. West Virginia passed a law that has only ever applied to one girl, and yesterday the court told the state it can keep her out. I think that’s sad, and I feel back for Becky.

The parts of this that can still be won are worth fighting for. The states that let trans kids play should keep letting them. The legislatures that protect those kids should hold the line. And when Congress tries to turn yesterday’s ruling into a national ban, which it already started with the Protect Women and Girls Act, that’s a fight worth having as loudly as we can have it.

Terry Schilling told you the plan

Terry Schilling runs the American Principles Project, one of the outfits that spent years writing and bankrolling bills like the ones the court just upheld. In early 2023, he told the New York Times what the group was really after. Its goal, he confirmed, was to do away with transition care entirely, for adults as much as for kids. Starting with kids was just, in his words, “going where the consensus is.”

He wasn’t being coy about the rest of it. That same year, lawmakers in Oklahoma and South Carolina were pushing bills to criminalize transition care for anyone under 26, felony charges included. Others, in those two states and in Kansas and Mississippi, would have drawn the line at 21. A 25-year-old isn’t a kid. Neither is a 21-year-old. The movement that swore it only wanted to protect kids was already writing adults into the bills, in 2023, where anyone reading the Times could see it.

Now here’s Schilling yesterday, in a statement his group put out to celebrate the ruling. He called it a “landmark victory for fairness and sanity.” He said girls deserve spaces “free from biological men who seek to invade them.”

The “biological man” in this case is a 16-year-old girl who throws discus.

So the same ruling that assured trans kids their “desire to compete warrants respect” is being cheered by the man who calls one of those kids an invader, whose stated goal is to end transition care for every trans person in the country, and who said so in the New York Times three years ago. Anyone who told you this was only ever about a fair race either wasn’t paying attention or was lying to you.

About those reasonable concerns

So let’s say you meant it. Your worry really was just about a fair race, or just about kids and hormones, and nothing past that. Fine. Here’s some of what’s happened while you were thinking it over.

Start with the care, since that’s supposedly where the line sat. The federal government stopped covering hormones and transition surgery for its own employees this year, at any age. It’s proposed a rule that would pull Medicare and Medicaid from any hospital that provides that care to a patient under 18, which would drive it out of most hospitals in the country. And in March, a federal appeals court let West Virginia drop transition care for adults from its Medicaid program, on the theory that it would, in the court’s words, “encourage citizens to appreciate their sex.”

Then there’s whether the government will admit you’re who you say you are. On his first day back, Trump signed an executive order defining sex as fixed at conception and ordering every federal agency to swap the word gender for the word sex. New passports now carry the sex you were assigned at birth, a policy the Supreme Court let take effect in November. The Social Security Administration stopped processing gender-marker changes. Kansas told residents it had flagged as trans that their driver’s licenses would stop being valid the next morning, no grace period.

That last part isn’t abstract for me. A license or a passport with the wrong letter on it doesn’t stay in a drawer. It comes out whenever a bouncer or a pharmacist or a TSA agent asks for ID, and I don’t go around telling strangers I’m trans. These policies do it for me, in front of whoever’s next in line, and then I get to learn in real time how that person takes the news.

It keeps going from there. Trans people in federal prison are now put through a program borrowed from Florida: hair cut short, hormones stopped, psychiatric sessions meant to talk them out of being trans. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi has told the FBI to pay for tips that lead to arresting trans activists she’s branded domestic terrorists, and the White House’s counterterrorism strategy now lists “radically pro-transgender” groups next to the cartels and terrorists it exists to stop. In the schools, the Justice Department has been demanding that districts hand over files on their trans students.

None of this is about a track meet. I could keep listing, because the real tally runs a lot longer than what fits here. But every item on it has the same hole in the middle that the sports ban does. Nobody who wrote these rules has ever answered the one question you’d ask about any new restriction before you agreed to it. What’s the problem it solves?

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Nobody’s making you say anything

That question never gets answered, and to see why, go back to what the reasonable-concerns crowd said it feared in the first place.

The fears were about words. Being forced to say “trans women are women.” Being made to say “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” or to watch the word “woman” get retired from official forms. None of that happened. And the part that should have been obvious from the start is that none of it could. There’s no law that can put words in your mouth and make you say a slogan. Nobody had that power over you, and nobody was trying to get it.

You already saw what this administration did to the word “gender.” It went into the federal code, struck it out everywhere, and put the word sex in its place (and as yesterday’s SCOTUS decision tells us, they view “sex” as whatever you were born as), effectively boxing trans people out of any legal protections at all. So if the thing that worried you was somebody with real power reaching into the language and deciding which words are allowed, your instinct wasn’t wrong. You just had the wrong culprit.

There’s an asymmetry underneath all of this, and it frustrates me. I can think of plenty of changes I’d like to see in trans people’s favor beyond just undoing the attacks against trans people that have taken place since Trump retook office. If I wanted them, the work of making the case would be mine. I’d have to show why the current rule is unfair, make the argument for a better one, and expect a real fight along the way. That’s what it’s supposed to cost to change the rules on people, and I’d consider it fair.

The other side never pays it. They never had to show that trans women were wrecking women’s sports. They never had to show that Becky’s medicine had hurt a single person, or that the letter on my license put anyone in danger. They just said the word “protect” and pointed at us.

And the press treats that as an argument. It runs the restriction as news, quotes the sponsor calling us a threat, books the segment, and never once asks him to name a person we’ve endangered. The bar for taking something from us turns out to be lower than the bar I’d face for asking to keep it.

That machine only runs because enough people who think of themselves as reasonable decided that staying quiet kept their hands clean. It didn’t.

So where are you?

I’m talking to you now. You spent the last few years telling everyone you weren’t against trans people, that you just had questions.

You were allowed the questions. Everybody had questions once. But it isn’t 2021 anymore, and the questions have answers, and the answers are sitting in a Supreme Court opinion and a stack of federal rules and a press release from a man who told the New York Times his goal was to get rid of us. This is a project with an endpoint, and the endpoint is a country where being openly trans gets harder every month, on purpose, until it isn’t possible at all.

So I want to know what you’re going to do about it. Whether you’ll say, out loud, that this has gone too far, the way you were so sure you would if it ever did. Will you use your platforms at big, mainstream news outlets, the same ones you used to help spark the moral panic about trans youth medicine and sports, to make a compassionate argument in favor of trans people and against the ongoing persecution?

Because the people you called alarmists have been right about every step of this, and most of you have met the moment they were proven right with silence.

I’d love to be wrong about you. I’d love for this to be the paragraph that ages badly, the one where I misjudged a lot of decent people who were about to find their voice. So prove me wrong. Say something now, while it’s still moving, while it still matters.

Buster Posey, the former Giants catcher who now runs their baseball operations, started with a short statement. He understood there were “strong feelings on this topic.” He understood there were “differing perspectives.” And out of respect to everybody involved, he said, this was “not something that I’m going to revisit.” Then he opened the floor. Baseball questions only.

Reporters had other ideas.

What followed went about how you’d expect from a man who’d decided ahead of time that the only safe subject was the infield. Someone asked about Pride Night. “I’ll answer baseball questions.” Someone asked again, coming at it from a different direction. “I’ll answer baseball questions.” One reporter asked him, flat out, why he’d take nothing but baseball questions when “there’s some very important matters that the public is debating outside this organization.” “I’m gonna answer baseball questions.”

He said some version of it around eight times. The reporters were probably aware that they weren’t going to break them, but I want to give them credit for trying and for being relentless about it.

My friend Darth put it on Bluesky better than I’m going to: “buster getting tougher questions from the local media than trump gets from the white house press corps.”

He’s right. And the more I think about it, the more that’s the actual story, not the caps. (Or, at least, it’s one of the stories.)

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