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FULL DISCLOSURE: I was kind of nervous to see Matt Johnson’s biopic about Anthony Bourdain, Tony, because I’ve always found something mildly repellent about the cult of Bourdain.

Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy and, on some level, admire the writer-turned-chef-turned-writer. Kitchen Confidential is one of the great popular memoirs of the last twenty-five years and you can feel its influence all over media, while his fiction has a rough-hewn-but-real quality to it. (I particularly enjoyed The Bobby Gold Stories: A Novel.) But I never cared for the travelogue chef identity he picked up when his reality shows took off. And the overstated admiration of his globe-hopping and “bold” “truth-telling” always felt like the college-educated himbo equivalent of “live, laugh, love.” (This is best exemplified by the fake quote often attributed to Bourdain highlighted at the top of a recent New York Times profile on the author-chef’s prolific afterlife.)

Then there’s the biopic as a form, a genre whose conventions are so calcified they remain completely impervious to parody. A novice learns the ways of the world, overindulges, and learns the importance of hard work and humility: These are the beats we expect, these are the motions we crave to go through.

However, I had faith in Johnson, whose BlackBerry was one of the best films of 2023 and whose Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie unexpectedly knocked my socks off earlier this year. Plus, Bourdain himself is an interesting enough guy to escape the gravity of the cult that has swallowed him. And I’m happy to report that this faith was repaid: Tony may be a pretty standard biopic, yes, but it’s one that’s crafted at the highest level and pierces some of the gauzier images of the patron saint of fine dining. At its heart, Tony is a movie about what it means to be Good.

Capital-g Good, like, the recipient of grace and providence Good. The movie is not particularly subtle about this, as Tony (Dominic Sessa) attempts to flirt with a girl headed to Provincetown for the summer by asking if she knows whence the word providence derives. It’s a recurring question, this idea of providence and its origin; by the end of the film, she has an answer for him. Providence is “the protective attention of God,” Nancy (Emilia Jones) says, and it’s clear that Tony has received some of that attention despite deserving none of it.

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He’s a liar, attempting to bluff his way through the summer after failing to obtain a fellowship from Vassar, where he’s going to school, to write a novel. That failure is richly deserved: When meeting with the fellowship committee, he offers up a half-conceived idea of an idea, a “buildings Roman” (sic) in the vein of Kerouac, an effort to become the voice of his generation. He thinks he’s fooled these stodgy professors; they quite obviously see through him, just as we do. Just as his mother does. And that’s why he resents his mother, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk), why he flees from her house to Provincetown in search of Nancy when he learns he didn’t get the fellowship, just as we knew he wouldn’t get it.

Tony quickly crashes out in Provincetown, getting hammered in a restaurant before being tossed on his ass by its owner, “Chef” (Antonio Banderas), and his oyster-shucking tough, Sal (Leo Woodall). As Chef is throwing him out, he says something interesting to Tony—that he’ll work on him later—and work on him he does. Here’s where the road to grace begins: Tony learns the importance of hard work, and that he can’t fake his way through life. Chef takes him to church, shuts down Tony’s and coworker Stavros’s (Stavros Halkias) blasphemy. When Sal introduces Tony to cocaine, he grimaces but does not speak up; this is a lesson the boy must learn on his own. And when Sal goes too far and must leave the restaurant’s employ, Chef says, sadly, “But I like you. You’re the sin eater.”

I could go on—every morning, Chef baptizes Tony with water from the ocean to wake him up; at one point, Tony is splayed out on the sidewalk, arms to the side, one foot on top of the other, looking very much like, well—but hopefully you take my point: This is very much a story of redemption, in the sense of deliverance from sin. Tony’s original sin is his lie. His lies. His constant lying. It isn’t until the film’s end, when he can finally speak the truth about himself, that he can begin his ascent.

Even though I am not, as I wrote, a fan of the Cult of Bourdain, this is a film that very much positions him as a religious figure, an icon of our age. It is, also, at least in part about how great art comes from living life rather than simply experiencing other artists’ work. The pitch he delivers at the beginning of the film about his ridiculous idea for a novel is wan, weak. Tony shows how the life Bourdain lived inexorably led to Kitchen Confidential and the rest of his written output. A college kid’s meditation on life through the lens of Kerouac and Salinger is worse than useless: It’s pointless. Kitchen Confidential changed the world. There’s a lesson here.

Between this and The Holdovers, Sessa is really cornering the market on “young, gawky punks who need to learn they’re not quite as smart as they think.” But Banderas and Woodall are the standouts here. Banderas was one of the more underappreciated action stars of the 1990s/2000s—the manic twitchiness in his collaborations with Robert Rodriguez remains great fun to watch today—and he brings a quieter version of that energy to this role. Woodall, meanwhile, has a perfectly calibrated brutish intensity for the sin-eating line cook. It’s a good follow-up to the fantastic work he did in Tuner earlier this year.

ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I talked to Alex Ullom, the writer/director of It Ends. The story of this film’s production and release is really fascinating and just goes to show how film distribution is changing: this is a picture that debuted at SXSW, no one bought it, then it played on Letterboxd’s video-rental service to raves from users there, only to get picked up by Neon for national distribution. It’s in NYC and LA this weekend and expanding wider next weekend. If you’re reading this, it’ll probably be playing near you. I hope you check it out:

Memories of Miasma

THERE’S A MOMENT in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma that’s getting raves, a longish not-quite-single take in which the film’s killer—whose name is “Little Death” and who has a vent for a head and a rusty spear for a weapon—engages in a bloody rampage for our amusement set to the dulcet tones of “A Long December” by Counting Crows.

It would take too much time to explain the metatextual layers of this sequence fully; suffice to say that what we’re watching is, supposedly, a scene from a Friday the 13th-like slasher that exists within the universe of this film. Critics and audiences alike have been amused by the juxtaposition of the prancing killer and the fountains of blood and the maudlin vocal stylings of Adam Duritz. It’s a neat little scene. The only problem is that it doesn’t make sense.

I don’t mean in the grand sense that slasher movies never make sense: What, precisely, are Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers at this point, anyway—demons, immortal ghouls, what, explain it, you can’t. I mean, within the film itself, this sequence doesn’t make sense, because the point of view is all wrong. Up to this point, the film-within-a-film we’re watching is shot like a pretty standard ’80s slasher with film stock simulating a film from that era. It’s stilted and awkwardly cut. There have also been a handful of sequences from the POV of “Little Death” shot in a hazier way. But this sequence is shot like something out of the 2020s in that it’s a stitched-together single take, on a different film stock, and pointedly not from the POV of “Little Death” or any of the other characters.

It has a view from nowhere, in other words, just image vomit with an ironic musical juxtaposition. And this is the problem with the film writ large, which is that it is a riff on slasher films that tries to be parody and homage and critique and is therefore nothing. The whole movie—which is about an indie director (Hannah Einbinder) who is tasked with rebooting a moribund slasher franchise with a reclusive star (Gillian Anderson)—feels like a brain dump from writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s movie journal. Indeed, it’s practically a manifestation of young Tony Bourdain’s bullshit pitch to the stiffs at Vassar; just sub in Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th for On the Road and Catcher in the Rye. It’s a work of “art” cobbled together from component pieces of other, superior works of art. I will happily grant that the film has a neat look and some cool visual cues, but it is ultimately confused, at war with itself, warped by the very media it is trying to celebrate.

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George Conway joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod.

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show notes:

• Two of Natalie's love notes to Trump

• JVL on the 'human printer'

• Tim's interview with Julia Curlee

• Tim's interview with David Wallace-Wells

• Katie Britt's contact page for Venezuelan detainees Freddys Revilla and Edgarianny Gervis

• Tim's playlist
  

As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.

Ad-free editions of The Bulwark Daily are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Tim Miller’s Bulwark Daily is available wherever you get podcasts and on YouTube. New shows drop each weekday afternoon. If you like the show, leave a comment and ⭐⭐⭐⭐ wherever you listen. Add The Bulwark Daily to your player of choice, here.

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• Sen. Darlene Graham says that voters in South Carolina don’t care about Taiwan—they care about boys playing girls sports.

  • Spoiler: There are exactly zero (0) boys in South Carolina playing girls sports.

• Top CIA analyst Julia Curlee served Trump, Biden, and then Trump again honorably. Then she was fired because some MAGA influencers discovered she was trans.

  • What duty do civil servants owe the country which elected Trump for the second time?

• Is Jon Ossoff the one we’ve been waiting for? Sarah has him in her Big Four. And you’ll never guess who the other three are.

• People hate Data Centers. So where is the juice for Democrats?

• JVL can’t stop/won’t stop beating on tankies and greens.

• And the birth of a new feature: Pickleball talk!

We want to hear from you about any/all of this. Let’s ride.

The Secret Podcast with JVL and Sarah is exclusively for members of Bulwark+.
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Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live today at 12:30 p.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.

Leave Darline Alone

by Andrew Egger

Darline Graham’s Taiwan gaffe couldn’t have come at a worse time. The South Carolina senator—sister and successor of the late Lindsey Graham—had hoped her Tuesday debate against Rep. Ralph Norman would quiet Republican whispers that she wasn’t ready for primetime ahead of next week’s runoff. Instead, she tripped headfirst over a question about America’s posture toward Taiwan and the South China Sea, managing only to say that foreign policy isn’t her area of expertise and she supports the military.

The moment was particularly painful because Lindsey Graham was one of the Senate’s biggest Taiwan boosters and China hawks. Darline Graham’s entire case is that she’s carrying on her brother’s legacy. And yet there she was in a damage-control appearance on Sean Hannity the next night, insisting that her voters are “concerned about a lot of things other than Taiwan,” like the Save America Act and men in women’s sports.

It’s all been very embarrassing for Darline. But I keep wondering: What if she’s right?

Here are two ways of thinking about the work of being a senator. One is as an awesome responsibility: One of just a hundred members of America’s upper legislature, the Greatest Deliberative Body On Earth™, setting down laws and policy for the most powerful country in the world. If that’s the job, then it’s hard to dispute that being informed on national security and foreign policy is crucial.

The other is as a fun D.C. social club and media platform. Nothing real ever happens in the ossified, deadlocked Senate, to whose legislating and foreign-policy-setting powers President Trump has helped himself in ever greater amounts. The job of a GOP senator is to say nice things about the president, vote down Democratic efforts to rein him in, and give him whatever he asks for in a massive reconciliation bill once or twice a year. (Pretending you might occasionally do something else is an optional extracurricular.)

I would like to live in a world where every senator believes in Option A. Is that the world we live in?

Keeping China constrained in the South China Sea is a longtime U.S. policy goal. It seems important that senators should know the issue back to front, and it’s a good thing that we have such a robust class of China hawks in the Senate GOP.

What has that class of China hawks been up to lately, by the way? Because I seem to remember that, earlier this week, President Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to our Pacific China posture in one of his most insane statements in recent memory. Fuming that South Korea was not sufficiently respecting his bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and that it had not joined his war with Iran, Trump abruptly ordered longstanding joint exercises with South Korea’s military cut short—a dramatic blow to our alliance, which relies in large part on American guarantees of protection against South Korea’s lunatic nuclear neighbor. America doesn’t provide these guarantees out of the goodness of its heart. South Korea would be a crucial regional ally, providing military support and key bases, not just in the event of a future conflict against North Korea, but against China as well.

What did the Senate’s GOP China hawks make of this senseless provocation, so damaging to our regional interests? They’re harder to find than usual at the moment, since the Senate is currently on recess.

But yesterday, I reached out to eleven of them: Jim Risch, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Pete Ricketts, Dan Sullivan, Todd Young, Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, John Cornyn, and Ted Cruz. Did any of them, I wondered, have anything at all to say on the topic? Not a single one of their offices—not one—sent back a substantive reply.

The foreign policy titans of the Senate GOP have had their hands full not noticing things like this lately. They’ve sat by as Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department blows through our missile inventory pummeling a truculent Iran, despite growing concerns that this short-sighted action jeopardizes our future ability to defend Taiwan. They’ve repeatedly tied their own hands on the Iran conflict in other ways as well, shrugging at Trump’s brazen defiance of their warmaking authorities and routinely voting down War Powers resolutions that would force him to seek their permission to keep the Iran conflict going.

It’s Darline Graham’s contention that GOP voters don’t care about any of this. What they want their senators to be doing, she argues, is chasing a bunch of right-wing culture-war shibboleths: beating their heads against the wall of the DOA Save America Act, rabble-rousing about the elevenish male trans athletes a year who want to play in girls’ and women’s athletics. The Serious Men of the Senate flatter themselves that their job is more serious and important than this. But I suspect Darline might know what time it is better than they do.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Is Finally Losing Ground Among Republicans… Focus groups show they’re mad about Iran. They’re mad about grocery prices. And they’re starting to wonder what on earth the president is doing, writes SARAH LONGWELL.

• End of the Endless Summer… The Eve Babitz revival offered an intoxicating escape from our modern literary anxieties. Her final, briefly wonderful book of letters brings us back down to earth, writes HENRY BEGLER.

• The Politics of AI Are Shifting in Real Time… Mark the summer of 2026 as the moment when an unlikely supermajority of Americans came together on one issue: their opposition to data centers. DAVID WALLACE-WELLS joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.

• Trump Just Ordered the Government to Delete the Receipts… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss the Trump administration’s move to erase corporate ownership records, the latest developments in the Fauci investigation, how a bizarre election controversy in Alaska led to a DOJ investigation, and what Democrats still need to learn about persuasion in the Trump era.

• Natalie Harp Is an Intelligence Nightmare… On Bulwark Takes, MICHAEL WEISS and MARC POLYMEROPOULOS discuss the “human printer,” Trump’s “economic D-Day” against Iran, the risks of secondary sanctions and a prolonged blockade, and why Tehran may retaliate rather than simply give in.

• Life Is a Highway: The Terror of ‘It Ends’... Writer/director ALEX ULLOM joins SONNY BUNCH on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood to discuss his new existential indie horror.

Quick Hits

SPEAKING OF DRONES: Gen. Randy George was a well-respected infantry officer and something of a reformer—a rarity at the top of rigid conservative hierarchies like the U.S. military. The defining effort of his tenure as chief of staff of the Army was the Army Transformation Initiative, which sought to catch the service up to the technologies of the modern battlefield, like drones and directed-energy weapons.

Then Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired him in April, on suspicion of leaking internal disputes to the press. George’s acting successor is Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was confirmed as vice chief of staff in January after a stint as a senior military assistant to Hegseth.

LaNeve recently ordered an experimental drone unit George had pioneered shuttered, reports the Wall Street Journal. An Army spokesman told the Journal that “Ultimately, these aerial systems are enablers that support our soldiers.” Sure, fine—but how is kind of an important question, as anyone who’s been paying attention to the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Nagorno Karabakh over the past six years would realize.

The Journal reported that “The elimination of a futuristic drone battalion is part of a broader ‘back-to-basics’ approach ordered up by . . . LaNeve.” Did America’s enemies get that memo, too?

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BAIT-AND-SWITCH: If you’re an American healthcare company, you probably rely in some form or other on immigrants. If you’re an unscrupulous American healthcare company, you might lure people here with the promise of work and a better life, only to pay them poorly, and if they try to quit, threaten to charge them $10,000 or more for the privilege—oh, and maybe also call ICE.

That’s exactly what a group of nurses accused Avant Healthcare Professionals of doing in a lawsuit. At first, the firm fought the suit—but then it signed a $3 million settlement. Avant Healthcare Professionals, it turns out, is part of Jackson Healthcare, as in Rick Jackson, who just days before the settlement won the Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary.

If this news had come out before the primary, it’s hard to tell how Jackson would have fared. Maybe Republican primary voters would have punished him because his company lured people here from abroad. Or maybe they would have rewarded him because it subsequently mistreated them.

CNN has the whole story.

INVESTIGATION INCEPTION: The government is investigating the government for investigating the guy in charge of the government for crimes against the government. Did you get that? Reuters spells it out in more detail:

The U.S. Justice Department has ​requested to interview FBI officials who were involved in the 2022 search of Donald Trump’s ‌Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida as part of a wide-ranging probe examining past investigations of the president, four sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The requests came from investigators working with Joe diGenova, a Trump ally who began overseeing ​the Florida-based investigation earlier this year. The investigation has been seeking to establish that Trump was ​the victim of a criminal conspiracy against his rights.

A refresher: The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago because Trump had illegally stashed troves of extremely highly classified documents there, including some related to nuclear secrets. At various points, he discussed some of these documents with people who had no business knowing about them in places where discussions about such things had no place being held. When the government asked for the documents back, Trump went to extreme lengths to lie, hide the documents, and avoid returning them. The only reason he’s not in Florence, Colorado is because Judge Aileen Cannon’s sycophancy toward him was second only to Natalie Harp’s.

Can’t wait for the next administration, when the FBI gets to investigate Justice Department officials for investigating FBI officials for investigating Trump.

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Cheap Shots

Food for thought in these letters: Who comes off worse, the worshiper or the worshiped?

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This week’s episode is a real treat: I’m joined by Alex Ullom, the 28-year-old writer/director of It Ends, and he provided a real window into the process of getting a low-budget indie movie made. His story has everything: fundraising from professional magicians; a first cut that didn’t work at all; acceptance into SXSW followed by no offers to buy the movie; a grassroots groundswell that got it the attention of Letterboxd; and, finally, a pickup by leading indie distributor Neon for release this week.

It’s playing in Los Angeles and New York City this week before expanding wide next week, and I cannot stress this enough: if you liked Backrooms or enjoyed the existential dread of Exit 8, you have GOT to go see It Ends.

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EVE BABITZ RETURNED WHEN WE NEEDED HER MOST: in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when the pressures created by a rapidly shrinking media industry, a diminished appetite for literary fiction, and an ascendant social media panopticon made for a dismal, paranoid atmosphere in the world of letters. The most acclaimed novels of the period were chilly and self-interrogating; they made the act of writing seem like something to be vaguely ashamed of. The dominant tone in literary nonfiction was a mix of indignant hectoring and handwringing solipsism. Neuroticism and uncertainty ruled the day. Is it okay to get on an airplane in the age of climate change? Am I adequately reckoning with my privilege when I eat this Sweetgreen salad? Is it suspect to enjoy Tolstoy or Picasso or Phil Spector or any of history’s other monster-geniuses? Am I saved or damned? Am I a Good Person?

All of this was very overbearing and a real drag. So it was no wonder that, beginning in 2015 or so, there was a sudden flood of interest in Babitz, a cult Los Angeles writer of the 1970s who became a sensation after her books Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company were reissued by the New York Review Books NYRB Classics imprint.

Babitz had a moral core and an admirable sense of feminist self-respect, but if she felt anything akin to millennial neuroticism, it never came through in her prose. She is instead a voluptuous, good-natured, inviting writer of supreme insouciance and lovable glamour, dedicated to celebrating pleasure in all its forms, from sex to taquitos to a Dodgers game. Life as a big-city writer, she seemed to say, doesn’t have to be an endless climb out of a bucket full of crabs or the constant evasion of a howling mob of internet vigilantes. You could ignore all that. You could move to L.A. You could take Sunset Boulevard all the way to the beach and listen to the Byrds and carry on no-strings-attached affairs with young and beautiful scenesters. Life could look like palm trees and jasmine and courtyard apartments and feel like the first sip of the second margarita. Life could be, as the song goes, a dream.

It was an enchanting vision, and unlike many so-called lost masterpieces, the books really were that good, or at least Slow Days, Fast Company was. (Eve’s Hollywood is nearly great, Babitz’s journalism is fun, the other novels vary wildly in quality from page to page.) Slow Days, a collection of short autofictional episodes and encounters in way-out 1970s Hollywood, is one of the great books about the city—the sunset-hued heaven to Play It As It Lays’s bleak hell. It can seem slight and tossed-off at first glance. But try to write in her style—breezily vivacious with an undercurrent of melancholy, evincing a sort of Zen awareness of life’s beauty and its transitory nature—and you’ll realize how much skill it actually requires. She offers a delicately layered vision of life, full of people and places and gossip but suffused with California light and still air, as evocative in its way as David Hockney, or A Month in the Country, or Swann’s Way.

Now, marking the close of the Second Babitz Era, comes what will presumably be the last work we ever have from her: Too L.A., a collection of mostly unsent letters. Really, they are diaries in letter form, which Babitz’s biographer Lili Anolik discovered after her death in 2021. It was Anolik who first brought Babitz back into the public consciousness in a splashy 2014 Vanity Fair article, and who set down her story for posterity in her 2019 biography Hollywood’s Eve. Anolik went back to the well in her followup, Didion & Babitz, which looked at the intertwining stories of the two L.A. writers, and which was widely interpreted as an attempt to permanently knock Didion off her pedestal as First Lady of L.A. Literature and install Eve in her place.

A forgotten talent needs a champion, and Anolik’s often quite excessive praise of Babitz in these books can be forgiven as the zealotry that accompanies a noble crusade. And the prospect of reading the unfiltered thoughts of Babitz, a writer who made the social world her subject, is certainly exciting. Still, one raises a skeptical eyebrow when Anolik claims in the introduction that Too L.A. is “Eve’s second masterpiece—her first being, of course, Slow Days, Fast Company—and her most consequential work,” and goes on not only to compare it to “a West Coast, late twentieth-century A Room of One’s Own,” but to claim it is “every bit as candid, every bit as lucid, every bit as brutal, every bit as delicate as Virginia Woolf’s celebrated manifesto.”

So, is it? Uh, no. The first half of Too L.A. is, even for an avowed Babitz fan, quite boring. Janet Malcolm, one of my heroes and a great skeptic of biographers, once wrote that “books of letters move us as biographies do not,” they provide “the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience.” I’ve thought of that Malcolm quote every time I’ve purchased a book of letters with excitement, and I’ve also thought of it every time I’ve found myself halfway through one of those books and bored as hell, trying to keep track of who went where and did what and slept with whom, with only the occasional flash of literary inspiration to keep me going. Many famous names flit through Too L.A., if you’re into that sort of thing, but without much detail or reason to care. A typical passage:

Saw the Burrito Bros at [Thee] Experience Friday. Peter [Pilafian] was there with his “New Flame.” Earl was there with Mrs. Dunn1 (who looked horrified at what a toilet Thee Experience is).

I’ve been practicing on how to make the perfect omelet.

Of course, these are private letters and diaries, so one can hardly blame Babitz for not being her most interesting self on the page. And anyway, collected letters are usually meant for scholars and researchers, so some judicious skipping and skimming is to be expected. But the lack of an index with which to keep track of Eve’s many relationships and the breathless rapture of the introduction certainly lead one to think that Too L.A. is meant to be read straight through, as do Anolik’s chatty, faux-chummy footnotes. “Keep your eye on Larry Dietz,” urges one, “He’ll pop up again and again, always to Eve’s displeasure.” (This promised plot thread with Larry Dietz does not turn out to go anywhere terribly interesting.) Elsewhere, a use of the word “faggot” in a letter prompts Anolik to leap to Eve’s defense: “I feel honor bound to say that Eve is not a homophobe. . . . I think she sometimes just likes to talk hard, casual, cruel—a pose she’s trying out.” The effect is rather like having a conversation with Babitz and a mostly silent friend, who occasionally chimes in with something to the effect of Isn’t Eve awesome? Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she brilliant? After a while, it all begins to seem vapid, exhausting, shallow, pointless. After a while, one begins to get sick of the oh-so-perfect Eve.

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But—miraculously—something happens around 1972, when Babitz really begins to take writing seriously. The letters suddenly take wing, away from the quotidian and into the jacaranda-scented dream realm of Slow Days and Eve’s Hollywood. Her signature charm, only occasionally glimpsed in the first half of the book, floods out of the page like a 12,000 watt spotlight. Scenes that would have been described flatly and prosaically a few years earlier are given wonderful specificity and detail. Letters become more pointed and more literary: There are more love letters and more breakup letters and wonderfully angry ones (she has a major talent for cutting people, particularly men, down to size). She becomes something like a machine for producing memorable sentences.

On an article in Rolling Stone, from a letter written to editor-in-chief Jann Wenner:

I looked at Reliable Sources and thought that Granola article was not engrossing. I hate crunchy granola and breakfast generally and find any reference to it, especially in the public press, to be vile and obnoxious.

On the fine art scene:

My artist friends have extraordinary dearness for me, though I could never become one of them because I always had wall-to-wall carpeting and how can you be an artist if you’re a Jewish girl with [wall-to-wall carpeting]?

On her novel-in-progress Sex & Rage:

I am going to write the most luxurious, Beverly Hills Hotel greenery, lion’s paw amber kind of dangerous book.

On the publication of Eve’s Hollywood:

When Gerald Murphy (i.e. Dick Diver in Tender is the Night) said “Living well is the best revenge,” [he] was only slightly off. Having your book on the bestseller table at Pickwick is the best revenge.

Yes!, you think. There she is! Our Eve! It’s inspiring to see her suddenly become herself, like watching a favorite baseball player break out of a slump. It makes you marvel at how someone can appear initially so minor—just another L.A. scenester—and yet all the while she is simmering, simmering, simmering until she boils. To see her metamorphose in real time nearly makes the slog of the first 200 pages worth it.

The letters also provide a valuable opportunity to learn more about Babitz’s literary influences, and the picture that emerges is of someone who reveres the Anglophone novel of manners: Woolf, Forster, Henry James, Anthony Powell, and all those other magi of the drawing room. (How charming to think of her leafing through The Ambassadors or At Lady Molly’s in the soft light of morning following some raucous bender in the hills.) I still don’t think Too L.A. is as good as Woolf, but you can at least start to see why Anolik reached for the comparison. Babitz takes the drawing-room wit and the mixture of bohemian daring and Victorian propriety that defined the Bloomsbury set, applies it to her own environs, and gives it a California makeover: looser and groovier, with hotter people and better music.

This golden period lasts about seven years—100 pages or so of the 400-page Too L.A. Then, the long slow fade. Even as she was doing some of her best writing, Babitz was spiraling into a major cocaine addiction; her ex-boyfriend Paul Ruscha (brother of artist Ed) recalled dropping by her apartment and finding that “There wasn’t an inch of floor not covered in bloody Kleenex. The cats were running around high.” She got sober in 1982, but the pace of her writing drastically slowed. In 1997, an accident with a cigar left the lower half of her body horribly burned. She became reclusive; her signature vivaciousness curdled into grouchiness, misanthropy, Rush Limbaugh–listening delusion. Barely any letters appear from 1980 onward, and after her accident, writes Anolik, Eve lives “a posthumous life. . . . a life without letters.”

Good old American Protestant morality tempts us to read this as a cautionary tale: fly too close to the sun and you’ll—literally, in her case—burn up. And here in present-day Los Angeles, with an evaporating film industry and half the city threatening to burn down every year and jackbooted federal agents stomping through the streets and gigantic chemical fires making the air smell wretched and a general miasma of bad vibes pervading, it’s tempting to resent Babitz for exaggerating how much of her life in the Seventies was sun and sex and beauty (and, to judge from these letters, for not having to work very much).

But why should we? The persona she created—wise, wistful, self-deprecating, righteously indignant when necessary, always up for anything, and always aware of where the best party is—is an example to strive for, even if the life of the real Babitz never quite lived up to the one on the page. Thanks to Too L.A., uneven as it may be, we have a better glimpse into how she created that persona, and how for six or eight or ten years, before she crashed back down to earth, she embodied something eternal: the destructive, cruel, frustrating, inspiring, beautiful California Dream.

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SOMEONE ASKS ME AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK whether they should still trust the federal government’s data releases. When we hear official announcements about things like unemployment or inflation, can we rely on those figures to accurately reflect reality, and to be based on proven models? Up until now, I have always said yes.

Sure, the numbers coming out of the White House may be bull.1 But the numbers from independent statistical agencies (the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, etc.) have remained solid and trustworthy, I usually explain.

After all, these stats agencies employ armies of dedicated, fastidious civil servants who collect the underlying data and conduct careful statistical analysis. Their work is firewalled from political interference. I’ve been covering these data releases long enough2 to know that if Trump were cooking the books, it would be obvious—not least because those career civil servants would be screaming bloody murder and quitting en masse.

Unfortunately, I can no longer vouch for any of that. Now my answer is: No, you should not default to trusting the government data. There’s clear evidence the Trump administration is cooking at least some of the books.

That’s because (to switch metaphors) this week we crossed the Rubicon: The granddaddy of all statistical agencies—the U.S. Census Bureau, which has existed in some fashion since 17903—was infiltrated by

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Bulwark LIVE: GOOD FIGHT TOUR with Tim, Sarah, Sam and JVL is coming to the Southeast in October. Tickets go on sale August 21 at 10am in the East. Head to TheBulwark.com/Events for details and to get your tickets.

How to Eat An Elephant is coming! Sarah’s debut book is out September 8 and she is hitting the road in September with stops in New York City, Boston, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Kenyon College. She’ll be in DC with Kara Swisher September 3. All the event details and links to secure tickets are here.

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AS A MATTER OF ROUTINE IN FOCUS GROUPS, I ask voters to grade Donald Trump’s performance as president.

Often the most interesting grades come from Republicans. Those who give him an A or a B are probably among the roughly one-third of voters who will be with Trump even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue. If they give him a C or lower, that’s an indication they might be disappointed enough in Trump’s performance to sit out the midterms. A participant who gives him an angry F might even consider voting for a Democrat or independent, if the circumstances are right.

Usually, we have to recruit voters into our focus groups who specifically disapprove of Trump to get at the C-and-below graders. (Trump lovers who are mad about the Iran war and the state of the economy but happy with mass deportations and attacks on transgender people will usually toss Trump a B-.) Recently, though, groups of straight-up Republicans, many of whom voted for Trump three times in a row, are feeling deflated and disappointed.

Across several Republican focus groups this summer, it’s clear that the intraparty sentiment toward Donald Trump isn’t what it used to be. I’ve heard more participants than usual grade Trump at a C or a D.1

Throughout his first term, I’d consistently hear some version of the following: I wish he’d tweet a little bit less, but he’s the GREATEST PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME. PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT. My 401(k) is crushing.

In 2026, lots of people still perfunctorily express that they wish he’d just behave himself. But compared to Trump’s first term—or to what Republicans said during Joe Biden’s presidency—what I’m hearing now is

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The New York Times' David Wallace-Wells joins Tim Miller.

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show notes:

• David's recent newsletter on keeping the world safe from AI

• David on Trump's deportation machine ramping up

• Derek Thompson's recent "Plain English" pod on AI that Tim referenced
  

Bulwark LIVE: GOOD FIGHT TOUR with Tim, Sarah, Sam and JVL is coming to the Southeast in October. Tickets go on sale August 21. Bulwark+ members get early access via our presale NOW. Head to TheBulwark.com/Events for details and to get your tickets.

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When they learned that Edgarianny was pregnant this summer, they decided to go back to Venezuela. They saw the writing on the wall. So they went through all the proper government channels to execute a “self-deportation.” Because even leaving the American immigration system is a mess.

On July 6 they went to their ICE check-in appointment after being told they were approved to self-deport. Instead of being given travel documents, they were arrested.

This father, his pregnant wife, and their daughter have been held in an American prison camp ever since. Edgarianny has no access to prenatal care. Their daughter barely eats and has told her parents she wants to die.

Our government is doing this in our names. To a family that followed all of our laws and then made their own decision to leave America when it was clear that we no longer wanted them.

Freddys and Edgarianny have written to Sen. Katie Britt asking for help, since Britt told the New York Times that she’s concerned about the welfare of immigrant children. You can read their letter here.

Here’s my ask: Please reach out to Katie Britt’s office, respectfully, and encourage her to help this family. Here are a few ways to do it either over the phone or via email:

• Katie Britt’s office: 202-224-5744

• Britt’s chief of staff: Sean_Ross@britt.senate.gov

• Her subcommittee clerk Dave Roth at 202-224-4319

Again: Please be civil and respectful. This family needs Britt’s help.

Thanks, fam.

1. De-Dollarization

I hope you enjoyed the candy yesterday because I’m gonna force a pound of spinach down your gullet today.

Last week a friend sent me a link to a conversation JD Vance had three years ago with the MAGA think tank American Moment. This was before he was Trump’s vice. Before the Iran war. Before the Ozempic, even. It was the halcyon days of the Biden administration when the worst thing happening in America was the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Maybe you remember Silicon Valley Bank? At the time, people like Vance warned that it was another of Sleepy Joe’s failures and would crater the economy. It wasn’t, and it didn’t. The Biden administration handled the situation responsibly. There was no contagion.

I want to draw your attention to two things from this talk. (The relevant sections are here.)

The first is Vance’s populist view of Silicon Valley Bank. At one point in the conversation he’s asked how regulators failed to anticipate the bank’s instability. Here’s his response:

“Because they’re all woke idiots.”

Really. That’s it. He blames a bank failure on “woke.”

After he does that, though, Vance talks about how ZIRP—the times when interest rates were set at zero—supercharged finance and tech and how bad this is:

In a super-low interest rate environment . . . capital flowed to, it flowed to two industries to an extraordinary degree: finance and tech. . . . QE [quantitative easing] was a massive, massive subsidy to finance and tech. . . .

[Y]ou can’t have a financial system that creates a massive asset inflation for the banks and for the tech companies and then when there’s a correction basically come in and say ‘Well, we’re going to protect you from the downside risk,’ right? That’s socialized risk. Socialized loss and privatized reward. That’s how you get the pitchforks.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this analysis. There’s just one problem: JD Vance is a cat’s paw for finance and tech.

Vance isn’t much more than a biological asset belonging to Peter Thiel. The world of finance was two fists in on the Trump 2024 campaign. Most of Silicon Valley—from Palantir, to OpenAI, to Meta, to SpaceX and the Elonverse—have chosen to collaborate with the Trump administration.

JD Vance has eagerly participated in socializing risk and privatizing reward at a scale never seen before.

The shamelessness of this guy is breathtaking.

Which brings us to the second thing that caught my eye: JD Vance says he thinks it’s bad that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency.

Here’s JD on the supremacy of the dollar:

I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America. I think there is a good argument that reserve currency status is akin to coal in Appalachia. It’s a resource curse, right? It allows your consumers to consume very cheaply, right? That’s been the story of the American economy for the last fifteen or so years, even before that, is we can just borrow, basically in an unlimited way because we have the reserve currency. So that’s a massive subsidy to incurring debt. The debt is cheaper even in raised interest rate environments. That’s one of the crazy things about what’s going on right now is the market is in some ways pricing future interest rates lower than what the Fed is right now. That’s kind of weird. So we have this massive subsidy to cheap debt for the American consumer.

That is a . . . take.

You guys know how obsessed I am with the reserve status of the dollar. And there is an argument to be made that the true value of owning the world’s reserve currency is less than people like me believe. I’m open to that.

But the idea that holding the reserve currency is a curse? That Americans would be better off if China controlled the world’s reserve currency?

Wow.

At least on this one, JD’s actions are in line with his words. He’s helping prosecute the Iran war, which is helping to slowly de-dollarize the world.

JD Vance is a dumb person’s idea of what smart people sound like.

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2. Limbic Capitalism

A couple weeks ago a friend introduced me to the idea of limbic capitalism, which he proposed as an explanation to a great deal of what we see in America today: From Donald Trump, to Fox News, to Kalshi and the ubiquity of sports betting.

Limbic capitalism is a concept popularized by historian David Courtwright in his 2019 book Age of Addiction. It’s an idea that sits at the intersection of brain chemistry and economics.

The limbic system is the network of structures in the brain that handle emotional processing and memories. It’s central to addiction. The limbic system is the part of your brain that (a) processes how good some thing (food, sex, heroin, winning a bet) makes you feel and then (b) links it to the memory of that thing.

Addiction is an idiosyncratic state. Not everyone who tries an addictive thing becomes an addict. Not everyone who abuses a thing is an addict. Addicts can quit their addictive behaviors. Genetic predisposition plays a huge role in addiction. But so do environmental factors. For instance: If Sally is exposed to an addictive substance or behavior at the age of 13 she might become an addict; but if she isn’t exposed to that same substance or behavior until she’s 50, she might not.

With all of those caveats, there are some broad truths about addiction: We know that genetics do play a role. We know that some substances or behaviors are more addictive than others. We know that timing of first exposure does tilt the odds.

That’s the backdrop.

Courtwright takes this basic understanding of addiction and overlays it with market economics.

Some of this is well understood by everyone, the most obvious example being cigarettes. For generations the tobacco industry profited by selling highly addictive products. The industry specifically targeted young users to increase the chances of creating addiction.

But there’s a whole class of industries, colloquially thought of as “sin” categories, over which the government exercised special regulation. Sex, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling. We didn’t have a scientific understanding of addiction, but we knew it when we saw it. Society intuited that something about, say, booze, created a category difference. Americans realized that we should regulate alcohol in ways we did not regulate ball bearings.

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What Courtwright does is put all of the idiosyncrasies together and propose a systemic concept: limbic capitalism.

Limbic capitalism refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments and criminal organizations, encourage excessive consumption and addiction. They do so by targeting the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for feeling and for quick reaction, as distinct from dispassionate thinking. The limbic system’s pathways of networked neurons make possible pleasure, motivation, long-term memory, and other emotionally linked functions crucial for survival. Paradoxically, these same neural circuits make possible profits from activities that work against survival, businesses having turned evolution’s handiwork to their own ends.

Age of Addiction is a re-examination of history through this lens.

Because the book was published in 2019, it barely notices the Trump era in American politics. But I can’t help wondering if MAGA, too, is an example of limbic capitalism.1

Fox, Twitter/X, Facebook, Truth Social—the entire Trump ecosystem in which the president is not a distant, staid figure but a constant source of dopamine hits touching your pleasure centers—what if American politics is now operated in the mode of limbic capitalism?

Sit with that for a bit and then tell me your thoughts. Maybe it’s always been thus. After all, what is a demagogue if not a political figure who hacks the electorate’s limbic system?

But Courtwright argues, convincingly, that while addiction has always been with us, the infrastructure of limbic capitalism—the mass consumer culture, the emergence of digital communication—is relatively novel. (Meaning: New to the last couple hundred years or so.)

Is it possible that novel developments in American society are also creating a new kind of limbic politics, modeled on limbic capitalism?

I’m looking forward to your conversation on this.

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3. Catch

This was not the best time for me to read this essay. But maybe it was the right time for me. And maybe the right time for you, too.

[B]aseball is something you inherit from someone, whether it’s your parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, or even your persistent friend who begs you to come out to the ballyard some Sunday afternoon. . . . You don’t stumble into being a baseball fan; you’re led.

If you became a baseball fan when you were a child, it probably involved a game of catch. I think my uncle was the first one to really play catch with me, but I also played with my dad plenty. At some point, though, you have your last game of catch with your father. You typically don’t know it. It’s something the two of you have always done, but over time, you play less and less catch. Suddenly, you haven’t played in years. And you didn’t even know it. Maybe it’s when you left for college. Maybe it’s when you hung up your glove after two agonizing years of tee ball. Maybe your dad throws out his shoulder, as many middle-aged men do, and you never get back to it. Maybe Dad left too soon, earlier than either of you hoped or expected. . . .

I had the privilege of knowing I was playing catch for the last time with my father. When I was 24, and Dad was 58, he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. . . .

A few months after his diagnosis, I was visiting home. My younger brother was spending the summer in our hometown before leaving for graduate school, and we’d planned to play catch that afternoon. My brother called me a bit later, saying he’d gotten busy with some friends and not to wait up for him. So my dad, sensing the opportunity, asked if I’d like to play catch for a bit.

I have no idea when he’d last thrown a baseball, let alone when we’d last played catch together. His arm was shot from years of throwing us batting practice, and I’d hung up my cleats after my junior year to focus on other sports.

I clocked what was happening in the moment, and I think he did, too. He made it through about ten overhand throws, his shoulder stiff from years of disuse, before switching to underhand. We played for maybe ten minutes before putting our gloves away for good. But for those ten minutes, we were both 20 years younger.

It’s been seven summers since that game of catch. By his 59th birthday, he required a walker to get around, after a lower back injury that he never recovered from. These days, Dad doesn’t do much talking. Or moving. Or even looking around. Once in a while, on a good day, you’ll look him in the eyes, and you’ll know that he knows who you are.

We both knew we’d reach a day like today. So I like to think something divine kept my brother away from our backyard that day. We both needed that game of catch. To this day, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth to have had it—tied for first place with thousands of people I’ll never meet, and with Dad.

My story isn’t special. As I said, most people reading this of a certain age or experience have their own version of this story. There are an enormous number of people who would do anything to play catch with Dad one more time. I suspect many baseball fans think about exactly that every time the Field of Dreams game is played in Dyersville, Iowa. There’s the beauty of the players walking out of the corn, but there’s also the reminder of that final question. Hey, Dad. Wanna have a catch?

I’d planned on telling a version of this story about the man who coached me not only in baseball, but also in football, basketball, and track, at a later date. You know, that later date. But Thursday’s Twins-Phillies game hit home for me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. Every time MLB plays a game in that corn, I lower my head and shed a tear thinking about my own father.

But this time was different. Because when I lowered my head on Thursday to think about the big strong man that I used to play catch with, I saw my own newborn daughter, my firstborn, sleeping in my lap. She’d been born less than a week before; it was her first Twins game sitting in front of the TV with me.

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HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADERS had a bullish plan for the August congressional recess. They would visit swing districts around the country, raising money for their candidates and delivering the party’s campaign message. They would crow about the economy and paint Democrats as Communists.

Unfortunately, the plan has run into a problem: the Iran war.

On their favorite national TV outlets, Fox News and Newsmax, the GOP leaders get free rein to spout their talking points. The anchors try not to mention the war or gas prices. But in swing districts, these topics keep coming up. The party’s leaders struggle for answers. And the more they talk, the more they tie themselves in knots.

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TWO WEEKS AGO, Speaker Mike Johnson went to Arizona to help Republican congressional candidates. While he was there, he gave an interview to Politico’s Dasha Burns. She told him that his colleagues were freaking out:

I can’t tell you, Speaker, how many times I talk to Republicans . . . that are trying to win seats, that are tearing their hair out because they don’t know how to message this war. They don’t know how to talk to voters about what great achievements the president has made on the economy, when [voters] are unhappy with what they’re paying at the pump and what they’re paying at the grocery store. Like, how are Republicans supposed to contend with this?

Johnson argued that his colleagues could brag about “the return of American energy dominance and the return of peace through strength.” But that answer just raised more questions. If energy production is thriving, why are we paying so much for gas?1 And if we have peace through strength, why are Iranian drones and missiles still choking off tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz?

In January, House Republicans thought they had a good story to tell in the midterms. The story was that their tax-cut bill was creating jobs and putting money in people’s pockets. But then Trump launched the war. So now the Republicans have to amend their story. They have to explain why grocery prices and other economic indicators regressed after the war started.

On Friday, as Johnson was campaigning in Colorado, he and one of his endangered freshmen, Rep. Gabe Evans, gave a joint interview to Shaun Boyd, a reporter for CBS News Colorado. Boyd asked about surging gas and food prices. Johnson replied that the GOP’s tax cuts “had the desired effect. And in the first quarter this year, the economy was beginning to take off like a rocket. And then we got into the skirmish with Iran. That’s what the prices are related to.”

On Monday, as Johnson campaigned in Virginia with Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, he was asked again about gas prices and the war. “The Iran conflict has been the cause, of course, of gas prices going up. It’s drug on,” he conceded.

Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, has the same problem. Two weeks ago on Fox Business, he complained that Republicans weren’t getting credit for reducing egg and milk prices. He chastised the media for focusing instead on high gas prices, which he said were “related to something that has to get done in Iran.”

Was the war really necessary? In his interview in Colorado, Johnson pleaded, “We had to do it. They [Iran] were very close to nuclear capability.” In Virginia, he said Trump “understood their nuclear capability was almost there and that we had to act.” Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, made a similar pitch while visiting Michigan last week.

But as congressional Republicans parrot this Trumpian lie about an imminent threat, the president himself undercuts them. On Monday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he boasted that if Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon, “after what we did previously with the B-2 bombers, it’s going to be a long time.”

In other words, we took out the Iranian nuclear threat last year. This year’s war was gratuitous.

House Republicans also have trouble explaining why Trump didn’t consult Congress. On Friday, when she spoke with Johnson and Evans in Colorado, Boyd pressed Evans: “Shouldn’t the president have come to Congress and asked them to approve [the] war?” Evans replied that Iran had supported al Qaeda, and therefore “the 2001 AUMF”—the authorization passed by Congress twenty-five years ago to use military force in response to 9/11—gave Trump sufficient approval to attack Iran this year. It’s hard to imagine a more dishonest abuse of a congressional resolution.

Johnson keeps trying, doggedly, to peddle Trump’s euphemisms for the war. “As soon as we get the Iran skirmish settled out, I think everybody’s going to have much more economic opportunity,” he told Burns. His use of the word skirmish to describe a six-month war made his prediction seem equally ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Republicans struggle to defend another Trumpian lie: that the United States fully controls the Strait of Hormuz. Last week, when Scalise went to Iowa, Local 5 News reporter Dana Searles pressed him about the war’s effects on gas and fertilizer prices. Scalise danced around the question, leaving it to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was standing next to him. Bessent assured Searles that the United States and its partner countries would soon issue a statement “to call for the Iranians to let fertilizer out of the Gulf.” When you’re asking Iran to let ships out of the Gulf, that’s a confession that you don’t have control.

Nor can Republicans explain how the ongoing deployment is both a gift to the world and a defense of America’s interests. Johnson told Burns that voters supported Trump because the president stood for “America First.” But in the same interview, the speaker predicted that other nations would step in to keep the Strait of Hormuz open “because most countries have a bigger stake in that than we do.”

TRUMP’S PERSISTENT PROMISES that the war is about to end have become a joke. But Johnson keeps hyping them. “I think we’re getting close to resolution as we sit here today. There’s big developments,” the speaker told Burns. He added, “You’re hearing the White House and folks close to the administration say that we’re on the verge of something big.” A week later in Colorado, he professed, “I believe we’re about to take a turn on the issue in Iran.” On Monday in Virginia, he repeated the same forecast: “I believe we’ll be getting into a new phase of that where we can calm this down.” That was the day Trump’s “memorandum of understanding” with Iran expired.

Even if Iran were to sign another deal, Republican lawmakers know it would be a sham. Last week, during his visit to Michigan, Scalise said Trump was “working to try to get peace agreements” with Iran. But in his next breath, Scalise noted that Iran’s rulers had “never been truthful or honest with anybody that they’ve dealt with.” And if Iran holds out or reneges, the Republicans have no Plan B. Johnson told Burns: “If we’re disappointed by the Iranians again because they can’t be trusted at the negotiation table, then we’ll handle this as quickly and as steadily as we can”—but he didn’t even try to explain what that would entail.

The war has become such a mess that Republicans no longer express much confidence it will end before November. Standing next to Scalise in Iowa, Bessent said he hoped Iran might let normal shipping resume in the Persian Gulf “by October.” And Johnson told Burns that Republicans would win the midterms “whether we resolve the Iran situation before the election or not.”

IF ALL ELSE FAILS, the Republicans might just try to gaslight the public. Last week, when Scalise and several colleagues spoke at a forum in Michigan, a local resident asked what they were planning to do to lower costs. Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told her, “We need to make sure we’re talking facts and the truth. Gas prices today are high, but it’s still lower than it ever was during the prior administration.”

False. The average price of gas on the day Joe Biden took office was $2.39 per gallon. On the day he left, it was $3.13. Today, it’s above $4.00.

Speaking to reporters after the forum, Scalise said energy prices were “heading in the right direction, meaning coming down at the pump.” False again. When Scalise made that statement, gas prices were up 28 cents since early July and more than a dollar since the start of the war.

I almost feel sorry for the House Republicans. Trump launched the war without consulting them, and he wrecked their plan for the midterms. But they’ve had several chances to try to rein him in, and they’ve spurned those opportunities. They bet the election on him. Now they’ll pay the price.

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A Data Center? In This Economy?

by Andrew Egger

A few months ago, I went to an after-work D.C. event for folks in the AI space. The drinks were flowing and the vibe was cheery, mostly young would-be tech tycoons talking their book with chipper GOP policy staffers. But at one point, I talked to a different sort of character—a rumpled older guy who turned out to be an academic researching public attitudes toward AI development. How was that going, I asked. He looked at me with haunted eyes. It is so, so much worse out there, he said, than anybody even realizes.

What a difference a few months can make. Across the country, politicians are waking up to a simple fact: Voters hate AI and are gearing up to punish elected officials who seem to like it. Mostly, their ire has come to land on data centers—the factory-size banks of chips that power the cloud-based internet and are its most visible real-world incarnation.

Everywhere you look, politicians are suddenly sprinting away from data centers. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who had formerly rolled out the red carpet for the AI buildout, signed a moratorium on new data centers this month pending a state “audit” on their energy use. Just last night, Abbott bragged about having “halted up to 1,800 data center projects.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro followed Abbott’s lead this week, inking an order heaping up red tape on new proposed data centers. He, too, was until recently a fan.

This week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised the alarm explicitly in a memo about the Ohio Senate race, where Republican Sen. Jon Husted is trying to stave off a challenge from Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown. “Ohio is one of the leaders in building these AI factories,” reads the memo, which was first reported by Axios:

Brown has made his opposition to them the centerpiece of his campaign against Husted. Brown is using it because it works. More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck. If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice.

But it’s not only Democrats making use of this attack. In Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, Francesca Hong ran hard against data centers, while her opponent David Crowley took a more centrist approach: Not to ban them, but to require they be powered by green energy and built by union workers. Now that Crowley is through to the general, however, Republican Tom Tiffany is hitting him hard on the issue, describing him as “Data Center David Crowley” in ads: “Crowley’s campaign is funded by the people building them. Big Tech wins. Wisconsin pays.”

If you’ve been paying attention, it’s been clear for a while that we were heading here. Back in March, I wrote about the massive latent political energy surrounding AI, noting that neither party had yet won voters’ trust on the issue. “The party that can win the argument over AI is set up for a political windfall,” I wrote, “and then will be tasked with shepherding the country through massive disruption toward a prosperous rather than a dystopian AI-integrated future, if possible.”

The problem is that public hysteria over data centers has reached the point that there’s essentially no debate happening at all. Politicians are simply turning the phrase into low-calorie ragebait: If my opponent won’t pledge to stop letting companies plug in a bunch of chips in a warehouse, that’s because they’re owned by Big Data Center.

AI has remarkable potential for good: The tech’s capabilities just keep growing, and it is already paying major dividends in fields like medical research. And of course, AI has incredible potential for harm—it could eventually kill us all, or enslave us, or just feed us slop until it turns all our brains into soup. It’s a pretty big range of possible outcomes!

But while there are certainly good reasons to be anxious about AI development, concerns about data centers’ local effects are often wildly overblown. There’s something bleak about seeing the policy debate over how we ought to shape and regulate this massive, unbelievable, titanic technology collapse down into what’s essentially a NIMBY squabble over where to park the chips that power it.

Michigan’s Green Ghost

by Brendan Hartnett

As The Bulwark first reported, the Green Party of Michigan may have nominated a Republican plant to run on its ballot line in Michigan’s competitive 7th Congressional District. Our investigation uncovered that 25-year-old Shane Dedrick was chosen as the party’s nominee after joining the Green Party of Michigan’s April nominating convention on Zoom—during which he kept his camera off, seemed to know little about the party platform, and went through practically no vetting. Dedrick is not active on social media, does not have a campaign website, and has yet to register with the FEC.

Despite multiple attempts, The Bulwark was unable to get in contact with Dedrick. We’re not alone.

Following our story, Michigan’s WLNS reached out to Dedrick unsuccessfully and even visited his residence, but no one came to the door. Douglas Marsh, communications director for the Michigan Greens, told WLNS, “To my knowledge, no one has heard from him since April 25,” when Dedrick first introduced himself to the party, never showed his face, and left 33 minutes later as the party’s nominee. Marsh told The Bulwark that he has still not been able to contact Dedrick.

Initially, that didn’t stop the Michigan Greens from continuing to promote Dedrick on social media. However, in recent days, the party has not included Dedrick in its posts advertising its slate of candidates.

On Wednesday, the party even posted a quote from its secretary of state nominee, Eric Borregard: “If I lived in the 7th District, my own personal choice would probably be the grassroots candidate Felix Thibodeau of the Working Class Party now.”

Asked if this meant the Michigan Green Party was withdrawing its support for Dedrick and endorsing Thibodeau, Marsh told The Bulwark, “The party has opted not to formally endorse any candidates not in the party this cycle, but the longer Dedrick remains MIA, the more difficult it is to extend him the benefit of the doubt.”

The post about Thibodeau has since been deleted from the post.1 But a comment from the party account expresses largely the same sentiment:

No, unfortunately it’s passed the point of no return for that one. The party did make a mistake in the Dedrick nomination. It’s up [to] the voters now to make up their own minds which one of four candidates is best for them in the end. Maybe the Republicans would rather vote for a handsome young MAGA mystery candidate than an old warmonging [sic], crazed budget busting lunatic like [incumbent Rep.] Tom Barrett.

Marsh told The Bulwark, “I remain agnostic about Dedrick’s intentions in seeking and accepting our nomination. He signed a sworn and notarized affidavit in 2026 indicating his wish to affiliate with an ecosocialist organization. If it was fraudulent, we will explore options, but so far all we have to work with is silence and unanswered questions.”

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Postliberalism Is Not About Economic Transformation… Disregard the empty allegations of ‘socialism.’ The real problem with postliberalism is its underlying authoritarian vision, writes MATT McMANUS.

• Cowards Are Running This Country… On The Bulwark Daily, former CIA officer JULIA CURLEE joins TIM MILLER to talk about the chaos of the anti-trans witch hunt that resulted in her firing, and ERRIN HAINES comes on to discuss the Florida primaries and Democratic prospects in the South.

• Tim Unboxes a Republican Candidate’s “Medical Device”... Zach Lahn is the Republican nominee for governor of Iowa with a very unusual résumé and some very unconventional positions. BRENDAN HARTNETT joins TIM on Bulwark Takes to dig into Lahn’s ties to . . . Kansas (?) and the Koch network.

• The Good Fight Tour… Are you coming to one of our shows this fall? Or are you attending a book tour event for Sarah’s? Come join fellow Bulwarkers in the subscriber chat to see who else is going to these live events. Bulwark LIVE Member Presale ends tonight! Get the details, access code and ticketing links, here.

Quick Hits

DIFFERENCES OF JUDICIAL OPINION: During his first term, Donald Trump was mostly happy to nominate federal judges from the existing conservative legal movement. Then he noticed something: Sometimes, when he wanted to do a thing—steal the 2020 election, for example—his own judges wouldn’t let him. Judases! Benedict Arnolds! When Trump got back in office, he decided he’d target a different kind of judge.

The strategy is paying off. Yesterday, Politico took a look through the towering pile of lawsuits—more than 20,000 of them—that have been filed over the past year over ICE’s policy of locking up people facing deportation proceedings without bond. In the vast majority of cases, judges have ruled against these detainments. But there’s one single group of judges who have tended to side with the president: The judges he nominated since returning to office.

Seems pretty bad—but then, there are some silver linings. One, Trump is way off the pace of his first term in filling federal court vacancies, in part because there are many fewer vacancies for him to fill. And two, he hasn’t gotten any new cracks at another SCOTUS vacancy yet—and God willing he never will.

NOW HERE’S A PUZZLER: “President Trump’s half-built White House ballroom is a 90,000-square-foot embodiment of a recurring legal conundrum,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “What happens when a boundary-pushing president moves faster than courts can keep up?”

What a mind-bending paradox indeed! The report continues:

Construction of the “concrete-and-steel superstructure,” [the Trump administration says], has already advanced so far that it would be “practically impossible” to stop now, let alone tear down what has already been built.

Two lower courts have ruled that the ballroom project is probably illegal because Congress never approved it. But Trump has been allowed to build while the litigation proceeded. He has taken full advantage of that dispensation, leaving the Supreme Court in a pickle as the grace period is set to expire this week. [Emphasis added.]

The solution seems pretty simple: The president shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do something that’s probably illegal. That’s more or less what the word “illegal” means—you’re not allowed to do it.

Frustrated sarcasm aside, the Journal article is really about how the administration is rushing, in a whole bunch of areas, to create facts on the ground before the courts can intervene. It’s an important subject worthy of attention.

It’s also why the Supreme Court should block further construction immediately and indefinitely, and why the next Congress and/or president should demolish Trump’s construction—as a demonstration of the supremacy of the law and the government’s fealty to it.

Besides, if the Reflecting Pool saga is any indication of Trump’s preference for contractors, that ballroom won’t be safe to stand in.

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Cheap Shots

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ARE POSTLIBERALS THE “SOCIALISTS OF THE RIGHT”? So argues right-wing troll and race-science promoter Richard Hanania, whose case against the postlibs has been echoed by others on the dwindling center-right.1 Their concern is that their rivals—whose ranks include blogger Rod Dreher, Notre Dame prof Patrick Deneen, and the vice president of the United States, JD Vance—are trying to move conservatism in not only a postliberal but a post-capitalist direction by using a veneer of social conservatism as a way to smuggle in “left-wing economics.”

In fairness to these critics, it is true that postliberals are more willing than much of the American right to advance conservative criticisms of capitalism—an unusual point of view in America, but one with a long history.2 In his 2016 book, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, R. R. Reno, a postliberal thinker and the editor of First Things, muses that when the most bullish capitalist conservatives talk about “economic freedom,”

they can sound irrelevant, even perverse. The free flow of capital, goods, services, and labor is all well and good if you’re one of the winners in the global economy. But what’s in it for the high-school-educated guy in Toledo who has to compete with low-wage workers in Thailand?

Some postliberals go so far as to propose ways to offset what they believe to be the worst effects of capitalism. In a 2017 interview, Rod Dreher described capitalism as having a corrosive effect on institutions like “families and communities.” (He made clear he was “not advocating socialism.”) He commended nationalist politicians opposed to excessive globalization and high levels of immigration, predicting they may “save capitalism in our day by imposing limits on it.”

And some figures in this camp, including Dreher, did become fanboys for Viktor Orbán–style “illiberal democracy,” which harnessed the power of the state in an effort to incentivize native family formation (a failed policy, in the end). In his book Regime Change, Patrick Deneen calls for strengthening labor unions, making trade schools more accessible while reducing the number of people who pursue a university education, and making efforts to “break up or limit the power of monopolistic economic organizations.”

But while the ultra-capitalist right-wingers are right to identify a number of right-wing anticapitalist gestures in these proposals, the “socialist” accusation ultimately fails. These thinkers are not interested in the sort of systems-level change that allegedly inspires the horror of their right-wing critics; they are interested in tinkering with capitalism to mitigate some of its excesses while mobilizing the state to pursue socially conservative policies. (More on that shortly.)

That the claim is false isn’t altogether remarkable; right-wingers throw around the “socialist” allegation constantly, as they have done for decades. But beyond being inaccurate, the claim is distracting. There are truthful and substantive reasons for rejecting postliberalism, and they should be at the center of any honest conversation about the goals of the political movement and ideological tendency.

IN HIS COMPREHENSIVE CRITIQUE, Against Post-Liberalism, Paul Kelly, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, argues that postliberals’ potshots against capitalism derive more directly from their authoritarian instincts than from any beliefs having to do with human equality or welfare. They “are uncomfortable with libertarian and neoliberal theories because these privilege freedom and autonomy as primary goals of politics or as a basis from which a reasonable moral order might emerge.” As Kelly notes, “post-liberals are not interested in fundamental equality, whether that be an equality of wealth and resources for all. They appear to be quite happy with a structurally unequal society, as long as the ruling elite is not the current one.”

Postliberals are not against capitalism tout court; they simply oppose versions of capitalism they take to have undermined their preferred moral order. Kelly observes that what is “most surprising about post-liberalism is that, for all its commitment to a politics of the common good, it is unwilling to address the legitimacy and justice of the fundamental question of the distribution of wealth, resources and economic power.” Kelly consequently regards the postliberals’ signature rhetoric about the centrality of the common good to a just political order as “just spurious.” They would be perfectly content with a tame capitalism and a reactionary political order—and they’ve shown this to be the case time and again.

Kelly is on to something: If you remove the mysticism and high-minded theory from most postliberal arguments, it gets difficult to avoid the conclusion that what largely animates the movement isn’t indignation over economic inequality and class exploitation. It’s rather something like disgust at the sight of men holding hands on the street. That’s because instrumentalizing economics to protect and preserve a conservative social and cultural order is close to the heart of the postliberal project.

For starters, the most prominent postliberals, including those mentioned above, are hardly capitalism haters. In the same book in which he speaks up for the Toledo, Ohio everyman, Reno writes that global capitalism has gone from “strength to strength over the past few decades, transforming societies throughout the world, especially in Asia.” And in this capitalist era, Reno describes himself as inclining “toward free markets” and being “suspicious of large-scale government interventions,” at least as far as the provision of goods and structuring of economies are concerned. In Return of the Strong Gods, Reno even rails against the “government-provided security” that would come with a “progressive” and “redistributive plan” to implement a universal basic income.

In Reno’s mind, there is no contradiction between his lament for the Ohioan with few prospects and his opposition to policies from the left intended to improve the man’s prospects. He’s ultimately not opposed to the inequality part of capitalism: His complaint is that capitalism seems to have a liberalizing effect on populations. While the “benefits of economic freedom do in fact extend even to the poor, what trickles down from lifestyle freedom is dysfunction, disorder, and disarray,” he writes.

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Reno’s desire is for a market system without these malign knock-on effects of licentiousness and libertinism. He suggests a reconceived class war: Instead of economic exploitation, this one’s leitmotif would be the depredations of permissive liberal social policies. Reno describes how the “class war, the war on the weak, is epitomized in the campaign for gay marriage”—a bogeyman he has, in the intervening years, put in the company of other bogeymen such as COVID-related public health interventions and the public existence of trans people.

COMPARED TO RENO, DENEEN appears more willing to countenance economic change. As far back as 2007, Deneen was intoning about the impending catastrophe of “peak oil.” As always, liberalism was to blame for the economic calamity owing to its endorsement of selfishness and its mandate to conquer nature for humanistic purposes. But even then, with what he took to be a major economic crisis on the horizon, Deneen offered restrained, moralistic, and decidedly non-socialist recommendations: Embrace “stoicism” and learn to live with less. Whatever this is, the Green New Deal it is not.

Today, Deneen’s agenda amounts to little more than watered-down Eisenhower-era economic policies: domestic manufacturing in certain sectors, the strategic use of tariffs as a “policy of last resort,” more education in the trades over university (Deneen insists university education could be “substantially reduced”), national service requirements, stronger unions and limits on the power of monopolistic companies—that’s the gist of it. Anything more would raise the professor’s hackles. Regime Change offers a negative account of “the main aim of the populism of the left,” which is, Deneen writes, the “redistribution of wealth.” What is needed is “not an economics that purportedly seeks the equalization of outcome through the actual or effective elimination of private property, but an economic order embedded within a broader context of the common good”—one that supports and encourages social conservatism, naturally.

This sentiment echoes Deneen’s arguments in his career-defining Why Liberalism Failed, where he argues that even moderate liberal aspirations for greater economic equality are simply a vehicle for a deeper goal liberals don’t want to fess up to: destroying the cultural values that once brought the country together. As he puts it, the liberals’

appeal to economic justice and taming of the market—never realized, of course—was advanced not ultimately in the name of greater equality but to secure the liberation of those living outside the guidelines and strictures of cultural practices that supported the flourishing of the greater part of humanity.

Deneen might regard convictions about economic justice as insincere simply because he can’t imagine sincerely holding them. In Regime Change, he intimates that he has no problem at all with the idea of an economic and ruling elite, with all the inequality entailed thereby. The only real problem for him with our current political arrangement is that our current elites are mostly liberals. What is needed is a post-liberal “elite [that] must govern for the benefit of the many, while the many must restrain the dangerous temptations of the elite.”

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So intense is Deneen’s nostalgic illiberalism and hostility to modernization that in his recent book, American Odyssey, he even chastises George Bailey, the iconic protagonist of holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life, for being too radical. In Deneen’s reading, we should commend Bailey’s efforts to build affordable housing for the poor so they can escape the slums of Mr. Potter—but only to a point. After all, Bailey’s project came at the unacceptable price of changing the makeup of the idyllic community of Bedford Falls. More important than improving the town for most of its citizens is preserving its “deep sense of place and history.”

SO, IF POSTLIBERALS ARE BASICALLY COMFORTABLE with capitalism as long as it remains subservient to their cultural vision, what actually distinguishes postliberalism and “common good” conservatism from earlier iterations of the right?

In short, what’s distinctive is what’s written on the tin: their uncompromising rejection of “political liberalism”—the idea that the state should accept or even encourage the formation of divergent views on the good life, and secure for its citizenry goods about whose value there is overlapping agreement, but without endorsing a single overriding “thick” account of what specifically makes those goods valuable.

Postliberals simply prefer for their “thick” account of value to predominate and for the state to dictate or at least privilege a single account of moral reality for the sake of our communal well-being. Some postliberals flirt with the claim that political authoritarianism is necessary for the sake of saving the immortal souls of those compelled to abandon their sinful ways—and further, that such authoritarianism would be a just Schmittian punishment of and rejoinder to the already-existing “authoritarianism” of woke liberalism.

Just how far they are willing, or able, to go in this theocratic direction is unclear, especially since few Americans share their thick claims about the moral good. In his critical Post-Liberalism, Matt Sleat highlights Deneen’s frustrating vacillation between the “often-extreme tenor” of his calls for a regime change—that is, overthrowing liberal elites and replacing them with conservative ones—and the “relative moderation of his prescriptions.” The Notre Dame prof talks a big game, but ducks out on proposing genuinely transformative policy. Some read this tendency as a tactical move to lure in moderates. Others think it reflects genuine uncertainty on Deneen’s part about the kind of order he actually wants.

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HOWEVER, NO ONE WOULD ACCUSE Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor and author of Common Good Constitutionalism, of such ambivalence. In Vermeule’s manifesto, the discussion of property and economics is limited to a few sentences here and there. (Perhaps tellingly, it amounts to a little less space than he dedicates to mocking the Obergefell decision.) In the disinterested tone typical of postliberal discussions of economic issues, Vermeule suggests property rights ought to be “recognized as an important component of human dignity and development” even if they are a secondary concern to pursuing the common good.

With that tedium brushed past, the book returns to Vermeule’s real raison d’être: mobilizing the power of the American state to destroy every graven image of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Drawing on fascist jurist Carl Schmitt, Vermeule is emphatic that liberalism needs to go. He delights in his own perverse enthusiasm for authority in a controversial article in the Atlantic, calling for “legal liberalism” to be rejected and replaced by a “common good constitutionalism” that does not “suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy.” Such common good constitutionalists don’t fear order, because they see law as “parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” And while such domination and hierarchy might be “possibly experienced at first as coercive,” Vermeule is optimistic those feelings will disappear as the state and its laws “encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.” This is politics as Stockholm Syndrome at scale.

Needless to say, Vermeule is no fan of socialism, even mocking New York liberals’ anxieties about Mamdani for being, like Victor Frankenstein, “terrified by the monster [they] labored to create.” In the book-length version of the argument, Vermeule is even taciturn about the value of democracy. As he writes, democracy “may or may not be oriented to the common good; one has to see whether it is, and the answer will depend on circumstances.”

This last line makes clear the stakes of postliberalism. It is good to see through the “socialist” accusation against postliberals like Vermeule, of course, but we should not let the failure of the right-wing critics to correctly identify the problems with the postliberal movement stop us from seeing the movement’s illiberal vector clearly. With one of postliberalism’s foremost proponents already leading the field for the Republicans’ 2028 presidential nomination, that vector could soon enough become an imminent threat.

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DEMOCRATIC OFFICIALS did not go into this election year believing that they had a good shot at flipping the Florida Senate seat that’s on the ballot this November.

And for good reason. Once a deeply purple state, Florida has been trending away from Democrats since Donald Trump carried it in 2016. As the state’s large Latino population has shifted rightward and as Republican-leaning baby boomer retirees have flocked to the Sunshine State in search of warmer weather, it has become harder for Democrats to break through. (The last Democrat to win a statewide race was Nikki Fried, elected agriculture commissioner in 2018.)

So winning the Senate race against Republican Ashley Moody—who was appointed to the seat last year to replace Marco Rubio when he became secretary of state—was treated by national Democrats as almost beside the point. In my conversations with party officials over the past few months, many emphasized that it was important just to compete in the Florida Senate race as a means of forcing Republicans to spend money there. Even more importantly, they believed it was critical to put up a good fight as the party confronts the looming 2030 census changes that will make Southern states like Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia all the more politically powerful.

Thanks to a decades-long flood of cross-country migration from states like California and New York, Florida is projected to gain four or more congressional seats after a new census is conducted in 2030. Texas may gain four—or even five—more seats, while North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee could each gain a seat. Meanwhile, reliably blue states like California could lose as many as five; New York might lose three; and Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin could all potentially lose seats.

All of which means that in order to win sustainable House majorities and the presidency in the future, Democrats must start performing better in places like Florida.

“People get caught up in the fire in front of us and forget that there is a bigger fire coming,” said Amanda Litman, cofounder of the progressive group Run for Something, which works to develop downballot candidates, when I asked her about the implications of the 2030 census for Dems.

So when Lt. Col. Alex Vindman—a former national security official who was a top witness in President Trump’s first impeachment—jumped into the Florida primary race, there was hope among Dem officials that he could help build a party brand more palatable to red-leaning voters across the state. His ability to quickly raise money (he raked in over $8 million in his first two months in the race) gave party leaders additional hope that Vindman could put the state in play.

But Vindman’s surprising loss in Tuesday’s Senate primary to Angie Nixon—a state legislator who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—has complicated all of that.

“To win statewide in Florida, a big chunk of that is winning back Hispanic voters that we’ve lost,” said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, noting that the word “socialism” is poison among this subset of voters, many of whom fled left-wing dictatorships. Nominating someone who has flirted with that label could be consequential to the party’s brand in the state.

“There’s a group on the left that thinks that we lost them because we didn’t go left enough. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong,” said Schale. Nixon is “going to have to figure out how to overcome [Moody’s attacks], and I’m skeptical. It’s just kind of hard to know where that leads us.”

Much of the work of convincing independent and frustrated Republican voters that there is a place for them in the Democratic party will fall to former GOP Rep. David Jolly, who won the Democratic nomination for Florida governor.

“I reject the DSA. I reject socialism. I’m a capitalist and I think capitalism provides the greatest amount of economic mobility,” Jolly said in an interview with MS NOW on Tuesday.

It’s hard to think of two statewide candidates from the same party who are more misaligned.

NIXON’S ALLIES ARGUE that if mainstream Dems were really so worried that she would hurt efforts to rehabilitate the party brand, they would have worked harder to defeat her in the primary. Her backers say she simply outworked Vindman, who appeared to believe he could coast to the nomination without putting in much effort. In a display of confidence that he had the nomination locked up, Vindman already had a Nantucket fundraiser scheduled for next week. Vindman’s campaign also seemed to think voters would reward him for the role he played in Trump’s first impeachment and look past the fact that he moved to the state only recently and lacked longstanding relationships in the community.

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But his 12-point loss is the latest sign that the era of impeachment politics is over; Democratic voters are no longer impressed by actions—however heroic they may have been—taken during Trump’s trials. In this cycle, billionaire Tom Steyer, who led the “Need to Impeach” campaign during Trump’s first term, lost his bid for California governor; Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, who served as an impeachment manager for Trump’s second impeachment, also lost her primary; and George Conway, who made impeaching Trump a central message of his primary campaign for New York’s 12th Congressional District, received less than 10 percent of the vote (although we are very happy to have George back with The Bulwark fam).

“Impeaching Trump is not a great talking point when he is back in the White House and worse than ever,” tweeted Democratic strategist Rebecca Katz.

Nixon’s primary victory might have complicated the party’s long-term goals in the state. But despite the very real concern that Nixon will drag the party brand further down, some Dem operatives stressed that there may be an upside to Vindman’s loss.

Adam Jentleson, president of Searchlight Institute, argued in a post on X that Vindman would “attract a ton of grassroots money only to set it on fire, a la Jamie Harrison and Amy [McGrath]” and that the cash could be better spent in more winnable races.

Of course, Harrison and McGrath were running in South Carolina and Kentucky, states that are far less critical to the future viability of the Democratic party and where building a party brand and infrastructure doesn’t have the same payoff on the national level.

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— If you’ve been closely following the Los Angeles mayoral runoff, odds are you came across a poll from Median Strategies showing Mayor Karen Bass leading Councilmember Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points. Or if you tuned into the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor last week, then perhaps you saw another poll from Median Strategies claiming that Francesca Hong led the field by more than 20 percentage points.

Well, it turns out that Median Strategies fabricated those surveys. On Monday, Median Strategies withdrew the polls and posted a statement on its website claiming it had been conducting a “short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Although major polling aggregators didn’t include the Median Strategies surveys in their trackers, the polls still got traction online and influenced media coverage. In the case of the L.A. mayoral race, the poll was covered by conservative tabloid the California Post (the new sister publication of the New York Post) and L.A.’s Fox 11. Bass even shared the survey to her campaign’s X account in a post that has since been deleted. Less directly but still significantly, the New York Times reported that Bass’s election odds showed slight improvement in the betting markets after the poll was reported.

We don’t know the motivations behind Median Strategies. On its website, the organization said that the project was not funded by any political group, and that no one involved in the project traded any position in an election prediction or betting market. But the fact that these surveys were able to seep into the political discourse with little interrogation is a concerning sign—especially with the 2028 presidential primary coming up.

“Fake/cooked poll releases are quickly becoming the hottest form of election interference,” tweeted Democratic strategist Lis Smith. “This does not bode well for 2028.”

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— One of the hazards of covering politics is that I’m on just about every fundraising solicitation list you can possibly imagine. I get emails from Donald Trump about how he has “OFFICIALLY informed my team to grant you MAGA Guardian status for your never-ending commitment to the MAGA Movement” . . . an honor he can officially bestow upon me if I just give him $50. Democrats, of course, use similar tactics to get supporters to open up their checkbooks. I’ve spent countless hours trying to unsubscribe or filter these emails into separate folders with limited success.

That task is about to get even more challenging.

On Monday, Google introduced a new policy that will allow candidates, political parties, and super PACs to more easily circumvent Gmail’s spam filter. The program will go into effect on September 8.

The change comes as Republicans have long complained that Gmail has unfairly blocked more of their solicitations from landing in users’ primary inboxes than it has Democrats. The Republican National Committee unsuccessfully sued Google in 2022, claiming that it was sending their emails to users’ spam folders, rather than primary inboxes, for political purposes.

Given that Google is making this change in the final few weeks before the midterm elections, brace for your inboxes to be flooded with pleas for money.

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My open tabs:

— Searching for Answers From the Man Accused of Sabotaging Alaska’s Senate Race

— The ‘Body Guy Caucus’: The Lives of the Men and Women Paid to Shadow Senators

— Why the Most Urgent Threat to America Is Actually a Bee